IGN have posted a very intersting article in which they discuss The Future of MMOs, courtesy of a panel of top names from the MMO industry.
Present on this panel were such names as Rob Pardo from Blizzard Entertainment, Mike Miller fron NCSoft and Jack Emmert from Cryptic Studios. As well as these veterans of the MMO Industry, Ray Muzyka was there to give his 2 cents as BioWare enter the MMO genre.
The session started out friendly enough with Jon opening up a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of working with established properties or branching out to create entirely original worlds. The main issue, according to Ray Muzyka, is whether or not you fairly assess the potential risks and rewards of investing in marketing a new setting or paying license fees for an existing one. According to him neither way is substantially cheaper than the other so it's purely a matter of opinion and what works best for your game design.
This gives an interesting insight into what the future may well hold for the MMO genre. With BioWare and Blizzard both working on as yet un-titled MMOs, Cryptic working on a new superhero based MMO and NCSoft continuing their portfolio approach to the market, the coming years promise to have some nice surprises for us all.
They also discussed the idea of micro-transactions versus monthly subscription. Nexon pioneered the micro-transaction approach to P2P back in the 90s and is now outdoing NCSoft in the Korean market. Despite this, Emmert and Miller both stated that the micro-transaction system of payment isn't friendly in the American and European market due to the fact that the consumer is so used to paying monthly subs fro services such as telephones, televisions and mobiles that it just makes sense. BioWares Muzyka was on hand to give his impressions of the two systems, which may give us some insight into what BioWare plan to do with their MMO come release.
BioWare's Ray Muzyka suggests that the choice of revenue model should be driven by the design of the game. Some, he argues, simply work better under one system than another. A better solution would be to have it both ways, charging a nominal monthly subscription and offering micro-transactions on top of that. Both World of Warcraft and City of Heroes allow users to spend additional money for things like server transfers or extra emotes, and that added status is worth it for players who desperately want to invest a little more money to enlarge the game's they really love.
All in all, the panel was very informative with some interesting topics being discussed.
You can read the full article courtesy of IGN here.
