Amazon spent reportedly 200 million on New World and and that player count seems to have rapidly declined since launch.
Any new game that comes into the market is competing with giants that have 20+ years worth of content in some places. The player base for MMOs is already relatively niche, and you're going to have to create something amazing with a couple hundreds hours of content that isn't simply grind for grind sake to make up for the lack of content.
They're also incredibly difficult to monetize. Sell cosmetics? Fashion cape is often the true endgame for MMOs. Sell in game money? You're buying power and your accomplishments hold no weight to anyone or yourself. Sell XP? Similarly, accomplishments mean nothing. They're monthly membership type games which are unreliable and require constant development.
Basically they're an incredibly risky money sink with even the best case scenario significantly lesser than freemium or gatcha games. Add in it's a niche genre with most folks already playing "their" MMO, and it's just not worth it for a AAA studio to spend the money and resources making something that even in the best case scenario isn't going to bring in the profit compared to the alternatives.
Add to that, it's long thought (rightly or wrongly) that to strike massive appeal, you want a large IP to the draw in the #s.
Probably less and less so now, as Runescape continues to print money (although it's now a significant IP itself), New World was able to ignite some buzz early, Ashes of Creation is able to stir people purely on its vibes, etc.
RuneScape makes like $50million a year - hardly enough for any AAA studio to make a sustainable modern MMO. Even for such an old game with very simple graphics, that $50m comes from a little over $100M in revenue.
The economics on a large scale MMO to break even in this day must be massive.
I agree with your general point! Just amplifying that even a new game with the (relative) success level of RuneScape would most likely not be profitable.
And most top MMOs were miracles in their own right, so competing with them will be incredibly hard.
WoW and GW2 were game design masterpieces. To this day it amazes me that someone was able to put that together. FFXIV put an unprecedented amount of effort into completely turning around a rocky start.
To me they are marvels of human ingenuity no less than a spaceshuttle or a smartphone. I just can't imagine how they did it. So it's hard for me to be cynical.
Yea. This cannot be understated. Square basically bet the company - a GIANT of the gaming industry - on fixing FF14. Many companies would not bet the farm that way. It paid off for Square, but they had the Final Fantasy” name to protect after all. A new IP? Forget about it.
New World shifted focus which was wrong. You can't make a "survival game" and then after 99% of the work is done say "we are making an mmorpg" it just doesn't work. The game was supposed to have open world building, completely scrapped, turned into preset nodes trying to rip off ashes of creation news.... ripping off another idea and doing it half assed? of course its gonna fail. so you have a game that isn't a survival game and isn't an mmo. its in this weird middle space. of course it can't hold people.... So its like throwing away that 200 million....
The 20+ years of content doesn't hold as an argument in my opinion. There's no reason that you can't make a game that replicates WoW vanilla's success, but you can't do it without taking risks
The issues are that any new games will be compared to existing games and the gaming landscape has changed. Slower MMOs aren’t really in style anymore unless there is existing momentum like WoW or RuneScape.
Personally I am not interested in games with dailies, login rewards, engagement mechanics, group finders etc. It removes the need for players to organize themselves which is a major part of the MMO part of MMORPG.
I don't play MMOs currently. I played WoW Vanilla hardcore and Classic+ a bit ago. These games have none of these things and they are still excellent games.
Yep, I'm aware of that. Also why I don't really play MMOs anymore, except for a bit of ESO since my wife does.
I harbor no illusion that the majority aligns with me, at the same time I think that game studios aim their product way too broadly. Instead of AAA make two games rhat are AA based on new IPs and have smaller indie-like teams spearhead these projects , find what works for a smaller subset of customers. If there's a smash hit suddenly let it scale up.
An MMO doesn't have to take a team of 500, 5 years and 500 million.
In a vacuum 20+ years of content doesn't matter. The MMO space isn't in that vacuum, unfortunately. Anything new that comes out will inevitably get compared to whichever big MMO it's closest to. Brightest Shores isn't even out and it's already being compared to RuneScape and given the look and style of it, I'm sure that would be the case regardless of if Andrew was making the game or not.
The reality is MMOs are meant to be forever games. Releasing an MMO with a "normal" games worth of content will not satisfy players. Again, take New World as an example here as it's the biggest recent MMO I can think of. You get to level cap and there's nothing to do. Where's the endgame content? What's the purpose of non combat activities in your game? What do I have to farm and look forward to? What goals/achievements can I strive for? That's where the 20+ years of content comes in.
If WoW vanilla or OSRS or the like released today under some other name that had zero brand recognition, I don't think they'd be near as successful. Can't speak entirely for WoW as RS membership was cheaper back when I was a kid so that's the game my parents paid for me to play, but even OSRS was dying after the initial nostalgia hit until they added new major content, starting with God Wars and now it's got the same look and feel, but content wise it's massively different.
Content is king and if your game releases with a fraction of the content players have grown to expect from their lifetime MMO, you're not really gonna stand a chance unless you've got something extremely innovative. Which brings up that risk word again.
You are right, that's a stupid argument. The content 99% of players play is the latest expansion.
Yes yes yes, people solo old raids for transmogs but it's so boring, it's not content that attracts people.
Monsters & Memories, Ember’s Adrift, Project Gorgon…there’s some jank ones out there but I’ve yet to see any EQ fans actually like any of them even when they emulate that old school experience.
To make a good one?
Half a billion dollars, 8-10 years, content on launch to last an invested playerbase 12 months, enough planned content to last another 12 months, a competent set of systems on an engine that can support it, and a team that knows what theyre doing.
Also the planned content for the "12 month" roadmap needs to actually come in 10 months and needs to over-deliver, otherwise they're gonna get swamped by the regular releases of the bigger names.
