The Premature MMO Deathwatch

Ah, zombies and a cricket bat. What a way to start off the new year’s worth of posts, right?

If there’s one thing I see flying around when it comes to MMO, it’s the declaration of death for one, the sort of funereal kneel that some people like to declare for titles that are going to the grave (read: that they don’t like or regret spending money on). The clarion call of hype for an MMO is only drowned out by the sea of cynics and pessimists that tend to declare “epic fail” at every turn of the key when patches come out, or when a bug is found and needs to be squashed, or when they die in PvP when they shouldn’t have. The amount of people that like to talk about a game as if it were dead (or worse yet, a zombie) is staggering.

I’ve never really put stock in these sorts of predictions – mostly because I use my own judgment to determine whether or not a game is worth playing, or if it is well and truly dead. In this respect, I’ve always been a bit selfish about my own opinions abut games, especially MMOs. Letting someone else shape that perception for me, especially as it relates to whether or not a title is going to die a fiery death, is not something I typically like to have happen. In fact, if I’ve just had an evening of fun and games with my current MMO of choice, and someone then tells me the game is dead the next day, I’m even less inclined to believe them.

MMO death – and I mean real death in the sense that games are shut down, is rare. It doesn’t happen that often, and many games keep going despite many peoples’ ideas about them not being worth the DVD’s they’re printed on. And any company worth their salt doesn’t run a game at an operating loss, either. The immense resources required to run any MMO mean that infrastructure and development costs are through the roof, and running that at no profit is company suicide.

However, just because it’s a bit off doesn’t mean that declaring death for MMOs doesn’t have an effect. This kind of premature cynicism has honestly creamed many an MMO within the last 2 years. Player perception is immensely powerful, especially when herds of players can drive design decisions and  complain louder online than any disgruntled customer at the local Target or Walmart. As an eternal optimist, I’m force to scratch my head and wonder what the motivations for people quick to declare terminal disease for an MMO might be. Could it be that people find that a game they’ve followed for years at a time doesn’t live up to their terribly high expectations and need to lash out? Is it the fact that so many players want a game to “kill” World of Warcraft so bad that they think anything less than millions of subs is an immediate failure?  Is someone pissed because there are no Twinkies in the vending machine? Your guess is as good as mine.

If this sounds a lot like a “give MMOs time/a chance/please sir may I have another”, it isn’t meant to be as such. THe debate about how much time an MMO should have before judging it is one I don’t want to really get into in today’s positive missive. Actually, it’s more of a call to people to not let others’ opinions cloud their own so easily. It’s real simple to take bloggers’ opinions like myself as gospel, or read the pundit stories from across the web and share their thoughts completely. Its a lot harder to only use those as subjective reference points to formulate your own opinion. I would hope that, regardless of whether your opinion on an MMO turns out to be negative or positive, that it’s one that you create on your own. You might find, when you do that, that reports of MMO death are greatly exaggerated.