I’ve gone ahead with a cunning plan to do a video instead of a regular blog post for my next-year prognostications. Unfortunately, it’s the first time I’ve tried to do this in a setting like this, and as a result it’s taking longer and running into unforseen difficulties. No shocker there, but it won’t be up for a bit yet.

That whole ‘unseen difficulties’ thing made me think that I should link to T=Machine, which recently posted two of the most thoughtful discussions of the MMO industry I’ve read in some time:

• Does it lose money when you do that? Then don’t do that! – A discussion of MMO business models and pitfalls. Stuff Raph and Co. have been harping on for a while and a great argument for the kool-aid I drank early in 2008.
• Customer Relationships and Support for Online Games and MMOs – Variations on themes Sanya’s been putting out there for some time now, and well worth a readthrough.

A year ago, at the close of 2007, I threw out some prognostications about the coming 12 months. Those months have now passed and it’s time to pay the piper. Just as with last year I’m going to grade my predictions on a straight pass/fail basis; percentages are for actuarials.
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It’s been a long week and a half for me. My wife had surgery on the 26th (day before Thanksgiving, yay!), and it’s been a slow recovery process. We’ve had fits and starts, and a bunch of bumps along the way. Just keeping her happy, me sane, and Massively rolling during a week of seemingly non-stop MMO news and drama was … challenging.

So, my first December 08 post falls on the 6th. So it goes. That said, I want to do a little bit of catching up. Because, like I said, busy week.

• Tabula Rasa’s closure is pretty well BS. Sorry, I know I should be more politik about it, but that’s why this is my personal site and not my responsible-day-job site. I appreciate that they have business needs and all that kinda jazz, but guess what? I’m a player. I don’t have to care about their bottom line. The herculean efforts of the team to put out new patches, introduce new content, and encourage community behaviors at the end of days just proves to me that this is a collection of people which deserves to survive.
• Colin Brennan took them to task opinion-style on Massively for TR’s closure, and we got nothing but hell from it from people on both sides of the fence. I particularly didn’t appreciate this post from Lum; we talked via email and I guess I feel a little better about it. I perpetually live in a state of ‘you can’t please everybody’, but this issue was more like ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
• Good idea: Own up to the fact that one of your core game elements needs some fixing. As I’ve argued here in the past, these games simply cannot be released 100% perfect. If you couch it to the community in the right framework, they’ll be unhappy but understanding. Bad idea: Let your creative director bitch out the guy that made the mistake in front of the entire fucking internet. I’m sorry, I respect Mr. Barnett – as I’ve said here in the past – but come on. I disagree with Lum’s opinion on one point: it was at no point funny. I may not have had any formal management training, but I know one bottom-line concept pretty well already – you don’t make someone into an example. Ever. It’s not funny, it’s not cool, and it inspires people to, um, hate you. Anyone want to take a guess as to how long Colin’s going to stay with Mythic after this?
• In a week with so much bad news, it was great to see Darkfall and Chronicles of Spellborn moving forward after their lengthy development stalls. City of Heroes Issue 13, also? Awesome, completely. They’ve reinstated all the lapsed accounts this weekend if you’re looking for something to do.
• I’ve been struggling with the WoW vs. LotRO issue a lot. My ‘Monday evening’ character has turned into something of a going concern with me. I’m going to talk a lot more about this in the next few days, but … yeah, Turbine has a lot of respect from me.

In a comment to my post yesterday about Warhammer, Snafzg said: “If you’re releasing a product you’re damned right I’m going to compare it to another established product in the market. If you launch something that doesn’t compare in terms of quality, why should people give you the benefit of the doubt, especially as paying customers? We don’t do it with automobiles, restaurant food, or clothing. Why do MMOs get a free pass?”

Sorry, I just don’t buy these ‘we’re too easy on MMOs’ arguments. Should they be good? Yes. Should they run? Yes. Should they be fun? Yes. If any of these things are untrue at launch, I totally agree, that’s unacceptable. Witness: Vanguard, Age of Conan, Auto Assault, etc, etc.

