The Tedium & Appeal of MMOs

[May90]

The developers of MMOs do think the content they create is fun. They wouldn't make it otherwise.

It's absurd to think devs sit around their TL meetings saying, "but how do we add content that is not fun but takes a long time?"

Incorrect. A developer company is concerned more about income than anything else. They just focus on different ways of obtaining that income. Some make the content that people will play because it is fun, and so they will pay more because they want to have fun more. Others make the content addictive, so people will play because they cannot stop, and again, pay more. Aside from gamedev projects based solely on fund raising campaigns or donations, the ultimate goal of most projects will always be income. And mainstream projects, just like in literature and cinema, will usually have content of lesser quality than unique masterpieces aimed at particular minority in the consumer base.

I do believe most, say, Blizzard employees individually work hard on making their contribution resulting in more fun for the players. But the whole goal of the project, that is attracting as many players as possible and keeping them playing for as long as possible, just doesn't correlate with their wishes. And that regards any other MMO which, instead of aiming for a particular group of people, aims for sheer number of players. Mainstream is mainstream.

[Interim]

no mmo's todayhave any tedium. If this is what kids consider tedium nowadays, what I would give to be a fly on the wall when they tried to excel in a real true, heyday mmorpg. these faux mmos are commercialized and made easy for mass appeal of kiddos. Devs now lead w/ their wallets and even though mmorpgs take roughly 20k subs to stay profitable, they want millions! Even worse the new casual demographic assumes millions = successful and anything less = fail.

I could go on for ages but instead I'm going to dig up a really good dissertation written by a professor at CMU regarding the state of mmorpgs and why theyre in the state they are.

hint: abysmal & because of blizzard and the new generation of gamers.

edit: links to dropbox okay on mmochamp?

[Fencers]

Incorrect. A developer company is concerned more about income than anything else.

No, I am sorry. You are totally and completely incorrect. I worked for two game publishers and one game developer. My husband has worked for two developers. And my sister has worked for three developers as well.

I know how games are made, published and marketed intimately. How you think games are developed is wildly inaccurate. Even in highly corporate organizations such as Sony; whom I worked for.

In addition, Microsoft games is currently a client with my company and they are genuinely trying to make games people think are "fun". It is literally what my organization works at figuring out for MS.

[May90]

No, I am sorry. You are totally and completely incorrect. I worked for two game publishers and one game developer. My husband has worked for two developers. And my sister has worked for three developers as well.

I know how games are made, published and marketed intimately. How you think games are developed is wildly inaccurate. Even in highly corporate organizations such as Sony; whom I worked for.

In addition, Microsoft games is currently a client with my company and they are genuinely trying to make games people think are "fun". It is literally what my organization works at figuring out for MS.

I cannot carry out discussion with a person referring to their experience to counter all the arguments. But I also don't think you've read the sentence correctly; I didn't say developers didn't care about making games fun, I simply said that this urge is secondary to the urge to earn money. Blizzard is not just a bunch of programmers who want to create a fun game, it is also investors, marketing people, big wallets trying to make them even bigger... I might not know well the insides of Blizzard, but I do know a bit about the market, about the economy, and I know one thing for sure: not a single company can ever become big, able to withstand the competition against hundreds other companies, without being financially extremely profitable. No profit, no company, regardless of how amazing the product they are making is. Blizzard generates billions a year, they are masters of the market, and, whether you like it or not, profit remains their goal as a company (perhaps not the goal of exclusively the WoW development team, but, like I said, they are not the only ones who decide in which direction the game goes).

Regardless, my point is: the reason MMOs have so much tedium in them nowadays is that this model is very profitable, not because this model is fun for players. It might be a bit counter-intuitive, but indeed, sometimes producing something people want less is more profitable than something people want more.