Take-Two: MMOs Don't Work in the U.S.

[Matt Dellar]

I dunno, Runescape was sitting at a pretty comfortable 200-300k players on at any given time before the combat update made it more like World of Warcraft (and now it's lucky if it scratches 90k simultaneous players).

I'd say games that don't try to be World of Warcraft generally do pretty well.

 

[Caiphus]

He's not entirely wrong. The Asian market does seem to have a higher tolerance for bullshit when it comes to MMOs.

 

[dumbseizure]

No, I'm sorry.

The only reason "mmos don't work in the U.S" is because generally they are the same churned out crap every single time.

An MMO would do will in America if it was actually innovative, if it was different.

But they all seem damn near the same.

 

[Mycroft Holmes]

Take-Two posted a net "income" of negative 109 million dollars for 2012. Yeah I'm going to go ahead and ignore anything they have to say about video game markets, sales and viability.

Oh and their idea is NBA 2K Online? Yeah... they're making a basketball MMO... how is this company not bankrupt yet?

 

[runic knight]

No, hugely successful mmo don't come up here in the states, and that is what he wants. Because he, like most other game CEO has his head up his own ass with what he wants from a game being a complete genre defining money cow, no wonder he doesn't see mmo as successful. When all you damn well do is copy the current big thing, no, you wont ever beat it on the market because people are already playing it.
Seriously, this is just stupid. You can't make a wow killer out of a clone so because of that, obviously the mmo market is dead in america? No, more like you need to not throw money into a god damn pit hoping for a runaway success and get some fucking perspective first. A game can be very successful when you stop demanding they sell 20 million copies to break even by having development costs and advertisements suck up all your money first.
It is amazing that rather then address this horrid business practice, they keep blaming every other thing but their own management choices. It isn't the fans, it isn't the game genre, it isn't the system or graphics or limitations of the consoles. It is the raw greed and delusion that any game can only either do massively good or it fails. The never take into account that games can do well and be successful when they aren't bloated budgeted piles of shit or outright clones bandwagoning in hopes of being the next whatever.

 

[Catrixa]

This whole all-or-nothing attitude is getting really, really tiresome. There are a lot of great MMO's out there that have been around since forever that aren't WoW or EverQuest. No, they didn't beat WoW/EverQuest, but they still make money and are fun (or are EVE, which transcends fun). Why do they have to beat WoW? Why does every shooter have to make more money than Call of Duty? I get that MMO's are expensive and need to be somewhat successful, but does it have to topple the absolute top of the market Every. Single. Time? Can't there be moderately successful MMO's with modest budgets that have a niche playerbase? Seriously, it's OK to do OK sometimes...

That's the thing though, it's not okay to do okay sometimes (in the eyes of big publishers). You have to be on top, at all times. Or at the very least, on par with the competition. And its that mentality that is going to sink gaming.

Yeah, I think it has something to do with the weird place games are in, especially MMO's. They're a service, so you want to have the most customers on your service as is humanly possible (so, beating the competition is a must, since they're theoretically in command of customers who could potentially be your customers), but they're also an art (story/gameplay/aesthetics), so you will have people who dislike your service based on personal opinion/taste alone (not necessarily on how reliable/customer friendly it is).

I think the problem is: You will never create an art product that pleases everyone all of the time, ever. Or even mostly everyone. I have plenty of friends who think I'm dumb because I've played plenty of WoW (I've heard "eww, it's too cartoony," "blech, who wants to grind for that long," and "eww, that game is an easy game for babies," among other things...), but then go ape some other MMO like I'm somehow objectively wrong. If this was a cell phone company, these kinds of issues wouldn't exist: your service is either good, or it isn't. You are either providing something useful and/or innovative, or you are providing a lesser service (potentially for a cheaper price, leaving you as a viable option). Yeah, popularity and name go pretty far with both, but if Apple started breaking hugely important features (like web browsing or something), they'd tank pretty fast to the competition.

