I have seen a future future

August 25, 2006 on 12:08 pm | In MMO (Upcoming), Playstyles, Innovation, Industry

Lum recently posted a report from the Leipzig Gaming Conference panel discussion on the 'Future of MMOs'.

On the one hand, I'm getting worried that I'm getting to the point where I've been around long enough to be seeing new people learn old lessons.

On the other, it was interesting to hear their take on my favorite topic. I think some of the talk was a bit single-minded though, particularly the focus on hardcore gamers.

You can get a lot of time and interest from hardcore gamers. They're a great fit, the ambassadors for MMOGs in particular. However, you can't grow this genre except incrementally without appealing to casual gamers. And I mean <i>real</i> casual gamers, not someone who's casual because they only raid two nights a week instead of seven.

World of Warcraft proved this. They didn't increment into doubling the amount of Westerners playing MMORPGs. They grew by appealing to those already here and adding truckloads of new ones turned off by the time sinks. The vast majority of those people are not repeating Blackwing Lair (BWL) for new drops. They play the game as an RPG and either leave when they realize they can only grow beyond 60 by repeating BWL for new drops, or stick around to play a different portion of the game from a different perspective. And they'll be back for Burning Crusade because 60-70 is being structured the same as 1-60 was. And leave at 70 because that won't be.

But forget WoW. Big as it is, it is not the future. It is just one part of it. Segments of the punditry in this genre are fixated on Everquest (EQ), things like EQ and things that aren't like EQ but still take a whole lot of time to be successful within. Hardcore, hardcore, hardcore.

Other segments look beyond the typical CD>patch>subscription-fee model to see where the real growth is happening. It's easy to ignore this part because it doesn't show up on MMOGchart, but it's there, real, and is where a lot of companies disinterested in spending $60mil to take on the ultimate diku are looking.

You can get casual people to play MMOGs. Look at the top six titles at one of the hotter destinations for casual games. Until recently, three of them were MMOGs (Club Penguin, which has been top almost since launch, Runescape which has been there since their launch, and Puzzle Pirates which appears to have fallen off again).

That's saying something.

The future is not by reskinning diku for hopefully millions more. Rather, it's about getting more people to join a persistent online ecosystem where they can be plied for more cash by being given more experiences. The average person is not interested in an MC drop to start the tech tree to eventually take down Ony/Naxx/whatever. They want a fun game they can get into and out of that may be part of a longer-term growth strategy. And particularly in the U.S., there's a lot more average people out there playing casual online games than there are playing massively-multiplayer ones.

Make the persistent long term rewards easy to understand and a natural evolution for people you attract through casual games. Then you've got them. Just don't expect to keep them with raiding.

And finally, here's a quote I found particularly funny, given the source:

Sigil Games’ Zack Karlsson pointed out that in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes (due sometime this winter), they are finding gamers well outside of the typical 18-35 year-old male demographic.

From a guy working for the makers of a game that previously made another game in which Nick Yee revealed, through qualitative study, the same info, almost four years ago.