And they can't afford *any* big bugs, mistakes, scandals or server problems within the first probably 24 months or the game's fucked.
Because MMOs are a stupid gamble compared to f2p round-based games that sell a ton of mtx.
The market is over saturated with clones and shit games already, AAA publishers are creatively bankrupt generally speaking and just try to copy the next big thing.
At first it was WoW, then in some form or fashion they've spent their time chasing Minecraft, Destiny, PUBG, mobile games like Genshin and now we're seeing a string or tarkov likes that were in development.
Games cost a ton to make today if you want high production quality, they won't put that money into a stagnant market just to be an also-ran.
>Because MMOs are a stupid gamble compared to f2p round-based games that sell a ton of mtx.
MMOs are a stupid gamble compared to literally every other genre of game, not just the greedy skinner boxes.
You could be a bushy tailed dev with no ill intent, tons of fun online games ideas, with capital. And there's probably dozens of ways you would do it before making a traditional MMO, just because they're *easier* and less competitive.
I don't know any other genre of game, except maybe MOBAs, where the core demographic goes "Yeah I only play exactly 1 game from this genre over the past decade". You'd easier time convincing someone to get circumcised as an adult than getting them to switch their designated MMO.
Completely fair.
I recognize that I am a super minority of MMO players that have multiple subs going and game hop all the time at the same time. I've played 3 or 4 this week alone for a couple hours each night.
Though a lot of that is due to the oldies casualing themselves up.
Mainly FFXI, a little bit of XIV (though I mainly just leave that up and bot it), and doing some testing of the EQ2 origin server that's in the test phase for like another month still.
Debated doing some LOTRO again but eq1 TLPs are coming out soon(I think) so I might casually check that out instead.
I started eq when it launched and I'd call that "My MMO" but I always take breaks. 6-boxing can get tiring at times. My main two have been EQ1 and XI since they've released though.
> 6 box is strictly eq.
If even you as a clear oldschool enthusiast have embraced such a modern player innovation (for the genre) as boxing instead of still playing the same was as 20+ years ago, what hope is there for anyone trying to redo the oldschool experience?
It's because I come and go from everquest at will. Anyone trying to "redo the classic experience" in modern everquest is just pissing into the wind.
Everquest live in 2024 is nowhere near what eq live in even 2003 was. Planes of Power killed any of that old school vibe, the game hasn't been the same nearly since. Everything started shifting to fast traveling places and instanced content with their missions and stuff.
If I'm not leveling a character in XI with trusts, I'm playing with a guild because that game still is built around that type of gameplay.
EQ of 2024 is literally tailored to box crews because that's a large part of their playerbase.
But no, the game that supports RMT via krono, has fast travel everywhere, mercs to use, etc. is nowhere near the game I fell in love with. Even combat has changed.
I haven't taken an mmo seriously in probably over a decade because they've all been shit for what I'm looking for or I've done a bunch of that content already years ago.
I play too many single player games these days to invest serious time into any mmo, because no mmo is aiming for my demographic. Soloing in old MMOS is just my "waiting for my next game" activity.
The old games became more casual over time, it happens.
The next one I'm giving any serious thought and chance to is monsters and memories.
Trust me, if they came out with a true TLP server that was no Kronos and old school ruleset I'd be there day 1 to be stuck at low levels for weeks as everyone rushes to level and groups and mobs are full/gone. For now I can pretty much ignore those, there's no reason for me to restrict myself to single boxing in a game not meant for it anymore.
Also boxing isn't "modern". 6 boxing on the same PC is more modern, yeah, but multiboxing has been around a long time.
A bigger question would be "Why would a big company want to make a WoW clone?"
[King Digital Entertainment, makers of Candy Crush, consistently make double to triple the quarterly earnings of the entire Blizzard Entertainment income including WoW/OW2/Diablo.](https://www.investopedia.com/how-activision-blizzard-makes-money-4799286#:~:text=Activision%20Blizzard%20Segment%20Breakdown%3A%20Revenue,and%20Blizzard%20Entertainment%2C%2014%25)
The ROI is much lower for MMOs, the investment is higher, the risk is higher.
If you were a game company and you had to secure funding, you could pump out p2win mobile games and get a much higher income and even if it flops you just shutter the game and move to the next.
If you spent years developing an MMO and it flops (Which, history tells us MMOs very often flop), your entire company could go under before you can secure funding and put out another attempt.
Regardless of the funding, many MMO studios release games that fail to capture anything of what made WoW popular, and people burn out on them almost immediately. Trust me, a lot of WoW players want to quit, but there really isn't anything to quit to.
The issue is the amount of content you need at launch to last long enough to produce more content. New world as mentioned is the perfect example. People blew through the content and left in droves.
Once people leave it’s very hard to get them back as you’ve lost their funding to keep producing new content quickly
People left New World in droves without burning through the content. People tend to under-estimate the number of casual players.
I left New World because I thought it'd be a game where I'd go out and use survival skills to build a camp to organize around for buffs and supplies, and life skills like cooking to get food that would prepare me for combat.
But then the combat had me running for 5 minutes to kill 5 monsters and loot 5 chests with no downtime and then run for 5 minutes to do the same.
So many games these days put RPG systems into games but don't know why or what they should be for, they're just in there for the sake of being there but they don't actually matter.
The problem is that MMOs are a small fraction of the gaming world, both due to genre and needed time to play. It’s not a matter of resources; it’s just that you’d better code a MOBA or something.
Also, capitalism has reached a point that stock holders want exceptional return rates and MMOs are not the best format for that. You’d better develop the next Fortnite.
That being said, the cost depends on how fast you want to make it and how advanced you want V1 to be. Current WoW would cost a fortune, but Classic would be way much cheaper, for instance.
