Money for nothin'...

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.

Comments

[CorvusE]

I'm going to enjoy your additions to the site, I can tell!

[Mike Rozak]

Is the money the symptom or the cause (or both)? How much of the lack of creativity is due to the changing demographics of the players?

In the 1910, the typical automobile driver was someone who was into machines, exploration, the challenge of new technology, and was probably wealthy. Today's driver just wants to get from point A to B. A similar comparison could be made for virtual world players in the mid 1980's vs today vs 20 years from now.

[Mark Wallace]

Nice post, Jessica. As you point out, it's all very understandable, from a bottom-line point of view. Publishers smell money and follow their noses, which is never a formula for innovation. I think someone's going to have to get their nose very badly burned before the big-money types are going to be willing to back anything innovative.

Gaming as an industry is still relately young, the MMOG end of it younger still. (I like Mike's comparison to the auto industry, though I think we're already slightly past that point.) I see the trend you mention as "a natural part of the evolution of the industry that we’ll get over someday."

But there must be things developers can do to help move toward that moment more quickly. Modding and more open-source tools will no doubt help in this area. But a related question is whether there's anything really innovative going on out there at all. Are there any truly "new" MMOGs that publishers should be backing but aren't? Or have the tools not yet progressed to the point that it's even possible to create a satisfying MMOG without a deep-pocketed suit looking over your shoulder?

If the latter (i.e., no money == no MMOG), then it seems we may just have to wait.

[magicback]

Great to have you here Jessica. I have read all of your articles hosted on Skotos, but haven't had the time to read the book.

I think it's the fear of losing money that's killing the industry.

As with all industry development, there comes a time in the cycle where people start worrying to much about the "competition". This divert focus away from the product and more towards defensive.

So while I believe there are still innovative ideas around, existing business have erect barriers of entry to (using US football ling) prevent any long passes.

Students still in school have the same passion and drive as before. However, structural forces don't make it easy for them to enter and try new things.

For example, would a 3D MMO that combines the input model of Dance Dance Revolution and Mario World be innovative or just derivative?

[Theo]

Innovation is risky. Businesses want predictable, safe returns on their investment dollars. It makes perfect sense of course, but it does mean that we're seeing fewer truly new ideas. For every company that risks it all to create the next phenomenal breakthrough success, how many others will miss the mark and collapse? I feel for anyone with a really original idea and a desire to earn a living off of it.

As a player, I'm longing for a different game experience. All the MMOs I've played are variations of one another, with each being better in certain aspects while coming up short in others.

[Thomas Clausen]

The thought of money as a catalyst for innovation is questioned, not only in this article but also in the book: ‘Empire’ by Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri. Their thought is that creativity is only possible for the poor, or at least more possible. And the new poor are the ones that don’t feel the scarcity of money, like the developers of WoW.

If in fact, as economist Robert H. Frank states, economy is how people choose under conditions scarcity, the traditionally poor will be more likely to innovate in a radical sense than in an incremental sense (From Schumpeter where radical is an innovation that doesn’t build on something prior).

[Edward Castronova]

Making games under the terms of commercial industry leads to a certain kind of games. Making games under the terms of other souces of funding leads to different games.

One of the overarching objectives of Terra Nova is to bring gaming and academia closer together. For a couple of years, that's been mostly about fostering talks between the more insightful side of the game dev community and the more practical side of the game academic community.

It's a natural partnership, I think, and will (eventually? soon?) lead to major game-building projects at universities. That's my dream, anyway, and I am sticking to it.

[bruce rogers]

Money is destroying the industry? Isn't that the same thing as saying CUSTOMERS are destroying the industry?

[Samantha LeCraft]

But a related question is whether there's anything really innovative going on out there at all. Are there any truly "new" MMOGs that publishers should be backing but aren't?

As an indie developer myself, working on an MMOG that my mainstream-MMOG-designing husband often looks at with disbelief, I definitely think that there are truly new MMOGs that are in the works or that have launched with a small degree of success -- Yohoho: Puzzle Pirates or A Tale In The Desert anyone? -- that publishers should be backing but aren't. Even now with Puzzle Pirates having a publishing deal with Ubisoft, I've yet to see a single box or ad for them, much less a presence at Ubi's E3 booth this year. (Didn't see Shadowbane there either, FWIW. Did see the Frag Dolls though. ;P )

All that said, I think we are looking at MMOGs over the past 10 years with blinders on. There have been innovative games, some that have done well enough to become 'mainstream' (remember when Realm vs. Realm was considered innovative? Ever see a superhero MMOG before 2004?), some that have done moderately well (aforementioned YPP and ATitD), and some that have been spectacular failures, in terms of RoI. Jessica, in one breath you talk about TSO's budget, and in the next say that we've all stopped innovating. I'm not saying that TSO was worth the $30 million it took to build, but it certainly wasn't a UO/EQ clone.

At the risk of turning this back into the Burning Down The House discussion, I do think its important to point out that publishers are the ones who have become risk adverse, with budgets rising, not MMOG developers. There are plenty of indie developers working hard on what could be The Next Big Innovative Thing, if only publishers would stop worrying about how many different types of longswords the game will have. Unfortunately, we live in a world where EA backed an innovative MMOG based on the best selling PC game of all time, and came away with nothing; and where World of Warcraft has 1.5 million subscribers. Having played both those games, I feel that the RoI for each accurately represents the caliber of the game -- but that doesn't make it any easier to get an MMOG without elves or longswords published.

[hikaru]

Put your money where your mouth is. Players play MMOG's because they're FUN. They honestly do not care if it's a corporate derivative rehashing of last year's imitation of the previous year's tripe.

Just because your game is built on passions and dreams does not make it good. It does not make people necessarily want to play -- or pay for -- t. As a player, I would trade a developer's innovation and passion for playability and fun any night of the week. Pride in production does not equate to end user enjoyment, especially if the producer is so far off on her idea of what the end user wants.

No one gives a damn about innovation and dreams, and everyone gives a damn about innnovation and dreams. That is, all game developers believe in their product. They all believe their unique product is made of rarified stuff. Just like everyone else.

And most consumers won't give a damn, and nine out of ten games will fail, and we all will end up playing the game we like best. It may not be the most innovative, the most passionate, the most insert-your-stuck-up-of-choice-concept, but it will definitely make a large number of people happy. Those people will put down good money monthly, and a year and a half from now, that publisher will be able to have another go at replicating that fun, even if it means more of the same exact stuff. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

If anything, money doesn't destroy the industry. It's ego.

[Nathan Combs]

bruce>
"Isn't that the same thing as saying CUSTOMERS are destroying the industry?"

I think the problem here is not that the industry can attract a growing customer base. The better question is who are they missing out on and why? Constrast the MMO genre with other online games: a small fraction.

[Bruce Woodcock]

Is money killing the innovation in MMOs? My short answer is no, but then who cares what I think?

The money is driving an increase in the number of MMOs, an increase in the size of the market, and the attraction of casual players into the market. Yes, a lot of this can be done through evolutionary design to make these games less time-consuming, but innovation is also going to be inevitable, especially as some MMOGs work to exploit niche markets within the larger pie.

Still, the market is less innovative in the sense that before, developers were stumbling around to find what people would play. When you only need 100 people playing your game and you are dealing with early adopters who are willing to put up with a lot of warts if it delivers something they can't get elsewhere, it is very easy to be innovative. But now, as MMOGs have figured out what most of the current hardcore like and what they think the casual market want, it becomes hard to design a game that doesn't meet those requirements. So you still can innovate, but you have more constraints on you.

Bruce

[Jimpy]

How is this any different than film? Or novel writing? Or songwriting? Or televisions shows? Or heck, non-MMORPG video games?

The same thing has been written about every creative industry ever known. The basic tune is,
"when we began, we were truly creating art. But then money came along, and all corporations want is the next (Titantic/Harry Potter/Halo/American Idol/Britney Spears). How sad that we will never see another (Chinatown/Lolita/Pong/All in the Family/The Clash). Ergo, money has destroyed art."

But what stops you from continuing to make innovative games for $3,000? Because "everyone" is playing WoW? No more so than "everyone" is seeing Star Wars. There is always an audience for the "indy" film, the "new postmodern" book, the "innovative" video game. Just not necessarily a 1.5 million member audience.

Big corporations (and film studios and record labels and publishing houses and and and and) will continue to chase the potential for big money offered by the next WoW. And creative souls are free to lament about how money "destroys" their craft.

Even though it doesn't.

[Galrahn]

Am I missing something or do I just play different games than most here?

