Overly Positive

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.

…oh yes, so bright, Neo has to give me some of his cool shades for me to wear.

Two posts made me feel a disturbance in the MMO force today. One was Kill Ten Rats’ Ravious, who uses a restaurant comparison to paint a bleak picture of WAR, and perhaps MMOs in general. Spinks is not so doom-gloomy, but has an equally sobering opinion on 2010 perhaps being the last of the “AAA MMO titles”, citing lack of success for recent titles as evidence that MMOs are moving in another direction.

Obviously, I’m planning on shoving myself into this whole discussion with a bit of fresh morning sun, because I really do think that MMOs are evolving into a market past the WoW craze and into something that has a variety of options for potential players.

I’ve used restaurant analogies before in reference to MMOs, but I usually do so with regards to kinds or quality of food served, rather than the black and white comparison of success vs. failure that Ravious portrays. While there’s a high perception out there about the “failure” rate of MMOs out there that might match the high failure rate of the restaurant industry, the reality is that most MMOs don’t close up shop. Only a small fraction of those that have launched in the last two years have actually shut down (Tabula Rasa and Hellgate London), while the rest remain open. Where others see the crash and burn of recent releases, I see the maintenance of a market that now has a lot of choices for us players. Does this mean players can afford to be more discerning and make developers pay for that with their wallets? Absolutely. Does this mean that developers now need to create more realistic and unique expectations for their titles? Certainly.

If we’re talking restaurant food (damn you Ravious, now I’m hungry), the MMO business ultimately benefits from a omelette despite the inevitably broken eggs it takes to get there.

As for the lack of big budget titles past the 2010 year, the rise of social networking-related games and what that means for “MMO” as a definition, again, I really see that as a means of evolution in the MMO genre. It’s part of why I don’t really mind microtransactions, and don’t think of them as the pariah that lots of others do.

It’s just a part of the overall process of not just figuring out what the players want, as Spinks says, but the players themselves figuring out what the players want. It’s hard to tell what players want, post-WoW, which may partially explain why all of the titles released in the last two years have experienced a surge and a dropoff. If there’s been something silly about the big budget titles, it’s that they’ve created expectations for themselves that they ended up falling short to meet. This, however, does not mean that big budget titles are going away – merely that they will probably take a more cautious slant towards their hype machine. This is already apparent in Bioware’s approach to SW:TOR.

Certainly, my predictions of the future could most certainly be wrong when it comes to MMOs – but I’d like to think that despite hardships, the genre is in a place where there are tons of choices with players that can make them intelligently. You can’t really complain about that.

There’ve been a lot of folks this week that are buzzing about Blizzard’s decision to allow people to purchase in-game pets for a crazy price over in their store, in what is admittedly another step in the long line of paid services Blizzard has created with WoW. It was interesting to hear about all the furor over this, especially reading another perspective from a perturbed Gordon, who said that the price translation to the UK is more than the monthly subscription amount, and therefore, ridiculous.

I get why people facepalm over microtransaction stuff. The concerns range from folks with practical concerns such as Gordon to people who worry about the inroad into microtransaction is a smoking gun for more significant purchases (such as gear or levels). There’s also the whole side market of RMT, too, and how its influence has given developers pause about opening their own alternative services. Microtransactions is one of those things that affects both the present (as in WoW) and the possible future (as in SWTOR not having committed to a pricing model yet) of MMOs.

But I think that what people can and should realize is that right now, microtransactions as a whole aren’t a big deal. I don’t really mind microtransactions for the simple reason that they are a choice – an optional decision made by players to get something that isn’t essential to gameplay. Sure, the future of microtransactions might see players able to purchase a “fast forward” to their levels or to their gear, but again, such a decision would be a choice made by players, and not one they are forced into.

The reason why I believe this is what the outcome will be is because even though MMO developers might not seem like they have their pulse on the community feeling sometimes, they do have at least some idea of how their players feel. Right now, players feel that the idea of microtransactions are potentially something that could end up out of control, as more financially stable people are able to get a leg up on folks who live from paycheck to paycheck. Any MMO developer worth their salt is going to do things to minimize the impact of microtransactions, whether to make it so that purchasable items are not more powerful than getting things “the old fashioned way”, or allow players to be relevant no matter if they opened their wallet or not.

Honestly, even if a microtransaction-based major MMO came out without these balancing effects in place, the decision to subscribe to one is also a choice by players. While it may not seem like it, players vote with their wallets more often than not. While a microtransaction business model for MMOs might seem practically sound, ultimately if the players don’t like it, they won’t bother with it. Their voice is more powerful than you would think, and it’s that for that reason that microtransactions as a model ultimately don’t bother me in the slightest.

If there’s one thing that gets talked about frequently as a measure of success in MMOs, it’s the Great Subscriber Number. The number of players that are interested in the persistent world of an MMO is, after all, more likely to feel “massive”, more interesting in social dynamics, and, for the money folks out there, more revenue. It’s no surprise that a standard of success is attached to subscribers as a result.

But after reading what Up Past Midnight’s Aiiane had to say the other day regarding living and dying by the subscriber number, I begun really thinking about how worthwhile a simple number is for an MMO to be considered a success. To a certain extent, the argument holds water, but I think it’s more from a practical standpoint. I say practical because it’s obvious that every MMO out there has to have subscribers to actually pull a profit and keep a game viable and relevant. I also mean practical in the definition of the idea that “Massively Multiplayer” needs the “Multiplayer”, too.

Within the communities I’ve shepharded, however, subscriber numbers are really only used as a secondary means of declaring a game a success. Even if you say “11 million players can’t be wrong”, ala World of Warcraft, there’s an easy counter-argument to be made in that millions of people go to McDonald’s, but yet would not consider that quality foodstuffs. No, the real reason WoW has garnered the success that it has is through gameplay elements, features, and a little dumb luck, not through some number crunched through active account subscriptions. Developers reserve subscriber numbers for press releases and general “state of the game” addresses. The real meat and potatoes comes from changes, patches, and gameplay.

I guess the message I’m trying to send is that both players and developers can stand to look at subscriber numbers for an MMO and say “that’s more of an effect, and not a  cart-before-horse smoking gun”. Players should feel good about a game if they are having fun playing it, regardless of how many others share the same experience or impressions. Developers should stop worrying about how many subscriptions they are predicting or hoping to acquire and concentrate on creating fun gameplay experiences. Both should be extra cautious about using subscription numbers as the clarion call for success or failure, because looking at it from a deeper level, the reasons for both stretch far beyond monthly active playerbase. When more folks learn how to do that, I think they’ll stop fretting over game experiences and have a little bit more of a good time.