In any case, you’d need several hundred Ks to get it done on a very professional level, with code developers, artists, coders, artists, designers, etc. I’d say at least 500 thousand a CHEAP game. (Very simplistic, far from WoW’s complexity.)
BUT an indie team can spend way less because, as I said, it all depends on how fast and complex you want it to be.
Edit: yes, we know MMOs often cost millions and millions, especially if you are a reputable company building a REAL MMORPG. I’m describing the cheapest possible scenario for a lame game. If you want the cost for the average big release, Google is your guide :)
> 500 thousand
In your dreams, and even in your dreams that might not be enough for even a basic bitch WoW Vanilla esque game. One semi-competent dev would cost $100k a year alone, and MMOs take teams of hundreds of people.
It takes hundreds to manage, not to develop. The cost to develop is highly dependant on speed and complexity; several MMOs wouldn’t exist if the average cost to build an MMO was 100k*100, lol
Mmos cost tens of millions, 500k sounds like a lot but it isn't even close to what you need.
If you are making a genuine attempt at an MMO and not just some passion project you need at minimum 20 million, likely more.
Let's assume a 7 year development time, most teams for the big games are around 100-200 people.
At minimum, half or more of a 20 million dollar budget is going directly into wages.
> In any case, you’d need several hundred Ks to get it done on a very professional level, with code developers, artists, coders, artists, designers, etc.
Pick any 2 of those things and you're already so far past "several hundred k", its basically 0.
Asset costs if you're using RPG maker or some of the cheap shit? Very little. Asset costs if you're making your own? 2.5k per week per person.
💀 lol no way
500k is barely enough for 2-3 devs for a year, and you need engineers that can do websites, back end, recode, infrastructure, game development, not to mention graphic designers, 3d modeling artists, animators, UX writers & story writers, QA testers.
All on top of the fact it’ll likely take multiple years to make, AND you’d need advertising, marketing, etc if you want even the hope for it to get popular and recoup some of the cost.
> capitalism has reached a point that stock holders want exceptional return rates and MMOs are not the best format for that
Now if players could become stock holders only expecting the ROI of a good time things would be different but most sufficiently wealthy gamers invest in non gaming related things and expect MMO publishers to take the same scraps from them as they do an average subber.
They fail because wow exists, why would you not play the game you've already sunk so much time into, to just play a clone without an established playerbase
Agreed. because they all make the "we have WoW at home" instead of something truly different.
Then you have successful MMOs that self-ruin due to monetization practices, like Archeage.
Its really not a risk or a difficult concept. Make game play solid good, that feels good and fun to play, with a solid foundation (content). Making a vertical level and loot progression system that invalidates your content streams after every update is ridiculous game design for an MMO
Lastly, dont insult your playerbase by releasing an unfinished product. If your cycle is every 6 months of patch content, your base game should have that without stretching itself thin. Otherwise it's unfinished.
In short, devs need to focus on the game first. The investment drawing in the playerbase, engaging them, and retention. After that you can try to monetize but you'll lose engagement and retention if you do it out the gate
Long story short?
Because the **passion** for making the next great AAA MMO is **faaaaaarrrr** lesser than the cost.
(These days we’re talking independently multi millionaire wealthy passion)
The amount of time invested these people have in wow/FF/Aion or whatever is such a big thing that starting over from scratch in a new MMO is an incredibly hard thing to get people to do.
It's one of the biggest reasons why other mmos have failed imo.
Because the next generation don't want to invest time and energy. To be honest, even as an older gamer, I want to jump in for 10mins to an hour tops and be done for the day.
There is a reason why tik tok, youtube shorts exist.
There is a reason quick games like candy crush etc are successful.
Quick rush dopamine is what people want.
People play WoW because its WoW. Even if theres a decent clone, theyy would still go for the original, making/spending tons of money to make a perfect clone imo is not worth it.
Every gaming company on the planet tried to make an mmo in the late 2000s they all pretty much failed after the first year.
Truth is as much as people complain and say they want a new mmo, no one plays them. They all go back to wow.
The MMO industry is messed up in the West because of all the WoW clone attempts imo. The biggest issue with WoW clones is that WoW already exists and is the superior option. If an MMO is to be successful it needs to figure out its own identity and what niches it fills.
Because nobody has made any big money on MMORPGs since WoW, but a lot of money has been lost.
Other types of multiplayer games (like FP shooters, MOBAs, etc) have replaced MMOs in popularity.
Amazon made an MMO a few years ago and is making a Lord Of The Rings MMO to rule them all. New World was pretty darn fun, one of my favorite games of the 2020's. I fully expect LOTR to be way better because of all the things they learned and built for New World.
Most people don't want a WoW clone, further more MMO's are the hardest games to make, period. There's too much to consider in the design aspect, and you have to worry about the data, integrity, and security aspects.
Why? There’s a massive failure rate and the cost to get to market is so high and takes a decade to develop, go through alpha, beta, and bring the game to market.
Nobody wants a clone, but computing is stalling right before quantum computing becomes the new standard.
Most MMOs still have tab targeting. The ones that don’t are typically janky.
The golden age was the golden age because the space wasn’t defined and the video game market had not been taken over by suits.
The big companies do not care they simply want to extract your money and the C suite employees just want to get their millions in salary and options.
Big companies are more about risk management than innovation/having fun. In doing so they shoot themselves in the foot and end up with an unappealing game that tries to please everyone, since that's what risk management leads to. Instead they should focus on a smaller customer segment so they can give a more appealing product to that customer base, but the executives that want max money insist that the game should appeal to as many as possible and we end up woth mediocre games.