There is a lot of innovation out there, however most MMO games in general have 'issues' that keep them nitch, particularly now how nitch is defined thanks to WoW who has established an enormous curve for mainstream.

I don't see the industry dieing, or even slowing down in terms of total population, but I definitely can see a scenario over the next 2-3 years where a bunch of old games are shut down and a bunch of new games never break even. It doesn't matter how much money gets spent, it matters how much money is lost. Honestly, I think there are large populations of gamers in general cheering for failure among many games soon to come out, the market is saturated, and quite honestly some of the concepts sound either too familiar, unappealing in general, or simply ridiculous.

BTW, how do other games immitate WoW's success, can anyone accurately define what created WoW's success? Jessica seems to credit the Blizzard and Warcraft names, but what bigger name is there than Star Wars, which is a small game relative to several others.

World of Warcraft rode a marketing wave of hype unlike any MMOG game we have ever seen, why would any of the 30ish MMOGs expect to have success even in the same continent as WoW considering how skeptical the market is to almost every game coming out, including the big name games like Lord of the Rings or Dungeons and Dragons. Even a young pup like me would be expected to play D&D because i did D&D RPGs way back in the day, but the truth is I think I represent a majority of MMO gamers who likely will never pay to play D&D online.

I consider myself an average RPG player, which means the only thing I pay for when I played D&D or Warhammer is food, caffeine, and alcohol. Those old RPGs were about the game for only 1 of every 100 players, but RPG was about the get together of a group of friends for the other 99. I think that reflects the MMOG market as well, which was why as WoW grew quickly, it kept growing like a wildfire thanks to word of mouth among friends (and rivals). There is no hype among circles for D&D or Warhammer or LotR, the interest is casual, so why should we expect those games to have WoW or even 1/4 of the WoW success?

Another thing. If people want innovation so bad, why was there so little discussion when NCSoft, one of the biggest players in the MMOG market, licensed the Unreal Engine v3 for their next round of MMOGs. I play a MMOG with the Unreal Engine and "O M G" the graphics are far superior. If NCSoft ever learns how to add both graphics and content to the same game, look out WoW.

Yes we are talking about 2007 and beyond when we talk about future games and technology, but the hype for WoW was alive and well in 2002, and it was with technology where the hype for WoW started.

[lewy]

I've long been a fan of studying the similarities between computer gaming as a medium and the birth of film in the early part of the 1900's. Both mediums are made possible by technological innovation, and the early criticisms directed at the movies are strikingly similar to the alarmist attacks directed at PC and console games. Now it appears that the game industry is stuck in a creative rut comparable to the one that large Hollywood studios are mired in: just as the movie studios feel compelled to remake classics like "Scooby Doo" and "The Dukes of Hazard" game companies seem intent on churning out EQ clones like World of Warcraft.

It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that game companies, asked to invest millions of dollars in a release, should be justifiably anxious about the potential return on their investment. It should also be noted that the problem isn't confined to MMOG's either but rather affects the gaming industry as a whole.

Carrying the analogy one step further I'm hopeful that independant game studios will be able to have an impact comparable to that of independant movie studios. It's just naive however to expect that either set of independants will ever get as much exposure or make as much money as the big guys. Is it really surprising that the average game player is no more discriminating than the average movie goer? This is after all a world where "Titanic" and Britney reign supreme.

[Peli]

Uhm, yeah.
You could write a simple mud 15 years ago for just 30k$, Wooooow!
Could you write WoW, or GW with just 30k and "passion and dreams".
I would say you need at last 60 people core team, to create anything playable. And of course few millions $ to pay their wages.

Oh, and FFS! There are tons of innovative games!
Take EVE:Online - where you're a ship, with fully player run economy and 50% of political map. It's just soaked with innovative features, so distinguishing from your typical mud-derived hack'n'slash. But it's also bugnanza, flooded with downtimes, rushed out patches lack of balance and any general idea where game should aim.

Check mmorpg.com, you find over 30 titles 'in production', most with unique and distinguishing features. They are being fueled by "passion and dreams" though, which is why not a single one have or will have successful launch.

To sum up: Big money is absolutly essencial part of good mmorpg. Times of projects fueled by "passion and dreams" ended with C64.

[Michael Chui]

Nice opener.

