Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds 190
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U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
Saturation Concerns for the MMOG
Most of the MMOG titles utilize a subscription service model. A player purchases the
game at retail, installs the game, and must pay a monthly fee to continue to have access
to the game. This has an obvious limit. How many game subscriptions will any
one player maintain? Zero? One to three? You’re not going to get very far by tacking
on a subscription fee to every single MMOG experience that becomes available to
players. This points to a saturation problem for MMOGs, since only the most dedicated
players forming a much smaller audience may subscribe to a few subscriptionbased
games.
One solution might be to “package” several MMOG subscriptions together and
offer the player a choice of which particular titles they would like to play for a package
price. Much thought has gone into several solutions along this line. In order to
pay for MMOGs, publishers are eager to find ways to attach a subscription-oriented
fee, yet this would seem to indicate that only a few titles could survive.
Despite this fact, many publishers are trying to capture an audience with an
MMOG. The titles available vary in quality, for a number of reasons, and many are
fighting just to stay afloat. One thing seems certain: no one really believes that game
players will pay for large numbers of subscription-oriented games simultaneously.
Pure Production Risks for the MMOG
The cost of developing, deploying, and maintaining an MMOG can be astronomical.
The risk level is very high. If a game publisher pours millions of dollars into an
MMOG, only to have it fail to find an audience, that game publisher may not be
around to make another game of any kind tomorrow. It seems that publishers regularly
look at the success of Everquest, as an example, and hope to replicate the revenue
stream created by having a successful subscription-based game. However, the
risk and expense in building such a title are enormous. Only by taking that risk with
a considerable budget and team composition in place were the developers of
Everquest able to deliver. This did not happen overnight. It took time for subscribers
to find and fall in love with the game, which is time other titles may not be able to pay
for. If they don’t find an immediate audience, they will die off quickly.
Everquest is now a good example of a soaring MMOG, but the competition to be
“one” of the profitable MMOGs is intense. Consider The Sims Online by Electronic
Arts (http://thesimsonline.ea.com/). This highly anticipated title, which was even
featured on the cover of Newsweek, was developed at considerable expense to provide
players with an MMOG version of the very popular Sims titles for the PC. It was
a large risk, and has met with mixed results.
There is little room for mistakes when development costs are this high, yet mistakes
will be made. Let’s not mercilessly beat up the developers and publishers for
trying to build an MMOG either. Don’t forget that MMOG development is gaming