Developing tensions

According to Greg Costikyan, 95 percent of MMOs fail. Rough guesstimates put the number of MMO games in development this year at about 100 or so. Some of these will fail shortly after launch. Some of them will fail in beta. Others will fail in development or even earlier at the internal technology demo stage. Some of them have already silently bit the dust, without so much as a launch announcement.

Online gaming and virtual worlds are a big pie right now, and everyone wants a hefty serving of that pie. If you're going to try to get yourself a slice, you want as much control over the process as you can get - and that's a whole lot harder than it sounds.

If you think playing in an online world or game can be a grind, well developing one is worse, and then maintaining one is even more so. It's not for the faint of heart, and it requires a massive investment in time and money - an investment that every developer hopes will be repaid. Most of them, alas, are going to be disappointed.

There's a certain tension involved between developers and investors. Developers want to be a lasting success and create genuine fun or utility for their eventual users. Investors don't much care about lasting successes, so long as they can walk away with a tidy profit on their investment - they're not really so interested in fun or utility.

This is pretty much why investors have the money, and the developers don't.

No MMO or Virtual World gets as far as its first six months of operation if either of these two groups has full control. If the developers are in full control, the investors don't give them the cash. If the investors are in full control the development usually winds up as a flop (this is not to say that developers must necessarily always do a better job of avoiding a flop - they don't always).

The best you can realistically hope for is an uneasy tension between investors and developers that fuels a development strategy that produces a product that is not one that either would create if they had complete freedom to choose.

It gets worse, of course, as additional competing groups are added. One such group is the users themselves. Whatever the developers want, whatever the investors want, the users want something else. More of this, less of that.

Often you also have the MMO operator(s), regional publishers and so forth in the mix. Quite a lot of cash and resources is required just to run the game, servers, bandwidth, electricity, network and operations teams, and the frequently overlooked community teams. When an MMO or Virtual World is released, costs just go up from there.

An MMO/VW is a complex arrangement of systems. Each system in and of itself is relatively simple, but put them altogether, and the whole show can break down. You've seen that with any number of launches already. Put ten thousand or twenty thousand people in contact with your systems, and little imbalances and glitches that nobody noticed suddenly become standout issues. Things that worked fine for a hundred users fail for a thousand. Things that are bulletproof for a thousand, are full of holes at ten thousand. A 0.0001% chance of a failure can create an actual, frustrating, and often mysterious failures several times every day.

Your developers need to fix things, tune and rebalance and test - and do it fast. They haven't magically gotten any cheaper, either. Patches and updates mean shutting users out, and they don't like that any more than they like it that you're changing something. Investors - well, investors may be getting a bit hot under the collar at this point. You've released the product, but this crazy thing is eating more money now, and there's no break-even point in sight.

Releasing an MMO is like graduating from College. You looked forward to it as the end of your education, only to discover that it was all just preparation, and the real learning was just about to begin.

Investors can't ever afford to lose control of the process - the industry is littered with the corpses of developers who managed to self-fund, and who also managed to make a complete hash of things.

Developers can't afford to lose control either - they're the only ones who know what can and can't be done, and how to do it. That's specialist, evolving knowledge. Venture Capitalists make lousy designers.

This tension between competing camps makes MMOs what they are today, and kills more of them than we ever see. We can't tell you just how long it might be before the state of the industry evolves to the point that the different camps can align, and take MMOs and VWs to the next level.