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Gentile or Jew
O ye who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

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I find that, perhaps more so than a Code Team or an Art Team, a good Design Team really should be spending a lot of time just talking, discussing, and arguing. Not only to learn from each other but also understand each other. Playing games and talking about what they mean, in the concrete and abstract. There’s a tendency, I think, for management to view this behavior as quaint or amusing and put up with it when things go well, only to jettison it when things go badly. But I think it’s exactly the kind of behavior you have to vigorously protect to make sure you’re Engineering Success instead of Managing Failure. If you ditch all the things that make your team special, all the things that inspire them and keep them creative, then you end up Making a Product instead of Managing a Team. A distinction that’s perhaps not very important in a port, or a budget title, but becomes critical when you’re working on an intensely creative project like a AAA video game. Good teams make good games. Focus on the former, and you’ll get the latter.

This isn’t an indictment of my experiences personally, such an indictment could never be contained in a single paragraph or indeed a single post, but it is something I believe in strongly. So if you see a sudden explosion of content here in the future, it’s probably the result of me getting another job which probably isn’t going to happen anytime soon. I’m not really looking, I’m enjoying the time off. I’ve been reading a lot. Starship (originally published in the UK as Non-Stop) by Brian Aldiss, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Use of Weapons by Ian M. Banks, still trying to get through Deadhouse Gates by Steven Erikson, tough going. I’ve almost finished the first 8 chapters of a novel I have an outline for. I’ve got a stack of Xbox 360/PS3 games here as long as your arm…and I’ve been playing a lot of WoW. A lot of WoW.

That brings me to the subject of this post. I was at lunch the other day with a friend who’s working on a MMO and told me the people in charge at his company described it in a company meeting as a “WoW-killer.”

For those of you reading this who may not be familiar with the term “Foo-killer” where Foo is whatever the current hotness is: GTA, Halo, the iPhone or before it, the iPod, let me enlighten you.

“_____-killer” is a phrase marketing people use to describe why their product is going to sell like hotcakes, usually when there’s no reason to believe it will sell like hotcakes beyond “we’ve worked really hard on it and spent a lot of money.” Marketing people say things like this because, by and large, they don’t understand the industry they work in. I have an idea why this is, but it’s a subject for another post.

The Marketing People don’t really understand why WoW is huge in the first place.  They naively see their product as being in all ways the same and in some ways better. From this point of view it’s perhaps forgivable that they think their product is going to be the next big thing. Inside the Echo Chamber of the company, working alongside a lot of talented, creative people, working on a game that appears to be really good, it’s natural to think “we’ve got the best thing ever!” They believe they’re just naturally taking pride in their team and their work, and promoting it, promoting good morale.

Unfortunately, this attitude brooks no middle-ground. My friend is an experienced developer, responsible for some of the best-selling games of all time, and when he heard the “WoW-killer” comment, he and his coworkers all sagged in their chairs. They know their industry. They know how popular World of Warcraft is and they know how absurd it is to describe their game as a “WoW-killer.” But suddenly they find they’re working in an environment where the propaganda coming out of the company is “WoW-killer” and suggesting otherwise becomes a kind of treason. Viewed by the top brass as morale-destroying. When in fact the top brass already destroyed morale with the “Foo-killer” phrase.

“Can’t we,” my friend wonders, “just make a great game? Everyone was happy when we were just making a great game.”

Well, I had to bring my friend down a little at lunch because I had to explain to him that no, it’s not ok to just make a great game in the MMO biz. His game is going to fail. He disagreed and so I brought him down some more and explained my point.

He’s a developer, as am I, and he makes a classic mistake a lot of developers make in thinking that the success or failure of his game will be due to some combination of the strengths of the game, and the whims of the marketplace. This is how I used to think. And, indeed, if he were working on a normal video game this would be the case.  But he’s not, he’s working on an MMO. MMOs are different from other video games in that their primary selling point is not anything IN the game, not the gameplay or the graphics or the setting or tone or any degree of innovation. Actually, that’s not true, let me rephrase that. The selling point may be tone and graphics (Age of Conan) or gameplay (Warhammer Online) or setting (Lord of the Rings Online), these may be what draw your audience. But these are not the factors on which your game will succeed or fail. Your MMO will succeed or fail based on one factor alone. The Network. I’m not talking about their computer network, I’m not talking about their servers or their up-time. I’m talking about the network of players.

