Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

http://www.eldergame.com/2009/01/25/yes-the-industry-really-is-that-bad/

by henning • 17 years ago

49 35 17 years ago

eldergame.com

TweedHeads2• 17 years ago

I am working on the first stages of a multiplayer online game.

Any tips on game hosting services with IRCD?

Between 500 and 1000 players is ok for a start.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

mahmud• 17 years ago

Any reason why a VPS wouldn't cut it? assume I know nothing about games, online or otherwise (at least not since Street Fighter II)

cubicle67• 17 years ago

cool! Any more info on the game you can provide?

TweedHeads2• 17 years ago

Not at this moment, but as soon as I get the hosting I'll put it online for testing.

Harkins• 17 years ago

I'm also building one, been blogging as I go: http://push.cx/tag/athenge

And, yeah, I have a similarly low opinion of the game industry as this article. Looking at it from the outside I see no reason to be part of it, I'm happier to be a software company that does games rather than a games company. http://push.cx/2009/the-game-industry

ricree2• 17 years ago

"There are no MMO engines for sale that can make robust games. They just aren’t any good yet"

That's somewhat surprising to me. There's so many MMOs out there that have failed for one reason or another that you'd think someone would be trying to salvage their sunk costs by selling the engine.

Despite the competitiveness of the MMO market, there are still a lot of companies trying to break in, so you'd think that there'd be a decent sized market for a product which would shave years off of the development time.

I wonder if part of the problem comes from most MMO companies clinging to life for as long as they can, and then not having the money to rework their technology into something suitable for a third party. Certainly, there have been quality(from a technical standpoint, anyways) games that got released, got a few rounds of post launch patching, and then died from lack of users. I'd bet that with a bit of polish, that sort of proven technology would be a moneymaker.

stcredzero3• 17 years ago

Panda 3D was used to make one Disney MMO at least. And that one's free!

anigbrowl4• 17 years ago

Oh, there are a few such companies. Can't think of the names right now, but I did some research into this over the winter. A big problem is that the asset creation is very expensive, and balancing the economic factors is much easier said than done. If you are interested in this, Richard Bartle, inventor of MUD, is the leading thinker in the field.

The best technical system that I know of is the stackless python one developed for Eve Online, which I believe is profitable but has only about $300k players. Mind you, with that number it's insanely complex already. I had to stop playing, because to do so well requires the same level of commitment as a full time job.

ricree2• 17 years ago

I can imagine that asset creation might easily be as large an expense as building the technology.

However, one of the big killers of MMOs is problems with the launch. With some of these large high profile failures, they've already gone through this and worked out at least some of the bugs, so one would assume that this would make them more attractive to buyers.

reedlaw• 17 years ago

Why not use an open source one? I saw a Google tech talk by Keith Fulton, one of the main architects of PlaneShift. He said that although the engine is GPLed, the characters, rules, scenery, etc. are all separate from the main project and can be scripted. So if someone wanted to, they could improve the GPL engine while creating proprietary art and storyline that could then be marketed.

pmjordan4• 17 years ago

Unfortunately, you can't use GPL or even LGPL licensed code on consoles, and try getting (L)GPL code past your publisher's/investors' lawyers. I had to go through an arduous approval process to be allowed to use zLib in a game.

demosthenes• 17 years ago

The Unity engine supports MMOs, Cartoon Networks' Fusion Fall MMO was built using it.. http://unity3d.com

thalur• 17 years ago

Could a viable company be created with the goal of producing and selling an MMO engine, rather than an actual MMO? You would be removing the expense and risk of creating the gameplay side of things (models, textures, quests etc), and could focus on getting the engine right. There would probably be some issues in selling the engine though: there would be a certain chicken-and-egg factor in selling an unproven engine to a new MMO-building company.

csbrooks• 17 years ago

There are such companies and products.

The fact that the article fails to mention them probably indicates that they aren't worth mentioning, though.

osi• 17 years ago

they exist. i work for one. the engine was built as we developed worlds on contracts for clients. once we got it to a certain point, we started licensing it out.

we term it a platform, as its something to build with an upon. all of the projects we've seen require extension and addition to the basic model we've defined to customize it for the project at hand. but we've baked in things that make doing so trivially easy.

http://www.electrotank.com/corporate.electro

stcredzero3• 17 years ago

Seems like there's plenty of room in the MMO industry, if most of them are this bad. Is there some sort of pathological psychology that's involved with wanting to make your own little world that works for bad group dynamics in MMO dev teams?

greendestiny• 17 years ago

Its the scope of MMO's thats the problem. Building a massive game world, with massive networking requirements is very hard.

anigbrowl4• 17 years ago

http://www.stackless.com/ stackless python See in particular the articles about Eve, who co-developed this to produce a non-sharded world (in other words, one that isn't split into virtualized incidences walling players in different 'dungeons' away from each other).

Eve can get away with fudging some of these problems to an extent because it takes place in space and so travel is achieved by use of things like warp gates and hyperspace jumps - you can just fly off into space with normal engines but given the astronomical distances being simulated this isn't practical for actual travel, only for tactical combat advantage (scouting or sniping at enemy ships).

As with a most other online games, players tend to congregate around a central point because of navigational and trade benefits. In Eve's case this is a system called Jita which regularly had 500 ships in one local volume, leading to horrendous lag. Load balancing can become a particular problem and so does client bandwidth since you're suddenly trying to feed everyone 1000 vectors per second.

anigbrowl4• 17 years ago

No. It's not just the dev team, it's the players. They think they own the dev team.

http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm http://www.themis-group.com/uploads/Pitfalls%20of%20Virtual%... http://eternal-lands.blogspot.com/2008/03/mmorpgs-economy.ht... http://eternal-lands.blogspot.com/2008/03/mmorpgs-economy-pa... http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-postmortem/part1.ph...

