What have the implications of different funding models been for MMORPGs?

BY WILL HOUNSELL

What is an MMORPG?

A Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) allows thousands of players to be online together at the same in the game’s ever-evolving world via the internet. Most MMOs usually have a subscription fee per-month.

Examples of popular MMOs are:

- World of Warcraft

- The Elder Scrolls: Online

- Star Wars: The Old Republic

- EVE: Online

- Planetside 2

- RuneScape

World of Warcraft

In 2004, developers Blizzard Entertainment released World of Warcraft (WoW), the game enjoyed huge success and is to this day, one of the most popular MMOs created. While it had many features that other MMOs had, it’s unique setting and features made it a hit, even in December 2013, WoW had 7.8 million players.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) is an MMORPG from legendary RPG maker BioWare, and published by EA. Announced in 2008, it was finally released on 20th December 2011. However, the game did not live up to its hype, and was a massive flop. An internet mimic of it called “The TORTanic” was even created. TOR was claimed to be “the death of WoW”, but in the end, the game was in many ways, a simple copy/reskin of WoW. Users quickly found a lack of innovation in the game, and everything had been done before, it has been described as “WoW with lightsabers”.

Decrease in subscribers

By April 2012, The Old Republic’s subscriber count had dropped by a reported 25%, going from 1.7 million players in February, to 1.3 million in April. Casual players had dropped out of the game after their free month trial ended. This is a very short time to loose so many players in, which did not happen to WoW.

One of The Old Republic’s flaws was it’s abundance of servers on launch, the lead to many servers being completely dead. I personally experienced this; running around a server barely finding any other players.

The game was also in an incomplete state, EA likes to rush games out as soon as they can to ensure profit, not allowing BioWare enough time to publish the game.

Players also refused the pay the $15 subscription fee per-month, and as of the 21st of November 2012, the game went free-to-play.

WoW Statistics vs TOR Statistics

From these statistics, it is clear that WoW has the majority of players by a long shot, while WoW’s data is put simply as a bar chart, the TOR chart shows the popularity of different servers, it clearly shows that even TOR’s most popular server does not compare well against WoW’s numbers.

The Old Republic is not the only MMO to experience a drop in subscribers however, recently Blizzard announced that WoW’s subscriber count had dropped from 10 million players in 2010 to 7.6 million at the end of 2013.

While this is still quite a drop, it has less of an impact as WoW has over five times the amount of players TOR has. Simply no MMO has been able to beat WoW since it’s released, perhaps it was because WoW was the first MMO to truly revolutionise the MMORPG genre, it took many features that worked from other old MMORPGs such as Ultima Online, Never Winter Nights, and RuneScape.

The repetition of MMOs.

Many genres and game franchises tend to lean on each other and copy key features from each other, for example: Every Call of Duty uses the same key features and style each year, this in turn becomes mundane and complacent.

But it is also MMOs that this problem apply to, I’ve already covered how it affected TOR but another example is Rift. Rift is another MMO but the main difference between Rift & WoW is that Rift is free-to-play. Another MMO that is free-to-play is PlanetSide 2.

While both games are free, the reason Rift in particular has not been as successful as WoW is because so many of Rift’s features, even its feel, has clearly been derived from WoW. Rift also did not have the hype or coverage behind it that WoW did.

PlanetSide 2 simply cannot compare in popularity to other online shooters like COD or Battlefield

Online gaming on first-person shooters

One major killer for subscription-based MMOs is the increasing popularity of the multiplayer feature on first-person shooters (FPS) such as Call of Duty, Battlefield, Halo, and recently, Titanfall. (Xbox 360/One, PS3/4 & PC).

Call of Duty in particular has an incredibly massive multiplayer audience, people will buy the game just for the online and skip the campaign. Call of Duty has had over 100 million players, that’s larger than the entire population of Germany or the United Kingdom.

COD: Ghosts made $1 billion on launch day, WoW has sold 25-30 million copies since launch.

Why is multiplayer so popular?

One potential reason that the multiplayer feature of games are becoming so popular is that unlike MMOs, there is no subscription fees. Games like Titanfall and COD now have millions of players, with that number going up all the time, because unlike MMOs, after the initial price to purchase the game, there are no more fees to pay. (Minus DLC).

FPS fans are usually considered much less “casual” than MMO players, so they would not want to pay every month for playing the game, this has a pro and a con: the good side is that the game gets more players and activity as it is free, the downside is all sorts of players can play that game, ranging from hard-core fans, to casuals, to inexperienced players. Games such as COD are notorious for having a lot of young players which is considered a burden (12-16 year olds).

The plus-side for MMOs like WoW is they only have dedicated, hard-core fans who are happy paying the fee, but may suffer from less players, TOR had this pro and con as well until it made the game free-to-play due to it’s lack of activity and success.

Multiple Servers vs a Mega-Server

The developers of The Elder Scrolls: Online (ESO) have already bragged about their unique megaserver concept. Early on during your character creation you will answer some questions and the answers will help ESO’s phasing engine determine which players you’ll see and interact with. This will eliminate the issues encountered in games such as World of Warcraft where you have a level 90 character on one realm but your buddies are on another. It took 7 years for Blizzard to solve that problem with cross-realm grouping. It seems that ZeniMax is going to avoid this problem all together.

The Old Republic also suffered from the multiple server problem as I mentioned, and caused the game to flop, having a Mega-Server instead for ESO is the first step in the right direction for creating a better, and different MMO to WoW, while WoW uses this feature now, they never use to, showing the benefit of fan-feedback over the years.

Whether ESO can take WoW down remains to be seen, but it is definitely trying something new, while The Elder Scrolls Franchise does already have a huge fan-base, it’s different to WoW’s fan-base, and that fan-base seems to be what has been saving WoW for years.

Are MMOs dying out?

There a few potential things that could be “killing” the MMO genre:

Too much hype from the press

Appealing to “casual audiences”

Multiplayer feature on FPS

How can developers fix this?

It is clear that MMO developers are still trying to appease the masses and create as much hype as possible (for example: The Old Republic), but too much press can damage a game because expectations can be so high that when it comes out it fails to meet those expectations.

This can also affects single player games, for example: Mass Effect 3, Duke Nukem: Forever.

So how can MMOs stop failing like this?

There is no set way, people respond to different games differently each time, the only thing developers should stop doing is stop focusing on creating hype for their game, and focus on creating a true, unique experience, and looking to games of the past for lessons on what to do and what not to do, not in terms of inspiration. Games of today lack a certain originality that they use to, especially in the MMO genre, none have ever as successful as WoW. There’s nothing that can be done about the growing fan-base for multiplayer in FPS, MMO developers simply need to focus completely on creating an original experience.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft

http://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-world-of-warcraft-subscribers-by-quarter/

http://www.statisticbrain.com/blizzard-entertainment-statistics/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegriffiths/2013/11/06/activision-boasts-1-billion-call-of-duty-ghosts-day-one-sales/

http://www.vg247.com/2013/08/13/call-of-duty-100-million-players-32-quadrillion-shots-fired-to-date/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Old_Republic