[MUD-Dev] When will new MMORPGs that are coming out get original with the gameplay?

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 05 Jul 2003 20:15:40 +0200 
Martin Bassie <martin at lyrastudios.com> wrote:
> Daniel Anderson wrote:

>> After seeing game after game being an almost exact clone, when will
>> things start to change?  Most developers know what works, so they
>> will implement the same design, ( i.e. the D&D clone) but needless to
>> say, how long will it be before people are sick of these clones?
 
>> When do you think we'll start to see the majority of MMORPGs more
>> original?

> When the target audience pays attention to the smaller names out
> there.

The general rule in analysing such problems is, "follow the money".  It
fits well:

  Commercial game engineers/artists/etc want to eat and pay their
  mortgages/rent etc -- they want their salary cheques to clear.
  Commercial game development companies not only want to write
  non-bouncing pay cheques, but to even make some, any, profit.
  Publishers and Venture Capitalists are very very big on that profit
  idea.  They like that stuff.  They also tend to have a commanding say
  in the business decisions made by the company for that very reason.

  So the people making the business decisions, the decisions that define
  where budget blocks get spent are explicitly profit oriented.  In
  their ideal world they want massive return for no risk.  They're
  willing to settle for reasonable return against minimum risk.

  Given the very high failure rate of game companies and game titles,
  they're not enthused about any risk in the first place.

  Okay, so we have critically risk averse decision makers operating in a
  violently risky field.  These are happy people by nature.

  The easiest/most_obvious way to minimise risk in such a market is to
  follow almost exactly in the footsteps of a prior successful
  title/model/brand/etc.  "Just do the same as XYZ but with bigger tits,
  more blood, or bigger numbers!"  Its a pretty obvious computation on
  the trade-offs.

  Doing something original is risky.  There are no clear grounds on
  either how to evaluate the risks, or what the potential market is for
  an original product.  Further, original products have an industry-wide
  (nay, humanity-wide) history of failing, with the second or third
  generation products being the ones to strike big
  commercially/financially -- not exactly music to an
  investor's/publisher's/etc ears.

  Further the player base is explicitly conservative.  Familiarity
  sells.  There can be "new factors", but they have to be small, easily
  digestible, and well primed so that they are acceptably and
  understandably surprising -- after all if the player doesn't
  understand the new thing (for whatever reason), or just doesn't feel
  comfortable with it, then you, as a game, as a game vendor, and as a
  company have failed to communicate with the person that matters most:
  The player.

  Thus the money people, of which the programmers, artists, designers
  etc are part as they want non-rubber pay cheques, are understandably
  loathe to accept to risks of original products.

Originality is always nice, especially when it happens over there and we
can get to survey it at a comfortable distance and wait around a bit to
see what it does before having anything to do with it.

  So when are companies going to do "original" work?

  When the arguments on the risk/reward returns of that original work
  are sufficiently convincing to not only get funded, but to retain
  funding across the development lifetime of the product.

Player demand and the efficaciousness of player demand is a fallacy.
Player demand is merely a signal that a potential market may exist, and
provides *some* (poor) hooks for attempting to guess the size of that
possible market.  The problem is that player demand only comes from
noisy people, and noisy people are a) rarely representative of the
player base at large, b) even more rarely really know what they
actually, honest to goodness, actually want in the real world.

  "Here you are, a vorpal sword!"

  "But that's not what I wanted, now I can kill everything with one hit
  and everybody hates me!  There's no game left!  This is boring!"

  "But its what you asked for..."

Of course none of this is unique to MUDs.

  So, are you willing to front your money, your house, and your
  financial future, along with your spouse's and kid's financial futures
  to do an "original game"?

Why not?  Why would someone else?

--
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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