Something completely irrelevant: Based on the URL, I'm guessing you made your post, then changed the title. Thought I'd point that out; Typepad's funny like that.

Regarding innovation, I'd say that, if no one's been able to stick something your face and say, "Here's innovation!" and have you agree in all this time... then it's clearly either not there or hidden well enough that it might as well not be.

Everyone else is forming up the old guard battle lines on the subject... to be honest, I couldn't stand re-reading the same old arguments so I skimmed every comment but the first few.

If you want money backing innovation, and that's not easy in any industry I know of, then you need a wildly successful MMORPG that derives its success principally and almost solely from its innovation. That's really, really hard, because too much of success requires some formula. Client-server-shard model. Perspectives. Controls. Interface. I'm not saying it can't be done; I'm saying it's damn hard.

[Van Sath]

First time ever posting on a blog. I once ran a RMT site and made a decent profit - 3K in 3 months, 10K in gross revenue. Hard to believe huh? I am about to start again as it's lots of fun. There are definitely frauds out there though - PayPal provides minimal protection. What's the alternative if you can't trust PayPal?

[ren reynolds]

Sorry I’m late. Hmm all the good points have been taken so I’ll just resonate:

No, money is not killing the industry. The ‘natural’ development of this type of industry within the contemporary economic climate is what’s occurring. For every <insert Hollywood movie you hate here> there is <insert indi move you love>. OK, the ratio is probably not 1:1 but you get my meaning.

[Jare]

I must agree with what Samantha and hikaru said. To complain about lack of innovation without mentioning the actually innovative games out there is, well... suggests another question: "Is age killing our ability to understand the industry?" 19 years since I published my first game, I often ask myself that question.

The romantic side of me still believes that TSO was a commercial failure because, deep down, Will Wright didn't want it to be a big success.

[Craig Huber]

On the original question: I think the "money replacing inspiration/passion" is just part and parcel of the natural evolution of the form. As "Jimpy" pointed out earlier, it's hardly a unique perception/phenomenon: you can see the same progression in nearly every form of creative endeavor.

I personally like to blame graphics for some of the cost inflation: creating written descriptions of some fancy new combat style (or some such) is a lot simpler and cheaper than creating a series animations for it, after all. However, that is at best a contributing factor, not a root cause.

It's also interesting to see what widely varying concepts various people call "innovation". For me, for example, innovation would revolve around entire new paradigms of "game". Others have pointed to the implementation of different genres of fiction (superhero, space opera) as innovation, or even (warning: my personal prejudice showing, front and center) simply how the use of a licensed 3D-shooter rendering engine enables some above-average eye-candy.

We can't even collectively agree on what innovation _is_. What, "we'll know it when we see it?"

Finally, I think there's a semantics issue underlying all of this, as well. "MMORPG", the first letter of which represents "massive". Define "massive". Is 2000 massive? 10000? Does it matter?

I think the price tag logically varies in relation to the target audience size. If a developer is shooting for WoW/EQ/CoH size numbers, the budget is going to _need_ to run into the millions. The real crime here is not that big budgets are getting bigger, but rather that small budget productions have little support. There are a dozen avenues for indie filmmakers to subsidize and promote their productions... where are the corresponding support organizations for indie developers (the IGDA's heroic efforts notwithstanding)?

How's that for a rambling initial comment? (heh)

[Jessica Mulligan]

Good comments and observations, all. Thanks. I know to some of you it looked like a weird and maybe even stupid question. I happen to think we ought to ask the obviously broad questions every once in a while, so as not to get lost in our own cleverness or navel-gazing.

[Lee Delarm]

Loved all your articles on skotos, waiting for payday to get the book :)

I believe innovation still widely exists today, but money is drowning it out. Money mainly seems to go toward marketing, not features for the game or better art and developers. The problem seems to be that marketting and hollywood seem to want to plaster their game to everyone and their brother, and this in turn makes sure that games that spend the majority of their money on developing never really see the success of the bigger games. It USED to be where you could post your new MUD or various other start up game on a few BBS boards, Unet, and some other spots (maybe even spend $1k for an advertisement!) and you'd be golden. Nowadays to reach the market you need to plaster your name on G4TV every other day, have a sprawling 3000 square foot layout at E3, TV commercials, giveaways, etc.

