Jan 3
Other Folks’ MMO Lookaheads
I really enjoyed the lookaheads that some of my fellow MMO blogfolk threw down in the last few weeks:
- Lum dropped his first, and I agree with a lot of what he has to say. I particularly like his personal viewpoint on the newly-independent developers and whta they’re likely to sink their teeth into.
- MMOment of Zen has some similarly well seen offerings. I think it’s interesting the different views of Aion everyone has.
- Hardcore Casual is a bit looser, I think, but he’s got a few good ones. I think his tone about RMT isn’t very useful, that said. Cracks like “one major MMO will make a legitimate push into full-on RMT, giving us the NGE of 2009″ make me grumpy.
- Brent makes a lot of really awesome callouts in his lengthy list of upcoming events. In fact, I’ll be honest: I feel like a big tool because he was willing to say a lot of the stuff I wasn’t willing to. Good on ya, mate. I think he goes a little far on some of those bullet points, but for the most part that’s some awesome work.
3 Comments so far
Re: “one major MMO will make a legitimate push into full-on RMT, giving us the NGE of 2009″:
I didn’t read that as a crack against RMT in general, but rather attempting to retrofit RMT into an existing game designed for a subscription-based revenue stream. If you do a “full-on” changeover, you risk completely screwing up your game’s economy, levelling curves, PvP, etc., resulting in pissing off your existing player base. This is apart from the simple backlash you may get on changing the revenue stream mid-stream.
A game designed with RMT in mind would (probably) not have these issues. Your gameplay would already presume RMT and the players would’ve signed on expecting it.
How accurate that prediction is I don’t know; I could see it happening in games that are floundering hard and have a dev/management team trying desperate measures…. like the NGE.
Actually, the full-on changeover already happened in the Asian market earlier this century. We have a clean case to study for how this pans out and what it does to games, communities, and the market.
Obviously free to play with RMT won the day in Asia, but that does not mean it will apply exactly the same way in the West. After you study the case, you have to compare it to the reality of your particular case as well, and see where there are difference points (and try to predict what will happen differently based on those points).
Calling it an NGE is just stupid though. It’s convenient shorthand, but thoroughly flawed application of the shorthand to identify a situation that is not nearly as similar. IE: If we woke up tomorrow and WoW had full RMT in their game, it wouldn’t be an NGE; it would be something entirely different.
@Grimwell: “Actually, the full-on changeover already happened in the Asian market earlier this century. We have a clean case to study for how this pans out and what it does to games, communities, and the market.”
Which game went from strictly a subscription-based revenue stream to full-on RMT? I’m not aware of one, but that’s probably ignorance on my part.
Regarding the NGE comparison, if you read it as “major shift that will result in a large loss of your existing player base,” then I can see where Hardcore Casual’s coming from with the prediction. If we woke up tomorrow, WoW had full RMT, and a mass exodus occurred as a result, I could accept the “kinda like the NGE” description. As an description of *how* the game changed… definitely apples and hubcaps.