[MUD-Dev2] [Design] Dinosaurs evolve to chickens, MMOs evolve to massively single-player games

[Mike Rozak]

And now for something to spur some discussion...

                *** Freerealms ***

I don't want to talk about Freerealm's features, but a larger trend that Freerealms represents.

Freerealms is a MMO... kind of. It's an online game with thousands of players in one world (= MMO)... Most of whom play by themselves in sub-games that are (generally) designed to be played alone. FreeRealms is a massively single-player game.

As many people know, despite WoW's raiding, a large percentage of WoW players also play it as a massively single-player game too.

Why do people forgoe the "massively" part of these games?


Here's my opinion:

Most people WANT to play a single player game. Or, they want to play a game with their close friends. Only a minority of the population wants to play in a world with thousands of other players (for PvP, raiding, trading, or other reasons). I wrote about this a few years ago in "The player pyramid."

Something signficant has changed since then...

The internet has gotten faster, AND importantly, easier to connect to (being "always on" and wirelessly "ubiquitous" in many households). At the same time, more and more MMOs are free.

These three changes have a signficant demographic effect on "MMO" players:

Back in the dark ages of MMOs (or at least the non-graphical ages), modems were 1200 baud, a pain to use (slow to dial in, tying up the phone line, disconnecting frequently), and MUDs charged by the hour. Given such hurdles, the only people that played MUDs were people who really-really liked to be around other (virtual) people.

Today, playing a multiplayer game is just as convenient as playing a single player game.

Actually, it's more convenient!

1) You don't need to go to the store; you can download the MMO.

2) You don't need sit and wait for 14 gigabytes to download; FreeRealms has shown that you can start playing after only 50 megabytes has downloaded. The rest of the game downloads while you play.

3) It's free to play! Or rather, it's free to try out (for as many hours/days/weeks as you like), and once/if you decide that you really like it, you can pay a few dollars a month to play (much cheaper than a store-bought game). Ads (thanks to being online) also enable free gameplay.

The only downsides are that the single-player store-bought games still provide better single-player gameplay.... but for how long?

What kind of hybrids are possible? How about taking Guild Wars a step further, and providing Bioware/Bethesda style single-player-CRPG gameplay in an instance, with walled cities/towns being public? It could play just like a single-player game, except that (a) you could invite friends into your instance, (b) meet new players in the towns, and (c) all the orcs in your instance would be wearing "Pizza hut" emblazoned armor.

FPS's could use the same formula, but would need to rely more on the client CPU's processing and low-latency (at the cost of exploits). Even adventure games would work as massively single-player games.

Which leads me to conclude, the "massive" part of MMOs is going away. The dinosaurs are shrinking to chickens.


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