Name: The Future of MMOs - Why Are There So Many WoW Clones? - Extra Credits
Uploaded: 2018-01-08T12:19:47.000Z
Duration: 7 min 37 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This week we're going to talk about MMOs.

Because every week James is getting emails asking two questions:

and what do you think the future of MMOs is?

Well those are good questions and there's no time like the present so let's do this!

Those two questions are pretty intimately tied but let's start by tackling the first one:

Because no one's thinking outside the box.

Well it has a lot to do with psychology and business so you know... buckle up.

The principal reason that MMOs fail today is money.

You know how much it costs to make one of those things?

With that kind of money you could buy a video game every 10 minutes

If you carried that much money around in 1 dollar bills it would weigh slightly more than a walrus.

For most studios, a gamble of that size is a life or death risk.

Almost no independently funded studio has the capital on hand to even attempt a venture like that

that means everybody that's making MMOs has to answer either to a publisher

Investors want to know they're investing in a company not a project

because individual games tend to be very hit or miss

and they don't provide the kind of long-term stability most investors are looking for.

This leads new MMO studios to try and develop multiple games at once

or create a web portal or start publishing games before they've even finished developing their first product.

in reality it's suicide for a starting developer.

Investors will eventually become more savvy about the game world but

the way things are now, MMO developers are having to split their resources and their focus in order to appease those investors.

And the result has been a pile of shoddy projects and cancellations.

Alternatively, MMO developers can work with larger publishers to get the funding they need

but the large publishers tend to be conservative when it comes to game design.

Historically they've preferred to re-skin game types they know will work

And, as much as we love to push innovation here I have to admit - it's a good business policy.

Because console games are launched and then done,

you beat the single player, you mess around with the multiplayer for a ittle while but

thrive on how much of the players time they consume

they're designed to be played to the exclusion of everything else.

People just can't play two MMORPGs at once.

they're continually being updated and expanded

creating an effectively illimitable amount of content for the player to explore.

Couple that with the social bonds people form in these games

that keep them from leaving and you have a very limited market.

Nobody can compete with it because users aren't willing to play two MMORPGs at the same time,

players will end up finding other games less fun because all their friends still play WOW.

This means many MMO players spend their entire MMO lifecycle in this one game.

And the size of the market for traditional MMORPGs isn't that large

it's probably close to its cap at about 20 million users now.

But! Because Blizzard is making a billion dollars a year on this thing

Unfortunately, it's so expensive to make an MMORPG that anyone who can afford to doesn't want to take any risks.

The problem with this strategy is that no amount of minor mechanical or

graphical improvements will make a World of Warcraft clone better than World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft has an enormous player base

Add to that: that it has 10 years of development and content behind it

and it's simply impossible to build a WOW killer by cloning WOW.

And yet, billions of dollars have been spent attempting to do just that.

Should we just wait until Activision Blizzard comes out with World of Warcraft 2 or

So we just give up on the idea of making alternate MMOs entirely?

But it would probably be better for everyone if we stopped trying to make World of Warcraft clones.

Well first we have to ditch the idea that the terms MMO

because everyone's trying to fight Blizzard over that little niche.

But think how many other genres are out there.

MMO real-time-strategy and brawlers and puzzle games I mean, why not?

Why don't we see any of these things around?

I mean, I guess we kinda do, honestly. We can see the first hints of the future of MMOs

by looking to some Korean games like KartRider or Combat Arms.