“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.

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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.

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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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There was a great comment on the discussion thread:

Swift Voyager Says:

I’ve never seen you make such a cynical post before. Do you really think that “most MMO companies are rudderless ships of overworked, desperately hoping, doomed people”? Sure, most video games fail, but the industry and the people who work in the industry cary on and succede in the long run. Not every game can be a blockbuster and the industry doesn’t expect every game to be a blockbuster, do they?

This is a very reasonable counter-argument, but it presupposes that the people in the industry are working reasonable hours, making decent money, and are able to stick with the industry for a decade or more. But for most developers and companies, those things aren’t true.

It’s very telling that I’ve never worked on an MMO that didn’t expect to be a blockbuster success. They didn’t just think it — they needed it at a very fundamental level, in order to keep their jobs and company afloat. Yet in spite of their high-flying goals, most MMO companies fail to even launch a game, let alone be a blockbuster.

The unusual thing about the MMO industry is that the normal flow of MMO development sets the company up for failure. Here’s a couple of the (many) reasons:

• There are no MMO engines for sale that can make robust games. They just aren’t any good yet. This means your company needs to either make a new engine from scratch (VERY HARD) or hack the living crap out of a third-party engine (only slightly easier). To put it another way: imagine that you wanted to make a film, but first you had to invent a camera. Hard. Risky. It’s trying to do two very different things at once.
• It is impossible to make a triple-A quality MMO with a tiny team. You need a major investment of money. Investors (typically VC companies, or your corporate evil overlords if you’re a branch of a mega-company) don’t want to give you just a few million dollars — the way they do the math, they expect to earn 500% return on investment for every dollar they give you. So they want to give you LOTS of dollars. Good luck getting $5 million. You’ll have an easier time getting $15 million. Suddenly you have to think big.
• The people who give you money need to see a return on their investment fast. They want your game out the door NOW so they can start earning money back. They tend to pressure management to move forward before they’re ready. Hire up your staff fast! Get your art production moving fast! Get the game in beta fast! No time to waste. Hurry!

There are a lot of ramifications to this. One of them is that prototyping (the key to making a game successful) is incredibly hard in an MMO. Your engineers are busy making the networking go, so they don’t have time to keep iterating on your wacky new experimental quest system. Or the VC company is pressuring you to start hiring ASAP… which means you need to declare your preproduction done now, so there’s no more time to experiment. Or you’ve successfully fought the urge to staff up your team too soon, but that means you don’t have enough artists on hand to flesh out the prototype to see if it will look good. Or… so on. It’s hard.

At the most fundamental level, this is a failure of management. It is management’s job to make sure the gameplay is fun at a prototype level before beginning production. But this requires a really really good management team. Game companies do not have this.

In fact, compounding the issue is that game companies are decades behind other industries in management practices, and have a really hard time hiring competent managers from other professions. Most MMO management sucks. I should know, I was made an MMO manager with no training, no experience, and no clear goals, guidance, or even expectations. Go forth and prosper! Or fail! Whichever! Just work hard!!!

I remember one time when Sandra (a very capable and experienced MMO producer, with many more years of production experience than I have) was talking with a producer from Google. She was trying to explain how the industry works. And he called her a liar. “No industry can survive using those practices.” He would not believe that an industry could be so mis-managed. Yet it is.

How many of the 1000+ MMO companies started this decade have you heard of? The ones that make it to market and then flop are the good ones, the uncommon ones. Most simply never go anywhere. They can’t get funding, or they can’t make the engineering work, or they implode when suddenly staffing up dramatically. Or all of the above.

I will grant you that there are well-managed MMO companies, but they are very rare. And nobody wants to leave them, so they aren’t hiring. It’s also very easy for a well-managed company to suddenly and spectacularly become a terrible company with just a few personnel changes. 

The Three Year Loaf of Bread

Another seemingly cynical thing I said was that “if you can’t fix your game, you should quit.” Here’s another counter-argument from the same great comment:

I work at a bread factory. Sometimes the bread doesn’t rise. Does that mean the company is a rudderless ship and we’re all just blindly sailing towards the edge of the world? Should I quit my job and go re-evaluate my life before this company sails off the edge of the globe? Naaahhhh, I’ll keep working and try again tomorrow.

Let me run with this example a little bit. Say you’re a baker. What if baking a loaf of bread took three years, and after year one you realized the bread wasn’t going to rise? Would you just keep baking the crap out of it hoping it will get tastier tomorrow? Or would you insist on making dramatic changes, including possibly tossing out the loaf early, instead of praying for a miracle? And if loaf after loaf failed after one year, how many times would you keep using the same recipe?

If it’s just a job, that’s fine. Maybe you don’t care about bread loaves, you just care about getting paid. You can be a cog in the machine for years and let upper management take the blame, and then move on to another job. Some MMO people do this, but most don’t. Most MMO developers are trying to make something special. They’re willing to sacrifice their personal lives, their money, and their happiness to take a roll of the dice. I respect this incredibly — it’s what it means to follow your dreams.

And frankly, if you aren’t in the industry to “follow your dreams,” you’re kinda… stupid. The MMO industry pays poorly, if it pays at all; it treats its employees poorly too, and all too often it works them until they drop from exhaustion. (How many MMO devs reading this can say they have a life outside of their job?) There’s no job security, poor health care and benefits, and often every day is a pressure cooker. In other words, the MMO industry subsidizes your meager pay with hope: hope that you get to be a part of something amazing.

But if most people are here to follow their dreams, then just bakin’ the crap out of bread that clearly isn’t rising is not the secret to success.

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I wanted to give my condolences to the folks who are losing their job at NCSoft due to Tabula Rasa shutting down. Tough luck, guys, and I hope you bounce back. On the other hand, I can’t say I liked the game.

Actually I have two strong memories of Tabula Rasa from before it shipped. One was from an E3 many years ago, when Tabula Rasa was the darling of the show. Groups of four sat down together to play through a prescripted scenario. I played a futuristic warrior that blasted the enemies with my electric guitar, causing musical notes to fly at him and knock him down. As a group, we managed to take out a boss monster and clear a dungeon. It was fun. The cumulative thinking was, “Huh. Really odd setting, but it has fun gameplay.”

There was troubling talk, however. The presenter told us that they were going to add aspects of a Great War, and everybody was going to be fighting everybody else and it was going to be great. That didn’t seem like a very compelling addition to me. It looked like a fun future-space-opera MMORPG with nice dungeons and interesting set pieces. Having a big PK war didn’t sound like the secret sauce this game needed, but whatever. Still reasonably optimistic.

My other strong memory about Tabula Rasa came from the Last Real E3 Ever, a couple years ago. Tabula Rasa was not the same as before. Now it was all about the big war, I guess. Gone were the silly space opera aspects, and now it was a game where you run around as a marine shooting people but not aiming. I watched people play it for a while, feigning enjoyment before wandering away. The presenter asked me if I’d like to play it, and if so I’d get a free T-shirt. I turned him down. In other words, Tabula Rasa didn’t look fun enough to play it for free, even if they paid me with a free T-shirt. I played a lot of other, much more terrible games at that E3. But this was all about market. I didn’t find the “be a space marine!” hook to be at all interesting. And that combined with the “you don’t have to aim!” hook meant nobody was interested. The wacky vibe from the earlier incarnation of the game had actually been a decent hook — something new and fresh enough to at least get people to play it for a few minutes. But that was gone.

I think the moral is threefold:

1. Don’t re-make your game from scratch. There’s no surer way to fiscal failure than having to completely change the target audience of your game after it’s already through pre-production.
2. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. They redesigned Tabula Rasa so many times that it became a sterile and bland thing.
3. Have a target audience in mind AT ALL TIMES, and for God’s sake, spend a few grand testing to see if your target audience actually wants this thing you’re offering. They have companies to do this, they’re called polling consultants. Use them. They are not prohibitively expensive for an MMO company. $10k can get you a lot of really useful data about whether your $20m game is going to work or not.

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The article says that they expect to make $16m in 2008. Doing some quick math, that gives us an estimated population of about 88k users. ($15 a month for 12 months is $180 per user, and 180 into 16 mil is 88k.) That’s a totally hand-wavy number, but it feels about right. It’s what I would expect from an ultra-niche game like this.

The problem is not that it’s an ultra-niche game. The problem is that Tabula Rasa apparently went through three complete redesigns. COMPLETE redesigns. (I liked version #1, the space-opera with magical guitars.) The total development time was six years, and it cost over $100 million, largely because of how long it took to make the game.

I hate to say this, but three redesigns is an abject failure. If you have to redo your entire game after it’s left pre-production, you’ve lost your chance at the big bucks. The best you can hope for is to break even. If you have to redo your entire game a SECOND time before you launch, you’re screwed. The best you can do is hope your company doesn’t go under.

I don’t mean to rag on anybody at NCSoft Austin — I doubt there were more than a few people who were involved in the decision-making process for all six years. (And if you’re in the know, I’d love to hear how the decisions came about.) But the fact remains that after $106 million has been spent, the result was a game that generates only $16 million a year.

Just as a comparison, the now-dead MMO Asheron’s Call 2 cost less than $20 million. It had even fewer players than Tabula Rasa, but since it cost a lot less to make, AC2 could break even after a few years. Tabula Rasa, on the other hand, will need to keep all of its 88,000 players for almost seven years before it breaks even.

Let’s look at it another way – they could have created three mediocre games with that same amount of money, and they’d have 264,000 players (88,000 * 3) right now. Then they’d be able to recoup their money in only a couple years, and eventually they’d be in the black. Probably even successful.

Tabula Rasa tried to be innovative, but it was not a particularly good innovation. I’m sure that a lot of people will assume this is why it’s a monetary failure. But I want to be clear here: Tabula Rasa failed because it took six years to make. That and only that. If it had been made in three years for $20 million, it could have been profitable in its lifetime. But now, because it took so long to make, it can never be a success.

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I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about how subscription MMO games are on their way out, soon to be replaced entirely by free-to-play MMO games with upsell or micropayment features.

