That’s lot of soon-to-be free XP. Special thanks to the Missouri who repaired one fire:
This grind reminded me why I abandoned CVs. The old UI is horrible and the CVs are very dependent on the team for self-defense. Friendly battleships are usually behind me sniping.
Bhagpuss made Azuriel look modest with his 40 games: he has 38 MMOs installed. MMOs, not games. Most of them are obviously dead or dying.
This leads me to the question: who the hell are making these? Not in the sense of who codes them, it’s easy to find game devs, because it’s popular to be a game dev. But who the hell gives money to make these things?
Single player games are playable alone (go figure). MMOs cannot. This means that a single player game can live long and slowly get a few players. Like I picked up Northgard years after publish, despite it’s not being too popular. These games can linger and hope to slowly get profit by late players, bundles, nostalgia or whatnot.
But if an MMO doesn’t get on at the start, it’s dead. In the saturated market, they need marketing hype to get initial players. An MMO that doesn’t build hype is without hope to get off. Without getting off fast, it start losing the already too few players and become “dead”, and nothing in the world can bring it back to life.
So if an MMO doesn’t have a serious marketing team, it’s hopeless. Yet I’ve never heard of most of the games Bhagpuss mentioned. So who made them and why? What were they expecting?!
I know, right? It baffles me, too.
I think it’s just a case of “too much money-itis.” Big media companies have huge media budgets and not enough quality holes to pour the money down, so these fly by night mal-investments get funded. And hey! As long as the money holds out, might as well ride that train as long as possible if you’re the studio that made the game.
It’s just too much money sloshing around at the top with no “moral hazard” to attenuate the selection of projects.
So… you might ask, why not fund REAL projects? There be where the moral hazard lies, captain! Don’t want to fall off the edge there! Easier to toss a few mil or so at lots of individual lottery tickets hoping to get lucky.
Really, I can’t think of any better reason.
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I would also find it baffling. But most of his MMOs are either very well-known and sometimes quite old (don’t forget that GW2 is 7 years old, DC Universe is 8, Warframe is 6, Neverwinter is 6, Rift is 8 and so on). It’s not that a lot of MMOs ARE being developed is that a lot of MMOs were released. That means that development of those titles started about 10 years ago and they were started as an alternative to WOW. Most MMOs released nowadays are just endless clones of Korean style grind-fest. And even those numbers are much lower. In the same time period (about 10 years) that those 40-50 MMOs were released, thousands upon thousands of other games were released. The market is just so big, that it can maintain enough for those games (best of them still have tens of thousands of players). Games industry is estimated at about 100 billion dollars. Film box office is only 42 billion, the whole industry is estimated 136 billion. Surely, you are not surprised about any type of film still being released (remember, black and white mute film just recently won an Oscar, at the same time that movies about a bunch of dudes in latex suits is the biggest thing ever). Why are you surprised about the games being diverse? I think you just don’t believe the game market to be as big, as it actually is. You can make a game about flinging shit at the wall and still most likely find enough buyers.
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But who the hell gives money to make these things?
people who want to double their money over 4-8 years. And if you think ‘its easy to weed out’ and calculate risk properly. It isn’t .. it is easy to buy stock from already big game-dev-studios and software powerhouses. Anything else is very much like anything else in entertainment … very hard to predict anything from a startup, young artist or anyone without a long and lasting portfolio. Look at flappy birds success and downfall and revenue at peak and how the company is entangled in copyright infringement now. dotGears the company was struggling prior to the FBird hit for a decade and FBird was a prototype sprint where the company last resorted to putting anything out as app. If you invested later into this company you got hit by their copyright shit. So long story short; Some people put in their 5% to 10% of “does not hurt if its gone”-money towards these highly risky Projects/Companies … with the chance that it will blow up and they will get gazillion % out of it. It is gambling and they sooth their addiction that way.
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The NPC meme caught on for a reason. “Thinking? What’s that? Is it tasty?”
It’s pretty much MMOs make money => money is high status => I must demonstrate my previously-unknown high status, I will therefore make an MMO and be rich etc. “Expecting” is a verb far too sophisticated to describe what’s going on. It’s stimulus-response.
What rock-star lottery ticket these folk these folk pursue is basically down to chance. For most it’s whichever one they run into first.
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I made a throwaway comment a few weeks back, somewhere, in which I said I thought there must be dozens of MMORPGs still active that had been running for ten years or more. Later, out of curiosity I went to check. Using the list on Wikipedia, there just short of a hundred of them, with something like twenty or thirty more about to hit ten years old this year or next. A lot of them I know for a fact are still running and while there are a fair few I don’t recognize, I checked some at random and they do have live websites.
That list, though, is far from complete. Last time (it was a few years back) I did a serious trawl of the web to estimate the number of live MMOs I found over three hundred. They seem to be made by everything from single individuals to mega-corps. Some are little more than hobby projects, some are probably small businesses providing a handful of people with a regular income and lots seem to be incremental assets forming part of a larger portfolio offer. The ones we tend to think of, the AAA games from major publisers, are a minority.
As to who plays them, that would be very interesting to know. If you log into any of them you’ll almost always find someone there. Even the most obscure, MMOs no-one ever mentions and which don’t even feature on most lists, like Auteria or The Hammers End, have had a handful of other people playing when I’ve logged in to see what they’re like. Whether they ever had a viable population or made any money, who knows?
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Oh, finally something i got first-hand knowledge of, as i’m last remaining programmer on still-up low-cost MMO from “MMO hype wave” 🙂
MMOs are basically printing money as long as you keep your dev costs low.
Servers are steadily going cheaper and more powerful – for example, currently we run 3 separate “servers” on single 64-core server while previously we needed about five, so you could technically “keep the lights on” if it’s just server for about 50 people paying pitiful amounts each (in a world with multiple 2x2km maps), or 10 paying non-trivial amounts.
And once auidience is captured initially and forms stable community, player churn can actually be pretty slow.
Most of your profits obviously come at the start – when it’s new and investors budget for advertising to bring people in, but even later profits still managed to maintain entirely separate dev team for creating different titles.
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I had forgotten about the mechanic Shalcker talks about which leads to the numbers Bhagpuss mentions.
However, don’t forget that for those 300 surviving MMOs, there’s 300-1500 failed MMOs. Don’t get caught up in survivorship bias.
And the main reason there’s so many is because it’s not a small world after all, it’s surprisingly huge.
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