Brad McQuaid made a post about the state of Vanguard recently. Brad McQuaid is on of the founders of Sigil Games, which is currently in development of Vanguard, a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. Originally, Vanguard's publisher was Microsoft, and now it's Sony. Earlier in the week, Sony said:
"SOE is in discussions with Sigil regarding the future of Vanguard and Sigil Games in Carlsbad. Talks are going well and first and foremost, our primary concern right now is what's best for Vanguard and its community. We want to ensure that this game and its community have a healthy future. The specifics that we work out over the coming days will all be with that single goal in mind."
Brad's response to this statement:
"What does that mean? It means that right now Vanguard is doing decently but not as well as we hoped. If you haven't read my last long post that outlined some of the things that went wrong during development, etc., please do. So the bottom line is that SOE is going to be getting more involved with Sigil and Vanguard - our relationship is going to become even tighter - much tighter. At this point I can't say much more than that.
Does this mean an acquisition? I can't say at this point.
Does this mean more or less people at Sigil? I can't say at this point.
Does this mean management changes at Sigil? I can't say at this point."
My translation of this statement reads as saying that Vanguard didn't pull in the numbers they wanted. With their release being exactly a week behind the release of Blizzard's Burning Crusade expansion pack for World of Warcraft, Vanguard was released unnoticed.
Here's the standard cycle for MMOG developers getting released by a third party publisher.
- Step One: Find a publisher.
This usually involves pitching the idea to everyone who might be interested in undertaking a huge, costly project. For that reason, MMOG developers have to target publishers with deep pockets, and that means EA, Sony, Microsoft and NCSoft.
- Step Two: Negotiate rights with a publisher.
This is usually the part where developers say "Give us the money to make this game, so we can pay our employees, buy some servers and bandwidth." Publisher usually says okay, but they usually lay down a timeline for the developer -- meaning that the developer needs to meet certain milestones if they want to get paid.
- Step Three: Make the Project.
This is the part that makes or breaks the development team. If the development team can't make those milestones, the project dies, so they kludge it together, meeting the milestones with playable but buggy builds.
- Step Four: Go Beta
In Beta, the development team releases the build for players to try while the "Final Build" is shipped off to be manufactured. Players play, they find bugs, and programmers fix the bugs. That's the way it's supposed to work, anyways. What usually happens is that in the course of fixing bugs, new bugs are revealed. Because beta is an arbitrary time frame meant to find bugs which will be corrected in the initial patch of game release, only severe-level bugs are usually fixed, with minor fixes incoming after the release of the game.
- Step Five: Release the Project
Usually at this point, the developer wants three more months to do bug fixing, but marketing and sales want to release it immediately so they can start making their money back. Marketing and Sales usually win this round, and the product is released.
- Step Six: The Call for Help
With the game released to the retail channels, problems start happening. Servers can't withstand the load, hardware failures on brand new equipment, there's not enough support to handle the calls. All this, plus money hasn't even started to come in yet, since all players get one month free.
- Step Seven: Two Months After Launch
People start cancelling subscriptions. Publisher gets worried. "Why are numbers dropping? Why aren' t we making money yet? Where's the return on investment, and why are we only making $150,000 a month on our game in subs, while Blizzard is making 120 million a month?" Developer explains that it needs time to build momentum, and that they need some time to build word of mouth.
- Step Eight: Three Month Later
If sales numbers don't improve, Publisher and Developer meet to figure out what's wrong. Developers list their problems, which is usually "We need more people and more money to fix everything that's wrong". Publisher says something along the lines of "We've already spent 50 Million on this project, and we've only made 1 million back from the sales. We aren't spending any more on this, you guys are going to have to come up with another solution, which doesn't involve tens of millions of dollars."
- Step Nine: Present Yourself as a Target of Acquisition.
At this point, the developer points out that in three years time, they will have made back that initial investment, and that every dollar past that point is pure profit, and that it would be terrible if another competitor were to buy them out. Developer can also point to past successes, such as Everquest, which took a year to make back the development costs, but has been running for nearly a decade.
- Step Ten: Publisher buys out Developer.
Publisher decides that future revenue is good, but they want more control over the project, and that their project management is the problem. They buy the company, and replace all the middle management with their own choices. Founders stay on for a time specified in the buyout clause before leaving to startup their own company (again).
So what Brad McQuaid says next doesn't surprise me the least:
"What it does mean at this point is that both companies agree that we need more of SOE's involvement if Vanguard is going to continue to get the support it needs to both continue to be worked on and improved and debugged and optimized."
In other words, SOE (Sony Online Entertainment, Vanguard's publishers) likely told them "We'll give you money, but we want one of our employees to be in charge of overseeing what you're doing with our money. If you don't do what he says, we won't give you any more money."
Brad McQuaid further explains his game plan:
When people start getting burned out of the Warcraft expansion (pardon the pun), we need to make sure that the game is more polished and will play on lower end machines. As people continue to level up, it means that we need additional higher level content, including raid content.
