That article goes on to talk about how their player base doesn’t rise and fall linearly. They’re referring to the rebound cycle: your hardest-core players leave periodically, and then come back later. But there’s something missing from this picture.

World of Warcraft has always had a huge newbie hose: a constant stream of brand new players that flood into the game every day. This stream appears to be dwindling — or at least getting more expensive to maintain.

I’m still incredibly impressed with their newbie hose. Can you imagine if your favorite non-WoW game got newbies at the same percentage as WoW has? What if multiplayer console games just kept getting huge waves of new players every week, for year after year, so you never had to keep playing against the same old people? A newbie hose is incredibly valuable — all those newbies make the game more fun for existing players, and when everybody’s having fun, the newbies are more likely to stick around, too. When a game’s newbie hose drops off, its overall retention rates can drop too. So getting new blood in is extremely valuable.

And most games fail at it, or don’t even try. Most MMOs that have been around a few years have basically no newbies coming in, and they are slowly, quietly shrinking.

As an MMO shrinks, the dynamics of its game systems change. For instance, the economy of WoW is just like most other MMO economies: it’s designed around the newbie hose. As long as a constant influx of new characters show up, there’s always going to be people to buy your herbs. But when the newbie hose runs dry, and everybody finally gets all the alts they want, suddenly the bottom falls out of the auction house. This is par for the course for pretty much every other MMO in existence.

Every other MMO has to constantly and aggressively address problems like this one. (For instance, by making herbs do an ever-larger and more valuable array of things, so that people keep buying them.) So one way to get a feel for how many newbies WoW is getting is to watch for changes like this. When fishing becomes a more and more valuable skill in order to keep the value of rare fish from dropping to 1 copper, that’s what you’re seeing: the newbie hose dwindling.

Now, to repeat, I’m not saying their newbie hose is even close to dry yet! But I do think it’s slowing down, and unless they do something really magical, it will continue to dwindle. That would mean a slow death by attrition, which I calculate will take… lesee… holy… well my guess is it will take about 9 years before it’s under a half-million subscribers. So unless they do something stupid (like stop making expansions, or stop advertising hard), they can keep this baby going for another decade. And if they change the game in some innovative new way, they can bring the newbies back too.

But while they aren’t in danger, they’re certainly very aware of their newbie hose.

Cataclysm’s Newbie Experience: Self-Indulgence

It seems like Cataclysm was designed specifically to revitalize the newbie hose. At least, I’m sure that’s how the live team pitched it to upper management. “By improving such-and-such areas, we’ll convert x% more newbies.”

But really, this was a self-indulgent move by the live team. What live team hasn’t wanted to just fix everything? And that urge isn’t unique to games… ask anybody who has to maintain something for years and years. Who wouldn’t want to start over, to apply the lessons they’ve learned?

Can you imagine a city planner that got a chance to completely re-design their city? Tighten the zoning, bolster the transportation structure, maybe get some high speed rail into downtown… sure, it means destroying everything that’s there, but the new stuff will be so much better! Who could resist such an opportunity?

The urge is near-universal, but it rarely makes sense to completely rewrite everything. While you’re busy rewriting things to make them 25% better, you could have been adding new content and features that made the game 35% better instead. Adding new stuff is usually just a lot more efficient. And rewriting stuff has its own dangers. Everybody makes mistakes, and nothing’s perfect the first time. So you’re inevitably going to throw out some time-tested stuff and introduce new stuff that has unforeseeable problems in it.

So gigantic rewrites are only worthwhile to the bottom line if they cause a tremendous amount of expansion when they’re done. Cataclysm’s re-envisioning of the old world did not accomplish that.

I’m not saying they should never change their old world. But most of the time they should be improving it incrementally. EQ2 did this pretty well, I think: some of their original zones were so bad that they actively caused players to quit. (Seriously.) So the live team redid all of those zones. But by “redid” I mean they refactored all the quests and adjusted monster placement. They left the terrain itself unchanged! And these were some very ugly zones. Let’s just say they could have stood a revamp. (If you contrast them to the later EQ2 zones, you won’t believe they’re in the same game.)

But SOE’s product-driven mindset protected them from falling into that trap. By default, SOE assumes “new” is always more valuable than “improved”, because “new” goes on store shelves. This might be short-sighted in today’s digital-download environment, but at least this mindset stopped EQ2′s live team from going overboard here. The EQ2 artists were so busy making new areas for expansion packs that they couldn’t take the time to redo old areas. Old stuff isn’t sexy, it doesn’t sell boxes. I’m sure the designers would have loved to do it, but the people with money kept them in check.

Nobody keeps WoW’s live team in check very much. So they went ahead with a total universe-wipe. This meant that vast chunks of everybody’s knowledge about Azeroth, their shared experiences, were wiped out.

Now you have to ask yourself two things:

Question #1: If I’m a new player, will this revised world make me significantly more likely to stick around?

Well, in the past, an amazing 30% of WoW free-trial players stuck with the game. This is so much higher than any other long-running MMO that it is frankly hard to take seriously. But of course they are interested in getting that number much higher.

To make this number go up, we’ve watched the WoW live team tighten their newbie experience dramatically over the past several years. They’ve said that if players got past level 10 in their free trial, those players were likely to stick around. So it made a ton of sense to make the first part of the game more fun and a bit shorter.

But before Cataclysm, they did this by iteratively tweaking and refining. Cataclysm let them completely redo the newbie experiences. So… the question remains: does Cataclysm’s newbie experience significantly increase the number of newbies that sign up?

I dunno that. But I do know that the new newbie zones are so graphically complex that old PCs can’t play them anymore, and many of the new zones are also over so quickly that some of the elements of “sense of place” are lost from the experience. Those problems are countered by tighter quests with more diverse and engaging activities, so for the most part it’s hard to argue that the new zones are worse. But how much better are they, really?

More specifically, in how many zones was the old content so clumsy, and/or the new content so amazing, that players will sign up when they would have quit before? There were some stinkers, but I suspect most zones could have just been revised, not rewritten.

And even if the content is amazing, WoW’s sign-up rate can only get so high from content alone. Sign-ups are affected by a million factors, from hardware requirements to how many of their friends are playing to whether the game seems popular, stigmatized, or the underdog. Different people want different things. There’s no way to get your acquisition rate up to 100% — that would mean that everybody who tries WoW likes it. No video game is that good.

So my guess is their newbie hose was improved, but only for a while. On the other hand…

Question #2: If I’m a returning player, will this revised world make me significantly more likely to stick around for a few months?

No. Simply put, no. It boils down to one thing: leveling has been sped way the heck up.

Leveling has been sped up, which means you don’t spend nearly as much time in these brand new areas as you did in the old areas you remember. You don’t have time to replace your old memories with new memories. Everything just seems like a blur: oh weird, the mailbox moved. Where was the bank again? Hmm, the whole city’s been redone…

If leveling took as long as it did five years ago, this would have worked a lot better. As it is, it just makes a jumble in returning players’ heads.

