How Long Have They Been Axe Grinding?

Also, if I search for NCSoft I get this:

http://www.thisisgame.com/en/2012/08...nancial-result
...

That whole page, and the entry about Mr. A, makes it sound like the Korean gaming industry is in trouble in general.

They also require a system to eject players under 16 at midnight till 6am, this includes at home online console gaming, not just from gaming cafes.

Oh BTW, great news site link. Interesting to see Korean gaming news and what they are promoting as features in games.

That's kinda happening too. The MMOs we're seeing out now have been at least 5 years in development. The way SWTOR crashed and burned sent a message to investors that no one's really going to "take" all of WoW's customers, and MMOs are not a great investment (especially if you force them to go the WoW route and stifle innovation - if people wanted to play WoW, they'd go to WoW with its 7 years of content, not to a brand-new clone.)

I think we're going to see a lot more think-outside-the-box games like Minecraft and the stuff in Arcanaville's thread, and a lot less traditional pay-to-play MMOs being released in the next 5 years or so.

Personally, I'm in favor of slowing the hell down. The market really does NOT need 50 MMOs. The gaming population can't support it.

It would appear so.

Well, that's where folks like Notch have a freedom that invested game studios don't.

Game studios HAVE to make back their development costs, and then make money after that, in order to keep putting a product out. They can't afford to just go "hey, I think this random level-less game where you do nothing but build and explore would be fun!" and then get it made.

I think we're going to see all our innovation come from small studios like Mojang where the initial investment is a labor of love. We're not going to see anything but imbeciles in suits trying to jam things into the same WoW-shaped hole over and over from the big studios. Even games like GW2 can only innovate so far - they're basically just "fixing" some of the things wrong with the WoW model, rather than coming up with anything REALLY shockingly new.

How long did it take Detroit to start making smaller fuel efficient cars ?

It's Hollywood, it's the music industry... It's the gaming industry... it's everything.

It's not that there are too many games (or movie makers or musicians)... it's that there are too many producers banking on the sure bet by sticking to formulas based on the previous successes.
Everyone forgets and/or abandons that the previous (and future) successes were things imagined and created by highly talented (and usually exceptional) artists and these things were not based on standard formulas.
Of course, the big successes (this-year's-Disney-Pop-Singer) create big new dollar sign goals in business-people's eyes... and the smaller, completely reasonable and sustainable ventures get left in the dust...
And the cloned entertainment gets more and more repetitive.

However, as an independent artist, I thank people like you who, at least, recognize these things.
I fully believe that there are many people starving for greater variety of quality entertainment (and I think that our need for such entertainment is similar to our need of food and sleep).

Much like our society has a gluttony of food, but a severe lack of nutrition,we have a gluttonous amount of entertainment options, but the majority of it leaves the people severely lacking of any benefit.

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

Simple answer? Yes.

I hear you, but how much of that is much bigger marketing?

You see, marketing has won so much within these industries that their mandates now star within the creators themselves...
Due to marketing optimization, the product must fit into a category that can be easily described and understood.
Trying to come up with more complicated and different things that fit into these cookie cutter pitch categories is extremely difficult (though not impossible). Unfortunately, the money that is required to market, back, produce these endeavors is large and there are more less-talented-people out there (skilled enough to create, discover and/or believe-in such projects) than there are talented visionaries with the backing and/or money already, so you get a lot of the same... and people grow accustomed to and accepting of it.
That does not mean that it is what they truly want... It's just the best they can get and don't consider themselves to be in any situation to change any of that at all.

And, again, with the enormous amounts of money that goes into the actual marketing campaigns, honestly... with the right marketing, you can sell millions of pet rocks. That doesn't mean that everyone really wants pet rocks.

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

It's not that people don't want the standards! Even if I do not enjoy World Of Warcraft, I would never say that its success is due to big marketing alone (if at all).

The point is that there are enough people that do indeed want different (tv, movies, games, and so on).
Enough people that are indeed profitable!
The reasons that these different things get canceled and/or don't get made is because they're more difficult for the backers to believe in and they don't get the recognition and facetime from widespread marketing (or improper marketing, when you try and sell something different as something typical) and then they measure the amount of profits vs. the amount of profits their big, widespread standardized successes have.

There are enough people that want different that can benefit business that want to make different. There's plenty of room for people who want to make and want to have the samey same. It just does not need to come at the cost of everything else.

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

When Japan made smaller more fuel efficient cars in the 70s during the fuel crisis in the USA.

I think marketing just reinforces what we already have preferences for. It's an actual psychological quirk called the "familiarity principle" or the "mere-exposure effect," where we tend to prefer things that are similar to what we're already familiar with.