So to sum it up, in my opinion, money seems to be moving the "innovative" games to niche status or indie developers (which does not in all cases make them unsuccesful, which I'd love to prove if I had some charts on how much companies spent :)

[Marco rolandi]

I don't think money is killing the game industry. The game industry has become simply what the name suggests. A business. We're talking safe bets, investments, profits and the like. No revolutions, but evolutions.
The real issue with all this, lies benetah the MMORPGs nature. Going from project to Golden master is just the first step, not the end. This way the usual game industry business has (yet) to evolve. People buy the game, then pay a monthly fee and expect to recieve fresh content every month or so. In order to accomplish that, the industry has found the only known way to face the challenge. Throw in more money. And if it doesn't work throw in much more money. I think this is just insane. I believe the next generation MMOGS will be those that don't need a complete horde of developers that needs to produce expansion after expansion. I don't even believe the nextgen mmorpgs will need all that content. The opposite. Nextgen mmorpgs, virtual worlds and the like should evolve from a carefully crafted set of rules, the content created on the fly by the engine itself, and be completely shapeable by the players. The more the players play, the faster the world changes. Players get into guilds, guilds into empires, empires rise and fall. This way you can have history. The more freedom you give the players (the more basic the rules are) the more the game would be interesting. Hideo Kojima has begun working on something similar (even if his games are completely different from mmorpgs) and Will Wright latest creation (Spore) is another step in that direction. I believe this is the only viable way to build an always evolving, always interesting MMORPG. Sure that would be very difficult, maybe it wouldn't even be fun at all, but I believe it's the only way. Throwing in more and more content is just a suicide move. There will always be a limit, a boundary. To get back to the original question, how much such a game like that would cost? Hard to say. I believe it would cost less than some of current giant productions, but it would definitely require knowledge from very different fields.
Summarizing I would say: money is not killing creativity, but it's definitely not saving the day.

[Galrahn]

What is and is not innovation though? Can someone provide a definition?

Free content upgrades are now available in several games. To me, this is innovation.

In PvP centric games player control is now dominated by not only power, but authority (legitimized power) driven by the mechanics of the game giving winners control over the greater populace of the game. This is an enormous innovation for PvP centric games, it makes winning and losing mean something.

'Hack and Slash' powerup character development has given way to more quest centric character advancement in several new games. To me this is innovation in character development.

There have been several enhancements to completely player driven gaming economies in several games that I would point to as very innovative, particularly how they hold up to influences of inflation and RMT. This is huge, because now inflation is a player driven effect, and with effective money sinks RMT becomes an option that doesn't hurt the balance within some games.

The technologies out today have revolutionalized what MMO games can be via perception. I think in the catagories of art, graphic design, and character customization, and particularly the advancements in capacity has seen some very positive innovation. In the old days, 50 people on the same screen killing one monster became a lag fest and difficult to manage, but today in some games thousands and thousands of players occupy small battlefields to compete against each other. Todays character interaction was the hope of yesterday, what will todays innovations bring for tomorrows interaction? A single server for an entire game maybe? Likely yes.

I see innovation in lots of games, but maybe my definition is too broad. What is and is not innovation in MMOGs?

[magicback]

In reference to Spores, Will Wright got the funding necessary to make Spore happen. Also probably a nice sum of money to make those wacky, but innovative Japanese games.

Someone still can make El Marachi, but that someone would love to have the money to make Desperado or Sin City.

Perhaps we as consumers are accustomed to .. highly polished disposables. For example, would you buy a $1 innovative broom that does corners really well, but made of bamboo by some genius in India or buy the $10 shiny from Walmart?

Eureka! I have define the new consumer segement.

Shiny-urism: a segment of consumers who will pay a premium for something shiny, fresh, and bling. Their replacement cycle is approximately one-year. For MMOs, it's 3-6 months. I term this the MMO Shiny cycle :)

Frank

[Darniaq]

I've been wondering the same thing of late, asking whether some games are victims of their own success. Money allows people to overthink things; almost requires it given the conditions that provided that money and their desired assurances for a good ROI.

But I don't think innovation has suffered really.

Rather, I think the amount of people seeking true innovation hasn't grown at pace with the number of people currently playing all MMOs.

Like movies, books, and other industry (I agree with Jimpy), there's the "mainstream" that gets the bucks and the art seekers/scholars that drive forward the thought. I don't know how that breaks down exactly for MMOs, but in my opinion, it feels like the span between, say, Second Life and WoW. The former is a voluntary exploration of potential group think while the later is one of the more polished Diku iteration we have to date.

