Someone has to think it makes business sense. I can't afford to make it by myself.

The whole point of the essay was that business factors make it harder and harder, and audience factors make it harder and harder.

Just as an example -- a truly immersive world would not have instant teleportation. All the players have gotten used to having it. It would not have items and monsters color-coded based on difficulty. Players have gotten used to that too. It would not have a lot of the things that people today take for granted and complain mightily or even quit if they are not present.

That makes it hard to make such a project. Certainly at any significant production value, which is freakin' expensive.

Basically, everything has gotten gamier. And if you're not gamey, you are dinged for it.

Deep Realms was not my design, I just helped the team out with it. It tried to be far deeper than the typical Facebook game, you know.

You know, Metaplace was in many ways a more "legit project" than SWG ever was. We built the code base for the Matrix, the Holodeck. It was still in its most early stages, but we had a platform that allowed anyone to cheaply create any sort of world they wanted, interweave it with the Internet in a very fundamental way, and link them all together into a single networked virtual reality. It was Otherworld, Snow Crash, all of that. Seriously.

It did not live long enough as a consumer service (it's still around as an engine) to get anywhere near its potential... but it was a true passion project and had all my years of experience and a lot of passion poured into it.

No, it didn't make it to having even one sandboxy world on it. But it did have tens of thousands of individual small worlds on it, and an amazing community. It taught middle schoolers how to create worlds, it served as a venue for live concerts and readings, it streamed presidential speeches, and hosted a ton of games and got a lot of its users into the industry, Don't knock that.

I did actually beta test Metaplace for a few days. I dont recall if you/the company explained why it was shut down. Was it financial, did the game lack direction, or was it pre-determined during development that it had a grim outlook?

It was financial... we were not able to make enough money, and could not raise any more to continue. So we switched over to Facebook games in order to try to salvage the company and the engine and people's jobs -- which we succeeded at doing to the degree that the company sold within six months to Disney/Playdom.

I responded on your blog, Raph before I noticed that you were here.

Would you say that finances in the gaming industry have changed now? Say for example, it is easier to get funding for social games than sandboxes and such? Kind of a limited investment, quick return market? Is this one of the driving forces behind the decline in the overall quality and depth in games in recent years?

Oh wow. I am not even sure where to start answering this.

UO cost less than 1/4 of what a AAA console game costs today. It cost a few percentage points of what SWTOR did (a single-digit percentage). Heck, SWTOR also outspent SWG by MANY multiples.

The insane cost of making games has made everything be about blockbusters and huge hits and minimal risk, for mainstream publishers. You can find several presentations on my site that graph the growth in costs in AAA gaming.

Ironically, the way to go it without a publisher is to raise money or pay for it yourself, and you're not gonna succeed at that without an F2P model. Which plenty of the core MMO audience hate (and just have to get used to, for better or worse).

You can't raise venture capital for straight-up MMOs at all, I suspect. Trion did it by pitching themselves as a "virtual console" and platform, not as an MMO company.

Raising money for social games -- that window pretty much closed a year ago, that business segment is in consolidation phase now. The new hotness is mobile games. That you can probably land funding for. Remember that venture-capital style funding looks for 10x returns.

As far as the decline in depth... that is because games now appeal to a broader audience. This audience is less sophisticated, and are a lot more numerous than people like you guys. And funders chase the money and the reach. Developers chase the funders so they can work and eat.

When I said it was a confluence of factors, I meant it. And a lot of people seem to take my simply describing the market as it already is as some form of advocacy.

Yeah, I kind of coupled your blogs with some of your earlier interviews and came up with the idea that you are describing it kind of like a embedded reporter on the war front seeing and saying it as it is or has happened.

Well, that and a mix of nostalgia and nearly 3rd person disheartenment in the state of now and future gaming. Of course this is just an assumption on my part though several people here have been feeling that way especially in the last few years.

yet in all honesty. which dumbed-down themepark MMORPG has in fact "succeeded" after WoW?

I am not going to argue the point that the industry perceives these sort of games to be the only viable option right now; or that people expect certain elements that put convenience above immersion or depth; but at the same time many of these games ended up flopping and people claiming for "something to do" past the progression phase which themepark games fail to deliver; or cant deliver fast enough.


Heck even SWTOR is getting criticised right now by some for lacking social features or player-driven content and being pretty shallow.


Features such as instant travel or death penalties can be introduced to varying degrees and an optimum one can be found to cater to both immersion and practicality. Even SWG had instant travel which took you from one planet to the next... or shuttles within a planet. Then came the ITV and made the whole experience ridiculous.

Of course my opinion wont change how things are but I do believe that there is a market out there - perhaps not 10 mil - but a market nonetheless that would respond well to a game such as SWG without SOE involved.

Vanguard was promising enough but again riddled with unplayable bugs. But it did create a lot of hype early on.

Anyhow thanks for dropping by and sharing your perspective!

The definition of "AAA" needs to be changed. The "AAA" stamp should only be applied to a game post-launch and after X amount of time. For example, I would call Angry Birds a AAA game, not because it had a mind blowing dev team and awesome publishing, but because its been bought/downloaded a billion times and is now on T-Shirts, stuffed animals and TV commercials.

To echo what some others have been saying, I believe there are 300K players out there, maybe more, maybe less that are looking for the spiritual successor to SWG. A game that appealed to a broad assortment of players. There were crafters, adventurers, entertainers, PvPers, PvEers and more. The beautiful mix of kids and housewives and everything in between made the community in that game nearly perfect. The community made it a place people wanted to "live".

Maybe, since money seems to be the problem, we can re-think the setting for a sandbox game. All those assets that need to be created for vast and diverse settings. What about a sand box game that takes place in one small town. Think about the movie City of Ember, an entire civilization in one town, underground. Something like that. Something that would require a community (through game mechanics and inter-dependability), but maybe wouldn't cost an arm and a leg.

Surely somebody has to be willing to go for a long haul project. Dammit, I'd pay 30 bucks a month or more to play the spiritual successor to SWG. It's a premium game for premium players, charge a premium!

Temploiter wrote:

same here. id pay 20-30 per month if it was a free download client. id even deal with a little RMT if i had to.