More Men in Tights
If you go here you will see a list of the top upcoming mmorpg games for 2005. Do you notice anything? We are once again looking at another year of men in tights. It seems like all massively multiplayer online role playing games continue to follow the same formula. We get lots of fantasy characters slaying mythical monsters. There are a few games which branch out a bit. If you look at City of Heros and the upcoming Matrix Online, they are slightly different, but at their core, they are still appealing mostly to hardcore gamers.
At just about any industry discussion on the future of online games, the question becomes when will the mass market join the online games population. The answer is that they already have. Neopets is effectively a mmorpg. There are over 70 million registered users of that site. It has many of the elements that are found in a hardcore mmorpg. It just happens to appeal to kids. Toontown Online is another game that appeals to the mass market and has the same elements of a mmorpg. Imagine how popular that world would be if Disney put all of their marketing muscle behind it. And then there is my daughters favorite online pastime - The American Girl Club. This goes back to the real appeal of mmorpg games - social interaction.
The online game that successfully combines social gameplay, community building, and a mass market vehicle will be the one that sets new membership records. World of Warcraft recently boasted 200,000 simultaneous players. As I type this, there are 500,000 people playing at pogo.com, Yahoo Games, and MSN Games alone. There are plenty of people who want to play social community based games, they just don't want to play as men in tights.
There are two main reasons we don't see more variety in online games. The first is what I call the Hollywood effect. It is so much easier to take something that is proven and simply reskin it than come up with something new. That is why we saw so many sequels last year. Once in a while there are breakouts. The most obvious is The Sims, but now that is even being cloned to death. The second reason why we don't get innovative mmorpg's is that game designers are still building games that they want to play. How many game designers would enjoy Neopets. Game designers need to figure out how to build games that the mass market would want to play, which is probably not the game that they want to play.
I do have faith in the games industry. They are an incredibly smart bunch of folks. If you listen to any mmorpg designer talk about game design, it sounds like a class in sociology - not men in tights. Once they apply all that knowledge to more accessible properties, then we will finally see the mmcorpg - massive multiplayer casual online rpg.
Posted at 08:49PM Feb 03, 2005 by dtwilleager in General | Comments[0]