Honestly, what MMO companies (probably) need to do is start looking for markets that are not being satisfied by WoW and appealing to them. If the market for metroidvania-style MMO's about pizza-delivering vampires exists and doesn't have anyone catering to it, make a proportionately-budgeted game for them. I mean, people pretty much use Kickstarter for that at this point--if finding these markets is already pretty doable, why the crap is doing this so unpleasant? Does every game need to result in a yacht for every publisher?

 

[DrunkOnEstus]

There's more people in Asia, for one. Also, the PC market is more lucrative over there because consoles are technically illegal. Following that, the F2P and MMO markets are so huge because piracy is such a big deal over there and you can't pirate an online game or need to pirate a game that's free to begin with. He makes it sound like the genre itself doesn't work in the US, but the thing is, we have more choices and there's less of us. When you do something different from WoW and do it well (Eve, FFXI), you make money.

Someone needs to embrace the sandbox, like what Star Wars Galaxies used to be but on a larger scale. If you're going to borrow from WoW, you aren't going to start off with the 9 years of patches and expansions that game is riding on now. It would cost literally billions and people are already playing WoW, you don't convince them to quit with a different WoW at level 1 with none of their friends. Think small-scale, and embrace the creativity and freedom that affords you. The hell am I even saying any of this for, guys like this only listen to the echo chamber of the boardroom and nobody's paying me for advice.

 

[Lyvric]

I'm also enjoying Neverwinter, and could Minecraft/Terraria online servers kind of count as mmos?

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

I think the problem is mostly that the MMO market is so massively bloated and over saturated that unless you really have something amazing, you are going to just fall by the wayside.

 

[Strazdas]

Well, statistically the most MMO players are in asia. So he kinda has a point. But to say it does not work in US is stupuidity.
Two most popular MMOs in existence - WOW and LOL are both from USA companies.

Everquest? Really? That may have been true a decade ago but I honestly don't know anyone the successful MMO's in my mind are WoW, EVE, Rift, and Guild Wars 1 & 2.

Eve isnt american though. Theri from Iceland. And judging from the players majority are european market.

If you consider them as MMOs, then Diablo, LoL, even modern day CoD and Halo Reach and 4 would be MMOs.

Diablo and LOL is a MMO. So is WOrld of tanks even though max players you can see on your screen is 30. COD or Halo does not have persistent world or main server.

He missed one. Eve is also a pretty big mmo the last time i checked. It just has a specialized niche.

Eve isnt US based.

 

[Sol_HSA]

"Successful." You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

 

[Kahani]

"We're actively investing in online MMOs

As opposed to offline MMOs?

Also, you can't go around expecting every single MMO that comes out to be World of Warcraft.

The problem is that's just not the way modern economics works. Merely making a profit isn't enough, you have to be constantly making more profit and always competing to be the absolute best of the best. As soon as you're reduced to making a steady income from a stable customer base, you're considered an abject failure and investors and shareholders will throw a hissy fit and head elsewhere. If you don't aim to be WoW, no-one will give you the money to develop anything.

I would love to play a non-WoW MMO, but sadly the only one I've seen is EVE, and it's subscription based (which is a deal-breaker for me)

You can pay for Eve entirely with in-game money. Not easily for a completely new player, but a month or two of paid time should be enough to set yourself up as self-sufficient.

 

[minimacker]

I don't know if Europe is very MMO-crazy either.

 

[2xDouble]

Actually, that's a pretty solid bet, business-wise. China and Korea hold the lion's share of nearly all online games' populace, with Europe (led by England and Germany) placing just ahead of the US (iirc).

Of course claiming that massively-multiplayer online games aren't successful in the region based on that is pure idiocy. You might as well claim Australia and the Oceanic region actively hate MMOs and online games because they hold so little market share...

