In the last couple of days, a couple of companies have been beating and thumping their chest about upcoming MMOGs. The timing of these announcements isn't the best (perhaps they're taking advantage of the downtime due to Blizzard's 2.01 patch for World of Warcraft).
The first was the ex-Blizzard producer Mark Kern's company Red 5 Studios, which announced that they had received 18.5 million in VC money for development of a MMOG (which I believe is being published by Korean company Webzen). It feels like they've been working on the game forever.
The second was Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling announcing his game studio, Green Monster Games, which will be focused on bringing a MMOG to market in the next 2-10 years.
"If there are 100 games or 100,000 games in development, there isn't a game out there that has anything to do with us," said Schilling. "Our development, our company, our project is solely dependent on the people in our company. Seeing as they work for us, they don't work for anybody else. And none of the employees of those other companies work for us. When they told me I couldn't pitch in the World Series on three days rest because nobody else had done it well, it had nothing to do with me. That's the way I look at this. We've entered an industry that oddsmakers would tell you it's a long shot to be a profitable company and that it's an even longer shot to even publish a game. That's based on criteria set by people who aren't me and by companies made up of people who aren't here, so that has nothing to do with us. I'm just focused on building a company and making a game. And if we stay focused on that, we'll do both."
Such spirit. Such enthusiasm. Such inexperience. Now obviously, I don't know the people working for Schilling at Green Monster Games, and I don't really know much about Mr. Schilling other than he used to play for the Red Sox, and that he used to play Everquest, and he nows plays Everquest II. However, knowing the games he plays (and what he hasn't played) leads me to believe that he really doesn't know what he's getting into.
It's something that I try to make clear to everyone entering into the games industry -- there's a big difference between making the game, and playing the game, and enthusiasm for one is different from the other. He's an EverQuest player, so I know his type (as I was once an EQ player too) and when you're playing EverQuest, there are a lot of things that are broken, and there are alot of things that could be changed for the better. When you play a game for too long, you can't see the possibilities outside the game.
It's my belief that Schilling will attempt to make an Everquest clone that fixes what he sees are the problems. World of Warcraft was created on a similar principle by former Blizzard President/CEO Alan Adham, and it's done quite well, but there were many factors to its success other than being Everquest-Improved. With GMG being based in Boston, they can poach from MIT (though I've met very few MIT grads in the games industry) and other schools for those eager to get into the gaming industry, and I really have my doubts that Schilling's company will ever succeed in managing to make a game, much less get it published. Schilling is too much in the field of dreams, thinking that if he builds it, people will come -- Guilds Wars, in many ways is superior to Everquest/Everquest II, but still only has a fraction of the audience it could have because people are paying more attention to World of Warcraft. Depending on how much money he puts into the company, it's feasible we might see a game in 4 or 5 years depending on how the first 3 years go -- by then maybe people will have gotten bored enough of WoW to want something new.
World of Warcraft is the current king of MMOGs which will have its next expansion releasing next month (which means the current addicts attention will be captured for the next year or so). As long as people are playing WoW, game development in MMOG space might as well be non-existent -- if everyone in the industry is playing WoW, no one is building a better WoW, or a different WoW. The problem is there are people attempting to build a better WoW, in fact, there's hundreds, maybe even thousands of companies who are in the process of building a better MMOG, and more than likely it's going to be a game you've never played or even heard of that's better than WoW, but will fail miserably, because the attention can't be diverted.
Blizzard has won the MMOG war -- it has managed to crush the competition with superior gameplay -- all the competition can do now is wait for people to burn out from WoW and seek new forms of entertainment.
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