I was also reading a post by Seth Godin recently that included the advice “Whenever possible, sell subscriptions.” In particular, he made the comment that:

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.

And this lead me to wonder: We know that a game which embraces microtransactions will need to be designed differently from the ground up. But what does that actually mean? What does a micro-transaction game look like?

One big difference is that we’re no longer talking about a democratic society where every player is an equal. (That’s one of the big reasons that players in the US react negatively to micropayments — both Americans in general and RPG players in particular are very attached to the idea that effort leads directly to reward and that money is a dirty shortcut.) But it just doesn’t make sense for a game developer to lavish the same resources on everybody equally when only a few people are actually paying the bills.

Let’s extend the HBO example. HBO is a subscription service; it is most concerned with adding and retaining subscribers. It does this by producing quality shows that appeal to its audience. In theory, HBO needs to provide just enough content each month so that any given subscriber feels that their subscription cost is justified. Once a subscriber is satisfied that the subscription is worth the cost, spending additional resources on that particular subscriber is a waste — it’s better to move on to satisfiying another customer. This is fairly similar to a game like EQ2 in which expansions and regular game updates provide a broad variety of new content, with just enough depth in each area for different types of players to feel justified in continuing their subscriptions.

In contrast, we can look at the Home Shopping Network as an example of a microtransaction model. HSN provides free content to everyone who tunes in, and profits only when viewers make a purchase. The majority of their income derives from a small fraction of viewers who each spend quite a large amount of money. A slightly larger fraction of viewers spends just a bit of money each, and the vast majority spend almost no money at all. In this environment, the most efficient profit strategy focuses all your resources on the big spenders first and foremost. HSN programs are very carefully tailored to appeal to the big spenders, the people who give them the most money. So long as the big spenders still have money to spend, the best strategy is to target them narrowly.

These are both perfectly viable business strategies, by the way. HBO uses its large subscriber base to focus on high-quality content for all the subscribers. HSN can make tons of cash from only a tiny portion of its audience, so it doesn’t need as many dedicated viewers as HBO in order to be profitable.

So an MMO based on micropayments would focus heavily on the big spenders. An MMO like this is unlikely to provide regular content updates: it’s just not an efficient use of resources to provide too much extra content for players who aren’t paying. And for the players who are paying it’s more effective to give them something new to purchase once a week or so (to encourage repeated small purchases) than to dump a whole bunch of items on them all at once. In fact, it’s likely that a micropayment MMO would largely forego expansions (free or paid, boxed or downloadable) as well, for the same reason. Instead, their development model will likely embrace constant small paid additions (which is going to be a real pain to QA, let me tell you!).

More than that, however, these MMOs will be trying to reach each individual player in an entirely different way than we do now. For instance, if enough heavy spenders would really like a particular niche item — say a giant Cat-in-the-Hat style hat — then it might make economic sense to create that item and sell it. And depending on the cost of resources and the purchase price of the hat, ‘enough’ spenders might be only a few hundred! In a subscription MMO, on the other hand, it is much harder to make the case for niche items like that because all the content needs to appeal to a much larger audience — it needs to help justify a broad swath of subscriptions. So one effect of the coming revenue model revolution may be that our games give up some of their vast breadth in favor of highly targeted depth.

Of course, there are plenty of business models for MMO games that blur the lines between subscriptions and micropayments. But in any case it will be fascinating to see what happens to our assumptions about development as we develop into a more diverse ecology of online games.

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• Hasbro launches their secret stealth project: the new Care Bears MMO. Sadly, it is quickly overrun with Real-Money Trading (RMT), which points out a serious imbalance in the dueling system. After a disastrous first six months, the remnants of the game are bought up by SOE.
• After seeing the WoW commercial starring William Shatner, Turbine hires Leonard Nemoy to promote LOTRO. His touching rendition of “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” is a huge success and LOTRO’s population finally grows enough to open their first new US world.
• Warhammer Online launches, but only 300 people manage to purchase boxes; everybody else is unable to distinguish it from World of Warcraft and buys the wrong game. After Warhammer fails it is bought by SOE, who muddies up the graphics, lowers the quest quality, and reopens the game as “EverQuest 3.”
• During beta, Age of Conan discovers that players aren’t quite shocked and disgusted enough by the rampant rape of female characters. In a desperate bid for the all-important adolescent crowd, Funcom adds first incest, then necrophilia, and finally bestiality to the game. This brings down the wrath of PETA, who firebomb their offices. The few survivors are quickly hired by SOE.
• Bioware finally announces their big secret, the one that industry insiders have known for years and players have been whispering about for months: Bioware has no MMO engine, has no idea how to make an MMO engine, and can’t buy one since there aren’t any working MMO engines for sale. Instead of trudging along making a doomed MMO, they make KOTOR 3 for the XBox 360, and everybody’s happy.
• Blizzard continues to ignore everyone everywhere and do whatever they please. They continue to have record-breaking sales and subscription numbers, and they are not bought up by SOE.

All in fun, guys! You know we love ya. :)

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