EDIT: Also.... pretty sure he's talking about the absolute bath SquareEnix took from releasing, killing, and remaking FFXIV as opposed to Blizzard's "mystery box", Titan. (it could even be a boat!) That precedent, alongside the multi-million-dollar "flop"* that is The Old Republic, is enough to shy developers away from the genre.

*Note the quotes. TOR was/is a success to an extent, but the tremendous development costs overshadow its meager profits in the eyes of publishers and investors.

 

[SecondPrize]

Why is it so hard for these people to understand that you have to judge a MMO based on it's own merits, just like anything else? If a shitty MMO releases and drops subscriptions like it had the plague, it isn't MMOs in general which are the problem. Conversely, if someone releases a fun game and it does well and retains and even grows it's subscriptions, it wasn't successful because all MMOs must be, it was because it was, well, good.

I never mention my captcha's because I never believe anyone who happens to claim theirs was somehow related to their post, but mine is Moe's Tavern this time, which is pretty sweet.

This. The WoW demographic is already dominated by, who would have thought it, WoW. Guild Wars 2 managed to wrest a bit of a place for itself, but mostly WoW's got the complete monopoly. I would love to play a non-WoW MMO, but sadly the only one I've seen is EVE, and it's subscription based (which is a deal-breaker for me)

EVE is actually worth the sub, in my opinion.

 

[Drejer43]

maybe it is because Western audiences dont like grinding as much as the asians do?

 

[Micalas]

What he's basically saying is: Developing a successful MMO in North America takes time, money, creativity, and no small amount of risk. Meanwhile, we can go to Asia, slap together a derivative grindfest from a generic MMO template, and make good margins off a tiny investment.

Sadly and unfortunately true. To be fair, the east Asian countries kind of brought this on themselves by showing that they're willing to pay for it. "Korean Grindfest" is practically a genre.

CAPTCHA: million dollars. Yes, CAPTCHA, about that much to make said Korean Grindfest.

 

[elvor0]

Well, statistically the most MMO players are in asia. So he kinda has a point. But to say it does not work in US is stupuidity.
Two most popular MMOs in existence - WOW and LOL are both from USA companies.

Everquest? Really? That may have been true a decade ago but I honestly don't know anyone the successful MMO's in my mind are WoW, EVE, Rift, and Guild Wars 1 & 2.

Eve isnt american though. Theri from Iceland. And judging from the players majority are european market.

If you consider them as MMOs, then Diablo, LoL, even modern day CoD and Halo Reach and 4 would be MMOs.

Diablo and LOL is a MMO. So is WOrld of tanks even though max players you can see on your screen is 30. COD or Halo does not have persistent world or main server.

He missed one. Eve is also a pretty big mmo the last time i checked. It just has a specialized niche.

Eve isnt US based.

Diablo and LoL don't have persistent worlds either. You play the game, then when you're finished the world ceases to exist.

WoWs world would still be there even if no one was playing. And Diablo/LoLs games can only have 4/10 players in each game respectively. That's not massive at all. I mean if you define LoL as an MMO, would you define Starcraft as one? You get lots of people logging on at once, games are made in the same way, and it has a main server but you'd be called nuts to call that an MMO. Same with CoD. Just because lots people can be playing the game at once that doesn't make it an MMO, otherwise almost any game with a Multiplayer component would qualify.

WoW, Everquest, LotR, Eve etc = MMO.

LoL, Diablo, CoD, Halo, Borderlands, etc are session based games, not MMOs in the slightest. Diablo does have your persistent character, but it's certainly NOT an MMO.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

Maybe if those MMOs tried to target a different niche to the ones currently DOMINATING the industry, they might make some progress...?

 

[Gatx]

and Halo Reach and 4 would be MMOs.

Diablo and LOL is a MMO. So is WOrld of tanks even though max players you can see on your screen is 30. COD or Halo does not have persistent world or main server.[/quote]CoD has as much persistence as LoL though, the only thing that's continuous in LoL are runes and purchased Champions, in CoD you unlock weapons and perks, so I fail to see how one can be an MMO while the other isn't.