Mixed Messages

WoW seems to be mixing their messages here. On the one hand, they rewrote the entire first half of the game so that it would be stickier for new players and interesting to returning players.

But on the other hand, they sped the first half up so much that you fly right through it, right to the latter half, which is not better than before (and some argue is worse).

What was the point of rewriting the content if you’re going to reach level 10 in 2 hours? Why not just speed up leveling and be done with it?

Why? Oh yeah: because the live team really wanted to do it. And I don’t blame ‘em one bit. I would have tried to get to do that, too. It musta driven them crazy, knowing that players couldn’t fly in the old world, and not being able to fix it.

I don’t know how effective it really was, but from an outsider’s viewpoint, it didn’t seem to make the game a lot stickier.

Live teams have their own agendas, and those agendas aren’t always the best way to make money.

Newbie Hose vs. Holding On To Rebounding Players

You can now get a lot further in WoW in your 10-day trial than ever before, yet clearly this has not spiked their newbie acquisition rates to dizzying heights. I’m not saying there’s definitely a causal link here — for all I know, their newbie hose had dropped to 0% and now it’s back up to 30%. I’m just a stupid blogger.

But I just have to ask this: what if, instead of completely redoing twenty newbie zones, they had added twenty new zones to the end of the game? Hindsight is 20/20, but I’m sure that would have been a much bigger win for their retention.

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Your players think a graphical upgrade would help you recruit new players. They tell you how embarrassed they are to be seen playing you and how easily they could convince all their friends to play too if you just looked a little nicer.

Your bosses think a new graphics engine should form the core of your next expansion. They tell you how important looks are to getting new players and how much reviewers like shiny graphics.

Your team members think a graphical upgrade, especially a new graphics engine, would be great. You’d get new players, maybe some more marketing money, and it wouldn’t even affect content creation all that much because graphics is all code.

Let me give you some advice: Don’t do it!

You will never be the prettiest. That boat has sailed.

Your players are fooling themselves. If they haven’t convinced their friends to give you a try based on their stirring recitations of your game systems, some shiny art isn’t going to help.

(And it’s not like they’re going to quit out of embarrassment. When they do quit, it will be because they need a break from your gameplay.)

Your bosses are fooling themselves. You’re an older MMO. You will never be an impulse buy for a new player looking for something shiny. You’ll be lucky to get a cursory look and half a column from major reviewers.

(Online reviews will be happy to dissect the intricacies of your game systems at length. If they mention your graphics at all it will probably be in the context of how they really aren’t that bad. Really!)

Your team members are fooling themselves. Graphical upgrades will drain time from new features and game systems, from new art, and from QA. And all of those things will have a fundamental impact on the ability to add more content.

Worse, a graphical upgrade may well slow down your art pipeline – and therefore your content development – in the future.

No matter what you do, be very, very careful about affecting your system requirements. Raising system requirements on a live game doesn’t just throw away existing players – it throws them away with extreme prejudice.

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The bit that really caught my eye, though, was his discussion of the impact of BioWare’s SWTOR (which I still call KOTORO in my head, accompanied by a mental imago of Goro).

Allow me to quote two small pieces:

But all the same, I hope The Old Republic is a massive hit, with millions of subscribers, enough to make back its development costs and then some. [...] Because Austin needs studio that has a successful MMO shipped within the past decade. Because a lot of my friends work there and I’m pulling for them. [...]

And because in 2012, the Old Republic development team may get some sleep.

(I’ve clipped the bits that deserve another, rather longer post.)

If it succeeds, it will show that the “big iron” still works – throw as much meat as you can at the machine, and crank out a huge project, and spend your way to greatness. [...] And everyone will breath a sigh of relief. The old gods still listen to our prayers, now shut up and find more virgins, we have to get the sacrifices ready for the next expansion pack.

I know where Scott is coming from when he hopes that SWTOR is a massive hit. I have friends in Austin and at BioWare as well. I don’t want to see them unemployed or have their last four years of blood and effort go down the drain.

But I also don’t want to see another decade of $50+ million meat-grinder projects. I want my friends to be able to sleep more than once every four years. I want MMOs to improve through a better understanding of target audience and design*, not through luck and blood sacrifice to the old gods.

And one day, I want to be able to consider getting back into the corporate side of the MMO industry again. I miss my teams. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to sacrifice my health and sanity for someone else’s minuscule chance of profit.

* You think SWTOR will succeed because BioWare does have a better understanding of target audience and game design? It’s possible … but right now I’m not seeing it. Let’s talk more when I’ve actually seen the game.

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Because it’s wrong, and you guys are shit, that’s why.

First, take a look at this. Just a brief look. See the date at the top? September 12, 2003. Now take a look at this. Note the date it was filed? November 9, 2004.

This is relevant because the patent is a super-broad one — it patents the entire generalized idea explained in my article, and every obvious permutation they could think of. They actually have three different patents now, covering various elements of my meta-language idea.

The Boring Details

What does this mean? What’s the patent all about? In very simple terms, it makes translating games easier — in fact, it makes any grammatical construction easier — by abstracting away conjugations and different spellings of words.

Words have lots of conjugations. In English, a noun might have one form for singular and one for plural, e.g. “monster” versus “monsters”. Some nouns have gender, so they should be referred to as “he” or “she” or maybe “it”. And there’s always tons of crazy special cases. Suppose your game has a pair of sentient blue jeans… do you use “he” or “she” or “it”? No, you’d use “they”: “The pants come to life and start running! They flee to the north!” Great, that’s yet another weird special case. Getting all the possible special cases is hard.

The solution I described on GamaSutra simply makes all those details data-driven: you embed the various parts of speech right into your string tables, so that you don’t have to manually code all the different permutations in your game. A separate string-table-manager module can figure out how to conjugate entire sentences just by looking at the tags built into the various strings. The data is embedded via special characters and codes stuck into the strings.

This is really important when you want to support many languages with the same executable… you sure don’t want to have to write hundreds of C if-statements for all the different ways things can be put together in all the different languages you support! Putting this into data also makes it easier for the translators to do their job separately from your game coders… no game coder likes to take time away from their AI coding to add some more pronouns for the Italian version of the game. It’s a waste of time.

Yes, Yes, They Reworded It, Very Clever

Taking a look through the article and the patent papers, the similarities are quite striking. For instance, here’s my example set of meta-characters:

And here’s SOE’s example:

$: name (Bob) or base text
^: A proper possessive (Bob’s)
%: subject pronoun (I-you-he/she/it-we-you-they)
#: object pronoun (me-you-him/her/it-us-you-them)
&: possessive pronoun (my-your-his/her/its-our-your-their)
=: direct address (sir/sire/milord-madame/madam/milady)
+: count/number of the objects
<: indefinite article (a/an/some)
>: definite article (the)
*: used for locales other than the source locale
.about.: used for locales other than the source locale

Well I’m glad you went to the trouble of changing the example parts of speech and the little symbols, you thieving bastards. It makes all the difference in the world. No it doesn’t. You’re thieves.

