GGL Wire

Looking back at 2007, we can see that a record amount of MMOs have been released. As World of Warcraft hit ten million subscribers — setting a new milestone in MMOs — many people look forward to see where the MMO will be in ten years.

Will World of Warcraft still be on top? Will a WoW killer be released in 2008? What can kill a MMO? To find out, we must look to other MMOs who have withered away and examine their deaths.

Studying what kills an MMO can be an involved process. The life of an MMO is affected by countless variables and changing just one of these variables could result in a game’s upheaval. In 2007 alone countless MMO titles have died; Vanguard, Fury, Hellgate: London, and Tabula Rasa were all very promising, yet somehow they fizzled out.

While some MMOs have a dedicated audience that will allow a game to live on for years, other MMOs have had their population decimated in a matter of months. Many MMOs are destined to burn out quickly in a crowded and turbulent market.

Looking at what brought down promising MMOs in 2007 reveals several game-breaking problems that contribute to the deaths of many games in the genre. MMO are plagued by low player populations, developers alienating the player base, inadequately developed titles getting rushed out the door, and poor communication between the player base and developers.

Sometimes a game will suffer from several of these problems and die shortly, while some games can have one or more of these problems and still survive. These trends will not always be a factor in the collapse of every MMO; however, they are present in most MMOs that died in 2007.

The major draw of an MMO is that the game will provide a world full of interaction. NCSoft’s Auto Assault showed a lot of promise having Mad Max-like game play combined with the size and scale of an MMO. The game looked like it would be a successful alternative to the traditional fantasy MMO, but didn’t have a large number of subscribers, largely because of a lack of marketing, and the player base was spread across four different servers.

The massive world of Auto Assault was left desolate and deserted as each server contained one fourth of the total population. If the servers had been combined the player would have increased interaction and the game wouldn’t have felt like the Titanic as it was sinking. Auto Assault has the capacity to maintain a dedicated, long lasting player base.

Instead the players deserted Auto Assault for a different MMO and Auto Assault servers were shut down in under a year. The game could have grown or survived for many years as though it were a game like Star Wars Galaxies had its population been condensed…

In the second part of this article, I’ll go into how community relations can save a game. Keep your eyes peeled for it tomorrow.