Dethdlr As we reported earlier this week, Daybreak Games President John Smedley recently gave an interview to GamesIndustry.biz which included the following comments:
“I firmly believe the days of the WoW-style MMO are over,” Smedley said. “And that means we have to change with the times. Luckily, we were kind of early on that bus as opposed to late. But we’re changing what we’re making. Look at H1Z1. Is it an MMO? Sure, by definition, but I would consider it a session-based online game with a lot of people. And I say that because the average life expectancy in H1Z1 might be 45 minutes, and that’s what today’s gamers want. How many people do you still know that are still raiding in WoW every night, or EverQuest and EverQuest II? It’s just the time commitment necessary has changed so much. That means we need to change with the times, and we are. So we’re getting interested in a broader array of games and gaming styles.”
There are those among the community who didn’t particularly like some of the things he had to say. Yesterday, he took to Reddit to “clarify” what he was talking about. I’ve added my two cents on the subject over on the page at Reddit which as of right now is up to 120 comments. Let him know what you think about his comments and clarification.
Well, I couldn’t find your comment at all. I scrolled slowly down the page and then back up the page. I searched for your name. THEN I noticed that the link has been removed from EQ2Wire again and by that time noticed RadarX has posted on the page. Seriously, that person has maturity problems AND control problems.
At any rate Smed himself has actually made a few comments. Nothing of substance, of course, but he is posting.
Players are giving great feedback. It’s a pleasure to read some of the posts.
Who’s comment were you looking for? Notice who posted this article? 🙂
Sheesh, /bonks self on forehead! Of course I saw your comments. Forgot fearless Feldon was out and about ))
Still, I’m rather amused at the on again/off again clickability for EQ2wire ))
Mea Culpa Dethdlr!
I totally agree with you too 😉
there are plenty of other games out there that offer that quick match gameplay. they are fun for a while, but have very little long term attention holding for me. the fact there are still people playing eq1 eq2 and wow show just how wrong he is. please smed tell me more about what gamers want.
what i took away from this is – as a company we are going to go after the most popular of game types that have the highest number of players and make our own version of it. they already did it with minecraft and dayz. wouldn’t surprise me to see soe make a moba type next.
also, the man who created EQ thinks wow has a such a big time commitment now? seriously?
I totally agree with smed this time.
Having kids , when they are in bed and I have the time to play for 1 and half hour.
Coincidentally play session length is also what this week’s Extra Credits is about. Interesting stuff.
I guess for some people, what Smed mentioned is true due to families and such, but for me I prefer long play sessions (I live alone). I like games that can pass the time. MMOs are where I’ve done this over the years the most. Within the past year I gave up on all MMOs because it feels like a stagnant market. However I recently had a 8 hour session in anarchy online because I felt like it. Suddenly it was 3AM and I was like wtf? That game is old as nails, yet it still manages to hook me. Just like good ol EQ. For me a game that doesn’t hold my attention very long doesn’t remain on my hard drive for very long.
So the powers that be are saying that people do not have the time or patience to put in massive game time. But then they have spent a considerable time in the last year purposely lengthening the gaming process. How about you stop making the massive time sinks of leveling each and every toon the same way over and over again. They took out the easier (and much faster) leveling options like dungeon maker and then remind us that gaming needs to change because play styles have change and people want shorter sessions. He is just so out of touch, always has been.
I agree with what you said, they talk about game play being about 2 hours, but then put in all the roadblocks to that so you have hours of grinding in place. There is a real disconnect between what they have said and the reality of what actually exist. Basically they took out all the easy grinding option and forced you to run the new content. Just like they took out the newby isles to force you to run in frostfang sea. I can say after running 14 toons through every single quest line in the AOM xpac, I was board to tears.
I think it’s more that the generation that played MMO’s is now 30+ and have full lives now (family, work etc). When I look at teens now, they can NOT hold their attention for longer then 5 minutes, this 5 minute thing is seen in a lot of games, you know the instant gratification thing. I work in the hotel industry, I see a lot of people.