The patent document certainly does go into more laborious detail than I did in the article. It points out all the obvious extrapolations: that a meta-language could store the permutations of speech in the noun strings rather than the final presentation strings, as my example setup did. The patent also drones on and on about every different configuration they could brainstorm, to make sure it covers everything in the known universe. But at its core, it’s theft. They stole it from my publication.

I know at least some people at SOE read my article because when I interviewed there years later for a contract gig, I mentioned it, and the people that interviewed me recalled it. (My wife Sandra actually worked for them for a year as a game producer, but I never did. And my wife never heard anything about the patenting of this idea while she was there… SOE’s a big company.) And really, why wouldn’t they have seen this article? It was back in 2003 and GamaSutra was king; everybody in the MMO industry checked GamaSutra religiously. It seems like it was the only industry source that people quoted back then.

The real question is, why wouldn’t their MMOG localization team have read my article, entitled “Localizing MMOGs”?

But SOE Didn’t Invent It

So here’s the thing, guys, this is prior art. My article describes this technique, which I had already successfully used on a published game prior to the article. I know the patent laws in the US are very squirrelly, and I’m not even remotely close to being a lawyer, but I don’t see how this patent could hold up.

The weirdest part of this patent is that it’s not even entirely my prior art. I solidified it, extrapolated a bit, and devised tools and techniques to work with it in a uniform way. But the underlying idea (of using meta-characters in strings to assist in string generation) is quite old… antique even. Whenever engineers have needed to solve this problem, they inevitably come up with this solution. It’s the only way to solve this problem. Hence the problem with SOE “owning” it.

I may have been the first to publicly describe this idea in English, but I wouldn’t be surprised if something like this was described in another language, since so many of the best translation companies are in Europe. When I explained this system to the company that translated Asheron’s Call 2, they already knew the basic idea. They said they had already worked on several other applications (some games, some not) that used similar techniques. I don’t remember most of the examples they mentioned, but one concrete example was Dungeon Siege by Gas Powered Games in 2000. That game used a primitive meta-language for their randomly-generated treasure items.

This is What SOE Does

What evidence do I have that SOE would steal this? Maybe they invented it at around the same time and just didn’t do any research, or they forgot that I had already described it a year earlier, and literally think they invented it. Weirder mistakes happen. I would like to assume they aren’t intentionally stealing my idea. But it is in fact their MO: whenever possible, they seem to use their  lawyers to screw over their competition.

I remember back in the day when Turbine and SOE were competing: Asheron’s Call 1 versus EverQuest 1. SOE did every dirty legal trick they could think of. Here’s one that haunted us years later:

http://www.trademarkia.com/empyrean-78069007.html

What’s that? Oh, just a trademark on the word “Empyrean.” What’s that for? Well it wasn’t intended to be used by SOE… it was just to screw over their competition. Asheron’s Call’s backstory had a progenitor race called the Empyreans. As soon as SOE found out about that, they [rightly] presumed Turbine would want to make an expansion pack with that word in it. So they trademarked it. They actually trademarked a lot of different words that Turbine might want to use. Trademarks are cheap, like $1000. So they just bought them up like candy.

This example had a somewhat ironic ending because by the time Turbine wanted to make an AC2 expansion pack, Turbine actually used SOE as their publisher! But even though SOE was publishing the game, Turbine still couldn’t use those words. Too much lawyer hassle to get the paperwork through. Ugh.

SOE, please. Come clean here. Do the right thing on these patents. I don’t even know what the “right thing” would be in this case. But do something. Don’t just be evil.

This is What Is Wrong With Everything

I know SOE isn’t the only big company that uses their lawyers for evil. And yes, I’m quite familiar with the old “we have to collect these patents in order to have leverage against other people’s patents” tripe. But it’s all tripe. It crushes indies’ hopes and dreams, and it’s not fair. I wish I knew how to help solve the problem. Over the years I’ve donated a fair amount to organizations like the EFF that sometimes go after overzealous patent trolls. But nothing has fundamentally changed despite a lot of donating and a lot of letters-to-my-congressperson. I feel completely helpless against this.

These SOE patents are horrible. Now I can no longer use the simple techniques I’ve known for a decade? Even though I was the first to formally describe it, publicly, well before SOE used the technique in a game or submitted a patent? This is terrible. Humiliating. Depressing.

Apparently Robert McEntee (who is listed on the patent) talked about this idea at GDC this year, calling it “his idea” and claiming to have invented it. I don’t even care about that. He can be the official owner forever for all I care. I just want to be able to use my technique.

I mean yeah, maybe the fact that it’s covered by my prior art means SOE couldn’t win a lawsuit against my use of the idea. But it would take a lawsuit to find out, which of course I can’t afford. And even if SOE wouldn’t bother to sue me, given that I have no money, it’s still a huge chilling effect. Now I can’t use this technique when I take contract gigs to set up localization for other people. What would I tell them? “Yeah, SOE patented this last year, but don’t worry, if they sue the bejeezus out of you, just point to this prior art.” No… those contract gigs are gone now. Oh, and the lengthy chapter I authored in the 2006 book Perspectives on Localization, which expanded on the ideas of the GamaSutra article? Yeah, don’t use that either, it was patented retroactively. I was quite proud of that article.

Worst of all? I was informed about this by a translation company who was distraught by the news. Variations of this technique are in common usage all over the world, and SOE now owns the rights to it in the US, somehow. Where does that put everyone else? Nobody knows; everybody’s worried.

I just wish there was a way to fix patents. I wish I could do something useful besides call SOE names and rant on a blog like a petulant child. But I can’t.

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Suddenly, a year later, his quotes are all “out of context”? That’s interesting. It turns out that the common reference that proves they are ”out of context” is a recent post on One Of Swords, by Dan Amrich, who happens to work for Activision PR. But just because he works for Activision PR doesn’t mean he had to defend his CEO — well, I mean maybe he was ordered to, I don’t really know. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

First off, he’s right in the sense that the average gamer may have misunderstood Kotick’s quotes. But he’s wrong in painting Kotick as being dramatically misunderstood. Here’s what I mean:

Belief: Bobby Kotick wants to “take the fun out of making videogames.” He cultivates a culture of “skepticism, pessimism, and fear,” and wants to keep his employees “focused on the deep depression.”
Source: Comments made at the Deutsche Bank Securities Technology Conference, September, 2009

Truth: As soon as I heard this quote when I was at OXM, I knew (and said at the time) that what was being reported, while likely word-for-word accurate, was not the full information or spirit of the quote. So I went digging and found the full, correct meaning.

You have to start with a look at exactly what was said in full and in its conversational context, which was transcribed from the audio recording and posted by Gamespot:

Jeetil Patel, Deutsche Bank Securities – Analyst
“What do you think the retailers’ willingness these days is to hold inventory on the video game side? Are they building positions today or are they still very reluctant and very careful of how they are buying?”

