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Everyone seems to be developing a massively multiplayer game these days. I should know because I've personally written previews in the past couple of months on PlanetSide, EVE: The Second Genesis, Disney's Toontown Online, and Guild Wars. GameSpot has also covered Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, Horizons, Anarchy Online: Shadowlands, and Shadowbane in the past few months alone. Dozens of others are on the way. Is there really room in the market for this many massively multiplayer games?
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I can drive vehicles and fight with many other players in PlanetSide... |
The appeal of developing these games is obvious, from a publisher's perspective. Almost all massively multiplayer games charge a monthly fee, and with a large enough subscriber base, publishers of successful games can generate millions of dollars in monthly revenue. The main problem I see is creating a game that's compelling enough for people to want to pay a monthly fee. How many massively multiplayer games are currently considered successful? Ultima Online's on its way out. That leaves EverQuest and Lineage, and perhaps Dark Ages of Camelot. I'm sure dozens of you are going to send me irate messages trumpeting the subscription numbers for your favorite game. But the real point is that as long as other great games offer free online gameplay, how many more games with monthly fees can the market bear?
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...but I can do the same for free in Battlefield 1942. |
To be brutally honest, the only time I find myself playing massively multiplayer games is in the beta stage, when it's free to play. By the time the retail version of a game comes out, I find that I don't have enough time to devote to any one single game to justify paying a $12-to-$15 monthly charge. I'm getting nickeled-and-dimed to death already with all of life's other monthly charges--rent, car payments, insurance, gasoline, transit tickets, cable television, broadband Internet access, phone, and so on. These are basic expenses that most people need to deal with every month. Those of you in college have tuition, books, and lab fees to pay for. Some of you may have children to support, which also greatly reduces disposable income.
Personally, I'm not compelled to pay to play an online RPG when I can have just as much fun playing a game like Diablo II with friends. I'm having tons of fun playing the PlanetSide beta, but will I really want to pay that monthly fee when I can just as easily load up Battlefield 1942 and get a similar experience, without incurring a monthly charge? Some of you will write in and tell me that the monthly fee supports new content updates, to help keep the game fresh. But quality mods for games are often created freely for the most popular online games, offering new experiences without any extra charge. And in many cases, you'll still see free content updates from the developers of the most popular online games. Blizzard often gives away new maps and tweaks game balance in its real-time strategy games months and years after their initial release. Ensemble recently released a new single-player campaign for Age of Mythology, and EA offered a free map for Battlefield 1942 just a few weeks ago. These free content updates fly in the face of the argument that a monthly fee is necessary strictly to keep an online game fresh over time.
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Many thought The Sims Online would be a slam-dunk success. It wasn't. |
I'm not against "pay to play" in principle. I just think publishers need to explore other pricing models. Is it fair that the hard-core guy who spends 200 hours a month playing EverQuest is charged the same as the casual guy who puts in 15 hours? Shouldn't longtime subscribers get price breaks every few months on their bill for showing loyalty? Is it really necessary that I pay a full $40 or $50 for the client software when I'm still going to be charged to play starting in the second month? What if I play for the free month and decide I don't like the game? There are a finite number of development dollars out there, and it's a little perturbing that with every year a larger and larger slice of that pie is going toward massively multiplayer, pay-to-play games. Before things get any worse, I think publishers and developers should examine the existing market and come to terms with the fact that the market simply can't bear the hundreds of massively multiplayer games coming out.
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