Comments on: Does It Lose Money When You Do That? Don’t Do That

By: adam

adam — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:06:28 +0000

I.e. I think sandbox is much harder to make succeed. Eve is not the poster child for this because noone else tried but because it’s been too hard for anyone else to make work reliably. Remember as well it took a long time for eve to really get going. Some things eve does are easy andshould have been cloned long ago but IMHO the sandbox part is not one of those.

Ps excuse poor typing – apples iPhone autocorrect dictionary really sucks and doesn’t contain a lot of pretty common modern English words

By: adam

adam — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:01:39 +0000

I see your “sandbox” and I raise you one “there.com”, with a development costs in the high tens of millions of dollars.

Sandbox has always been a design trap for the unwary. GTA was never much of a pure sandbox, although lots of people tries to copy that, it was a game which hosted a sandbox. There are also as dboxes which host games, but they nearly always end up trying to be agnostic to game rules and allow anything, which pretty much destroys overall value.

Is eve a sandbox first or a game first? I think the latter but I’m never sure – I’ve barely played eve so I know it more through the meta issues thnlan trough the game itself. I’d love to know those of you that play it view it?

So I’m not sure how this affects things. One thing I do know though: sandbox is very often an excuse for “couldn’t invent a decent mmo game design, it was too enormous a task”, and has been the core element of many many games that never made it to beta, in many cases cancelled even before alpha.

By: David "CrazyKinux" Perry

David "CrazyKinux" Perry — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:26:50 +0000

Interesting analysis Adam.

I’m curious to see how the 2 different game play approach to MMOs (theme park vs. sand box) plays into the failure of some and not others. I would assume that former is much more difficult to successfully implement in today’s MMO landscape, versus the latter which has a better chance (IMHO) to grow over time, starting with core of players and slowly growing the base. (as in EVE Online)

By: MMOG Nation » Stopgap Content Pushing

MMOG Nation » Stopgap Content Pushing — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:35:02 +0000

[...] Does it lose money when you do that? Then don’t do that! – A discussion of MMO business models and pitfalls. Stuff Raph and Co. have been harping on for a while and a great argument for the kool-aid I drank early in 2008. [...]

By: mb

mb — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:39:54 +0000

I played AoC to max level and end-game raiding/city-building. I had no trouble getting the box as a preorder, downloading the game, and jumping in. However, there were numerous technical issues plaguing the game well into the 2nd month when I quit. Memory leaks, crashes, quest bugs, map holes, the works.

Tortage offered a polished single-player experience. However, many players on my server (PvP) described this as their *least* favorite area, citing the linear and highly scripted gameplay as primary cause for their dislike.

AoC taught me that there really are at least two audiences for MMO’s: 1) those who enjoy a single player RPG that happens to take place in a persistent and multiplayer world, and 2) those who play primarily to interact with others, either through PvP, raiding, or socializing. (Obviously there’s some overlap).

For Audience 1 I agree with your analysis, they loved Tortage and then cancelled.

IMHO, Audience 2 was lost because Funcom failed to deliver several game-making features. There was a lot of talk about the city-building, Border Kingdoms, large-scale conflicts, bar fights, social attire, crafting — all which turned out simply terrible (or were absent entirely). Raiding was so buggy it was practically unplayable, many guilds getting literally locked out of instances for weeks.

Either way, the stuff printed on the box ill-described the stuff in the box.