A recent post over at Frank Sanchez’s Overly Positive blog got me thinking on this particular topic. Frank stated that “ultimately more MMOs is a good thing, not a bad thing” when discussing fans of various games obsessing over competition in the MMO market. While I shared Frank’s sentiments regarding people needing to chill out in general over whether whatever MMO is currently the media darling is going to be a “WoW-killer,” I’m not so sure that I could agree that having more MMOs around is necessary beneficial – but for completely different reasons than anything Frank is really discussing.
At a basic level, I can readily understand the basis for Frank’s statement – “competition drives innovation” is a tried-and-true observation when it comes to any productive enterprise. There’s definitely room for more than one MMO in the gaming market, and probably even room for a reasonable number of them. In a purely business sense, there’s actually probably room for quite a lot of smaller-scale MMO games – assuming they’re not trying to shoot for the multi-million subscriber numbers with AAA budgets (and even that can be viable on some level if you have giant MMO markets like Korea and China to work with).
My thoughts, however, went beyond the simple business sense – they drifted towards consideration of the social aspect of MMOs. MMOs are rather revolutionary in terms of the both the scale and type of human networking involved. With single-player or even standard multi-player games, there’s no real concrete commitment to a specific group of players – one week, you could play with friends, the next week with another, and the week after that some combination of parts of the previous two, and there’s be no issues whatsoever when it came to organizing things (aside from perhaps what pizza toppings to order).
Things are not so simple for MMOs. MMOs are about commitment. They’re pretty much the exact antithesis of the casual “come over to my place Saturday afternoon and we’ll play Mario Kart” get-together. Whether it be coordinating the selection of a server shard so that everyone can play together, trying to keep all the characters approximately equal in level so that no one is being held up by anyone else, or even just trying to convince everyone to play a particular faction, gaming groups for MMOs require a level of organization and commitment above and beyond anything found in the non-MMO gaming world.
So how does this tie into the number of MMOs on the market? On a basic level, each MMO is essentially a “shard” in one big “meta-MMO” – subjecting potential players to all of the same problems as an individual MMO’s shards would, except now in another layer that you have to make it through before you even care about the game-specific stuff. Before picking what game shard you want to play with your friends on, you have to get them to agree on what game you all want to play. Just like with shards, it’s hard to divide up your attention between more than one or two (three if you push it) at a time if you want to make any real progress – but again just like with shards, it’s quite possible to encounter friends you’d like to play with who are already playing numerous different MMOs.
As the number of MMOs on the market increases, the chances that your friends are going to be split between increasingly larger numbers of games can’t possibly do anything but rise. So while yes, more MMOs on the market certainly can’t be a bad thing as far as increasing the quality of each game’s play… I can’t help but wonder if there’s some point at which we should really say “okay, we have enough options now.”
Afterword
I don’t think this issue is entirely without hope. After all, there have been some fairly innovative approaches to the social problems created by shards in individual games already – one example being Guild Wars’ districts system, which allowed players the option to move seamlessly between shards at will and without restriction (at least after the regional districts were made accessible – and even before this the International Districts were quite popular). Perhaps an analogue of this could be applied at the multiple-game level, where one or more games could actually be linked together in such a manner that progress in one would provide progress in others as well, such that you could swap between various games as desired without falling behind in any. I’m sure there are many possibilities out there just waiting for the right person to think of them and the right developer to implement them – but we’ll just have to see, won’t we.
Whoo – thanks Aiiane – your the bestest for the link.
Anyway, I can get behind what you’re saying. Saturation in the market also leads to an overall decrease in quality as well as division among friends. What’s missing from the accurate assessment of my opinion is the aftermath of it. More MMOs on the market is a good thing, because it drives innovation – but it also drives survival of the fittest, too. If there are plenty of alternatives on the market, that means your product has to work that much harder to be stable, fun and appealing to people. If it isn’t, your game is going the way of the dodo.
WoW became (and arguably still is) complacent because of their command of the subscriber market. But now, there are so many alternatives, and so many people who don’t play WoW in favor of something else, that they almost had to respond with Cataclysm to entice old-school players to come back. This is essentially why it’s a good thing and not a bad thing for lots of MMOs to be around – it forces a tit-for-tat that players only benefit from.
What kind of progress would carry over from game to game? Obviuosly not experience gain or coin, as that would cause problems. The only thing I can think of without putting much effort into would be titles, or fluff pets and such.
Would it really cause problems to allow experience gain/coinage to move between games? You’d probably have to design it in from the start, but what actual issues would it raise? I think we dismiss the possibility too quickly without giving it proper consideration.
I suppose it would depend on how much a person spread around their play time. A more realistic scenario would have people play MMO A which is easier to solo or faster to level in order to level quickly in MMO B which is more group oriented and generally takes more effort. I could see it functioning decently for those that dance around many MMO’s at a time.
Bringing in coin from another game would mess up the economy of the receiving game wouldn’t it? Unless you set it up so the currency through out all the games be the same, and making that the real economy which might be neat.
That’s why you’d have to design it in from the start – I definitely don’t think you could just layer it on top of existing MMOs, for a variety of reasons.
There was a point where I was like NOOOO to anything like that without so much as a second thought. I believe it’s common place to find people doing that, we don’t want to be viewed as casuals. At this point however, I’ve come to realize if new mmorpg’s keep coming out I wont have the time to start fresh each and every time. In some games, sure that will be important and interesting. In others, I may not want to run through the leveling gauntlet only to reach the end game. Perhaps games of similar genres by a similar company / publisher could allow some sort of ‘carry over’ between games. I know Sony’s STATION allows players to communicate between multiple games, and a few other features. Perhaps that is a step in the right direction
Maybe it’s the leveling system becoming out dated then. If you’re trying to think up a design to get around having to level up, maybe games should start evolving with new ways of progression.
The question is more general than just leveling though – how do you deal with friends at different places in progression wanting to play together? There’s only so much you can do with a sidekicking system.