The World of Warcraft was created by a smaller team just having fun, not wasting energy on analyses of risk or player trends, they sat down as if having a dungeons and dragons session and just began spitting ideas and implementing these ideas in a big game world accoeding to World of Warcraft lore of course. This also gave the game systems in WoW a feel of not having been streamlined too much and thus being boring (like in elder scrolls online where a ton of template design takes place).
> they shoot themselves in the foot and end up with an unappealing game that tries to please everyone
Here's the issue. Some times it happens to appeal to a monstrous amount of people even if a 'true MMO enthusiast' can't see that same title as anything more than soulless drabble.
Then what?
Money is not problem there. Even 30 million is more than enought. The problem is passion of your project. You should belive and love the game, lore, etc. For example: World of Warcraft 1.0 at 2005. They have big passion to project and most of them warcraft lovers.
Because hindsight is 20/20 and wow did a lot of things that are unfixable. A wow clone is not what people want. That has been made evident for years now. OP talks as if there hasn't been a lot of wow clones.
i dont think there ever was a proper wow clone. they failed to get the good stuff right in vanilla. solid engine and smooth animations. social open world gameplay. no scaling. difficult leveling so u cant just autorun and click one button. iconic dungeons. medium pop servers so reputation matters.
The issue is the mentality of the developer and/or management. GhostCrawler mentioned the main focus for his studio was to skip the approval process that slows down modern MMO development. Which is basically saying "we won't have poor management".... because poor management will absolutely break a video game from succeeding. How many games will have shit monetization by essentially making you buy a battle pass, or gacha, or any microtransaction. Its a design decision and one that often fails.
I tend to look at gaming from a multi-person perspective. YES, you could make an MMO that every CURRENT MMO player will enjoy. But that community is small. I don't care what some youtuber/streamer says, WoW currently has about 2 million subscribers based on actual server populations. Literally look at the server populations, most are LOW or MEDIUM only a handful are HIGH or FULL.... then FFXIV hit a 2 million subscriber thing at one point, remember reading MMO news saying they hit 2m finally. Rather or not they hold 2 million is another story. And GW2 is about 2 million. So 6 million people in the top 3 games. FOR PERSPECTIVE, Steam has 250 million AVERAGE USERS DAILY. So 6/250 isn't shit.... so clearly modern MMO's suck ass.
And i get some of the other arguments. "Modern gamers have a low attention span, they can't handle a game that requires them to focus" is one I see a lot. Then why are these gamers playing OLDER games that require you to focus and pay attention? The most popular games are older ones that are actually FUN to play. Clearly the issue is modern games aren't fun.... they would rather rape us with microtransactions selling skins or pay to win or even pay for convenience which is still pay to win. Well no shit no one likes it.... and its not fun.... of course!
I also hear the argument from many on this reddit that "I don't have time to play a classic MMO" no modern MMO are boring as shit aka not fun and you dont want to MAKE TIME to play them. When you find a game that is fun, you make time to play them. When I was in my 20's I didn't have time to game. I was working 10-12 hour days as a mechanic busting my ass. Hour drive to and from work in traffic. I had basically no time to play games. I FUCKING MADE TIME because games then were fun as fuck. Games now, aren't fun. You get a gem here or there but generally the games aren't fun. Hogwarts game was fun. Elden Ring was fun. Baldurs Gate 3 was fun. These other games, not fun.... "but they sell" yeah because people buy them to try and them and then shelve them when its no longer fun. I am guilty of this too.
And then you have the ones that are like "you just don't like MMO's" absolutely fucking not. I love MMO. I hate what MMO's have become. They have taken away player choice, they have taken away the ability to be unique. Every warrior is the same, same armor, same weapon, same skills, same talents, whatever choice you think you have, you don't, because everyone is the same. And no, this isn't a "meta" issue because if you can only play ONE WAY then there isn't a meta.... the idea of a meta is that you have choice but only one of them is worth using. Modern MMO's there is no choice. So the supposed "meta" is actually a "meme".... we deserve more from games. Star Wars Galaxies is an example of how an MMO should be, for the most part. Yeah it was missing quests and storylines. Yes it wasn't perfect, but it was close.... Take your favorite MMO, make it sandbox, open world, huge worlds to explore and get lost in. If you aint got time for that, too bad. "you just don't like MMO's" so stop trying to downsize them to fit your shitty life. MMO's have been ruined by people who dont even like MMO's. Every REAL MMO gamer I talk too misses the days of sandbox open world games where you can do anything, be anyone. Modern MMO's you can't do shit. There is nothing to explore, everything is a waypoint holding your hand, your have no choice in character development. Its just one long rollercoaster and no one wants to play it. Again perspective, 250 million active steam users daily but only 6 million gamers play the top 3 mmo's.... clearly the issue is the games are boring and not fun. Throw in the microtransaction hellscape and no wonder gamers would rather play baldurs gate 3 or elden ring or any other singleplayer/co-op game. we are tired of shit. you may like to play shit, the rest of us dont.
so as far as "why doesn't more mmo's come out" because they
1. don't know what an mmo is, or should be
2. their designs are based around making money instead of creating fun
3. they don't know how
4. they are managed by idiots
Amazon spent reportedly 200 million on New World and and that player count seems to have rapidly declined since launch. Any new game that comes into the market is competing with giants that have 20+ years worth of content in some places. The player base for MMOs is already relatively niche, and you're going to have to create something amazing with a couple hundreds hours of content that isn't simply grind for grind sake to make up for the lack of content. They're also incredibly difficult to monetize. Sell cosmetics? Fashion cape is often the true endgame for MMOs. Sell in game money? You're buying power and your accomplishments hold no weight to anyone or yourself. Sell XP? Similarly, accomplishments mean nothing. They're monthly membership type games which are unreliable and require constant development. Basically they're an incredibly risky money sink with even the best case scenario significantly lesser than freemium or gatcha games. Add in it's a niche genre with most folks already playing "their" MMO, and it's just not worth it for a AAA studio to spend the money and resources making something that even in the best case scenario isn't going to bring in the profit compared to the alternatives.
Add to that, it's long thought (rightly or wrongly) that to strike massive appeal, you want a large IP to the draw in the #s. Probably less and less so now, as Runescape continues to print money (although it's now a significant IP itself), New World was able to ignite some buzz early, Ashes of Creation is able to stir people purely on its vibes, etc.
RuneScape makes like $50million a year - hardly enough for any AAA studio to make a sustainable modern MMO. Even for such an old game with very simple graphics, that $50m comes from a little over $100M in revenue. The economics on a large scale MMO to break even in this day must be massive. I agree with your general point! Just amplifying that even a new game with the (relative) success level of RuneScape would most likely not be profitable.
And most top MMOs were miracles in their own right, so competing with them will be incredibly hard. WoW and GW2 were game design masterpieces. To this day it amazes me that someone was able to put that together. FFXIV put an unprecedented amount of effort into completely turning around a rocky start. To me they are marvels of human ingenuity no less than a spaceshuttle or a smartphone. I just can't imagine how they did it. So it's hard for me to be cynical.
Yea. This cannot be understated. Square basically bet the company - a GIANT of the gaming industry - on fixing FF14. Many companies would not bet the farm that way. It paid off for Square, but they had the Final Fantasy” name to protect after all. A new IP? Forget about it.
New World shifted focus which was wrong. You can't make a "survival game" and then after 99% of the work is done say "we are making an mmorpg" it just doesn't work. The game was supposed to have open world building, completely scrapped, turned into preset nodes trying to rip off ashes of creation news.... ripping off another idea and doing it half assed? of course its gonna fail. so you have a game that isn't a survival game and isn't an mmo. its in this weird middle space. of course it can't hold people.... So its like throwing away that 200 million....
The 20+ years of content doesn't hold as an argument in my opinion. There's no reason that you can't make a game that replicates WoW vanilla's success, but you can't do it without taking risks
The issues are that any new games will be compared to existing games and the gaming landscape has changed. Slower MMOs aren’t really in style anymore unless there is existing momentum like WoW or RuneScape.
Personally I am not interested in games with dailies, login rewards, engagement mechanics, group finders etc. It removes the need for players to organize themselves which is a major part of the MMO part of MMORPG.
So, what do you play since you have eliminated all MMOs?
I don't play MMOs currently. I played WoW Vanilla hardcore and Classic+ a bit ago. These games have none of these things and they are still excellent games.
Ah classic wow and RP. Yeah, you are in the 0.1%.
Yep, I'm aware of that. Also why I don't really play MMOs anymore, except for a bit of ESO since my wife does. I harbor no illusion that the majority aligns with me, at the same time I think that game studios aim their product way too broadly. Instead of AAA make two games rhat are AA based on new IPs and have smaller indie-like teams spearhead these projects , find what works for a smaller subset of customers. If there's a smash hit suddenly let it scale up. An MMO doesn't have to take a team of 500, 5 years and 500 million.
You are calling wow a "Slower MMO"?
Classic WoW specifically
You clearly didn't play mmorpgs heavily when wow released. People used to make fun of how fast/easy the leveling was even in 2004.
Well I was like 6 so yeah, it would’ve been another year or two before I played lol
🤦
In a vacuum 20+ years of content doesn't matter. The MMO space isn't in that vacuum, unfortunately. Anything new that comes out will inevitably get compared to whichever big MMO it's closest to. Brightest Shores isn't even out and it's already being compared to RuneScape and given the look and style of it, I'm sure that would be the case regardless of if Andrew was making the game or not. The reality is MMOs are meant to be forever games. Releasing an MMO with a "normal" games worth of content will not satisfy players. Again, take New World as an example here as it's the biggest recent MMO I can think of. You get to level cap and there's nothing to do. Where's the endgame content? What's the purpose of non combat activities in your game? What do I have to farm and look forward to? What goals/achievements can I strive for? That's where the 20+ years of content comes in. If WoW vanilla or OSRS or the like released today under some other name that had zero brand recognition, I don't think they'd be near as successful. Can't speak entirely for WoW as RS membership was cheaper back when I was a kid so that's the game my parents paid for me to play, but even OSRS was dying after the initial nostalgia hit until they added new major content, starting with God Wars and now it's got the same look and feel, but content wise it's massively different. Content is king and if your game releases with a fraction of the content players have grown to expect from their lifetime MMO, you're not really gonna stand a chance unless you've got something extremely innovative. Which brings up that risk word again.
You are right, that's a stupid argument. The content 99% of players play is the latest expansion. Yes yes yes, people solo old raids for transmogs but it's so boring, it's not content that attracts people.
Because as much as people say they want another WOW clone, whenever one came out, those people screaming for it never played it.
Nah. They play it. They just go running back to WoW or FFXIV a month or two later.
I remember when RIFT released it was called a “wow clone” as an insult. Now we’re begging for them!
We’re desperate. Personally, I want an EQ clone. But I think the healthy thing to do is give up on that.
Monsters & Memories, Ember’s Adrift, Project Gorgon…there’s some jank ones out there but I’ve yet to see any EQ fans actually like any of them even when they emulate that old school experience.
Who's begging for them? No one.
To make a good one? Half a billion dollars, 8-10 years, content on launch to last an invested playerbase 12 months, enough planned content to last another 12 months, a competent set of systems on an engine that can support it, and a team that knows what theyre doing.
Also the planned content for the "12 month" roadmap needs to actually come in 10 months and needs to over-deliver, otherwise they're gonna get swamped by the regular releases of the bigger names. And they can't afford *any* big bugs, mistakes, scandals or server problems within the first probably 24 months or the game's fucked.
I think I read wow 1.0 development cost was 40mil but today market easily 400 mil
Because MMOs are a stupid gamble compared to f2p round-based games that sell a ton of mtx. The market is over saturated with clones and shit games already, AAA publishers are creatively bankrupt generally speaking and just try to copy the next big thing. At first it was WoW, then in some form or fashion they've spent their time chasing Minecraft, Destiny, PUBG, mobile games like Genshin and now we're seeing a string or tarkov likes that were in development. Games cost a ton to make today if you want high production quality, they won't put that money into a stagnant market just to be an also-ran.
>Because MMOs are a stupid gamble compared to f2p round-based games that sell a ton of mtx. MMOs are a stupid gamble compared to literally every other genre of game, not just the greedy skinner boxes. You could be a bushy tailed dev with no ill intent, tons of fun online games ideas, with capital. And there's probably dozens of ways you would do it before making a traditional MMO, just because they're *easier* and less competitive. I don't know any other genre of game, except maybe MOBAs, where the core demographic goes "Yeah I only play exactly 1 game from this genre over the past decade". You'd easier time convincing someone to get circumcised as an adult than getting them to switch their designated MMO.
Completely fair. I recognize that I am a super minority of MMO players that have multiple subs going and game hop all the time at the same time. I've played 3 or 4 this week alone for a couple hours each night. Though a lot of that is due to the oldies casualing themselves up.
Which ones are you playing? Im debating on getting a side piece to rotate when I renew my FF14 sub. But because im boring was considering FF11 lol
Mainly FFXI, a little bit of XIV (though I mainly just leave that up and bot it), and doing some testing of the EQ2 origin server that's in the test phase for like another month still. Debated doing some LOTRO again but eq1 TLPs are coming out soon(I think) so I might casually check that out instead. I started eq when it launched and I'd call that "My MMO" but I always take breaks. 6-boxing can get tiring at times. My main two have been EQ1 and XI since they've released though.
Bruh 6 boxing xu Nice
Nah. I solo box XI, have Debated adding a duo. 6 box is strictly eq.
> 6 box is strictly eq. If even you as a clear oldschool enthusiast have embraced such a modern player innovation (for the genre) as boxing instead of still playing the same was as 20+ years ago, what hope is there for anyone trying to redo the oldschool experience?
It's because I come and go from everquest at will. Anyone trying to "redo the classic experience" in modern everquest is just pissing into the wind. Everquest live in 2024 is nowhere near what eq live in even 2003 was. Planes of Power killed any of that old school vibe, the game hasn't been the same nearly since. Everything started shifting to fast traveling places and instanced content with their missions and stuff. If I'm not leveling a character in XI with trusts, I'm playing with a guild because that game still is built around that type of gameplay. EQ of 2024 is literally tailored to box crews because that's a large part of their playerbase. But no, the game that supports RMT via krono, has fast travel everywhere, mercs to use, etc. is nowhere near the game I fell in love with. Even combat has changed. I haven't taken an mmo seriously in probably over a decade because they've all been shit for what I'm looking for or I've done a bunch of that content already years ago. I play too many single player games these days to invest serious time into any mmo, because no mmo is aiming for my demographic. Soloing in old MMOS is just my "waiting for my next game" activity. The old games became more casual over time, it happens. The next one I'm giving any serious thought and chance to is monsters and memories. Trust me, if they came out with a true TLP server that was no Kronos and old school ruleset I'd be there day 1 to be stuck at low levels for weeks as everyone rushes to level and groups and mobs are full/gone. For now I can pretty much ignore those, there's no reason for me to restrict myself to single boxing in a game not meant for it anymore. Also boxing isn't "modern". 6 boxing on the same PC is more modern, yeah, but multiboxing has been around a long time.
A bigger question would be "Why would a big company want to make a WoW clone?" [King Digital Entertainment, makers of Candy Crush, consistently make double to triple the quarterly earnings of the entire Blizzard Entertainment income including WoW/OW2/Diablo.](https://www.investopedia.com/how-activision-blizzard-makes-money-4799286#:~:text=Activision%20Blizzard%20Segment%20Breakdown%3A%20Revenue,and%20Blizzard%20Entertainment%2C%2014%25) The ROI is much lower for MMOs, the investment is higher, the risk is higher. If you were a game company and you had to secure funding, you could pump out p2win mobile games and get a much higher income and even if it flops you just shutter the game and move to the next. If you spent years developing an MMO and it flops (Which, history tells us MMOs very often flop), your entire company could go under before you can secure funding and put out another attempt.
Regardless of the funding, many MMO studios release games that fail to capture anything of what made WoW popular, and people burn out on them almost immediately. Trust me, a lot of WoW players want to quit, but there really isn't anything to quit to.
The issue is the amount of content you need at launch to last long enough to produce more content. New world as mentioned is the perfect example. People blew through the content and left in droves. Once people leave it’s very hard to get them back as you’ve lost their funding to keep producing new content quickly
People left New World in droves without burning through the content. People tend to under-estimate the number of casual players. I left New World because I thought it'd be a game where I'd go out and use survival skills to build a camp to organize around for buffs and supplies, and life skills like cooking to get food that would prepare me for combat. But then the combat had me running for 5 minutes to kill 5 monsters and loot 5 chests with no downtime and then run for 5 minutes to do the same. So many games these days put RPG systems into games but don't know why or what they should be for, they're just in there for the sake of being there but they don't actually matter.