Bobby Kotick, Activision Blizzard, Inc.
“I don’t think it is specific to video games. I think that if you look at how much volatility there is in the economy and, dependent upon your view about macroeconomic picture and I think we have a real culture of thrift. And I think the goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks that we brought in to Activision 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.”

“I think we definitely have been able to instill the culture, the skepticism and pessimism and fear that you should have in an economy like we are in today. And so, while generally people talk about the recession, we are pretty good at keeping people focused on the deep depression.”

No, You’ve Got It All Wrong! He Just Hates Developers!

Amrich goes on to argue convincingly that Kotick was trying to make a joke with that “take the fun out of video games” thing. I completely believe that — I assumed it was a joke from the get-go. Okay, settled.

But Amrich doesn’t successfully explain the rest of that quote, the part about the fear and the pessimism. There’s no way to convincingly spin that, frankly. And even if all of it’s a joke, it’s not like this is sarcasm. Kotick didn’t follow up by saying “Ha ha, I gotcha! It’s opposite day! What I meant is that I want developers to feel less fearful and depressed!”

No, he was talking to a room full of bankers and he gave a spiel he’s used before (Amrich’s article proves it’s a semi-canned spiel) about how he keeps employees as fearful and worried as he can. And this isn’t exactly the first time we’d heard Mr. Kotick’s philosophy of minimizing creativity, maximizing cheap sequels, focusing on quarterly profit above all else, and keeping costs down with fear and intimidation. This is pretty much his status quo stuff. So I’m not trying to pillory him for any specific words in this quote. But he’s been doing this stuff for years; there’s tons of data to provide any context that might ambiguous in his quote above.

Interestingly, Amrich’s primary goal is less about that angle and more about making sure you understand that Kotick doesn’t hate games themselves. He doesn’t want to make the games less fun, what he meant is that people who work in the game industry should be afraid for their jobs and livelihoods. See? You’ve taken him all out of context!

No, I got it. I do appreciate that many regular gamers probably didn’t understand the background to the quote. But when developers like Tim Schafer go on the record about him, there is not one iota of misunderstanding.

The reason this whole thing became a thing is because developers reacted negatively to his words. Yeah, developers probably helped misrepresent him to game players along the way. But developers hate him because he’s a jerk, not because they can’t source a damned quote.

Game Companies Are Run Poorly Because…

Kotick has a point that a great many gaming companies have very poor financial management these days. That’s because only a financial dipshit would try to create a AAA game studio in today’s environment. Those billions of dollars made in “the gaming industry”? They aren’t made by the artists, designers, or coders. They are made by the middlemen: the console manufacturers, the brick-and-mortar stores, and — most upsettingly — the publishers often take a huge chunk of the pie.

But you have to use these middlemen if you want to make a big game, especially a console game. So you have to play by their rules, give away the vast majority of your profit, ship quickly, and try to stay alive. Is it any wonder that sane businessmen stopped running these studios?

The result is that most “AAA” teams are headed by charismatic game developers with few financial skills, and they get taken advantage of amazingly quickly — if they’re lucky they’re bought by a publisher for dirt cheap, but mostly they just sign all the profit away and then can’t make payroll. Even when these teams have a big successful game, the employees still get laid off. Most game developers I know have been laid off, fired, or “asked to quit” numerous times. Most game developers are already fearful for their jobs and livelihoods, trust me. Kotick wants them to fear even more, work even harder, and accept even less compensation.

And that is exactly what shareholders would hope to see from the CEO of Activision — it makes sense, at least in the short term, because it will earn them more money. Why? Supply and demand. If you’re a game developer, you know every teenage hacker wants your job, and many are happy to do your job for free — or at least for ramen, a cot, and some Dr. Pepper. Even if you have years of experience, you can be replaced by three or four newbies who may not be as good as you, but hey, they still manage to get a new sequel out the door every year, and people buy it, so who loses? Well, for starters, the employees lose.

Amrich argues that "exploit" is just a financial term. Okay, but I think what people were upset about was the whole "we'll make so many low-quality sequels that all your favorite IPs will become burned out husks" part.

In my opinion, game developers are not generally very good at finances, either company-wide or personally. You don’t get into video games to make money — at least not for long! Most game developers earn less per hour than the lowliest of web developers (again, I know this first-hand, having been both); they work very poor hours, and they have zero job security. Do you know what gets a lot of them through the grind? What they mutter to themselves as they model the feet of the 28th orc of the day at 4am? “At least I work for a fun company. It’s not some crappy bank job. And I get to be creative. ”

This is a facade — and a very thin one. Sure, they get to be creative sometimes. And the office has subsidized sodas and there’s a ping-pong table, and during lunch you can play xbox with some really fun and clever people. But does that make up for the general crappiness? No, not in general — not for more than a handful of years, anyway. Most people get burned up and go to those “crappy bank jobs” or whatever they can get, while others find niches on the periphery, making middleware, edu-games, indie games, anywhere out of the spotlight. These people still want to make games… they just can’t keep getting punched in the gut every day to do it.

But since the facade of “fun” — specifically, of a non-conformist and creative atmosphere — is the very thing that helps people stay in the industry even as long as they do, it’s really telling that Kotick would even joke about removing that.

“You Are Utterly Replaceable” – Bobby Kotick*

* This is a joke, he hasn’t said that specifically. At least not in print. Yet.

So when Kotick talks about taking the fun out of video games, please understand that he’s not saying he wants video games to be less fun to play. What he really means is that game developers need to work harder and be even more afraid for their livelihoods, because every one of them is trivially replaceable. And he has done a good job of making sure they know this and understand their economic value, which is nil.

I hope it is obvious why that upsets the nil-value cogs.

Why should non-industry people care? Because an industry with this kind of turnover rate isn’t the best it can be. Most games aren’t very good, and that’s because most game teams (especially management) aren’t very good, and that’s because developers gets squeezed and overworked and quit the industry, taking their experience with them. But the middlemen like Activision still make cash even on schlock games. Sure, dedicated gamers may not like it, but what are they gonna do? Play indie games? Ha! Come on, get real. (Sigh… eventually it will happen!)

But I don’t really even mean to argue the pros and cons of his business strategy. My main point is that he’s not being misunderstood here. This is a guy who’s worked with developers for decades… he knows the score, he knows how to say things that won’t inflame them. He just has no respect for developers and doesn’t care what they think of him. That’s probably true of a great many CEOs that profit from their employees’ youthful ambition and naivety… but they at least know not to announce the valuelessness of their human resources. Kotick, on the other hand, doesn’t care, which is why developers think he’s a jerk.

I think Tim Schafer summed it up:

His obligation is to his shareholders. Well, he doesn’t have to be as much of a dick about it, does he? I think there is a way he can do it without being a total prick. It seems like it would be possible. It’s not something he’s interested in.

