Opinion: MMO Craze

MAY 21 2012

I’ve enjoyed my fair share of MMO games having played World of Warcraft for a couple years and delved into Star Wars: The Old Republic in the past year but I’ve never seen the tremendous draw these games have for some people… going as far as actually causing addiction. But thats not what I’m really wanting to cover here. More to the point I want to understand why developers suddenly think turning their properties into MMO games is such a good idea. It had been rumored that Bethesda had been working on an MMO Elder Scrolls game but only recently have those rumors become fact with releases of screenshots and story information popping up from official sources this month. Now I hear that the new and untested property, Kingdoms of Amalur is hopping on the MMO bandwagon. Blizzard has more then proven that MMO’s could be highly profitable with them milking an 8 year old game engine with periodic updates and large content expansions over the years but does this model truly work anymore? Many WoW imitators have come and gone and even pretty great ones like The Old Republic have lost large subscription bases in only a few months of being live. To me its a pretty risky investment and even more so since the new trend in MMO is now the ‘Free 2 Play’ model. So why unveil a product that more then likely will go Free 2 Play in the next 3 to 6 months after release? I don’t totally understand the economic value of the Free 2 Play model other then advertising revenue and the premium items sold for real world money for most of these F2P games but the publishers seem to see something that I don’t, especially if they’re willing to dump several million dollars into the project. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

MAY
21
2012

Categories

I’ve enjoyed my fair share of MMO games having played World of Warcraft for a couple years and delved into Star Wars: The Old Republic in the past year but I’ve never seen the tremendous draw these games have for some people… going as far as actually causing addiction. But thats not what I’m really wanting to cover here. More to the point I want to understand why developers suddenly think turning their properties into MMO games is such a good idea. It had been rumored that Bethesda had been working on an MMO Elder Scrolls game but only recently have those rumors become fact with releases of screenshots and story information popping up from official sources this month. Now I hear that the new and untested property, Kingdoms of Amalur is hopping on the MMO bandwagon. Blizzard has more then proven that MMO’s could be highly profitable with them milking an 8 year old game engine with periodic updates and large content expansions over the years but does this model truly work anymore? Many WoW imitators have come and gone and even pretty great ones like The Old Republic have lost large subscription bases in only a few months of being live. To me its a pretty risky investment and even more so since the new trend in MMO is now the ‘Free 2 Play’ model. So why unveil a product that more then likely will go Free 2 Play in the next 3 to 6 months after release? I don’t totally understand the economic value of the Free 2 Play model other then advertising revenue and the premium items sold for real world money for most of these F2P games but the publishers seem to see something that I don’t, especially if they’re willing to dump several million dollars into the project. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Comments

No Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *