I was at SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando last week. SAPPHIRE NOW is basically Blizcon for "big, boring software" (the kind of stuff used to run corporations, the logistics of pretty much every western army, etc.). Or at least it used to be boring. There was a demo of a custom analytics and promotion program built for Bigpoint and their Battlestar Galactica game. It uses SAP's HANA in-memory database, combined with frontend analytics for helping push custom microtransaction promotions to players in realtime.
In the demo, a CS rep uses his iPad to find players currently in combat... and not doing well... right at this moment and broadcasts a advert for a power boost to them. There is so much here, but the two biggies are a way to milk far more cash out of a microtransaction game than you ever could out of a subscription game and a built in incentive for bad game design to facilitate such promos.
Wow, that is insidious lol. But honestly, I have felt the subscription model was dead and buried for some time now. Scores of F2P MMOs have shown pretty much the whole industry that F2P with microtransactions are how your game makes truckloads of money without having to have boxed SKUs on store shelves. Is it for the best? For some players it is, as they could not for whatever reason pay a subscription (or fear periods of inactivity will render it a poor purchase). Other players like paying one fee and having access to anything they put their effort in to. But honestly, without World of Warcraft reaching huge subscriber levels with a per-month model, I think the subscription model would have been gone probably around 2006 or so. Particularly if WoW had not been there and Guild Wars had become the dominant game. It is also hard to come up with the name of a single major F2P MMORPG that has failed and closed, whereas you could count for days all of the major subscription-based games that have closed.
As far as game design in MMORPGs being dead, I definitely agree. WoW had a very adverse effect on the MMORPG industry as a whole. If you look back to the pre-WoW days, MMOs were wildly varied: City of Heroes, Everquest, Final Fantasy XI, Ragnarok, EVE, etc. Pretty much each of these games had only loose similarities to each other, and had vastly different player experiences. But now it seems that every game company releasing an MMORPG just picks up the entire design of WoW, and then simply tweaks it, adding in a couple of highlight features, and calls it a day. It is like that has become the default design for an MMO, and no one will stray very far from it. Not that I am saying WoW is a bad game, but we already have WoW! I just long for the variety from the pre-WoW-explosion days, where jumping into a new game meant throwing away everything you knew about MMOs and learning it all from scratch. Most MMOs today don't even require you to go through a tutorial or newbie quest. If you have played one, all of those skills and that knowledge transfer over to the new game. Where is the creativity in gameplay?
Ah but you are missing the trend. the new Nintendo, Xbox720, and PS4 are going to force the PC game industry to get danged creative otherwise yes all hope is lost. The longer Mac and PC continue to have this pissing match the more people will begin to hate computers. The more you have to upgrade your PC for every new game the more people will hate computers. The more they allow spam, Virus's, and especially spyware, the more people will hate their computers, the more jobs that turn to computers, the more people will hate their computers.
The point I am getting at and yes i do have a point is WOW would never survive on console. Nor would 90% of these MMOS. The console game market is far more competitive and the game play MUST be more entertaining. Look at most games made for PC then look at their Xbox port. You cringe at it. Look at games made specifically for the Xbox then look at its PC port. Pretty bad.
The consoles will soon be back on top. They were a few years ago with all the new releases and I remember well how desolate game sites got when the Xbox360 came out, then Wii, then PS3. Very few games were released on PC and the ones that were, were MMOs. That is what supercharged that time in space where we were all attempting a MMO. That time is coming back but it will not survive again without some changes. MMOs built then if not now are going to be looking more at the porting to console and they are going to have to step up the game to compete with the new COD's and BF's of the next generation console.
Consoles already are on top, and have been for years. The gaming market is something like 75% console. As you said, about the only place where PC gaming is still alive and well is MMOs, and to some degree RTS (although a couple of console RTS have shown it can be done, and done well). Piracy has caused the gaming industry to pull back from PCs as a whole, as non-DRM games are put up online in minutes, and heavily-DRM games are ripped apart in reviews and by players. That has caused new PC-focused games to change even single-player modes to server/client, such is the case with Diablo III.
But sadly, I don't think just seeing MMOs come to consoles at large will bring back creativity. That is because players accept WoW-clones as being MMOs, and many of the younger players don't remember anything different. I think it will take a unique, creative MMO to become a hit before varied gameplay comes back en masse.
What I mean is MMOs will eventually go to console as well. When that happens the PC game is in major doom. As far as 75% I would not say that is true. 75% of CDs purchase or physical store purchase? Yes. But not Game saturation. There are millions on MMOS, Facebook, and web games. The average popular console game sells 50k to 200k units. The average popular web game gets more than that in the first week to a month. Do they get $50 up front? No but they will get more over time.
True, that those statistics don't count things like Facebook games and PBBGs. I believe it counts just boxed store games, and games of that ilk, such as Steam downloads. Nor does it count mobile games, I believe, because there really is no metric to compare something like Modern Warfare and Angry Birds or Farmville.
hallsofvallhalla wrote: Angry Birds has made more sells than any COD
And that is where things get complicated lol. Most people who bought Angry Birds paid maybe $2 or $3 for it, whereas the first week sales of something like Modern Warfare or GTA IV cost $60 a piece. That is where the stat-heads just throw their hands up and say we are only counting one or the other
But then you also have 'market exhaustion' - ie, there are only so many people out there and they will exhaust/wont buy the exact same game a second time. Getting more money out of them before they exhaust is the preferable angle.