Elder Game is sponsored by:

“Our research shows that trial players who play World Of Warcraft past level 10 are much more likely to stick with the game for a long time. Currently, only about 30% of our trial players make it past this threshold.”

[Quote via Digital Spy. Apparently if you register on the Activision investor site you can listen to it yourself.]

Morhaime went on to talk about how they intend to use the upcoming Cataclysm expansion to improve this number, but at the moment I am more interested in the number itself. Most of the comments I’ve seen today focus on how terrible it is: OMG, 70% of trial players quit before level 10! That’s … that’s … awful! WoW is dying! Blizzard, do something!

Except it’s not terrible. It’s amazing. A five year old game, content that for the most part hasn’t been touched at all in five years, and three out of ten free trial players are putting in the 4+ hours of gameplay to get to level 10? (Remember, a new player will take longer to level than an experienced WoW-hand.) And for many players, that four hours is going to be more than one play session, which means that they have to remember to come back. Amazing.

Do you know what kind of numbers other MMOs have? Here’s a hint: For most games with downloadable trials, less than 30% make it to level 2 — let alone log in a second time. Seriously. Even new AAA boxed games that have no trial mode — which means that you’ve already paid $50 just to play — often fail to keep 30% of their players for 4 or more hours.

I know that if you haven’t seen the numbers yourself, you won’t believe me. But it’s true. Either Blizzard’s newbie game is miraculous or the people joining have other strong incentives to stick around (like friends in the game or the game’s reputation).

This is the first AAA MMO that has avoided dramatic player drop-off for so long. Normally when drop-off happens, all sorts of gameplay flaws are exposed. Eric and I have had the same discussion about World of Warcraft in various forms over the past couple of years. It goes like this:

Me: Game system X in WoW works really well.

Eric: It only works because they have an infinite newbie hose. Once the hose breaks, it will all fall apart.

But it looks like WoW’s newbie hose really is infinite. I shake my head in awe.

Elder Game is sponsored by:

Well, it’s true that most MMO jobs are not worth it. But if you see a job that sounds interesting to you, I’d definitely encourage you to apply. There are amazingly fun, non-health-damaging MMO jobs out there. They are exceedingly rare, but if you don’t look, you’ll never find them.

There are two big dangers you have to watch for: “Am I going to be able to survive this job?” and “Is this team going to successfully make a game?” You need positive answers for both of these things before you agree to uproot your life and change careers.

Is This Job Going To Kill Me?

Pretty much every MMO job requires 110% of your time and creative energy — it tends to quickly become both your “day job” and your hobby… it takes everything you’ve got. That’s not bad in and of itself, and it can actually be really cool to be a part of something so focused… if things are going well. But “giving 110%” isn’t the same as “effectively living at the office.”

Since we’re being realistic here, I must tell you that you will experience the practice known as “crunch time”. This is apparently unavoidable: I’ve never heard of an MMO project that didn’t have any. (Even the IGDA, supposedly a pro-developer organization, thinks it’s a fact of life.) Crunch time is when you work 60-70 hours a week and get paid for 40. Sometimes the management will bring in food so you can work while eating. Sometimes they provide cots so you can sleep right there and get all the way up to 80-hour work weeks. Crunch will happen, and when it does, it will ruin any semblance of an outside life you had.

The question is this: are you working one crunch week a month, or are you going to be crunching every damned week for a year (as the Gods and Heroes team did, before their game went tits-up)? You need to know this. Even if you can survive 70 hour weeks for a year (and I promise you that it will leave you a soulless, worthless zombie), remember to factor the unpaid hours into your effective salary. If you’re working 60 hours and getting paid for 40, that’s a 33% effective pay cut. This will often make your hourly compensation laughably low.

So how do you know if you’re going to crunch forever? Well it can creep up on any team — you may never crunch until one day you’re told you will need to crunch for the next three months. Zing! That sort of thing is hard to predict during a job interview. But you can at least find out what the company and culture are like right now. Here’s some helpful things to watch for when you interview:

• First, obviously enough, ask about crunch time. It’s easy for them to say the right thing here, which is: “We don’t like crunch time but we expect to do a little of it before milestones.” That could be a lie, but at least it’s the right thing to hear. But you’d be surprised how many people will tell you something else:
  • “We’re in the middle of an extended crunch right now, but when this ends…”
  • “We don’t ever crunch. But we do expect you to work weekends.”
  • “We have a hard-working culture.” [In other words, if you can't work overtime without being asked, you're going to be ostracized.]
  • “We crunch all the time. Seriously, this job will kill you. But it’s gonna be worth it when we overtake WoW!”
• Get a read on the employees’ morale. In the extreme cases, this is easy: when I walked into the Gods and Heroes office building after 6 months of crunching, I could feel the waves of misery rising off the cubicle farm like steam. If you’re in an on-site interview room all day, get a read on how downtrodden and miserable your interviewers are.
• Ask how many people work all-nighters, just as an off-hand comment. This question can sometimes get interesting results.
• Watch for cots. Cots are a bad sign. Sometimes one cot can be written off as eccentric. (MMO developers are very eccentric.) Two cots is right out.

Does This Game Have a Chance?

The biggest down side of the MMO biz is the success rate, which frankly isn’t that high. Everybody thinks they’ve got the secret to success, but most MMO’s fail to launch, or launch to such low expectations and fanfare that nobody ever hears of them. That’s a sad fate if you’ve spent three years making the game happen. (And even though they tell you it will launch in 18 months, it will take three years.) How do you spot a likely flop early?

First off, you need to know if they have any money. I mean funding, in the bank, right now. If not, the odds they’ll actually find funding soon are not so good. They may have to lay you off in a few months. It’s normal for MMO teams to hire up without any real money to back the jobs… because if they can’t find a publisher, the company’s going to evaporate anyway so they might as well lay every resource on the line. (It’s normal, but it’s also terrible, since it often leaves you in an unfamiliar city without a job.)

If you’re satisfied that they have funding for a year or more, find out about their tech. This is a tricky one if you don’t know much about tech yourself. And it depends on where they are in the development process:

• Just Starting: If they’re brand new, then you’ve got nothing to judge — except the engineers they’ve hired (see below). 
• Pre-Production: If they’ve been in pre-production for six months, they should have some sort of engine demos or prototypes, and they should be able to show them to you and talk about what they mean. If they say “Oh, the demo’s having some trouble this week,” beware. In the best case this means their prototype is so unimportant that they don’t even keep it running from week to week. This is a sign that pre-production is not going well, or has stalled severely.
• Production: If they are in production already, they should have an engine that supports at least 50 users at once. If they don’t have that, then it’s a tell-tale sign they were rushed out of pre-production too soon, and are not technologically sound. (This is very typical… but then again, so is MMO failure.) 50 users is not a lot. If they can’t even manage this, they haven’t got anything under the hood.

