Producer Mark Darrah saved the MMO Anthem from developer hell for BioWare and handled the release. However, Anthem turned out to be a flop. Darrah has apparently thought about this for a long time and developed a theory as to why new service games like Suicide Squad or Concord have failed so badly.
This is the basis for Darrah’s theory: Darrah uses two terms for games that fundamentally differ:
He refers to live-service games or MMOs like Anthem, WoW, or Destiny as “Forever Games” – games that you play forever. He compares these games to a shop where you go every day to have a coffee.
Single-player games like The Witcher he calls “self-contained games,” meaning games that stand on their own. He compares these games to restaurants.
Anthem chief explains why new MMOs have such a damn hard time
That’s why new MMOs fail so badly: Darrah states that when you launch a new “Forever game,” you are always competing against existing “Forever games.” You want a player to leave their existing game, which they enjoy every day, and switch to a new game that they do not yet know.
The existing games have a huge advantage:
For a new game, it must be compared to the already-existing game, but not to the game on Day 1, rather to the game in its current state. And that game has been improved over more than 20 years and supplied with new content.
The existing game also has the advantage that it is a fixed part of the players’ lives – where they have their friends and have invested a lot of time.
Moreover, the existing game has shaped the players’ perceptions of how such games should be.
Switching to a new MMO involves many hurdles
These are the disadvantages of new MMOs: When players switch from their old game to a new one, they have many hurdles to overcome, Darrah explains:
- They first have to buy the game
- Convince their friends to switch with them
- They have to get familiar with the new game and still level up their characters
You have to be better than this game for it to be worth the effort to make a switch. They need to buy the new game, they need to convince their friends to come with them, they need to learn the new game, they need to level up again – there are a lot of obstacles to switching between two live services. But even if I’ve set the other live service aside, the fact that I’ve played it for so much longer has ingrained an idea of how this type of game should be, which this new competitive game has to overcome.
He explains: New MMOs would inevitably be compared with established competitors like WoW. In his analogy, it’s like opening a coffee shop to sell people their daily coffee, but directly competing with the already well-established and optimized shop Starbucks.
New MMOs must dramatically outperform existing MMOs to survive
This is the mistake that MMOs make. Darrah states that studios make the mistake of thinking that their new MMOs only need to keep up with the old ones to earn enough money. This is a fallacy.
To overcome the massive pull of existing “Forever” games, new MMOs need to be “dramatically better” than the existing ones and have a massive appeal themselves.
The companies seem to have forgotten this or didn’t know it from the start. They think that their live service only needs to be comparable to that other live service [and] doesn’t have to dramatically exceed it.
And it’s not the same for other games? In single-player games, he says, it’s not the case because they are like restaurant visits. Players want new experiences and are also willing to go to different restaurants than McDonald’s to have a different taste.
Even if “The Witcher” were an extremely great game, players would eventually be done with it and be willing to play the similar but slightly worse “The Watcher” two years later to have a new experience.
For years, all games have been like this – the new “Forever” games demand a change in thinking.
Players of WOW know the phenomenon
This is what’s behind it: What Darrah says makes sense and is clear to many MMO players, even if they can’t articulate it that way. There is a significant difference between these “coffee” shops, the MMOs, and regular single-player games.
Those who play WoW can see this clearly: When a big new single-player game with strong appeal comes out, like Fallout 4, everyone is gone for a few weeks, and you can hardly get together groups or raids, but after a few weeks, everyone is back.
A bit bitterly, one might say that Darrah should have known this five years ago. Although he probably couldn’t have changed that Anthem wasn’t as good at release as other games were after five years: Anthem is dead – The short life and long death of EA’s “next big thing”