[Chas York]

I'm reserving judgment here. Sure, we can call all the blockbuster games "clones" with each one offering only minor advancements, with the others quickly copying the good ideas. We can also point to interface element X or feature Y as "innovation" with some pride.

Is it that "there is no innovation" or is it that "we expect more bang for the buck?" If these were all low-budget titles, would we be lauding their achievements on such tight budgets or would we still be complaining of stagnation?

Also, many of us academics and developers see "new" releases that offer little of the innovations we talk about today, or that we see in our own to-be-released products. Is it fair to compare the "state of the art" theories today with games whose core mechanics had to be hammered out in planning 3-4 years ago? How much should they adapt to the emerging schools of thought while in production?

[Flatfingers]

Just to pile on (and welcome, Jessica; feel free to shake up the big-upping beardy> types among us)....

The point about more money means less risk means less innovation has (as noted) been made before. It's a good point, but maybe there's another to be made.

Namely, that every successful thing eventually institutionalizes. If it succeeds, it attracts people who then don't want it to change (because it's succeeding, and they're the ones benefiting from that success). These folks have a vested interest in continuity.

You can see it happening now in games, and the analogy is made to the movie biz, but it happens in every organization created by humans.

It happens in civilizations. One comes into being, grows when it creates what Carroll Quigley called an "instrument of expansion," loses steam when the people who benefit most from that instrument try to lock it down (so that they can continue to be the ones who benefit), dies when the institutionalized instrument is not reformed or circumvented with a new instrument of expansion, and is replaced by a new civilization that develops a new instrument of expansion.

It happens in business, and in the same way and for the same reason. A company comes on the scene with a great new idea, does fantastically well and makes boatloads of money for its investors, who promptly decide that the only thing worth doing is more of the same. Eventually the big company stalls out and is overtaken by some other smaller, newer, and more agile company that has a better idea and, because it isn't beholden to vested interests (yet), is free to innovate.

So I'm not surprised to see the same thing happening to the game development industry. But there are two other pieces to this process: technology and access to consumers.

A small player can't hope to compete against a large player as long as resources and distribution are fixed. The good news is that while a big player is institutionalizing, technology usually advances. Eventually an order of magnitude advance is achieved, at which point regular people can afford to obtain and use that new technology... and that's when you see a sudden profusion of new ideas as the market shifts its love from the tired old lions to the young cubs. One modern example of this is the astonishing reduction in prices of prosumer digital cameras, which are allowing anyone with time and energy to make competent-looking movies. ("Blair Witch Project", anyone?) (There are also counterexamples, such as the auto industry... but the replacement technology for the internal combustion engine may finally be appearing as battery technology improves sufficiently.)

The third necessary piece for corporate revolution is access to consumers. In game terms, that means access to client machines. It won't matter if a sudden burst in technology makes it cheap to build competent-looking games -- not if there's a barrier to gamers a) learning about new games, and b) getting to those new games to actually play them.

Maybe this means we need something like a "game clearinghouse" that players know they can visit to find out about and download the latest game experiments. But whether it's this or something else, the small players will not be able to compete as long as putting boxes on shelves is the reigning distribution model.

In conclusion, there's a natural impulsion toward replacing institutionalized agents with new organizations that are better able to satisfy changing consumer desires. Within (I would say) ten years from now, we should be at that point. If by then we also have new technologies that allow the general user to create decent-looking MMOGs, to promote awareness of them, and to deliver access to them, then I would expect to see a wave of fresh and innovative games sweep away the old models.

But not until then.

--Flatfingers

[lewy]

Flatfingers wrote:

"Within (I would say) ten years from now, we should be at that point. If by then we also have new technologies that allow the general user to create decent-looking MMOGs, to promote awareness of them, and to deliver access to them, then I would expect to see a wave of fresh and innovative games sweep away the old models."

If the Hollywood comparison holds true then we'll see the large, established corporations co-opt the new and innovative models for their own.

[Marco rolandi]

Chas York wrote:
"Is it fair to compare the "state of the art" theories today with games whose core mechanics had to be hammered out in planning 3-4 years ago? How much should they adapt to the emerging schools of thought while in production?"
It is, because these state of the art theories are indeed 3 to 4 years old. Some even older. It's incredible to see them coming out now, and it's even stranger to see the reactions around (jaw dropping and the like). As for the money Will got to write the game, I do agree, but I believe the money he got for the game is immensely less than the amount required for a franchise like WOW, EQ or the like. But I'm just guessing, and have no actual idea: as usual I live in a country where founding a game is considered nonsense or kid stuff.

[greglas]

See the latest issue of Harper's:

Bambi vs. Godzilla: Why Art Loses in Hollywood

http://www.harpers.org/MostRecentCover.html

Paraphrasing Mamet, you might say that producers are PK'ing power gamers, and that good artists don't use that play style.

[Richard Bartle]

Galrahn>Free content upgrades are now available in several games. To me, this is innovation.

What, like we didn't used to upgrade our virtual worlds for free in the 1980s and ever since then?

Richard

[magicback]

This may be the future of online gaming:

PartyGaming's ~$2 billion IPO
http://www.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/06/02/internet.gaming.reut/

This is where the money and the profit goes...

Sad, but a reality.

[Techie_Zero]

So...what is this blog post really getting at? That money is the cause of the lack of innovation in MMOs? If there wasn't a lot of money being spent of late, the implication is that more innovation would have occured?

Is it possible that everything has run it's course? That maybe there are no new grounds to cover --- so that the only improvements can be in the technology and not the gameplay.

How many different ways can you have an avatar go against some sort of fill in the blank conflict, cooperatively or adversarily with other avatars?

The innovations if they do occur will have to be in the details, and that devil is not the money being spent. It's a lack of new ideas. Someone has made the parrallel about film and interactive entertainment, and maybe they have both reached their innovation plateaus.

[Chas York]

Techie Zero>How many different ways can you have an avatar go against some sort of fill in the blank conflict, cooperatively or adversarily with other avatars?

I think that there are plenty of different ways to approach MMORPG's, from they type of conflict to the details the conflict display in, to the methods of cooperation and interaction.

The original post, as I took it, suggested that now that big-money investors are at the table, innovation has stagnated because they want the "safe return on their investment" rather than a truly visionary rethinking of any core system. The result is stagnation... or incremental innovation.

[Mike Sellers]

Is it possible that everything has run it's course? That maybe there are no new grounds to cover --- so that the only improvements can be in the technology and not the gameplay.

No, that's not the case, not by a long shot.

Chas is right. The primary issue is raising the money needed to create a MMOG today given increasing budgets and the risk-averse nature of investors.

Then again, it was awfully difficult to do in 1995 too, when our budget on M59 was a pittance compared to games today. In terms of rough orders of magnitude: M59 was made for ~10% of what DAoC cost, which was made for ~10% of WoW's cost. Not that this is linear, mind you: I fully believe a commercially successful MMOG can be made today for a small fraction of what WoW cost. Just don't try to build WoW again!

[Arnold Hendrick]

In general, I can’t disagree with Jessica. Even a five million investment is a serious amount of money in the game industry, and that’s a bare-bones budget for an MMORPG today. The need to maximize returns forces one to carefully examine the risk-reward of even innovation..

However, there ARE some companies with buckets of money who are innovating. NCsoft’s US office comes to mind. City of Heroes / City of Villains, Guild Wars, Auto Assault, or even the PK-fest of Lineage II (not to mention those ultra-sexy female outfits) are all radical products by traditional American MMORPG standards. You wouldn’t catch EA or Microsoft dead with a lineup like that, yet NCsoft is arguably the richest MMOG game publishing company in the world. Of course, return on investment from the US office has been less than inspiring, which points up the problem of innovation. Overall, payoffs don’t match the investment cost if you’re trying to do AAA products.

It is my opinion that the more radical the experiment, the lower the budget. We’re increasingly seeing this in the PC gaming world as big-budget publishers abandon the PC platform in favor of console games. It’s only a matter of time before similar pressures start to distinguish big-budget MMOGs from small-budget “boutique” innovators. Of course, what innovator is willing to admit their ideas are so risky that they should deliberately accept second class art, an undersized game world, and modest subscription fees?

