[MUD-Dev] Re: Online vs Offline (was CoH and others)

[Mike Rozak]

>>From Byron Ellacott:

> Would there perhaps have been a far larger potential audience for
> an offline game?  Not everyone has broadband, not everyone is
> willing to pay a subscription fee, and not everyone is interested
> in playing with a bunch of adolescents.

I tried to figure this out the other night...

If the technology in a MMORPG were sold as a stand-alone game, would
it sell more or fewer copies? This question isn't going to be
answered directly, since no MMORPG will risk cannibalizing their
market with an offline version. However, I was wondering if it would
be possible to compare the sales of a best-selling MMORPG against an
equivalent bestselling offline CRPG - which is about as close a
comparison as one can get. One could potentially compare the sales
of SWG vs. KOTR, or Everquest vs. Neverwinter Nights (or
Morrowind). I'm not sure what any of these offline games sold as.
Anyone know? I'd guess NwN or KOTR would be around 1M copies, but I
really have no clue. The MMORPG numbers in my head are: EQ has
approx. 400K users now, with a high churn rate, so it must have
800K-1M copies sold. SWG, I recall, was someplace around EQ's
population. Piling guestimate upon guestimate, I'd guess that a
MMORG has 50% to 80% of the sales it would have if it were
offline.... although this is based on historical data, which doesn't
necessarily hold true for the future.

My previously posted calculations guestimed that MMORPGs would have
2x the sales of the offline equivalent because there isn't any
piracy. Historical numbers (above) imply that my previous guestimate
was way off, but history may not hold true in the future or outside
the US. I suspect in SE Asia, where piracy is really bad, that
MMORPGs will always outsell the equivalent offline game. The same
goes for games distributed online; if they's small enough to be
downloaded, they'll be pirated much more frequently.

Not everyone has broadband - Yes, but this number is increasing. Any
game design starting today can assume that a LARGE portion of the
gamers 3 years from now will have it. Besides, current MMORPGs still
work on 56K. From was I've read, the problem is not so much the
bandwidth, but latency and data trasmission costs. Latency goes down
with broadband (I think), but using broadband's bandwidth increases
data costs.

Subscription fee - Not only does an online game cost the player
twice as much (or more) as the offline game by the time all the fees
are introduced, a credit-card payment over the internet is
required. This is obviously going to reduce the units sold. (By a
factor of 2x?) If an offline game were masquerading as a MMORPG, its
retail box could include a free period designed so that 75% of the
users would get bored before thay had to subscribe. 100-200 hours of
free game time should work (which is more than the length of a
typical offline game, and about 1 month of average MMORPG usage).

Playing with a bunch of adolescents - Uru Live would have solved
this if it hadn't gone belly up. Introducing private regions solves
this too... at which point the MMORPG is really a CRPG that requires
you to be online to play.

Mike Rozak
http://www.mxac.com.au
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