Good example is the Rally driving games. They used to have full stages of sometimes 20 minutes drive-time, there is in the last 5 years not a SINGLE rally game that features races longer then 5 minutes !
I for instance, do love those games 🙂
Just my 2c.
I may be wrong but i think item shops are what started the instant gratification thing. Maybe not as much in EQ2 as it is in other games, but the mentality with item shops has always been “You don’t want to go out and earn it? Well buy it and get it instantly”. I almost never use item shops unless it’s for a costume or a mount I can’t get in the game.
The writing was on the wall years ago for nightly multi-hour raid guilds (aka typical hardcore raid guilds). The rest of the industry is only now becoming aware of it.
EQ2 and many other games have a good number of veteran players some like me find our available game playing time increasing , I would be quite happy with shorter adventures but set within an overall framework or storyline rather than standing alone
As much as we may hate the fact to admit it – Smedley is right. The grindy type MMO’s like the EQ games, WoW have lost their huge presence on the market and people have moved on to either MOBA’s, or more action oriented MMO’s like ESO, or Eve Online. Now this isn’t to say grindy MMO’s have no market – WoW is still the most played MMO but it has had to evolve and change as the market change. And sad to say, this current generation of young gamers have ADHD and want everything handed to them so more and more developers are removing the actual challenge from games. Our generation of spending hundreds, even thousands of hours grinding it out in an MMO, or any game really has come to an end. And you know what? It was a great generation to be apart of it.
This absolutely kills it for me. What is the highest selling game period right now? Call of Duty . Anyone who has played part of this franchise will be able to tell you this attention span thing is total fiction. The number of levels per prestige and the number of prestige’s gets higher and higher with every release. Kids will play for hours upon end including one who set a guinness book world record for playing 7 days straight.
The fact of the matter is smed messed up. Rather than taking accountability for the mistakes in front of the player base he shattered he would rather abandon and attempt at a new crowd to gain praise and acceptance. If you were only gonna boast up the gaming genre of your choice you should went somewhere else that could’ve used your inspirations. Thanks for showing everyone that the only thing between your legs is your ponytail.
The worrisome part for EQ1/E2 of course is:
* Smed got access to the game statistics, so he knows what he is talking about. Basically he is saying EQ1/EQ2 are more or less dead.
* Since Smed controls the money flow at Daybreak, expect reduced money flow to EQ1/EQ2 since they will not be big revenue generators any moer.
This is the time of what I like to call the “Entitlement Generation”. Teenagers and 20 somethings have zero patience and they expect things instantly and to cater to their specific wants and desires. Factor in the extremely wide range of electronic devices for various gaming and social media and we have an entire generation with A.D.D. who are unable to focus or devote a few hours of their time to MMO raids.
To be fair, I am 31 and was a hard core raider for a long time but once fights started taking 20 to 30 minutes (some longer) I really lost interest simply because there were better and more fun ways to spend my time.
Raiding is easily the best part of Everquest 2. The scripts, the dungeon designs, coordinating 24 players to accomplish the same goal and of course, the loot! I do think that it is time to improve upon it though. The main reason I quit was because raiding got stale. It was too rinse and repeat. Fight boss, cycle through script, don’t die, stay out of the fire and loot falls out of the baddies butt.
The only attention span they have is for Facebook, they are on that for hours on end. Yet in the morning they ask me what to do and where to go.
If they would have typed their location in a searchbox all kinds of activities would pop-up but they choose not to.
I can see this because I manage the WiFi in a small hotel. People come in for breakfast and can not look up from their phone, then I walk by to see what’s going on… yes, the blue Facebook is on 9/10 of the phones.
If I want guests to leave, I simply disable ALL social media sites and within minutes they leave lol 🙂
haha!
you know you made an accurate post when it gets taken down, thanks.
The virtual world/living world kind of mmo does not have to have raiding as its endgame. The endgame and therefore the metagame that these games depend on to provide interest is something that deserves a lot more attention from developers. But it’s difficult, and making lobby shooters is easier.
