I’ve been asked to introduce myself with a short bio. You’ve been warned.
Most of you either know me or know of me; surviving nineteen
years with an opinion in this veil of tears known as the multiplayer online
game industry can have that effect. I’ve
been variously described as a pioneer of the industry, an ill-tempered harridan
that bites the hand that feeds her and – my personal favorite – “that
goat-blowing bitch.” Well, everyone
needs a hobby, I guess.
Where did it all begin, you ask? I started out as a third assistant to an assistant of the assistant file librarian on GEnie’s Apple II RoundTable in 1986, played Stellar Warrior from Kesmai in beta test that same year and, with eighty of us blasting away at each other and my hands literally shaking from the tension of successfully defending a planet with a crippled laser cruiser, decided on the spot to change careers. Along the way, I’ve managed to fill just about every rung on the ladder in the development and publishing of these things, spoken at more conferences than I can remember, co-authored a book about developing online games and spent six years writing a rant column to point out the flaws in the industry and, maybe, improve things a bit. I’ve had my successes and failures, learned something from each… Basically, I was fortunate to have snuck in early, when no one was looking and before the publishers threw so much money at the industry that the bar to entry has become stratospheric for most.
And from that vantage point of 19 years gone, involvement in some capacity with over a dozen MMOs and uncounted other types of online games under my belt (or skirt, as the case may be), I raise a question about the height of that bar:
Is money killing this industry?
Overly dramatic, perhaps, but the content of the question is a serious one. From 1986 to about 1997, when the market was still relatively small and development money was very tight, we made quite a bit of progress in the design and development of MMOs. Small groups of innovative developers pretty much had free reign over their designs and it showed in the work. Each new game was, well, different, sometimes in startling and exciting ways. I know this is going to sound like a crusty old broad moaning for yesteryear, but it was a hell of an exciting time to be involved and I rarely see that level of excitement on development teams today.
It was only when millions of dollars started to be thrown at development that things changed. Meridian 59, the game that kicked off the third generation of MMOs in 1996, was made for a relative pittance by today’s standards, built mostly with sweat equity and passion until it was bought by 3DO and it had some very interesting concepts in it, for the time. Then came Ultima Online in 1997, the first MMO to spend over $5 million in development. It was mostly a graphic representation of a text MUD with some neat, but evolutionary, additional features included. It worked; the designers had included some of the very sticky features players love and the game was/is so broad and deep that I venture to guess it will be a long time before another game that comes close to it is developed.
Since that time, while budgets have risen to incredible, sometimes ridiculous, heights ($30 million to develop The Sims Online? On what did they spend all that money, anyway? Not the art, that’s for sure), we seem to have stopped innovating, for the most part. EverQuest in 1999 was a huge success, but it was just a tarted-up DikuMUD and that worked for the times (and came with a built-in audience, which was a smart, business-wise). When I look back between 1999 and now, in fact, the only MMO that had some true innovation to it was the original Asheron’s Call in 1999; the rest appear to me as all evolution, with the occasional flash of brilliance here and there. Not to say that some good games haven’t been developed – Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft and EverQuest II come to mind – but there hasn’t been much true innovation. Mostly we’ve been evolving, getting a bit better here and there, to be sure, but without the blinding innovation that makes one sit and exclaim “Whoa!”
I don’t think it is a coincidence that 1999-Present is also the period when publishers really became interested in MMOs and started throwing around money like a drunken sailor on shore leave. All of us in the Old Guard waited 15 or 20 years for those humongous budgets. To put this in proportion, between 1989 and 1992, I produced six MMOs for GEnie, three of them with graphic interfaces, for less than one third of one percent of the budget of TSO and every single one of those six games had something new and untried in it. Mythic, then AUSI, did its first game for GEnie in 1989 for the lordly advance of $3,000 and GEnie made back well over one hundred times that advance before I left in 1992. Believe me, by the mid-1990s, developers had had enough of living on passion and dreams; the publisher money was welcome, thank you very much.
However, considering the results, I’m not so sure it was worth it. In my opinion, we’ve traded innovation and passion for formula. I can understand the reasoning, even if I don’t agree with it; if a publisher is going to risk millions of dollars, it wants to do it with as great a chance for success as possible. Many publishers see limiting the risk of failure by following the formula; hey, if EQ has a grind and 450,000 subscribers, we better have a grind, too! And so, we get a bunch of expensively-produced clones that add nothing to the industry and most of which will disappear beneath the waves of history without raising a ripple. It is happening in Asia right now.
We’re seeing another turn of that wheel with the success of WoW; there is tremendous pressure right now on development teams to “make your game more WoW-like!” Never mind that, for all that it is generally a good game, there is nothing much new there and that a significant portion of WoW’s success is built on the brand and the trust that players have in the developer; gimme some WOWsy orcs, biyotch!
So I return to the question: Is money killing us? Is this just a natural part of the evolution of the industry that we’ll get over someday, or do we need to turn on a dime and do things differently?
I leave the discussion in your hands.
Recent Comments