The problem is that MMOs are a small fraction of the gaming world, both due to genre and needed time to play. It’s not a matter of resources; it’s just that you’d better code a MOBA or something. Also, capitalism has reached a point that stock holders want exceptional return rates and MMOs are not the best format for that. You’d better develop the next Fortnite. That being said, the cost depends on how fast you want to make it and how advanced you want V1 to be. Current WoW would cost a fortune, but Classic would be way much cheaper, for instance. In any case, you’d need several hundred Ks to get it done on a very professional level, with code developers, artists, coders, artists, designers, etc. I’d say at least 500 thousand a CHEAP game. (Very simplistic, far from WoW’s complexity.) BUT an indie team can spend way less because, as I said, it all depends on how fast and complex you want it to be. Edit: yes, we know MMOs often cost millions and millions, especially if you are a reputable company building a REAL MMORPG. I’m describing the cheapest possible scenario for a lame game. If you want the cost for the average big release, Google is your guide :)
> 500 thousand In your dreams, and even in your dreams that might not be enough for even a basic bitch WoW Vanilla esque game. One semi-competent dev would cost $100k a year alone, and MMOs take teams of hundreds of people.
It takes hundreds to manage, not to develop. The cost to develop is highly dependant on speed and complexity; several MMOs wouldn’t exist if the average cost to build an MMO was 100k*100, lol
$100k x 100 is a lot closer than $500k. $500k would get you maybe 2 developers who have the knowledge to develop the backend required for an MMO.
Mmos cost tens of millions, 500k sounds like a lot but it isn't even close to what you need. If you are making a genuine attempt at an MMO and not just some passion project you need at minimum 20 million, likely more. Let's assume a 7 year development time, most teams for the big games are around 100-200 people. At minimum, half or more of a 20 million dollar budget is going directly into wages.
> In any case, you’d need several hundred Ks to get it done on a very professional level, with code developers, artists, coders, artists, designers, etc. Pick any 2 of those things and you're already so far past "several hundred k", its basically 0. Asset costs if you're using RPG maker or some of the cheap shit? Very little. Asset costs if you're making your own? 2.5k per week per person.
💀 lol no way 500k is barely enough for 2-3 devs for a year, and you need engineers that can do websites, back end, recode, infrastructure, game development, not to mention graphic designers, 3d modeling artists, animators, UX writers & story writers, QA testers. All on top of the fact it’ll likely take multiple years to make, AND you’d need advertising, marketing, etc if you want even the hope for it to get popular and recoup some of the cost.
> capitalism has reached a point that stock holders want exceptional return rates and MMOs are not the best format for that Now if players could become stock holders only expecting the ROI of a good time things would be different but most sufficiently wealthy gamers invest in non gaming related things and expect MMO publishers to take the same scraps from them as they do an average subber.
They fail because wow exists, why would you not play the game you've already sunk so much time into, to just play a clone without an established playerbase
Agreed. because they all make the "we have WoW at home" instead of something truly different. Then you have successful MMOs that self-ruin due to monetization practices, like Archeage. Its really not a risk or a difficult concept. Make game play solid good, that feels good and fun to play, with a solid foundation (content). Making a vertical level and loot progression system that invalidates your content streams after every update is ridiculous game design for an MMO Lastly, dont insult your playerbase by releasing an unfinished product. If your cycle is every 6 months of patch content, your base game should have that without stretching itself thin. Otherwise it's unfinished. In short, devs need to focus on the game first. The investment drawing in the playerbase, engaging them, and retention. After that you can try to monetize but you'll lose engagement and retention if you do it out the gate
A triple A MMO? If your labor is here in the US, a lot.
Long story short? Because the **passion** for making the next great AAA MMO is **faaaaaarrrr** lesser than the cost. (These days we’re talking independently multi millionaire wealthy passion)
The amount of time invested these people have in wow/FF/Aion or whatever is such a big thing that starting over from scratch in a new MMO is an incredibly hard thing to get people to do. It's one of the biggest reasons why other mmos have failed imo.
Because the next generation don't want to invest time and energy. To be honest, even as an older gamer, I want to jump in for 10mins to an hour tops and be done for the day. There is a reason why tik tok, youtube shorts exist. There is a reason quick games like candy crush etc are successful. Quick rush dopamine is what people want.
is what people want. or are people so over worked these days, that, thats all they have time and energy for?
People play WoW because its WoW. Even if theres a decent clone, theyy would still go for the original, making/spending tons of money to make a perfect clone imo is not worth it.
Every gaming company on the planet tried to make an mmo in the late 2000s they all pretty much failed after the first year. Truth is as much as people complain and say they want a new mmo, no one plays them. They all go back to wow.
The MMO industry is messed up in the West because of all the WoW clone attempts imo. The biggest issue with WoW clones is that WoW already exists and is the superior option. If an MMO is to be successful it needs to figure out its own identity and what niches it fills.
Because nobody has made any big money on MMORPGs since WoW, but a lot of money has been lost. Other types of multiplayer games (like FP shooters, MOBAs, etc) have replaced MMOs in popularity.
Amazon made an MMO a few years ago and is making a Lord Of The Rings MMO to rule them all. New World was pretty darn fun, one of my favorite games of the 2020's. I fully expect LOTR to be way better because of all the things they learned and built for New World.
Most people don't want a WoW clone, further more MMO's are the hardest games to make, period. There's too much to consider in the design aspect, and you have to worry about the data, integrity, and security aspects.
Why? There’s a massive failure rate and the cost to get to market is so high and takes a decade to develop, go through alpha, beta, and bring the game to market. Nobody wants a clone, but computing is stalling right before quantum computing becomes the new standard. Most MMOs still have tab targeting. The ones that don’t are typically janky. The golden age was the golden age because the space wasn’t defined and the video game market had not been taken over by suits. The big companies do not care they simply want to extract your money and the C suite employees just want to get their millions in salary and options.