Meeting the Engineers:

Making a complex MMO requires millions (sometimes tens of millions) of lines of code. It is an order of magnitude more complex than coding a simple FPS or other genre of game. Developers don’t believe this until it’s too late, and that is one big reason why they fail. Crafting a full-featured traditional MMO from scratch is akin to writing the software for a space shuttle launch. It’s seriously complex and has thousands of moving parts.

If the team doesn’t think making an MMO is very hard, and they have no people on hand who’ve actually launched an MMO before, odds are they are making a toy rocket, not a space shuttle. They just won’t be able to tell the difference until 18 months from now. 

Remember, confidence is meaningless: All engineers are 100% confident they will succeed at all times. Don’t be convinced by confidence. What you’re looking for when you meet the engineers is a sense that they really know what they’re getting into, and a sense that they are pretty smart people that have done this before.

• Ask about their networking guy and their graphics guy. At most successful MMO companies, there’s a “guru” for one or both of these spots. Having a pair of gurus definitely improves your chances. You’ll be able to tell who’s a guru by how others talk about them in low, appreciative tones. And no, I’m not kidding. :)  It’s sad that the industry still relies heavily on engineering gurus to make things happen, but they do.
• Talk to engineers about their plans. The things you want to hear from the engineers are:
  • “We’re keeping it simple.”
  • “We’re using such-and-such code for networking and such-and-such for graphics.”
  • “Bob, the lead developer, helped launch such-and-such-MMO-you’ve-heard-of.”
• The things you DON’T want to hear are:
  • “Tim worked for a simulation company and compared to that, MMOs are a piece of cake. So we’re writing a new engine from scratch.”
  • “We have a really innovative engine idea. We’re going to patent/license/resell it when we’re done!”
  • “We’re outsourcing our engine to [Russia/China/Iran]. We have some great contacts who we’re sure can get the job done.”

Admittedly, all of this is fluffy stuff. Unless you can talk the talk, you aren’t going to get a real solid idea of their engineering chances. So you’re going to have to gamble a bit. But at least use whatever people skills you have to try to get a read on their experience level.

Remember: don’t assume confidence means competence. Engineers are always confident. They will be truly surprised when the engine proves unworkable, or takes too long to complete. However, that is nevertheless the most common outcome. What you need to see is lots of experience, explicit and prudent plans, and working demonstrations that prove they’ve got what it takes.

You can also get clues by talking to the other departments. Is everybody on board with the notion that they’re making a simple game? (Or that they’re making a sequel based on a proven engine?) If a startup company has crazy innovative ideas about how the tech is going to work, they’re probably doomed. An MMO company’s first game should not focus on technology. Instead, it should use simple tech to great effect.

Oh, and if they won’t let you see the engineers? There’s trouble a-brewin’. Ideally, they will have you interview with someone from every major department without you having to ask. But if they don’t let you talk to engineers, ask. You should be allowed to talk to at least one engineer for a half hour. I’ve been in situations where the interviewers didn’t want to let me talk to other departments because it cost them political capital to do so. Guess what? It turns out that’s another tell-tale sign of doom: too much departmental friction means they’re not really a cohesive team.

Be Careful About Exuberance

Lastly, watch for over-enthusiastic pitch men. I find it’s easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm of the interviewers. Especially early on in the project, it’s hard for anybody to realize that they’re building a car without an engine. I guess the best advice I can give is to have a healthy dose of skepticism when you talk to people, especially if they’ve never made an MMO before and have grandiose plans. (The interviewers’ reaction to healthy skepticism can also be very telling.)

There are good MMO jobs out there. But they are rare. Expect four out of five MMO positions to be untenable wastes of time. Don’t go in expecting perfection — go in expecting to find signs of failure. Then you can be pleasantly surprised when you’re wrong.

I hope this helps somebody find a dream MMO job! When MMO development is going well, there’s nothing quite like it.

Next time, Sandra will address the same topic, so you can get another point of view.

Elder Game is sponsored by:

If I were to tell you that I was thinking of making an MMO with a database-centric design, using a DB to serialize entities from one sub-server to another, you would be in good company if you thought I was a dumbass.

Darrin West, the architect at Emergent Game Technologies, does not waver in his disdain: 

There are hidden costs of a DB-centric approach for migration. … In my experience, DB throughput is the limiting factor in scaling a shard. Please, please, run screaming from DB-centric!

No? If that doesn’t convince you, how about Bryant Durrell, former Tech Ops director for Turbine? Let’s see what he thinks: 

Relational databases: please no!

OK. It is completely obvious that any MMO is going to need a way to store data. I understand that the instinctive reaction is to use a relational database, because that’s what relational databases are for. However, I beg of you as the guy who needs to keep the things running fast and smooth, think twice.  

However, Emergent’s MMO engine still isn’t ready for development, and Bryant doesn’t seem to have leaked Turbine’s server technology to the internet before he left. So I know there are better ways, and yet I can do nothing about that.

… Or Embrace Your Destiny!

Sandra and I, along with a few others, are plotting out what it would take to make an MMO on our own. And if I plug realistic timelines into a realistic engineering schedule, it appears that two or three engineers working half-time on an MMO will never ever finish it if they have to develop the server tech themselves (or the client tech, or the tools pipeline, but those are a different post). Every single hour that is not spent on gameplay reduces the chance the game will ever come to market. This is the bitter pill to swallow: the best practices of MMO server development simply aren’t available to tiny indie teams, no matter how experienced they are.

There are some really cool technologies that could help, like Terracotta. This sucker is just what we need! Wait, you say it would cost us how much?! Oh. I see… these solutions are designed for rich companies, not indie developers. Well, maybe we can use that for our second MMO. 

SmartFoxServer: The Glorified, Extensible Chat Room

In the mean time, we can use SmartFoxServer to make a simple database-centric MMO. It’s got a decent track record: Habbo Hotel runs on it. SmartFoxServer (SFS) is really a simple piece of software: it’s a glorified chat room. This is, contrary to what you’d expect, its strength. See, it’s a really full-featured chat system. Authentication, multiple rooms, private messages, friends lists, ignore lists, bad-word filters, you name it. But that’s all it is. It doesn’t try to be a full MMO engine. And that means it’s relatively fast, elegant, and stable at what it does.

You plug extra modules into the back of your “rooms” to add extra functionality. You can implement entire MMOs as plug-in modules to SFS. And that is one road we’re considering. 

If you’re thinking to yourself, “Chat?! Come on, I can write a full-featured super-powered chat service in a month!” then you aren’t getting the “tiny indie MMO team” part. But more importantly, you’re wrong. 

There are a ton of details that getcha when you want to make a professional-quality MMO. SFS also provides logging, banning, moderation, customer support tools, and flood prevention. It’s all little detail stuff, none of it hard, but all of it time-consuming. You couldn’t actually code all the features of SmartFoxServer in a month.