The canonical book is Richard Bartle's Designing Virtual Worlds. The first essay is from him, and a classic known by all MMO developers. The next three are an academic essay by Bartle on virtual economies, and a two-part essay by Radu Privantu on the day-to-day practicalities. The last is also by Privantu, a ~5000 word post mortem on the genesis, growth and maturity of Eternal Lands, a simple but moderately successful fantasy MUD.

There's about a full day's worth of reading here (or two if you read it carefully), but it will pay for itself many times over if you are ever thinking seriously of starting or joining the dev team of an MMO.

Many of the lessons therein could easily be extrapolated to other online contexts, especially those built around a persistent social model.

pmjordan4• 17 years ago

Thankfully I've never worked on an MMO, but "AAA" console games are bad enough. My take on the issue is similar to that in the article: management sucks. These are usually well-meaning people, but as they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

As far as I can tell there's a vicious cycle going on in the game industry: they won't hire people who don't love games and aren't in it because they are super-passionate about making games. I'm not saying you shouldn't love your job. I'm saying there's too strong a bias towards love of games in favour of actual ability in hiring. Outsiders "wouldn't understand the business", after all.

Personally, I've always cared more about the tech than anything else. I didn't go into the industry because I wanted to design games, I just love the technical challenges. I do also very much enjoy playing games, but the activities are completely separate for me, the fact that they both involve games is more coincidental than anything else. I guess I managed to get past the interview stage due to that coincidence or because I knew what to say. For better or worse, it probably afforded me a different perspective than many other people "on the inside".

In any case, I soon noticed there were few people like me in the industry. It's no coincidence the creative director is the one everyone looks up to. They all want his job. They don't really want to be managing hordes of programmers, artists, level designers and testers. They don't want to be hacking away at the guts of the AI. Working on iterating continuously on just 1 or 2 levels for the duration of 2-3 years, again and again, is just one step along the way. After all, they could still be stuck in QA like their friends, playing the same game every day for 2-3 years. But soon, they'll be designing their own games!

If you think hiring great programmers is hard and unquantifiable, try hiring game designers. By the time you can tell if they're any good they'll have scaled the ranks and be the object of worship somewhere and who's going to give that up or given up and left the industry. So the main selection criterion is persistence despite terrible working conditions. It's not a big step to plain delusion. So either they really really love what they're doing, or they're not skilled/talented enough to do similar work in an industry that pays more and treats them better.

Now, to get back to the point: who are these people managing development teams and large studios? They seem to be people who stuck around for long enough but weren't awesome enough at whatever they were doing to become creative director, technical director, whatever. They're not doing this because they love managing people. They're doing this because they want to be creative director, or because they're stuck. Worst of all, they don't seem to want to run a business. I know people always complain that big business gets in the way of making great games. I call bullshit. Not living in the real (business) world gets in the way of making great games.

There are exceptions, of course, as always. As far as I can tell, few companies encourage that kind of culture, though.

(FWIW, I still do game programming, but only as a contractor, for small companies, and only about 50% of the time in order to preserve my sanity)

req2• 17 years ago

The noteworthy example of a non-gamer hire is Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard. I've never seen any positive gamer news covering him because of his desire to beat franchises to death with yearly updates.

(As much as gamers claim to despise franchises and sequelmania, it's all the market seems to want.)

philwelch• 17 years ago

"As far as I can tell there's a vicious cycle going on in the game industry: they won't hire people who don't love games and aren't in it because they are super-passionate about making games."

That's funny. The CS program at my school is filled with people who want to work in the game industry because they love games. I have the same reaction as you--just because playing games is fun doesn't imply making games is fun, and vice versa. Someone might loathe actually playing a game but have a real fun time writing the AI for it.

blader• 17 years ago

Most <any industry> companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people."

I'm guessing it's especially true in software - everybody is involved in software nowadays but you can count the number of companies doing software really well on two hands and two feet.

raganwald• 17 years ago

Sturgeon's Revelation?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

johnyzee• 17 years ago

Game industry job interview:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2005/20050406l.jpg

hoelle• 17 years ago

I'm an MMO hacker that's shipped one unsuccessful game and one moderately successful game, and I have to comment on some points made in this article.

-MMOs fail due to bad management, design

Partially true. All the elements need to be there, and bad technology seems to be the biggest crippling force in games. We need more good hackers in the field.

-Good MMO studios aren't hiring.

Not true, even today.

-MMO studios all have terrible quality of life, pay, benefits.

Not true. Startup studios might, but if you're going into that situation you're either getting profit sharing, or a beginner getting a foot in the door.

-MMO engines don't exist, tech isn't reused.

This is becoming less true, but the third party tech out there is still untested. It's unlikely a great MMO company will sell its tech like Epic does with Unreal, since we need long term customers, and can't afford to undercut ourselves.

-Don't work in games unless you are a gaming fanatic.

Loving gameplay helps if you want to be a gameplay coder, but MMOs are vast. Networking, graphics, AI, scalability, the problems to be solved are endless. If you're bored at your job, I recommend giving the games industry a look.

sethg• 17 years ago

I wonder if the "secure distributed persistent communication" protocol developed by the E folks could be used to implement a virtual world running on a network of clients. I.e., one central server would send a client some model of a room, and the trust layer would prevent that client from moving walls around. (I'm being handwavey here because I'm not familiar with either E or MMOs, but maybe someone else can be inspired by this.)

http://www.erights.org/

Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

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