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

[loc978]

I'm going to jump on the "successful" bandwagon here. This is just another example of business culture being idiotic.
"It didn't meet our expectations for profit growth, it's a failure!"
...despite more than recouping its costs.

Bunch'a fuckin' five-year-olds, I tell ya.

 

[waj9876]

Eh, he's...kind of right. In some ways. Not on the issue as a whole, just some things.

The most popular MMO is still WOW. And WOW is a bit outdated in...pretty much every aspect compared to newer MMOs. And it doesn't look like that popularity is dying down anytime soon.

 

[Quadocky]

MMOs don't do good in the USA because most MMOs either: 1. Are a terrible value. 2. Are terrible games.

 

[geizr]

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.

It's not a reasonable expectation, and more money has been lost as a result of having such an unreasonable expectation due to over-extending one's abilities and capacities in a desperate bid to be the next WoW without first understanding what made the first WoW be so successful. What you are calling modern economics is not really modern economics, in the sense of being well-founded and stable; it's just fairy-tale dreaming and bubble creation, which only leads to disaster, by a bunch of "get rich quick" schemers. It's not feasible to assume the possibility of never-ending growth in any market. Eventually, you've sold to everyone to whom it is possible to sell, at which point, growth ceases. Once that happens, the best you can hope for is steady income, if you stay in that same market.

 

[Norix596]

The biggest problem with this statement is that he seems to be defining "MMO" as "WoW Clone". Even if games might have some original content, only defining games that adhere to all of the conventions of World of Warcraft as MMOs is a very narrow view. What about League of Legends? What about EVE? (not saying Dota because that arose from a fan modding institution that doesn't really exist anymore) What about Team Fortress? What about Farmville? Hey, what about CALL OF DUTY? (the Modern Warefare template- not the old WWII series). All of these are successful games that are massively multilayer online games. And if you say "well that's not what we mean by MMO" then that just shows that you are overly shackled into thinking of games as needing to tick off all the checkboxes of most popular game of the moment.

So when you say "MMOs (read WoW clones) aren't successful in the US" maybe you should consider that's because players interested in playing a game modeled off of World of Warcraft and adhering to all of it's conventions quirks are already playing, have been paying for, have invested time in and have friend on WORLD OF WARCRAFT. They're not going to switch and dump all that because you made a passable extremely similar game. You need to make a game that offers something different-that's what all the successful games I mentioned above have done.

 

[Dirty Apple]

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.

It's double edged sword though. Everyone screams for innovation and originality. Then they try the newest offering and the first thing they're taken to task for is lacking World of Warcraft components. What is a developer supposed to do? If it's too similar to WoW it's dismissed a clone, and if it's too different players turn away.