I once heard a comedian say, "Have you ever noticed that you forget how ugly your friends are? Then when you try to fix them up with someone you realize your buddy doesn't have a face?" That's the exact "familiarity principle" happening: the more familiar you are with someone and the more often you see them, the more attractive they become to you. It's the "I've grown accustomed to your face" thing in action.

Pop songs are so dominant because they sound similar to what we already know. (And the reason we get hooked on them is because our brains *love* to predict what the next note or lyric will be, and that's what pop -- and country -- music does. It doesn't matter what kind of music you like, every song in that genre sounds pretty much like every other one in that genre.

So I think police and medical shows are popular because they're familiar. Some of them are actually good, but we really don't have anything new to say in those genres. Fantasy MMOs are popular because that's what people are familiar with. No revolutionary game has become a blockbuster in the past 15 years. They're all just evolutionary iterations on what's gone before and what's familiar.

Unfortunately it took American car makers more than a decade to finally get on-board with smaller cars and even then it required a restriction on Japanese imports and laws passed by Congress forcing them to make more fuel-efficient cars. That sort of thing isn't going to happen in entertainment.

NOW I'm depressed again.

D: D: D:

It would if we were talking about studios which aren't invested or owned by a publisher, because then all they'd have to worry about is making more money than they spend keeping the MMO going—any decision to shut down the game would be entirely their own, and not because a publisher has to convince shareholders that they're ever more profitable.

I don't think Myst Online Uru Live would have ever returned from the brink of oblivion if Cyan Worlds was under somebody's thumb.

I'm not really sure how that's a response to the statement you quoted.

I'm saying that the physical population of MMO gamers - which is actually quite a bit smaller than WoW, which is what makes WoW such an aberration, lots of non-MMO players play it - is not large enough to support a constant population in as many games as we have on the market right now.

We have some people who'll dip their toes in multiple games at a time. We have more people who serially move from game to game. But "monogamous" gamers don't have the numbers to support the population numbers that the big studios think they "need." They don't want EQ or COH numbers of constant, steady players who love their game. They over-invest and need GIANT launches... and then they want that giant launch to STAY.

The problem is that most of the really loyal playerbases, the ones who REALLY pay the bills? They're still going back to "their" game when the free month is over. There just aren't enough people out there to play all these games they're throwing at us, not on a regular basis.

Investors like predictability. Detroit complained that Japanese automakers were undercutting American Jobs - true, but it was because Detroit was being predictable - it was stuck in it's grove and was not innovating. Fuel efficiency laws required a change, to be sure, but the main driver to change will always be successful innovation (barring monopolies crushing you or Government impeding you with endless regulation and requirements).

A lot of American's resent the fuel efficiency laws because they, rightly, view it as an infringement on their right to choose. And they are mostly interested in choosing big, heavy cars that can do a job - like moving equipment or a large family. Still, there are those of us who like fuel efficiency as well.

But to the point: investors like predictability so until the Next Big Thing™, they will demand a WoW killer by expecting it to be... well, like WoW. That is the problem when you have Non-Gamers trying to drive the creation of games. They just don't get it or understand what people like - which can vary between countries as well. Consider the main market for CoH/V is Western while the main market for Aion or Lineage is Eastern. Makes me wonder what the numbers are when it comes to Development support in Korea vs the USA. Does it cost more for less income and overall interest for CoH/V to survive vs pushing another Korean MMO?

Who knows... NCSoft has the hard numbers we don't.

But it was a response to what I quoted. I'm trying to tell you it's not a case of the gaming population being unable to support 50 MMOs. An MMO doesn't necessarily need the kind of population WoW has to be massively multiplayer. City of Heroes didn't. I've played a number of MMOs that only had a few thousand active accounts. In fact, have you ever seen MMO Charts? The size of active accounts and subscriptions among MMOs runs the gamut.

Quite a number of titles, City of Heroes included, would probably have done fine and continued operating if it was up to the company responsible for the game and not the parent company, or getting pressure put on them by stakeholders in the board of directors.

Is it me or did the CoH/V tracking end in 2009?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I



I'd say it's more than just familiarity that's the problem with MMOs. It's a combination of everything.

Some people just don't care for the idea of buying a game, then having to pay a monthly fee to keep on playing it.

Then for the people who are willing to pay the monthly fee, there's just so many options. Which isn't bad for people, but it lessons the customer base.

Then there's the entitlement issues, which is just becoming more prevalent. "I should beable to play for free! Never mind paying for the game!"

Then you throw in the investors