Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

The power of obtaining in-game status items should not be overlooked either. In a
real-world society bent on never-ending status judgments, players often take great
pleasure in the display of game-based status items. This propensity, from a content
development standpoint, has only been explored on the surface. There are a large
number of social-force phenomena that remain to be explored within the MMOG
setting.
Current Challenges
C H A P T E R 8
The biggest design learning challenge for MMOGs today is trying to understand exactly
how to best use the medium to entertain players while at the same time building commercial
content. There is such an inordinate amount of risk involved that mistakes can be
fatal. As we’ve seen, MMOGs demand huge resources. If huge resources are committed
to a design idea that flops, the results for game publishers can be devastating.
Although there are similarities, game publishers do not yet operate under the exact
same economic model as the movie business, where a monster hit can pay for many
failures. Again, what makes an MMOG a “monster hit” is the subscription revenue
combined with the game sales. However, as previously discussed, how many “monster
hit” subscription models can survive together? What about saturation? You can see
as many hit movies as you would like. You won’t be paying for each of them on a
month-to-month basis.
More than any other game type, the MMOG must reconcile huge financial risk
with a perceived “sure thing” design idea. Perfect design ideas rarely equal perfect design
implementations. Hence, the MMOG somewhat stands alone in forging out new
content avenues for game players.
SPORTS FANS OR GROUPS AND MMOGS
If the past shapes the future, sports will most likely play a significant role in the
growth of MMOGs if several technology hurdles can be overcome. Love them or
hate them, sports titles have repeatedly driven console game hardware and software.
Combine this force with every major console moving online with varying success so
far, and you begin to create a very interesting scenario for sports game development.
Sports game development for online consoles in an MMOG setting could quite certainly
help innovate technology solutions that would help make other, even newer,
genres available to players.
It’s true that sports titles haven’t had the same exact impact on the PC, for several
reasons (like the controller difference between a game pad and a keyboard), but FPS
titles that have continually pushed the PC forward don’t typically do very well on the
consoles.
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Design Considerations for Massively Multiplayer Online Games