Well, part of the reason Schilling wanted to make a MMO was because he was a huge everquest junkie back in the day. Had he instead been, say, a huge Street Fighter player I'm sure 38 studios would've been trying to make a fighting game instead.

__________________

It would have flopped too. Not to say he could not have made a MMO later but get a few games out before. Also MMOs are changing the old model is dieing.

__________________

No it's not. The old model is alive and well. The problem is that its all in WoW and the current MMO base are a bunch of entitled Facebook kiddies who want instant bug free gratification that just will never happen.

Themepark MMO games are bloaing the market, but tor and wow are the only rwo quality games iv tried.

We need a good sandpark. Mix of the two. Pathfinder online is sounding good.

And my point. That is a bad market to try to reach they need to find new people and not to court these losers. Also free to play can help out with that because you pay for what you want.
As good as wow is for the mmo market it also poisoned it. Wow is only good for itself.

__________________

The issue is most F2P games are clunky. Champions Online is ok, but it's not a popular genre.

Dungeons and Dragons online is very complicated if your not familiar with the D&D rules, which is normally good but they take it to far, and the game play is very clunky.

LotRo is fairly clunky from what I've played of it so far, though it's still better than most.

TOR is the smoothest after WoW, and I am looking forward to trying it again when it's a bit more mature.

It can't just be a F2P. It's got to have solid game play, and I'm really rooting for ESO and Pathfinder to effect the genre. Especialyl Pathfinder, with it's contracts. You can set player bounties as quests. Players can create their own quests. In addition to NPC quests .

Look at Guild Wars. Hell look at DFO the worlds biggest MMO is solely free to play and they make more than enough money to run their things. (It's at 300 million players)
Free to play should not be a dirty word.If done well they can well fund themselves quite tidily.

__________________

F2P isn't a dirty word. What I meant was it can't be the only draw. It has to be well made.

I kind of like ArenaNet model of buying the game upfront, but you don't need to pay a subscription.

But you have the side effect that you don't get nearly as much content and any you do get will be $$. Though we have to wait and see how this goes for GW2 since maybe it won't be like GW1.

I reckon GW2 could get away with microtransactions on things like cosmetics, like WoW does with pets and mounts and shiz.

I'd be cool with it, mainly because I'd only pay for things I actually like, and because stupid people will pay for everything else and generate money for more content I'd play.

Win/Win.

__________________

There actually was a bit of a uproar about their micro-transactions since one of the items actually did affect the game (gems).

Ah yes, I think I remember hearing about it.

That's a tad silly.

__________________

What item?

__________________

There is no real content sold on the store in GW2.

Not to mention you can buy gems with gold, and ArenaNet will be monitoring the gem/gold conversion to make sure that the ratios don't get out of hand.

You never have to spend another penny on GW2 other than the initial purchase price, even to buy things on the store.

__________________
Slywyn's Fanfiction Listing

You'll need to buy content in the form of expansions. Maybe they won't do it the same way as GW1 but they've been tight lipped about post release content in general.

That's pretty much an unsaid expectation though. While I'm all for finding ways to keep things cheap for the consumer, I do also expect they'll have to make money SOMEHOW. Expansions are the obvious way, both because it gives them a huge influx of money all at once, and because it gives the consumer even more content to play, especially presuming that GW2 will use the WoW model of expansions and raise the level cap while opening new zones to play in.

__________________

His "view" is pretty much the boilerplate liberal schadenfreude orgasm over seeing a conservative like Schilling fail. I don't see anything unique in his perspective at all.

I think it's very telling that, to date, just about everyone at 38 has nothing but good things to say about their management, and nothing but criticism for the way Chafee used them to score political points.

I blame the Soviets!

__________________

That and their item shop would be the best way. But like a certain company management has head up ass. Well when more companies die they will have to look at it

__________________

Gives some nice perspective on it, Schilling is being pretty unfairly villainised in a lot of discussions/articles on the subject.

I really hope that between this and the cash cow SWTOR not really living up to expectations starts to dash game companies incentives to make an MMO. In the past few years we've gotten 2-3 MMO's for every CoD installment. It's getting a bit ridiculous. And with ESO it's just getting frustrating to see franchises try to hop onto a band wagon they have no business being involved with.

__________________

Most importantly IS the MMO market even worth going after? If you are going to the 10.1 million consumers that wow has that's a terrible market. As good as they may seem they just want one game and will never move to another game to stay with. Then ask how much people want the MMO.

There needs to be a call of duty type disruption and I am not sure Blizzard is the one to do it. And nobody else will. Needs a massive contraction before we see a new MMO to look at. Aside from that if you like wow play wow you obviously don't want anything else.

__________________

Or maybe they'll try to make a good MMO. And make a MMO with what works rather then trying to reinvent the wheel and having it inevitably fail.

The problem with all of these is they're retreading the same fantasy/sci-fi ground with basically the same format as WoW. They're remoras trying to feed off of WoW's scraps instead of just picking up a niche of their own. Hell, take CoD. It could easily become its own MMOFPS, expansion packs and all, but they keep wasting their time on installments.

It's crazy to think WoW could be dethroned by one single evolution in the system, but its easily a possibility. No one is willing to touch it because they're too afraid it might drift away from assured formulas.

__________________
Rationalizing the irrational since 2005.