As part of “Find Your Next Game“, Leya Jankowski from MeinMMO and Julius Busch from GameStar spoke with two legends from the MMO industry. Interesting views on the history of online games emerged during the discussion.
Who are these pioneers? On Friday, June 5, our editors met for a live talk with the two MMO legends Raph Koster and Gordon Walton on Twitch.
Koster has been in the gaming industry for over 20 years, having served as Lead Designer on Ultima Online and was the Creative Director of Star Wars Galaxies. He is currently working on a new project that is supposed to utilize cloud technology, about which we do not yet know anything else.
Walton has also been in the games business for over 20 years and has worked on Mass Effect, SWTOR, and Ultima Online: Renaissance. He is currently working as Executive Producer on Crowfall, one of the most promising MMORPGs for 2020/21.
You can find the complete conversation on the GameStar YouTube channel and on MonstersAndExplosions on Twitch. We have embedded the video here for you (starts around hour 02:01:30):
“WoW-killers have almost killed the MMO business”
This is what Walton says: The conversation touches on the history of MMOs and the rather difficult situation of new games in recent years. Why is there so little innovation? Walton elaborates on the challenges that the genre currently faces:
The biggest challenge we have as MMO makers is that our interval cycles are too long. We are not evolving as quickly as other media in gaming because it takes too long to complete each [game]. […] We are behind the curve because our games are so large and complex. […] Our cycles are five years. That is a problem for development.
According to Walton, this results in the issue that MMO makers do not gain the same experience as other developers. When they fix a mistake in the next product, other media have already developed several products during that time.
In MMOs, one expects “5-year” cycles, which is incredibly long by comparison.
Gigantic success WoW has reset the MMORPG genre
What is the problem with the WoW-killers? Walton adds that a huge success like World of Warcraft is a setback for other developers because everyone wants to go in that direction. As a result, “two generations of games” have received less innovation. He sums it up as: “WoW-killers have almost killed the MMO business.”
Koster chimes in at this point and explains even more about the background – the problem apparently goes even deeper.
That is one of the reasons why I haven’t made MMOs for so long. Because if you wanted to make an MMO, no one would give you money unless you were competing with WoW. And to compete with WoW, you need to outdo it [financially]. That is a ridiculous amount of money that almost no one in the industry can raise.
As early as 2018, MeinMMO editor-in-chief Gerd Schuhmann believed: The future of MMORPGs is being created right now, but it won’t please many.
According to Koster, new, modern technologies now make it possible to create better games with less effort. That’s why he has now returned to MMOs.
What about the “WoW-killers”?
In recent years, there have been several games that strove to outdo WoW as the most popular MMORPG during development. One of the most prominent was Wildstar.
Wildstar was produced by former WoW developers and aimed to return to the roots of MMORPGs, to be harder and more demanding. Despite cool and new ideas, it was a theme park MMORPG, just like World of Warcraft.
WildStar tried to beat WoW in its own territory and had to close down again in 2018 – after just four years. By comparison: World of Warcraft has maintained itself for over 15 years.
Meanwhile, WoW is facing its own problems. For some time now, key employees have been leaving the company behind the MMORPG (Activision Blizzard), including the former “WoW father” Mike Morhaime. He even believes that the genre is currently having a tough time and explains, why MMORPGs are not as popular today.