A normal video game is a single-player experience or, if multiplayer, not persistent multiplayer.  It doesn’t rely on a network to succeed or fail. It’s going to live or die based on the strength of the game and the whims of the marketplace. Not so an MMO. An MMO needs a Network. And regardless of who you are, you cannot beat WoW’s Network. Allow me to illustrate.

My friend Jim, he of D&D0, joined my group when we were playing a lot of FASA’s Miniature Wargame, VOR. Vor was a lot of fun, my group liked it, and Jim said “This is a really well-designed game. It plays well.” It felt like we were beta-testing it, but there was a good game in there among the muck. If you’re a regular reader of this column you may know where this is going. When Jim wasn’t playing with us, he was playing Warhammer. A game he didn’t like.

“Jim,” I asked, “you don’t like that game. Why are you playing it?” A very Designermans question.

Jim shrugged. “It’s what everyone plays.” And you had to hear the way he said it. He didn’t mean “it’s all the rage” the way you might say “everyone’s seeing the new Ridley Scott movie.” He meant “it is a constant.” Everyone plays it, even when they don’t like it BECAUSE everyone plays it. The value is IN the Network, not the game.

That’s the Theory of Network Externalities and it’s not something most designers or developers think about. In its simplest statement: you buy a phone. If you’re the only person in the world with a phone, your phone has literally no value. Regardless of how it looks, or how much technological innovation it contains, it’s useless. If someone else gets a phone, now your phone has value. There’s someone you can call. I hope you like that person. If someone ELSE gets a phone, your phone just doubled in value. Now there are two people you can call.

In other words, the value of the thing comes not from the thing or the technology inside the thing, but from the network of users. The people. Warhammer has a nearly unbeatable network. Jim knows he can go into any game store and find a Warhammer game to join. Not so Vor. Vor was one in a long series of games by other companies to duplicate Warhammer’s success by trying to beat Games Workshop at their own game. This could not be done.

The good news was: the guys at Games Workshop, in deliberately aiming their game at teenagers and working to extract as much money from them as possible through the sale of huge armies, created an opening for another company. If another company went after the lapsed Warhammer players, the older players who wanted a better game, one that didn’t cost as much to get into, then you might have a hit on your hands.

One company did exactly that. Privateer Press. They released Warmachine forcing me to wonder if eventually someone’s going to release a miniature wargame and just call it War*, or WarFoo. Warmachine was a better designed game, cost a little less to get into and was a hit. No game is a hit forever, and Warmachine’s success may be slowing, I don’t know. But they found Warhammer’s weakness, exploited it, and Step Three Was Profit.

Part of the secret here is that Privateer Press piggybacked on Games Workshop’s existing network. GW did the work, PP just exploited it by targeting former Warhammer players.

As far as I can tell, and this may seem a controversial point, WoW has no such weakness. Oh sure, you may not like some element of it. I consider certain elements of it lacking, I’ve seen what I think of as some bad design decisions, but overwhemlingly the game is created to appeal to as wide a base as possible. Unlike Games Workshop, Blizzard wants everyone to like their game. The art style may seem primitive compared to other modern videogames, but it’s expressive, it’s not challenging, and it looks great on old machines. The setting might seem so generic as to be almost content-free, but it’s instantly recognizable to everyone. It’s set in Fantasyland. My mom could look at someone’s character and recognize a Dwarf or an Elf, or a Orc, even though she knows nothing about WoW’s setting. The design may seem pedestrian, largely a rehash of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, but these are proven designs that Blizzard refines to an art form. There’s actually a phenomenal amount of really good design in there the hardcore player might not notice focused, as they are, on other things.

So pick some element of WoW you think you can improve on. Doesn’t matter. Pick all of them. Imagine your game is in all ways better than WoW. Fine. Let’s imagine that through early adopters and Alpha Gamers and word of mouth you get 6 out of 10 WoW players to play your game. Forget that this means your game is instantly many times more successful than any other non-WoW MMO, I’m granting you an impossible majority of WoW players will try your game.

