[MUD-Dev] MMORPG Cancellations: The sky is falling?

[ceo]

Sean Howard wrote:
> "Samantha LeCraft" <slecraft at onlinealchemy.com> wrote:

>> Five years from now, will the same people be driving whatever new
>> innovation we have then, or will it be at least partially driven
>> by yet another new generation of MMO developers?

> Will Wright. Shigeru Miyamoto. Warren Spector. John
> Carmack. Richard Garriot. The same people driving the industry
> today are the same people who were driving it 15 years ago. And
> the few game designers with known names which are rather new
> (Chris Taylor) are little more than one hit wonders or
> understudies with the same philosophies and thoughts as their
> bosses.

> The frontier is gone. All the land has been claimed. Or so it
> would seem.  Maybe there is just a rarity of brilliant minds in
> the game industry. Who knows?

More likely it's just that recent changes in where and how money
comes in, and how studios are run, have acted to cement the
positions of the existing names and make it harder for new ones to
stand out.

Also, I'm sure that if you delve into the various studios you will
find a large number of silent geniuses. For instance, who'd ever
heard of Will Wright until his 7 year magnum opus came to fruition?
People like Carmack, Molyneux, Garriot, etc are an entirely
different kettle of fish, and even a brief analysis should clearly
show why. They entered the industry when it was a tiny fraction of
what it is today, and it was very easy for them to stick out. One of
the side effects of continued yearly 30% growth for a decade is that
it gets rather a lot more difficult to stand out from the crowd!
That some of their generation would have achieved similar fame
starting today is without doubt, but ... there are plenty of big
names who I'm sure if they'd started today would never have got any
fame at all.

Looking at it the other way around, I know plenty of people within
the industry who are still quietly working away, making contacts,
planning and refining their own ideas, working their way up to the
point where they feel ready to realise it all.

Some of those that were aiming in or around MMOG's have been badly
hit in confidence by some of the scandalously incompetent launches
of recent years, and have raised their own threshold higher. Whether
this is over-compensation for the public failures, or just a
sensible re-appraisal of their readiness I don't know, and won't
find out until they do strike out on their own :).

Either way, IMHO it is only a temporary glitch, and a new wave of
people will come along soon; they always do :).

>> Heh, if you know of a way to streamline the development process
>> down to six months and $100k, let me know.  My bank account would
>> thank you.

> I could think of a few hundred ways to simplify
> development. Alone, they barely make a difference, but together,
> they could be huge savings. For instance, 2D games requires
> something like a tenth of the budget of a 3D game, and requires
> less than half the time and staff (I forgot where I read that
> statistic - Game Architecture and Design, maybe).

I would like to know what your original source is for that, seeing
as 3D games are IME cheaper and quicker to produce than 2D ones -
and I know that a considerable number of independents and
sole-authors concur.

E.g. animating a 3D model is much easier than animating sprites, and
acceptable-quality middle-of-the-road 3D models are generally easier
to produce than equivalent quality sprites.

If the study were done long enough ago then the huge disparity in
effort between a blitting engine and a 3D scanline converter would
account for much of the observed differences; but these days you're
just going to use a 3rd party engine either way anyway, so...

Adam M
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