It’s unfortunate that MMO’s are going through some rough times but you kind of have to understand where Daybreak is coming from on this. I also don’t think many of the coders that are working on these games are good at vision and managing large projects. A lot of the content that was lost in EQ2 was blamed on making the codebase easier to maintain, for example. Imagine how much harder it is to come up with novel ways to do things you’ve never attempted before at all on the job.
The main problem with online games in general seems to be answering the question of WHY we want to play. This is where the metagame comes in. Why do I want to raid and get this set of armor? It’s the last thing your character can do, after that your character has “won” EQ2 (or WoW, or etc) and you can wait for the next expansion. But this isn’t a very enticing reason these days. I think this has more to do with the doldrums MMORPG’s are having than length of play session or anything else.
Over time we have seen many of the little things that make these games fun taken out. Random loot was gone from EQ2 a long time ago, stuff is often no trade, finding things is a chore in junk management. A big part of social games is the semi-free market of buying and selling on the broker. That alone provides a lot of value to the player. But what direction did the industry go? Alt currency grinds.
Even an alt currency grind can be tolerable (because we have given in to the endgame of getting the uberest armor to begin with), but nobody can get a group. And for some reason in EQ2 they are adamant about not fixing the dungeon finder. At every turn, it seems the wrong decision has been made.
I believe a lot of this comes down to management philosophy. Instead of people who are focused on making things fun, we seem to have a generation of control freaks taking the helm. Dedicated to enforcing metrics, smiting those who step out of line and question their authority, these people treat us as fellow office drones rather than customers. I imagine the pressure at work is very high given the economy and fears about jobs, but this isn’t the way to deal with issues. The main problem is that people are not having fun anymore.
I think that the whole issue comes down to the metagame. If a company does not build end goals into the game in a way that is sustainable and natural to the human mind, a rather toxic metagame usually develops. People who put up with grindy aspects of their favorite game will leave in droves when this happens. Nobody is going to pay money to be tortured by online a-holes, and certainly not when the company itself employs other a-holes to shout the customer base down.
But mostly, the game has to have a long term appeal. This creates the fun, and this reason for playing over the long term is what has been lost. If someone wants to develop a new gen MMORPG, the planning has to begin with the endgame and the metagame that spawns around it. You have to control that and then sell it to people; the rest of the game systems can grow around it. We’ve played lots of rather boring game systems (mashing buttons) so a lack of innovative combat or what have you is not the central problem. It’s always about WHY we play. Start at the end and work backwards.
John Smedley: “How many people do you still know that are still raiding in WoW every night, or EverQuest and EverQuest II?”
Strawman argument. Because he could not ask, ‘How many people are playing WoW, or EverQuest and EverQuest II?”, without getting laughed off the stage.
World of Warcraft surpasses 10M subscribers once again
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/05/world-of-warcraft-surpasses-10m-subscribers-once-again/
“Publisher Activision Blizzard announced today that memberships for World of Warcraft once again surpassed more than 10 million active subscribers. This comes after Blizzard launched the Warlords of Draenor expansion, which the company noted sold 3.3 million copies in the first 24 hours after its release.”
How many million copies of Rum Cellar were sold on the first day Mr. Smedley?
Guess what the competition plans for the long term?
“Blizzard now intends to focus on expanding WoW for the foreseeable future.”
And what is the money opinion?
http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/12/world-of-warcraft-helps-the-digital-games-market-generate-almost-1-billion-a-month/
“The digital gaming market generated $995 million in revenues in February, according to analyst firm SuperData. This is a 2 percent increase from the same period last year.” …
““The enduring strength of a franchise like World of Warcraft is a clear indication that emphasizing retention is a more valuable strategy than merely pursuing large acquisition volume,” Joost van Dreunen, chief executive officer of SuperData, told GamesBeat. “Here we are, more than ten years later, and still we see strong numbers for a game that is beset on all sides by titles competing for mind and wallet share. It also tell us that the recent emergence of MOBAs and other free-to-play games does not spell the end of subscription-based games and, rather, that the market is now big enough to facilitate both types.””
