[MUD-Dev] Room for more? (was RE: Dragon Empires is cancelled)

[Michael Sellers]

Dan Harman wrote:

> They put a tad more detail up :

>   "We were experiencing unexpected obstacles with the server code,
>   in particular our ability to serve clients at a scale which
>   would have permitted us to launch the game as an MMO. ...

> Seems like they didn't have the expertise to get the serverside
> working properly.

Yeah.  While I would question what the low end of the client::server
ratio is (do you really need 1000+ players per server) for an
economically viable MMO, this highlights an important point in MMO
development.

> I'm not convinced there is room for another big budget fantasy MMO
> at the moment anyway. Between WoW and EQ2 the market looks pretty
> sewn up.

Mark Jacobs talked about this at length in an informal discussion at
the Austin Game Conference.  He has pretty good numbers to show that
the market is far from saturated.  As one example, City of Heroes
has had a terrific launch and appears to be sustaining strong
subscription numbers (as does, say, SWG).  And yet none of the other
major games -- UO, EQ, DAoC -- have shown more than a downward blip
in their subscriptions.  It may be that people are hanging onto
multiple subscriptions and will drop one game sooner or later, but
that's not clear yet.  (NB: it's also the case that AC1 and AC2 have
lower numbers than I had expected, so there may be some draining
from those games to others.)

It will be interesting to see how things go as WoW and EQ2 come out,
but my bet is that the market will continue to expand to account for
upwards of 80% of their playerbase.  I don't see a new consolidation
of players (i.e., growth by cannibalization) coming soon.

OTOH, there may well be some fatigue in the market *channels.* This
is a different but related issue.  The question is, how many
relatively similar MMORPGs can the average game store shelf support?
This has always been the bottleneck in the market, and it's just
getting worse, especially for MMOGs.

Mike Sellers
Online Alchemy
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