MMO developers most laid off.

But...but, non-clone = risky = even more laid off

They needed a study to tell them this?

Thanks 38s!

Laid off to be hired by some other incompetent studio to finish their soon to be failed MMO.

well no shit.
high bodycount on pre-release rampup, and skeleton crews post release.

Long dev cycles. you are not going to pay artists to sit around fulltime while other parts of the game are made.

Study is biased if they lumped everyone from 38 Studios into MMO. It isn't everyday a studio just up and burns itself to the ground.

Are the developers really to blame for doing what the investors tell them to?

The MMO industry is dead, all these companies are just trying to ride the WoW wave and they fail. The simple truth is the MMO market is an illusion, it's not really as big as the numbers make it out to be. The people are there, but are they truly MMO players, or were they just bandwagon WoW people trying to relive the glory days when WoW was in its fad prime of coolness? The truth is MMOs aren't faddy any more, the mainstream clientele are over the whole WoW craze. It's time for developers to realize that the mainstream MMO market is dead, and if they want any success they need to change their target audience and accept a smaller population that they can build off of.

Illuziun_sl said:

It's time for developers to realize that the mainstream MMO market is dead, and if they want any success they need to change their target audience and accept a smaller population that they can build off of.

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Yes, agreed. There's nothing wrong with making an MMO that caters to 100k-200k subs total, so long as they are able to make that game profitable for that core niche of players. The problem is, publisher expectation levels for success on most MMOs are usually way off, by at least 10-15x.

Not only that, I imagine thats what consumers want anyway. There's a certain population of MMO players that want open world PVP (EverQuest players on Zek servers, WOW world PVPers, etc), but that population isn't that huge. So make a game that can cater to that small niche of users, and not water down the game with features not targeting that demographic. Conversely, there are a good number of players that want open world, un-directed PVE content (old school EQ players, for example), so for that population, making a game that tries to also fit in something like open world PVP doesn't make sense, and just waters down the population and fits 2 seperate demographics of consumers in the same world, which is problematic.

MMOs need a reboot/mass developer lay off until they can stop listening to investors who have no idea what people want(and stop insisting "formulas" be followed).

Sucks people are losing their job, but this kind of shit has to happen. :/

Hollywood leading the way... from a consumer stand point that hurts my head. :/ I dunno, there's so many remakes and copying other films in Hollywood it's hard to find anything original that isn't indie.

I'm probably wrong on that. But I meant what I said more along the points that SOMEONE(s) need to make a game that isn't catering to investors, which is hard when the market damn near demands AAA graphics/visuals/cutscenes(as you need the money to make that stuff) rather than just making a good solid game focused on the community and pretty damned dynamic so that the users are essentially making the content rather than waiting for the next attraction in theme park ABC123*.

Well god damn, be explicit when inferring such things. (Sorry, you are right in that regard, I meant my point mostly from a gameplay/story/setting standpoint.)

I don't mean to be all grumpycat, but I mean shit. How do people think this works... you pick "MMO Developer" as your major in college and walk into a 4 day a week 8-5 office job, put in your 30 years and retire with a fat pension?

If the games retained... well, there would probably still be as many layoffs. lol. But it would be an entirely different kind of thing.

All investors want is more money back than they give you. The problem is of a different nature than the stockholders are assholes.

I think it'd be silly to try to dump AAA money into the MMO rerolled wants, the MMO rerolled needs.

We are all assuming MMOs don't make money, but that may not be true. Sure, there are flops like 38S or SWTOR which have massive cost overruns, but things like GW2 or Conan have made hundreds of millions, and I don't know much about the financials of TERA, SOE, LOTRo, WAR, TSW, etc. Unlike console games which publish sales numbers, MMOs are still very very very murky with financials.

For us its completely logical that you keep costs tightly under control, produce a really fun MMO that is profitable at 100k or less subs, and churn out decent content to keep players and slowly grow (Eve online). From a financial standpoint however it might be better to burn a ton of money to get any shitty MMO dev'd in 2 years, pump out crazy hype, get a million+ box sales, fire almost everyone, and not give a shit how many people sub. I'm not saying thats how it is, but it feels that way based on a lot of recent MMOs.

Lost Ranger_sl said:

They needed a study to tell them this?

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They use studies for all types of garbage nowadays..