LAGWAR | GAMING'S BEST IN TOP NOTCH MEDIOCRITY

MCV, a UK based Video Game Industry media website recently published a fantastic article. This is a great read for anyone who is interested in hearing where some of the industry’s top developers believe the genre is headed – of course the idea of the next WoW-Killer was mentioned.

Development team members from such companies as Funcom and Fallen Earth gave their thoughts on the MMO industry’s past, present, and future. Topics vary greatly from the difficulty any new MMO faces, ways to measure a game’s success, how Blizzard has hung on to it’s subscribers, and on to why MMOs have yet to go mainstream with consoles.

When asked why is it that so few MMO games manage to succeed in today’s market, here’s what Funcom’s Erling Ellingsen had to say:

“In terms of sales, MMOs are in fact doing better than ever. We shipped over 1.2 million copies of Age of Conan, which is an impressive number for any game. Of course, if you measure the success of MMO games in terms of subscriber numbers and retention then the picture is quite different.

MMO games require you to invest hundreds of hours into them, and on top of that you even have to pay a monthly subscription fee.??Creating an MMO that convinces a player to spend hundreds of hours in that game and that game alone, is a monumental challenge to any developer. These are extremely complex productions, and creating gameplay that ties players to your game month-after-month is pretty much the holy grail of MMO development.

Luckily, developers such as Funcom and many others continues to pursue that holy grail. But you do not need to have over ten million subscribers to be successful. In the end, it’s all about how you choose to define success in the MMO segment.”

Many other topics are discussed by several other developers. It’s an extremely interesting and informative read for anyone who likes to analyze the industry or simply wants to know what the future holds for MMO players.

Read the full article here.