SmartFoxServer Plus A Database Equals “MMO” (With Air Quotes)

Using multiple SFS Zones to run the areas of your MMO

Okay, so how does it work? Well, you use SmartFoxServer as your “front door”: it helps with authentication and, of course, chat. Then for the game logic, it calls your plug-in module, which in turn loads the player’s character from a central database. Each geographic section of your world is run in a separate SFS “zone”. Multiple zones may be on the same physical server computer, or they might not.

A client only talks to one “zone” at a time (well, maybe a couple at a time. But the point is, it doesn’t talk to all of them at once). When the player moves to a different area, the client literally connects to a different zone.

It’s really simple to code — that’s the whole point. In fact, if you’ve got a good handle on SQL, this is probably the simplest possible MMO server. When you’re a tiny indie company, simplicity is key. But there are down sides.

Embracing Your Destiny Sucks Sometimes

What are the down sides? Well, we’ve basically invented the server technology for EverQuest 1. But EQ1 wasn’t technologically advanced even when it launched, ten years ago. This is a poor man’s engine in every respect.

The biggest limitation is that your world will be segmented into very tightly-defined geographical areas. When the player goes from one geographic area to the next, they will have noticeable delays. This engine isn’t going to win any tech awards.

The physical size of each geographic area is unimportant to the server. Instead, the limiting factor will be the number of players that can be in a given area at once. The exact number of people allowed in one area will vary from game to game, but a good guess is about 50 players per area, max.

And lastly, you have a big bottleneck in your design: the database. It will be the limiter on how big each game shard can grow. And you will need shards: you won’t be able to have one world in which every player exists simultaneously.

The Poor Man’s MMO Is Good Enough

Gee, what if I have so many people playing my game that I can’t support them all without more hardware expenditures? Man, as a tiny indie, I’d love to have that problem. It means I have a hit on my hands, and in that case I will be able to find the financial support I need to get more hardware.

The flip side of the coin is more dangerous: “what if I spend months or years making cool server tech and then never make an MMO with it?” Wait… I already did that before. In fact it’s the easiest trap in the world for an engineer to fall into. But it will doom your project, indie or not.

As long as the game looks good and is fun, players aren’t gonna care that there are load times occasionally. Lots of games have geographic zones, actually. Don’t get hung up on it.

We haven’t settled on SmartFoxServer yet. There are several other simple server engines that we’re going to examine before making a decision. But none of them are going to be amazing MMO masterpieces.

There’s a simple indie mantra that I’ve been trying to take to heart: “design around the limitations.” Don’t try to remove the limitations: get creative and figure out ways to minimize their effect, instead.

Elder Game is sponsored by:

• Low barrier to entry for new players because the game is free.
• Although most players don’t pay anything, a small number of players pay a ton. These customers are so valuable that they more than subsidize the free players.

But before we toss out subscriptions and jump onto the micropayment bandwagon, let’s look at the down sides:

• In order to have enough payers, you need a larger number of players. If your goal is to earn a million bucks a month, you need 66,000 subscribers paying $15 each… or 300,000 free-players who might buy items.
• In order to appeal to enough people, you probably need to homogenize your game somewhat. (There are some weird and wondrous outliers like the micropayment-based text MUDs from Iron Realms, but those are developers  who understand a very shallow niche very well. That’s not the norm.)
• Your profits rest on such a small percentage of players that losing a few of them can really hurt your revenue. You end up needing to make two games at once: a game that keeps your payers happy, and a game that keeps your non-payers happy… and often those two games don’t have as much in common as you’d hope.
• The new economy makes this model much scarier than it was a few years ago. Multiple mini-transactions are more susceptible to penny pinching. “Is this cool hat worth $5? No, clearly I can do without it.” vs. “Is playing this game worth $15 a month? Clearly yes!” That $15 subscription works out to 19 cents an hour if you play the game 20 hours a week.

Game Designers Are Not Marketers

Let me put it another way. Everybody in the industry “knows” that microtransactions are the future… just like they “knew” that all successful MMOs had to require forced grouping like EQ did. That is, until WoW came out and proved them all dead wrong. As an industry, we’re really terrible at predicting trends. Sad but true.

Instead of talking to game designers, how about we talk to marketers? What do they think? Here’s what marketing guru Seth Godin has to say about micropayments versus subscriptions:

Whenever possible, sell subscriptions
Few businesses can successfully sell subscriptions (magazines being the very best example), but when you can, the whole world changes. HBO, for example, is able to spend its money making shows for its viewers rather than working to find viewers for every show.

How about entrepreneurs? What would they say? Why not drop a line to a successful entrepreneur and ask them which is easier: making a cheap product for a massive market, or making an expensive product for a niche audience. I guarantee they’ll say the latter, by far! The cost of appealing to the masses is humongous. The safe entrepreneur money is in targeted products. And subscription games can be more targeted than free games, because they need appeal to a smaller audience than free games.

Is The Secret Micropayments, or Just Web Play?

One thing does seem certain if you study the market: boxed MMO titles are rapidly becoming obsolete (unless you’re Blizzard or EA, and even in that case you probably realize that the boxed model won’t last forever). The model for a boxed MMO is: spend three years making a game, put boxes on the store shelf to much hoopla, sell a million boxes, then watch your player base slowly dwindle away. Put out expansions a few times to temporarily juice your populations up again, but eventually watch it become a tiny game.

The web-distribution model is different: create your initial web game as fast as humanly possible, put it up to start getting an audience for your product, and then slowly improve the game and increase your audience over time. This is great because:

• You don’t need to fight for shelf space at Wal-Mart — you can spend your marketing money on campaigns to pull people right to your website.
• By removing the box, you make it easy for people to get their friends involved.
• If you use emerging browser technology, you can have gamers playing your game within 30 seconds.

This is the model that, for instance, EVE Online has used so successfully, showing year-over-year growth instead of watching populations dwindle. But EVE isn’t a microtransaction game: it’s a free-trial game. After the free trial, you have to pay a subscription.

It’s true that a lot of the web-distributed games have used microtransactions. But that doesn’t mean they have to. As the number of web-distribution games gets larger, I think microtransaction-based games are going to get harder and harder to pull off successfully.

There are lots of decisions in here: is your game a boxed product or a web distribution? If the latter, is it a downloaded program or a browser-based game using a plug-in like Unity? Do you make money by subscriptions, or by micropayments?

Unfortunately, most developers don’t see these subtleties. They see “Boxed games are out! Microtransactions are in!”  Maybe they look at the fact that some free games rival Warcraft in number of players, and don’t completely consciously grok the distinction between population and profit. But like I said, the MMO industry (and the gaming industry in general) isn’t exactly known for understanding trends — they’re better known for blindly parroting what other people did in the hopes that they can be successful too. That doesn’t work very well. If you pick apart what’s going on, you can get a better view of how to make a successful game.

More Questions Than Answers

“Great, Eric, thanks, that’s completely unhelpful. So there are lots of questions that need answering? No crap. How do I answer them?!” I can tell you that … after you tell me who your game is for and what tools you have to reach them.

