Bloody hell I’ve written a lot in the last two weeks. I’ve barely had a chance to get a free moment to do 3vil, let alone type at you people. Others, however, have been more dedicated to their sites.

Kendricke fires one off at the ‘my game can beat up your game’ argument.

“Seriously, I think I get it. World of Warcraft has a lot of subscribers. It’s a good game. This doesn’t make it the only good game. I think we’ve come to this place where we rely on subscriber numbers too much to gauge a game’s health. Certainly, too many people seem to rely upon the numbers to gauge a game’s worth or design, too. These type of discussions really seem to bring out the Monday morning quarterbacks though - myself included.”

I completely and utterly agree; especially with that new site thats picked up where Bruce has let off. I uhh, don’t want to spit in anybody’s tea, but I am told that his numbers … not so accurate. Of course, I think we’ve all had doubts about Bruce’s numbers all along, so thats not too surprising, right?

Ultimately, subscriber numbers are immaterial to the bottom line (and I’m not talking financial): is a game fun, or isn’t it? You can tell if a game is ‘working’. It’s easy to see. When you log on, are there people there? Can you get groups? Does what you’re doing in the game make you happy? If not, either the server you’re on is freakishly underpopulated (unlikely), or you’re not playing a very good game.

When LOTRO launched smooth as silk, and there were people overflowing the Shire, and everyone was chatting happily about their experiences in Middle Earth, you knew that the game was a success, right? It doesn’t matter that Turbine won’t give out stats: it’s easy to see from our location on the ground. Likewise, you didn’t need a graph to tell you people would be cancelling out of Vanguard almost as fast as they entered it. Servers that were more like ghost towns, bountiful bugs, grindy and unfun gameplay … it was easy to see from a single player’s perspective that the game wasn’t doing well.

Bah on numbers.

 edit: Ken and Darren do a great job riffing off these concepts over at Common Sense gamer.

Lauren at Mystic Worlds pines (but not really) for the game whot must not be named - a Harry Potter MMOG. In the end, she sort of talks herself out of that idea:

“You won’t be Harry or Dumbledore. I’m certain of that fact. No, you’ll just run into them some where along the way. You’ll turn a corner or enter a room, and there one or all of them will be, mumbling repetitive non-sense to the adoring masses. It’s rather demeaning in a way. That in order to be a part of their world, we must trivialize them – almost dethrone them from the pedestals on which they should rightly stand alone, so that we may stand along side … Hmm, so maybe as much as I’d like to be a young wizard learning her craft in Hogwarts, and racing to the aide of Harry and his companions, it’s probably better for them, the books and Rowling’s legacy, that I never get that chance.”

This is the thing that stops me from wanting a lot of my treasured IPs and world settings translated into a Massive format. Outside of the playerbase, the ‘world’ in Massive titles is resoundingly stale. It would break my heart to walk into a Forgotten Realms game and see Alustriel Silverhand ‘mumbling to herself’ in the soulless center of Silverymoon, or click on Elminster to get a quest and not hear Ed Greenwood’s voice coming from my speakers. I’ve *met* Elminster, man. I’ve shaken his hand. No stupid NPC is going to live up to that.

Other setting I don’t want to see made into MMOGs: The Young Wizards series, Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Dragonlance, almost any Star Wars time frame but KOTOR, and Planescape. KOTOR is an exception to this because it’s so wide open that a game set there would be epicly free. Dev like the wind, Bioware!

Finally, Cuppy comments on a GameDaily article about Conquering the Massive Market. The article itself is a good read, as Cuppy suggests, and her points are well seen as well.

“The final idea of the article is to promote user-friendliness. I feel this goes hand in hand with promoting community, because you really can’t have one without the other. User friendliness = more users = $$. The article states that games should have low system requirements, mass market appeal, the ability to accomplish something meaningful in a short time, and the ability to play alone if chosen.”

At this point I’m meta-meta commenting on content, so I’ll make my point quickly: Raph completely has it right; it doesn’t have to look good for people to like it. It doesn’t have to have all the bells and whistles; as long as it’s ‘good enough’, and that ‘good enough’ hits a broad enough audience, you’ve won. Then get them talking to each other and you’ve made a fortune.