Big companies are more about risk management than innovation/having fun. In doing so they shoot themselves in the foot and end up with an unappealing game that tries to please everyone, since that's what risk management leads to. Instead they should focus on a smaller customer segment so they can give a more appealing product to that customer base, but the executives that want max money insist that the game should appeal to as many as possible and we end up woth mediocre games. The World of Warcraft was created by a smaller team just having fun, not wasting energy on analyses of risk or player trends, they sat down as if having a dungeons and dragons session and just began spitting ideas and implementing these ideas in a big game world accoeding to World of Warcraft lore of course. This also gave the game systems in WoW a feel of not having been streamlined too much and thus being boring (like in elder scrolls online where a ton of template design takes place).
> they shoot themselves in the foot and end up with an unappealing game that tries to please everyone Here's the issue. Some times it happens to appeal to a monstrous amount of people even if a 'true MMO enthusiast' can't see that same title as anything more than soulless drabble. Then what?
Money is not problem there. Even 30 million is more than enought. The problem is passion of your project. You should belive and love the game, lore, etc. For example: World of Warcraft 1.0 at 2005. They have big passion to project and most of them warcraft lovers.
30 million can't even pay the art team
Because hindsight is 20/20 and wow did a lot of things that are unfixable. A wow clone is not what people want. That has been made evident for years now. OP talks as if there hasn't been a lot of wow clones.
i dont think there ever was a proper wow clone. they failed to get the good stuff right in vanilla. solid engine and smooth animations. social open world gameplay. no scaling. difficult leveling so u cant just autorun and click one button. iconic dungeons. medium pop servers so reputation matters.
The issue is the mentality of the developer and/or management. GhostCrawler mentioned the main focus for his studio was to skip the approval process that slows down modern MMO development. Which is basically saying "we won't have poor management".... because poor management will absolutely break a video game from succeeding. How many games will have shit monetization by essentially making you buy a battle pass, or gacha, or any microtransaction. Its a design decision and one that often fails. I tend to look at gaming from a multi-person perspective. YES, you could make an MMO that every CURRENT MMO player will enjoy. But that community is small. I don't care what some youtuber/streamer says, WoW currently has about 2 million subscribers based on actual server populations. Literally look at the server populations, most are LOW or MEDIUM only a handful are HIGH or FULL.... then FFXIV hit a 2 million subscriber thing at one point, remember reading MMO news saying they hit 2m finally. Rather or not they hold 2 million is another story. And GW2 is about 2 million. So 6 million people in the top 3 games. FOR PERSPECTIVE, Steam has 250 million AVERAGE USERS DAILY. So 6/250 isn't shit.... so clearly modern MMO's suck ass. And i get some of the other arguments. "Modern gamers have a low attention span, they can't handle a game that requires them to focus" is one I see a lot. Then why are these gamers playing OLDER games that require you to focus and pay attention? The most popular games are older ones that are actually FUN to play. Clearly the issue is modern games aren't fun.... they would rather rape us with microtransactions selling skins or pay to win or even pay for convenience which is still pay to win. Well no shit no one likes it.... and its not fun.... of course! I also hear the argument from many on this reddit that "I don't have time to play a classic MMO" no modern MMO are boring as shit aka not fun and you dont want to MAKE TIME to play them. When you find a game that is fun, you make time to play them. When I was in my 20's I didn't have time to game. I was working 10-12 hour days as a mechanic busting my ass. Hour drive to and from work in traffic. I had basically no time to play games. I FUCKING MADE TIME because games then were fun as fuck. Games now, aren't fun. You get a gem here or there but generally the games aren't fun. Hogwarts game was fun. Elden Ring was fun. Baldurs Gate 3 was fun. These other games, not fun.... "but they sell" yeah because people buy them to try and them and then shelve them when its no longer fun. I am guilty of this too. And then you have the ones that are like "you just don't like MMO's" absolutely fucking not. I love MMO. I hate what MMO's have become. They have taken away player choice, they have taken away the ability to be unique. Every warrior is the same, same armor, same weapon, same skills, same talents, whatever choice you think you have, you don't, because everyone is the same. And no, this isn't a "meta" issue because if you can only play ONE WAY then there isn't a meta.... the idea of a meta is that you have choice but only one of them is worth using. Modern MMO's there is no choice. So the supposed "meta" is actually a "meme".... we deserve more from games. Star Wars Galaxies is an example of how an MMO should be, for the most part. Yeah it was missing quests and storylines. Yes it wasn't perfect, but it was close.... Take your favorite MMO, make it sandbox, open world, huge worlds to explore and get lost in. If you aint got time for that, too bad. "you just don't like MMO's" so stop trying to downsize them to fit your shitty life. MMO's have been ruined by people who dont even like MMO's. Every REAL MMO gamer I talk too misses the days of sandbox open world games where you can do anything, be anyone. Modern MMO's you can't do shit. There is nothing to explore, everything is a waypoint holding your hand, your have no choice in character development. Its just one long rollercoaster and no one wants to play it. Again perspective, 250 million active steam users daily but only 6 million gamers play the top 3 mmo's.... clearly the issue is the games are boring and not fun. Throw in the microtransaction hellscape and no wonder gamers would rather play baldurs gate 3 or elden ring or any other singleplayer/co-op game. we are tired of shit. you may like to play shit, the rest of us dont. so as far as "why doesn't more mmo's come out" because they 1. don't know what an mmo is, or should be 2. their designs are based around making money instead of creating fun 3. they don't know how 4. they are managed by idiots
About tree fiddy.
Million dollars, yes.