MMO Games: Friend or Foe?

Justin Calvert is an editor at GameSpot who often spends what free time he has yelling "LFG UBRS" in Ironforge. You can invite him to your raid group at justin@gamespot.com

As games make their way further into popular culture, it's disheartening to see that the mainstream is not waking up to the qualities inherent in games. Instead, we find that more often than not, games are changing in order to better accommodate the tastes of the outside world. Like any niche group, I'd prefer the outside world to get into my interests by understanding what it is about them that interests me. As reactionary as it is, I can't help but worry that something will be lost when my interests start adapting to the outside world's existing wants.

I guess people are worried that game developers and publishers, like so many creators of popular music and movies before them, will concern themselves more with making products that sell than with making products that are great. Unfortunately, it's already happening, and as someone who is lucky enough to meet and interview game developers quite regularly, I can tell you that there are few things that upset me more than seeing a great game from a passionate and dedicated development team get beaten in the sales charts by an obviously inferior one, simply because the latter has a flashy license or obscene marketing budget backing it up. Licensed content and marketing spends aren't a guarantee of commercial success, of course, but neither is taking the time to develop a masterpiece of a game.

So, what's my definition of a masterpiece of a game? Aside from the obvious stuff that gets assigned scores in reviews, I think the most impressive games are those that cater to both "casual" and "hardcore" gamers without any obvious compromises being made. Sports and fighting games are often good examples, because while the best ones are relatively easy to pick up and play, there's invariably a great deal of depth waiting for players dedicated enough to devote a lot of time to them. Another great example would be GameSpot's game of the year for 2004, World of Warcraft.

Before World of Warcraft, I think it's fair to say that massively multiplayer online role-playing games were the reserve of a certain kind of player--people (like me) with a penchant for Tolkien, Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, and/or Warhammer 40,000...that sort of stuff. The only exception to this informal rule seems to be Star Wars Galaxies, which appealed to a much wider audience, not because its gameplay was particularly accessible (far from it), but because so many people loved the idea of feeling like a part of the Star Wars universe. Star Wars Galaxies is the reason that I started playing massively multiplayer online games, and for all of its faults, I don't regret for a moment the entire weekends that I spent hunting for rare pets as a master creature handler or stalking Jedi players as a bounty hunter. I don't even regret the Friday nights that I spent in guild meetings with players in other time zones for whom the timing was far less inconvenient. What I do regret, though, is that while Star Wars Galaxies was that big a part of my life, I neglected not only certain friends, but just about every other game that was released.

I kicked the Galaxies habit just in time to get addicted to World of Warcraft along with many of my colleagues. While the majority of them now visit Azeroth infrequently if at all, there are a handful of us who still bump into each other there--spending hours that could be spent checking out other new games. Since we have a great library of games at GameSpot, checking out the latest games doesn't necessarily mean that we have to go out and buy them, but what about the other 3 to 4 million people in Azeroth? If they weren't playing World of Warcraft, maybe they'd be purchasing another game or two each month. Those are some big numbers right there, which is why I can't help wondering if MMO games are bad for the game industry as a whole.

It's not just that most of us have a finite amount of time to spend playing, of course. There's also the issue of finite finances to consider. The money I spend on my subscriptions to World of Warcraft and Star Wars Galaxies each month (I just can't bring myself to cancel the latter, and I will almost certainly order the upcoming Trials of Obi-Wan expansion, just because) wouldn't be enough to buy a new game every four weeks, but the fact that I'm spending that much money on my hobby before I even visit my local EB definitely has an impact on my spending habits there. It's also worth noting that my MMO subscription fees afford me access to brand-new game content on a pretty regular basis, so it's not like I'm left wanting for new experiences just because I've been playing the same game for almost a year.

Thanks in part to the unprecedented success of World of Warcraft and other successful games before it, like EverQuest, I'm certain we can expect the number of MMO games to increase in years to come. But how many of them can the world's gamers realistically sustain simultaneously? And, more importantly, what kind of an impact would 20 World of Warcraft-type games have on the success of other games? An Xbox 360 version of Blizzard's masterpiece is rumored to be in development; if the rumors are true, maybe it'll quite literally be the only game that many people buy the console for.

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