In the real world, overpopulation is a serious concern. The 6.6 billion people on this planet are draining natural resources, and in all areas - except Europe, apparently - the problem is expected to get worse in the next half-decade. In online worlds, however, overpopulation is more of a goal than a crisis.
While Blizzard's unstoppable World of Warcraft (WoW) has seen an exponential growth in its subscriber base since 2004 - it now rests at around 10 million - two of its closest rivals, Lineage and Lineage II, have much smaller (1 million each) user bases. And most of the other notably successful Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) plateau at (and slowly decline from) the 200,000 to 500,000 mark. In these worlds, people don't use the resources - they are the resources, and if their attention drifts, the virtual world tends to languish.
Going back to WoW
Some of this can be attributed to WoW's success. The game's critical esteem and massive subscriber-base promise a very consistent and well-maintained MMO experience, so it's little surprise that when a smaller MMO's subscriber-base declines, WoW's inflates. "We see a lot of MMOs like that, where they get two-to-three months of a good reaction, and then their player-base disappears," says Flying Lab Software chief executive Russell Williams. "Where? Well ... they go back to WoW!"
For the majority of MMOs released after WoW, this rings true. After being released in 2006, Turbine's hyped and well-reviewed Dungeons & Dragons Online declined from 90,000 subscribers to 50,000 within a few months. A year later, SOE's Vanguard: Saga of Heroes lost 80,000 subscribers after its 120,000 peak in a similar amount of time. Other big-budget MMOs - 2006's Auto Assault, notably - can't even garner enough users to keep running for more than a year.
Is this simply because WoW is better than everything else on offer? Perhaps, but Williams believes it's actually because the market is too homogenised. As chief of Flying Lab's new MMO, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Williams is striving to introduce a new and original experience into the market (pirates and naval combat), because he sees that as the key to success. "When we started," he reveals, "we thought, 'Hmm, you know, there's a lot of fantasy out right now, and there's more coming.' And we wanted to do something a little bit different to what everybody else was doing. Unless you're going to go head-to-head with WoW - which is a crazy strategy - you'll invariably lose. You're always following, because odds are there's somebody who's been doing it even longer than you, with more money at their disposal. Do something fresh, and you can be the right product at the right time."
Pirates has only been live for several months, so subscription figures aren't a reliable indicator as to whether the game is going to float, but they're certainly extremely promising. As for Williams' philosophy? Results are mixed. City of Heroes, Second Life and slow-but-steady EVE Online all support the notion that different approaches to the MMO formula - in this case, superhero mythology, social sandbox mechanics, and economically driven sci-fi, respectively - lead to greater distinguishability and commercial presence.
These titles have around 100,000 to 200,000 active subscribers each, and while that's certainly not going to be impacting WoW's sales anytime soon, it's enough to keep the developers in the black. For other leftfield efforts - The Sims Online, The Matrix Online, and, again, Auto Assault - being different has led to buyer confusion and commercial failure.
Still, despite these high-profile catastrophes, many agree with Williams. For example, Raph Koster, lead designer of Ultima Online (the first mainstream MMO), Star Wars Galaxies and others. "If I could give any advice to a startup MMO developer," he laughs, "it would be: 'Stay the heck away from building another WoW!' One of the interesting things that's happened to the market is that we've had many, many WoW-style games, and the gameplay hasn't evolved dramatically. It's been streamlined, but it hasn't changed anything fundamentally. And one of the things we really don't want in this market is having it come to being a battle of polish. That's a bad place to be.
"So how do you do that to WoW? It's a very difficult challenge, because they spend so much time, and so much money, getting it to that stage where it's going to cost you as a competitor a lot just to achieve parity. And even then, that might not mean you succeed, so you've basically set a giant pile of money on fire."
Koster contends that back when the market was smaller, and its two biggest players were Ultima Online and EverQuest - similar in theme, radically different in gameplay - a greater level of diversity was permitted in new MMOs. "But now," he laments, "the vast majority of the market is held by the EverQuest/WoW-style games. Large budgets aren't going to other sorts of virtual worlds, and there are a lot of other sorts of virtual worlds to be made. And after seeing the market failure of Jumpgate or Auto Assault, or any of these more niche-targeted games, it breeds conservatism. So if I were going to give advice to a developer, I would say: why don't you make a truly kickass virtual world environment - make it a game or whatever it is, but make it something else. Bring in a new market!"
Undocumented millions
Interestingly, there is a massive MMO market that's largely undocumented by the mainstream press - browser-based online worlds such as Dofus, MapleStory, and RuneScape all have playerbases that number in the millions. And given the low-cost, high-convenience nature of these games (from both the developers' and players' perspectives), there's much less overhead than with their retail peers. Koster, motivated by the huge success of these smaller worlds, has created his own solution: Metaplace, a service that facilitates both the creation and online publication of user-made virtual worlds.
"Metaplace is designed so that virtual worlds can become essentially ubiquitous," he says. "They can go on any webpage; anyone can set up a virtual world on their own, so they can really become part of the daily fabric of the web. And so some of the hopes there are is that when we do that, we will get greater diversity, and more variety, and we'll explore new kinds of gameplay and social play.
"We have a markup language that is our equivalent to HTML, and just like HTML, anyone can write a browser for it that is a client. And different clients can in fact render the virtual world in different ways. So, you could have a mobile client, and a first-person 3D client. Then we have a generic server that doesn't make assumptions about what kind of virtual world is running there. It might be a WoW, it might be A Tale in the Desert, it might even be Tetris. And sitting on top of all this is a YouTube-style service that indexes, rates, and reviews all the worlds, and you can log into them from that website."
If nothing else, Koster's service allows users fed up with WoW's dominance the chance to have a go at it themselves. Having only been a part of our cultural fabric since 1997, the MMO as a concept is quite young. Ultimately, subscribers will decide which approach to online world design is most compelling.
As the market expands, it's increasingly likely that there will always be a single dominant MMO distantly ahead of the rest - simply because the social nature of MMOs requires large numbers of players, and players will naturally gravitate towards the world with the highest population. But as shown above, that's hardly a sign that other worlds won't prosper. Just don't hold your breath for an overpopulation crisis.
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