But if the question is, “Should they be as good as a game that’s been running for four years?”, the answer is no. If you think the answer should be yes you’re dreaming. Seriously. Look at this realistically. While WAR was still deciding whether to wear boxers or briefs World of Warcraft was fiddling with PvP balance, raid tweaking, even superfluous fun content like mounts. Blizzard has had four years of live service to tweak, fix, and change their game. As a result (as I said on SUWT), World of Warcraft is the best MMO ever made, hands down, do not pass Go.

Warhammer has had two months. If you seriously expect a game that’s been out in the sun for two months to compare, polish/content/balance-wise with a four year old game, you’ve really got to re-examine your priorities. MMOs are not likes restaurants, automobiles, or clothing. If a car doesn’t run, it’s because there was a problem in the factory that could have been fixed on the drawing board. If clothes don’t fit, it’s because they were sewn wrong in the factory. If restaurant food tastes bad, it’s because it was prepared badly in the kitchen.

Get it through your heads:

Beta testing is a joke. We’ve talked about it for ages, about the motives behind ‘free players’ and the lack of actual testing. People do not play Betas like they play live games, it’s a demonstrable fact. As a result, the only way to know for certain if you’ve done the right thing is to launch your game. Warhammer did the right thing; they launched, they hit the waters, and now they’re swimming like crazy.

They’re trying to understand what exactly they’ve built in relation to how players interact with the systems, in relation to how the systems interact with each other, and so on and so forth. In a couple of months Warhammer is going to have more content, two more classes, and a lot more balance. That’s when I’ll go back, and that’s when we’ll start to hear a lot of amazing things about this great game Mythic has created.

So, say it with me: MMOs are different.

I had some fun in Lakeshire and Goldshire this evening. Go check WoW Insider for the full details, and watch below for a demonstration.

Brian Green has a great writeup about getting a gig in the game development industry, with a focus on MMO development.

One of the most important things to remember is that reputation isn’t based entirely on logic. It’s based on word of mouth, so you get some potential miscommunication as things go along. You can be a great worker that did everything to the best of your ability, but if the project is recognized as a tremendous flop, then that will potentially taint your reputation. Or, people may remember your loud arguments during the discussion phase of a project, but forget that you were one of the workers that buckled down and did things as ordered after the decisions were made.

His statements are great for folks thinking about games blogging / games journalism as well. Certainly the above holds true. I’ve known talented and intelligent writers who toil in obscurity, while overblown windbags make decent living wages working at big sites. Shame all around.

Good read.

If you’re tired of my using this site for self-aggrandizing linkage, I apologize. It’s my blog and I’ll link if I want to. You would link too …

Anyway, I got pinged for an article about Activision/Blizzard about a month or so ago. It’s just now shown up on the Gamasutra site, and I’m in some unexpected company. Along with “the game attorney”, Thomas H. Buscaglia, usual-suspect Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan weighs in on the merger. If you’re not familiar with Mr. Pachter … you actually probably are. He’s an analyst who weighs in on the games industry fairly regularly, and it’s very surprising to find myself sharing article space with him.

I uhh … don’t remember being as pithy as I’m quoted, but apparently I was in a ‘mood’ that day:

“Will the new company try to use the Blizzard folks as sort of internal consultants on other MMO projects in the organization? I’m probably going to go with a no,” Zenke continued. “While certainly there are areas of development, design, and certainly technical areas where Blizzard is an industry leader, most of those concepts are on the institutional level. That is to say, I’m not sure a quick consultation from Rob Pardo would be all that helpful to another group’s game.”

Also in me-centric news: My very first appearance in print is going to be hitting the newsstands soon. As Simon notes in a roundup of the next issue of Game Developer, I’ve got a piece in there about the rise of the “small” MMO. I did a bunch of research on relative size of titles for another project for them that I kind of let fall through, and they were nice enough to let me turn that into a GD article. I think it’s interesting stuff; at the very least I’m sure it’ll stir up conversation.

In another notable feature, Michael Zenke examines free-to-play MMOs such as Nexon’s MapleStory, and why they might be more important than many subscription-based MMO developers might think: “Smaller, non-subscription MMOs have been slowly but surely making their way into the hearts and minds of the game community. But now, they’re getting too big to ignore. Are tiny MMOs eating away at your subscribers?”

If you read me this week, make sure to let me know what you think.