Meanwhile, if you ARE working on a big budget product, you have a whole different set of challenges. You need a certain amount of innovation to avoid the syndrome of “just another orcs and wizards level-up snore-fest.” However, you cannot afford to ignore customer-pleasing features such as the level-up ratrace with incremental rewards, the right mix of PvE and PvP, a judicious combination of solo and team play, etc. Furthermore, what succeeds in one region of the world probably won’t in another. For example, Lineage II has once again pulled ahead of WoW as the most popular game in Korea, while WoW is beating the panties off all those anime elves of Lineage II here in the USA.

[Grax]

Bruce Rogers said:
"Money is destroying the industry? Isn't that the same thing as saying CUSTOMERS are destroying the industry?"

Hikaru said:
"And most consumers won't give a damn, and nine out of ten games will fail, and we all will end up playing the game we like best. [...] Those people will put down good money monthly, and a year and a half from now, that publisher will be able to have another go at replicating that fun, even if it means more of the same exact stuff. If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

I honestly believe that, all things being equal, most customers would prefer a "good" (challenging, interesting, dynamic/fresh, etc.) game, but, as Hikaru said, they are willing to settle for smooth playability (e.g. World of Warcraft, which I will talk about here since it's a perfect example) over harder higher-learning curve games that happen to have many "good" qualities.

The most interesting question here is: why can't players have both? Why can't a game be both "good" and smooth? Well, so far the big companies seem to be trying to convince people like me that "goodness" and smoothness are incompatible concepts: consider how Blizzard has made a game (World of Warcraft) that offers an enormous amount of information to the new player in the form of in-game maps, quests with detailed info that all but obliterate the possibility of true exploration*, etc.

What is the evolution here? What has been improved upon, and is it an improvement? Well, the more difficult games require players to discover information by interacting with other players or by discovering it directly themselves. Information, and therefore good connections with knowledgeable players, has a lot of value in these more difficult games (I will shamelessly list EverQuest as an example here of a more difficult game, since it works perfectly in contrast with WoW). Information (and knowledgeable players) is much less valued in WoW than it was in EQ. The skilled, knowledgeable, veteran player is therefore under attack, as his collected knowledge (of terrain, NPC locations, creature difficulty, etc.) has been mostly handed directly to the newbie in various forms. This is to say that Blizzard has essentially taken the role of the veteran player, of the knowledgeable friend connection, of the helpful guild's collection of information. You therefore interact less meaningfully with the other intelligent beings (PCs) in your world. Inevitably, a player (me :) who is sensitive to this kind of change will notice, upon playing WoW for a bit, that one simply interacts much less meaningfully with other players. One uses them almost as part of the environment, as NPCs that can be grouped to help on a certain quest. This is especially the case during the early levels.

Blizzard's method of replacing the in-game value of the veteran, knowledgeable player involves a group of mechanisms, some large and some minor and seemingly harmless: the in-game maps provide quite detailed terrain information once one has wandered into the general area, the words "WELCOME TO STORMWIND" which flash up on your screen remove the need to look at actual signposts (parts of the world) to know where you are, the quest details which spell everything out for the new player seem nearly to encourage antisociability. Why does Blizzard do this? To allow the newbie player to enter its game much more smoothly, which we can all agree is a very good reason. However, with the sort of implementation we have seen in the simplifying, newbifying, smoother games (WoW, EQ2, etc.), the influx of newbies is coming with some serious consequences, one of which is the davluing of information (and therefore the veteran player), which effectively renders player interaction less necessary and meaningful. This is to say nothing of the other consequences, which I shan't go into here but which involve: the newbifying of PvP to the point that it is not frightening to the newbie, but not overly interesting to the veteran player. One wonders whether you really have to design the entire game around the preferences of newbies just to get them to walk in the door and stick around for a bit.

Or is there something else at work, possibly? Do companies like Blizzard believe that even the high level players have what I would call "bad taste", and need to be treated almost as antiseptically as the uninitiated newbies? In the future, an MMORPG may be released which ends up proving that one of these virtual worlds can be both "good" and smooth, allowing it to attract newbie players AND retain its skilled players.

Incidentally, a post I made here a while ago may unfortunately be relevant to this discussion. It is the third post on my blog and is titled "Where is the MMOG aristocracy?" ( http://freedomgreg.blogspot.com )

* For my view on the destruction of true exploration in WoW, consider http://freedomgreg.blogspot.com (search for "Fizloki")

[Grax]

note: "davluing" is new hip slang for a word which actually exists and has meaning: "devaluing"