His belief is that people who would be playing his game are instead playing WoW: Burning Crusade. It's a decent assumption, but burnout usually means forsaking playing MMOGs altogether for a time, not jumping to another one. The game polishing and lower end machine statement is more a reflection of Vanguard in its current state: buggy, unpolished, and requiring a much more powerful computer than World of Warcraft. WoW's system requirements are low, and Blizzard spent a lot of time polishing and making the user interface easy to use and understand.
It also means that presently Vanguard doesn't have any high-end raid level content. This is not a good sign. WoW built into the user interface the capability to manage raid-level content, EQ did not until several years later, even though for both games, raid level content was inserted at the very beginning. Things just work a lot better if you plan them from the beginning instead of adding it in at the last minute.
Brad says that marketing and attracting players is a problem:
If we are going to change our marketing message effectively to target those who played a lot of EverQuest but who have "grown up' such that they have jobs, families, etc. that they cannot and will not play another EverQuest even though they enjoyed they game years ago. We've done studies and it's not atypical of an old EQ player, when they hear about Vanguard, to assume that because many of the people involved in Vanguard's development worked on EQ as well, that Vanguard must simply be an EQ 3. From that point they don't even give Vanguard another look. They don't do any more research on the game. They don't go to the official sites. They don't go to the affiliate sites. Instead they think to themselves, "ah well, were I younger and had my life not changed, I'd give it a shot, but I just don't have the time for another EQ with better graphics right now.
And that's it - they don't give Vanguard another thought EQ peaked in late 2001 at almost 500k subscribers. In its lifetime it's sold over 2 million units. Putting EQ in a vacuum and that's a lot of people who played and who aren't playing anymore. And the total number of subscribers didn't start going down until sometime 2002. I'm also pretty sure up until its peak that the average lifespan of a player was nearing 9-12 months.
I'm an old EQ gamer. Avid player for 4 years. I spent 260 realtime days in that universe -- over a sixth of my waking hours for those four years, or about 8.6 months realtime. Even if it's not an EQ3, when a game gets an editor's rating of 3 out of 10 on 1up with the tagline "Massively Missing Online RPG", I can tell that I'm not missing much. Plus, unlike the WoW characters, which have a cartoonish feel to them, Vanguard is going for a more plastic look, and it really does feel like Everquest 2 Part Deux.
A lot of us, in quitting EQ made the vow that we'd never go back to Sony Online for our MMOGs. After seeing Star Wars Galaxies, it became clear to us that Sony was not interested in making a good game, and more interested in making a game that brought in money month after month.
Brad McQuaid spends the next couple of paragraphs explaining that they captured a huge market when the market was young, and now that the MMOG audience has grown, there's no reason why Vanguard can't pull in the kind of numbers that EQ did back in the old days. The market has changed. No one wants to play an EQ-like game anymore -- the badness that came with SOE and EQ set a really low bar for customer service, and players were, quite honestly, treated pretty disrespectfully. Enough so that when a better game came along, we all jumped ship
When World of Warcraft released, it was just a game that raised the bar for the MMOG genre. Relatively bug free, easy to use interface, quests that worked and had storylines attached to them, and best of all low system requirements.
Vanguard is a game that requires: Windows XP, Intel 2.4 Ghz processor, 128 MB of Texture Memory and 512 MB of memory. That's the minimum requirements -- so we're already talking sub optimal experience with a 2.4 Ghz processor, which is basically computers built in the last 9 months. Meanwhile, I can run WoW on almost any computer built in the last 4years (My Titanium Powerbook, made in 2002 can run WoW).
There can be only one
In the games industry, there is only one MMOG at a time that dominates the market. Every other MMOG manufacturer is, quite honestly, playing for second place. The only way to move into first place is to create a better game than the game currently in first place. Before WoW, the current MMOG champion was EQ1. Guild Wars, EQ2 and WoW all released around the same time, and while all of them improved on the design of EQ, they all did so in different ways. In the early days, I called WoW "EQ Better", because that's essentially what it was -- an easy to play EQ, oh it was different, but except for the randomly dropping magic items (which was a Diablo feature) everything in WoW was in EQ first. There was one difference though -- WoW actually worked. Because EQ was a work in progress when it was released, EQ never achieved the fine polish that WoW did -- and because of that when EQ launched, it was riddled with bugs and uncompleted quests and other problems which took years to fix.
If you just want to look at the Fantasy MMOG genre, there's two big gorillas in the field already: World of Warcraft with 8 million subscribers, and Lord of the Rings Online, which is much more recent game, and has has the whole background of Middle-Earth to play around with. Any contender who wants to take the two of these on, has got to outdo these two, and let's face it, WoW has a huge lead which isn't going away anytime soon, and for the time being, we ought to consider the fantasy MMOG market closed.
There's still plenty of other genres available which aren't fantasy, but may be riskier -- but fantasy is an assured loss.
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