Sarcasm on. Customer retention, what a concept. Sarcasm off
Remains to be seen who’s actually riding the curve, and who’s under it and digging deeper.
But do give everything more thought John Smedley. Or you’ll be another John Sculley in the history books.
/*
PC gaming is expanding
http://store.steampowered.com/universe
This just show that Smed will once again drive this game company down the wrong path. Go look back since eq2 came out and tell me which game has been a hit???? The Agency? …. Nope. Wizardy online…. nope. Free Realms? Nope, Star Wars Clone wars… Nope, Vangaurd they bought and could not help it….Gone. So no H1Z1 will not make it out of Beta the game is crap and the graphics and content are crap. Even bribing people to come to it won’t help it. Some one with a track record like that should be fired
Couple this with the apparent bribing of “Goon Squad” from EVE to play H1Z1, and you can get a pretty good read on what Smedley thinks about EQ/EQ2 and PvE; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4g75POBQNw
Yet, he continues to believe that we should be paying money for a game that he is clearly stating he has no intention to invest, time money or talent in.
Add to that, if one more person states that we need to give the people that work for this company a break due to their limited resources I am going to throw myself off of the top level of my GH. We have all work ed with limited resources and staffing at times in our careers. And we excelled and got the job done. If they are going to continue to want the same money then I want the same return.
I partly agree and partly don’t.
I played EQ1 from release until 2007 and raided hardcore for a lot of it. I lost days and months of my life but I enjoyed it.
However, it got to a point when it became frustrating because all the hard work put in to get the best stuff became obsolete in the next xpac. To me, the reward was the motive for doing it rather than the encounter itself. Well, at least after the novelty of beating an encounter was over.
This is the same for EQ2 and I’m sure other games. There needs to be a balance between fun and reward for encounters. But there also there needs to be a vision for multiple xpacs in the future which means your time investment people put in is not felt to be completely wasted when the next xpac is released.
It’s a really fine line because without the better rewards, you’re not going to sell the xpac. But if you make it just about the rewards, many burn out after working hard to get x item only for new y item to be twice as good and come from a solo mob in the next xpac.
Seems to be at least a few people here who get it.. the problem isn’t the gaming industry, or even Smed (although he’s got issues a-plenty), it’s a generation of people looking for instant gratification.
I’ve been trying to get my son to play EQ2 with me, and it’s been a challenge, because there’s so many other games out there that don’t require focus and commitment, and reward you constantly.
I long for the days of actual achievement and the sense of accomplishment; I feel SOE/Daybreak has even started to strip that out of EQ2, and it makes me sad.
I hope that over time I can get my son to feel that same sense of accomplishment that I’ve felt so many times in EQ2 (tradeskill epic, my first raid, mythical weapon, etc). If I can’t save the world, at least maybe I can save my own kid. I just hope Daybreak lets me continue to try..
Gaming is changing. The day of the weekend long raids where you have to remain logged in is changing.
Solos and advanced solos are the way forward for giving those casual players their fix. I support this. I’m hoping we will see more with more intresting scripts and stories.
But you can’t forget the raid, the grouper, the person who doesn’t mind sinking an hour or two to shoot the shit with some friends and getting some gear or spend a weekend with the guild clearing content.
Provided Daybreak don’t lose sight of the group/raider player, all is good.
EQ2 has never been more casual/solo friendly.. there is more solo/small group content in EQ2 then there has EVER been before…
Raiding is the ONLY thing that I play the game for… so the faster instant bam instant gratification games don’t interest me at all.. content is the reason eq2 is at a slow, and lower populated servers need to be merged so that people can get groups etc. also there is advertising that just never happened. Wow is still a strong game with loads of people playing it. As a end game player if we don’t see more end game raiding, I am sure more people will leave.