Are you a market?

July 19, 2006 on 1:09 pm | In General Gaming, Playstyles, Innovation

In a pretty good abstract discussion at F13, evocative of old Waterthread days, we're talking about the state of the MMOG genre. 

Some of the folks within the thread are asking for stuff either they or others before them have been asking for years. In the face of so many recent events though, and being reminded of something that occured to me last June, I got to wondering:

Are they even a market anymore?

There's a lot of older conventions still perpetuated in the genre. These games still take a lot of time to play, they require a lot of dedication and, eventually, they require both of these with a group of other players. The genre grew significantly in 2005 through the introduction of two games that specifically focused on this sort of experience, polishing to a high shine iterations of the Everquest many of us played years before. Guild Wars and World of Warcraft arguably offer the best iteration of this mode of play.

Veteran players are tired of these conventions though. Understandable since they've been around awhile. But while they may want new games for them, the success of WoW and GW was largely based on both non-jaded veteran gamers and new MMOG gamers brought into the genre.

This highlights a fundamental element: in the grand scheme of things there's a whole lot of people who, while technically capable of playing an MMOG, currently are not. There's lots of reasons for this of course and the smart effort is being placed on attracting them.

I remember conversations from years ago where people derided any attempt to attract new gamers into the genre. Pundits thought they had a pretty good beed on things, "knowing" the genre was going to forever slowly grow overt time.Seems like they were righ, but it took new companies to ignore the conventions and therefore attract new players who were turned off previously by them.

Maybe that's what is needed going forward. There's still a lot of gamers out there who, while technically able to be here, are not. What will it take to get them?

Something completely different.

Maybe it'll be a license-based compendium of massive experiences. Maybe it'll be a distributed world, like a beehive hosted experience that builds from grass roots, like MySpace, or XBLA, or RealArcade, with a 3D client. Maybe it'll be a Far Eastern manga-based title since Manga are starting to take off. It'll probably not target current 18-34 year old males either, but rather, a larger group with looser purse strings and greater buying power (like today's tween girls and teens). And it'll probably not have the same sadistic time-sinky nonsense that clearly defines the niche subgroup of this already relatively niche genre (in the U.S.).

And finally, it's likely to not target anyone who's hoping to have easier access at Raid-style mob drops.

The "next big thing" to me isn't going to come from this genre. It's going to be a new title that's called "MMO" for the easy messaging, but which is a different experience targeting someone different.