For instance, if you’re making an MMO for kids, you’ll need to get parents involved in the spending process. This may mean the parent buys “game money” for their kid to spend, or it may mean the parent pays the kid’s monthly subscription. If you’ve got no other sorts of leverage to reach parents, then micropayments probably work best — that way the kid can get hooked on the game and then bug their parents for cash.

On the other hand, if you’ve got other ways to reach parents (say you’re Disney with your own TV channel, monthly magazine, and fliers in every DVD box), then marketing straight to parents as well as kids will be very effective.

So you need to figure out who you’re aiming for, and how you’re going to reach them.

One Possible Game Plan

Now, if I had a few million dollars in VC money, I know what I’d do. I’d target the “boxed-MMO game runoff”. Those are users who’ve played several boxed titles before, are adventurous enough to leave their favorite game, but are clearly not sticking to one game. Although this doesn’t nail down the audience completely yet, we can already start to see important facts about our demographic. For instance, these are players who don’t need or want hand-holding about MMO basics like movement, combat, or banking. They want to get in and play ASAP.

This audience is also comfortable enough with the concept of an MMO that they are willing to pay to play them, but at the same time, they have the attention span of a gnat. I’d be pretty worried that they would visit the game website but not manage to even get started with the game, so I’d use a web-browser-based engine to get them in and playing as fast as humanly possible. Starting play within 30 seconds would be the goal. Let them play for free up to level 20, say, and then require a modest monthly fee to continue.

I’d put out the first version of the game in a year. It’d be crummy at first, but that’s okay, because it wouldn’t launch with any fanfare anyway. There’d be improvements every single week. As we started to get paying users, I’d choose the development focus based on what the players say they want, fleshing out the game in the direction these people need, so that they feel more comfortable bringing in their friends, and those people’s friends, and so on, growing virally every year.

If this sounds like the model that web 2.0 companies use, that’s not an accident. It’s cheap, effective, and frankly more satisfying for the developer, too. The nifty part is that the people playing the game will feel that the game is slowly being tailored specifically to them. And I can say from experience that adding features to a live game is a lot more fun than working on an unshipped behemoth.

In short, everybody wins.

Elder Game is sponsored by:

With respect to customer service, quality assurance and play testing, prior to the launch of WAR, we hired additional people to deal with the rush of demand associated with an MMO launch and to insure the best possible experience for our players.  We accomplished that goal and as a result we had the smoothest-ever launch of a major MMO.  Since the launch last year, the demand for customer service has gone down as players become more familiar with the game.  Obviously, demand for a large QA and play-testing staff also falls after launch.  As a result, we saw a staff reduction which is in line with the company-wide initiative. In no way does this conflict with our commitment to customer service.  Staffing numbers will always map to consumer needs – it goes up when we launch new products and expand popular ones, and comes back down as players become familiar with the game.

What’s interesting here is that he suggests the layoffs only involved QA and customer service staff, but in fact it appears to have also involved large numbers of designers as well. Does design quality also “map to consumer needs”?

But let’s leave that aside. What he explicitly said here was that he fully intended to fire a lot of people he hired. Those people did not, contrary to popular belief, know that they were going to get laid off after the game shipped. You don’t get high-quality people to QA your game for minimum wage by telling them that they have no future. You let them believe they are “paying their dues” before they can move up the company ladder.

Scott Jennings discusses the feeling of betrayal that those laid-off employees feel. But Tobold wants them to stop whining and accept their responsibility:

If a company makes a good product, which is profitable, all the stakeholders, that is employees as well as shareholders, somehow get a slice of that profit.

…

So if a company makes a bad product, which makes a loss, the pain has to be shared as well. You can’t just say “let the shareholders take all the loss”. Not only would that be not very fair, but also it is not a viable path into a better future. Layoffs and restructuring are painful, but they are less painful than the company going belly up.

First, I want to know what company besides SOE gives their employees ANY financial reward for success. EverQuest 1 developers got fat bonuses for a while. They were the exception, not the norm. Nobody else has ever gotten regular bonuses for good work. There’s not even a promise of reward! These employees all know up front that they will get jack squat if they succeed, and they will probably get fired if they fail. And then, here’s the real kicker: they may get fired if they succeed, too, if the company needs to down-size or “meet consumer needs” or shit-can or whatever you want to call it.

 But it’s okay, right, because they had to know they were just temps who would lose their jobs, right? I mean, how could they NOT know they were being abused? So of course they deserve the abuse! Nice logic.

I don’t buy the line that all of the hundreds of people who worked on a game that failed are completely innocent and unaware of that failure, and that all the blame is due to high management.

Unaware of the failure? No. Incapable of fixing it? Yes. But Tobold doesn’t believe that. Not deep down. And he’s certainly not alone in that. What Tobold really, really wants to say is that, in the aggregate, barring occasional errors of judgment, employees who get laid off deserve what they get.

But if all of the employees in one of the game companies now firing people would have done their job perfectly, and created the perfect game, perfect game design, no bugs, perfect quality control, perfect customer service, and so on, the layoffs wouldn’t be happening.

An MMO development team is a machine full of cogs. That’s crucial to its success… if every one of those 100 employees had real power over the future of the game, there’d never be any consensus, and hence no game. Most employees have to give up control to a small number of people who lead the development on behalf of everyone. Those leaders are responsible for their underling’s jobs.

Tobold’s examples betray the typical misunderstanding of how the MMO industry works: he doesn’t realize that the industry’s miserable management practices are the root cause of almost all game failings. Tobold mentions how animation problems caused a major fuss in Age of Conan, and he implicates the artists responsible. But actually, the artists should have been following direction from the design team. If the design team failed to give the artists enough direction, that’s management’s fault for not facilitating inter-department communication correctly.

The real kicker in the Age of Conan example is that a proper triage team should have been able to discern the dramatic effect this bug was having and get the engineering team to hack in a temporary fix, rather than waiting for the art team to redo all the affected animations. Again, this was a failure of management. The buck has to stop where the decisions are made. Those people are the ones responsible for the vast majority of the success or failure of the game.

I am the first one to tell people that they need to rise up out of their “cog” positions and try to fix their game before it’s too late. But the reason I need to say that is because it’s hard. It’s not the norm. It’s a firing offense. Remember that at Mythic, people who speak out are fired and publicly humiliated (“burned at the stake”).

Tobold, can you tell me with a straight face that developers who must follow strict orders or be fired are just as responsible as the people who gave the orders? It’s insulting to blame the cogs. (I want the cogs to stand up for themselves even if it means getting fired, but that doesn’t mean they’re not cogs.)

So here’s the bottom line. Tobold may not have the balls to say this outright, but I will. If you get laid off by an MMO company, you completely deserve it. You bought into the broken and unmaintainable development process, you knew full well that you were being taken advantage of and that when you’d done your best work you would be fired. And if you didn’t know that, you deserve to be fired for not doing your homework before you got into the industry.

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