Six months later you’ll be back down to 200,000 subscribers, just like everyone else. Maybe you’ve hit upon a way to make an MMO on the cheap, like the guys at NCSoft, and so you can keep things going with 200,000 subscribers, but that’s your fate. You think it’s going to be 2 years and $40 million and 2 million subscribers, but it’s 4 years later and $160 million and you’ve got 200,000 subscribers and now what? Time to give your game away.

The reason is, while 6 in 10 WoW players may try your game…10 in 10 were still playing WoW. Though they may not like it as much as another game, everyone plays WoW. That’s the Network. All your friends are playing WoW. And the reality is, you’ll be lucky if 1 in 10 WoW players try your game. Maybe you think you can grab the non-WoW playing MMO market. Well, what you’re saying is “we can create a new market.” Good luck. Maybe you’re Steve Jobs and Apple and you effectively create a new market out of thin air with your new iProduct. But I submit it would not be wise to bet on that. WoW is big enough now that if you’re not playing, it’s probably because you’re not interested in an MMO. You know what’s going to beat the iPod? Nothing. The technology will change and the iPod will become obsolete, but while we live with this technology, the iPod will remain on top. Activision looked into the MMO market and saw that it would cost them $500 million just to create a competitive product with no guarantee of success. So they just bought Blizzard.

So the secret of this column is; there will be no WoW-killer. WoW’s position is unassailable. We live in a time when absolute statements like that sound foolish, I don’t mind sounding foolish. I’d love to see a robust and mature MMO market where several games could be successful. But I don’t think that’s the reality. Whatever else is true, you will not be able to beat WoW’s network.

Frankly, I don’t think Blizzard can beat WoW’s network. A new MMO from Blizzard will certainly have a big head start compared to any other MMO, but in order to woo their own players away, Blizzard needs to find a way to get that Network to come with them from one game to the next. Maybe if I log into the New MMO, I can see my friends in the Old MMO. And all the time and work I put into WoW somehow pays off in the new MMO. I’m sure there are some ideas that may work, but this is what they need to do.

I once said that it would be irresponsible of Blizzard if there wasn’t at least a meeting in which they talked about turning Blizzard into The WoW Company. In other words, maybe Blizzard shouldn’t be making any other games. It might be financially irresponsible. I’m not saying it is, I’m saying they better have at least discussed it.

But I think Blizzard is going to need more games because they seem unable to take the next step. They have the Network, what they’re missing is the Externalities. They don’t have a Swoosh or a Mario.

Nike was maybe the first company to recognize that their brand was so strong, they didn’t need to make shoes anymore. Shoes would always be part of their business, but their network was so big, their brand was so strong, they were able to extract money directly from the network selling T-shirts and hats and pretty much anything with the Nike Swoosh on it. That’s their business now, extracting money from the network.

This may be the subject of another post, but Nintendo is the same way. There are internal Games Workshop memos that explicitly state that GW is not part of the gaming industry, they are the Games Workshop Hobby. I’d bet the same memo exists at Nintendo. “We are not part of the video game industry, we are the Nintendo Industry.” The Wii is a successful attempt on their part to separate themselves from the idea of “video game” in the public’s mind. Nintendo makes Nintendo Games for the Nintendo Gamer and a massive part of their business is extracting money directly from the network. Selling Pokemon and Mario merchandise. The games are nice, but it’s the Network that has the money. And they will give it to you for a hat, or a shirt. As long as that shirt has Mario on it.

Blizz has no Mario, that’s something they’re not very good at. In creating a deliberately bland, non-challenging world that everyone and their mother recognizes as Fantasyland, they’ve sacrificed Iconic characters. They’ve gained a lot in exchange. It may be enough. We may all still be playing WoW 10 years from now in which case…who needs new MMOs?

That’s the lesson. Your game may be great and I believe my friend’s game is going to be amazing…but there’s no market for a new MMO. We already have the only one we need…whether we like it or not.

End of Line.

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