The MI6 Marketing Conference, that takes place in San Francisco and concentrates on the business side of games development, featured a lengthy panel discussion about the MMO business modes
and the potential for growth that free-to-play games could have in the near future.
The most important speakers were Daniel James of Three Rings, creator of Puzzle Pirates, Andrew Sheppard of Outspark, the company that makes Fiesta, Min Kim of Nexon, developers of MapleStory and Craig Sherman, representing the virtual world Gaia.
Their main idea is that the business model of the MMO needs to change in the near future. Gaia's Craig Sherman stated that there are some 800 million teenagers that would like to take part in an on-line game, in a MMO, and that this number makes the apparent success of World of Warcraft, which is around the 10 million subscriber mark, seem like a low number. His original quote was: "There are 800 million teens in the world. That's not a success." A success, he thinks, would be to target an attract at least 10% of that 800 million population.
Min Kim declared: "There's a whole audience of tweens and teens out there who want to engage, but don't have access to plastic," and only the free-to-play business model can attract those gamers to on-line worlds and on-line games.
There seems to be a virtual (pun intended) agreement between the panelists that the MMO of the future needs to be free and incorporate as much social networking possibilities as it incorporates gameplay. Also it needs to be less time-intensive than the current MMO games, letting the player decide how much time he wants to put in and when he wants to play, rather than forcing a clear gaming schedule on him.
The MMO of the future also needs to be casual in that it allows easy access to the core gameplay mechanics and has a really low learning curve, unlike most of today's persistent on-line worlds.
It's an interesting discussion. Although subscription has been working well in the west, the Asian market dwarfs that of the west - and free-to-play easily rules over there.
Guild Wars in particular has shown that MMOs with no monthly fees can not only work, but be hugely successful.
With many features similar to WoW, Guild Wars 2 will be the tipping point I think for subscription-free MMOs outside Asia.
Comment #3 by Eric Bolosan on 2008-04-11, 14:20 GMT
Lets see the writer of this article make his own MMORPG and be a more "real success" than WoW. People are willing to pay $ if the product is great. If not, they will flock to something else.
Of course WoW is a "Real" Success. How many games have 10 million active subscribers? None. How many free games have 10 million subscribers... none.
Reply #3.1 by Koiju on 2008-05-23, 13:10 GMT
I think what he is trying to imply is that NO MMos are 'real' success yet. At least, not in comparison with other non-MMO successes.
What the article is trying to point out is, that MMO could be a hell of a lot more successfull than WOW if they used a different bussiness model, and in that, I agree.
Let's see, 10 million subscribers at $15 each per month, brings their earnings to, oh, $150 Million dollars PER MONTH, not including the money earned on each license and expansion pack sold. And i wonder where he pulled the "800 million teens want to play MMO" from, most likely his ass.
Well, frankly, it really sounds like their just talking about "dumbing down" the games, and in all honesty, that game sounds awful. Kind of like runescape... but worse even. Ask anyone who plays WoW, they like the complicated aspect. Not that it really is that complicated. And imagine if there were a bunch of people just trying it out, and since its so casual, they would all be high levels. Just a bunch of noobs. And since when is gaia an MMO?
I really wonder where the 800 million teens want to play an MMO number came from, personally I agree with Joe, he probably made up a random impressive sounding number and then went from there. ALSO if this is where MMO's are going, then I personally would want no part in them the basic learning curve in many an MMO is pretty low as it is, tho it does take some time to be able to be really good at the game. Honestly the agreement that these developers have come to sounds like their main market will be the Sp. Ed. class of america, way to go you guys, because an actual challenging game is obviously too hard for you to make successful, marketing to the lowest common denominator with your next attempt will OBVIOUSLY pull you out of the slump that you are in
Doing some very rough math, teenagers are ages 13-19, a 7 year span. If you assume (one again, this is not meant to be exact in any way) that people live to be the average age of 60 (I'm not doing any research for this), then 7 years of that would be 11.67% of the total world popluation (assuming all ages are the same ratio, which they arent.) If you multiply 0.116667 by the world population of roughly 6.6 billion people, you come out with ~770,000,000. So...the basic assumtion of Mr. Sherman is that every single teenager in the world wants to play an MMO.
And my other beef with this is, I play WoW, and a lot of people are already too stupid for me to deal with...I don't need them to "be casual in that it allows easy access to the core gameplay mechanics and has a ->really low learning curve
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Comment #1 by JMan on 2008-04-10, 09:36 GMT
Reply #3.1 by Koiju on 2008-05-23, 13:10 GMT
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