Games as service
 

Today I read that Asheron's Call 2 had run for 3 years and then been cancelled due to too few subscribers(). It made me start ponder. Game as service like mmrpg might sound fun but we might also be fooled by it. Would we buy Microsoft Office as a service which servers could be closed at the whim by the company - possibly taking online documents with it? Most people would be very mad if such thing happened. To a mmrpg this can happen as well. Players lose the work they have performed in the online world. They lose a game they liked. So in a way upgrading from singleplayer games(non service based ones) to mmrpg(service based) might actually be a downgrade.

To me it feels unethical of a company to sell a game to a customer and then make it impossible to play it. As there's no AC2 servers running anylonger the customers cant use the product they bought. Even if you look at it from the perspective that the customer bought a license to play the game it feels to me like there's something wrong somewhere. Perhaps the server software should be released to a mmrpg if it is about to get closed down? Then again I doubt many companies would want to do that as it could be making competition between your new mmrpgs and the old one.

The charts at can be interesting to look at. We see that AC2 "only" reached 50K subscribers before it started to decline. It's also interesting that AC1 had 120K subscribers a while but then dropped down to about 15K subscribers. One could argue that AC1 is closed next.

What does everyone think? Is games as service good or bad? Perhaps there's better models that should be used instead like some hybrid mmrpg with both offline and online mode?

Re: Games as service
 

Unfortunate, but hardly surprising. While a non-commercial mud is generally operated as a hobby, commercial muds tend to be operated for profit; if they cease to be profitable, they'll be shut down. In the case of graphical muds, their lifespan is even more limited by their graphics (eye candy becomes dated very fast).

In the past, it's been implied by some that commercial muds offer a more stable future than non-commercial muds, because the admin have a vested financial stake in making sure the game continues to operate. My counter-argument has always been that the existence of such a mud depends upon its financial status, and this situation with Asheron's Call 2 is a prime example of the sort of thing I was referring to; The game ceased to be profitable, so it was cancelled.

If you want a multiplayer game with lots of players, then you really need at least some service aspect - even something like Diablo II, which is great fun solo, relies on the Battle.net service for its community element.

Re: Games as service
 

Yes and that is an issue to both players and developers. The players can get to pay a lot when you sum the monthly subscription fee. Both players and developer lose a lot of work and effort if the game is closed.

I believe that WoW's huge success might be just as bad as it is good for the genre. From looking at the charts you can see both Lineage1 and Lineage2 are declining while WoW's subscription increase rate seem to not have reached its peak yet. It'll be interesting to see what happens once is released.

The different between Diablo II and e.g WoW is that there is no monthly fee to play Diablo II. Also I believe an emulator for Battle.net was created but was scared away by Blizzard's lawyers. So for a while atleast there was a backup service if the main service would have gone down. Even if Battle.net is closed the players still have access to the game. In the more traditional mmrpg they would only have the "unusable" CDs left if the service was closed.

Re: Games as service
 

ACII closed after they switched credit card processors, and all their "sleeper" accounts did not renew. I think they lost like 60% of their business from one day to the next.

I'm not sure that I agree with the decision to close the game down. Afterall, the coding is already completed, the servers have already been bought, and it's very doubtful that they'll need a hardware upgrade due to the lack of numbers. At the same time, I freely admit that there could be costs that I can't imagine such as tech support, customer service, player complaints against other players, forum support, etc. Perhaps those costs heavily outweighed the gain. These companies, unlike most mudding teams, have share holders to answer to, so I see why they might try to cut their losses once they go in the red.

Honestly, I think I would give our muds away to people who wanted to host them rather than shut it down, but even Mythic made the choice to shut down all their muds once they got huge in the MMO arena.

Re: Games as service
 

They're not cancelling all of their muds though, only Asheron's Call 2, and releasing it to the public wouldn't do the first Asheron's Call any favours. If it were the other way around, and they were cancelling the original Asheron's Call, then I might agee with you - but how many people are going to pay money up front to try out Asheron's Call if they know they can play the sequel for free?

Re: Games as service
 

Do people really care that much about a MMORPG closing down? Assuming it's done responsibly and nobody's cheated out of their money, people just go to the next game. MMORPGs are about the people, and so I think that the mechanics aren't really all that important.

Re: Games as service
 

I believe the mechanics are very important. From what I have read, it seems that releasing a mmrpg too early with broken mechanics can ruin the entire project. If you read the review of Dark and Light over at you'll see that what looks like a quite nice game from the graphics get a low rating. A quote I find interesting in that review is, "The game in its current state is broken, full of bugs and does not have half of what was promised."[Mortensen]. My guess is that they released the game too early. Perhaps they had no choice. Could the game have gotten a better rating if they had fixed the bugs before releasing it?

This is also backed up by Jeff Strain, one of the co-founders of ArenaNet who are the makers of Guild Wars, in the article located at . The relevant quote is "I can assure you that releasing an MMO into the market before the development team is proud of it will result in writing off every penny invested in its development."[Strain]

It might be possible that in cases like AC2, people would become hesitant to buy future MMRPGs made by that company.

Re: Games as service
 

Well, considering that every single text MUD I know of is run as a service, we better hope games as a service are a good thing. As most text MUDs don't have a client-side component, they are ALL service, even more so than Asheron's Call, for instance.

--matt

Re: Games as service
 

For every Asheron's Call 2 there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of hobbyist MUDs that launched and then shut down quickly afterwards. It's so trivial to start a hobbyist MUD that that fact alone ensures the rate of failure of hobbyist MUDs will always dwarf commercial projects. We'll just never hear about most of them because they'll never attract more than a handful of players.

All it takes for a hobbyist to decide to shut down the world is that he's bored of it. That's not to say the good hobbyists act that way but it's pretty obvious when you look at the full list of MUDs on Mudconnector, for instance, that most of the devs operating most of the MUDs there are far from serious about creating and sustaining value for players. And why should they be? It doesn't take much of an investment in terms of time/money/will to download yet another DIKU copy, slap a name on it, and "launch it".

Again, that's not to imply that commercial = will always be around (obviously not) nor is it mean to imply that hobbyist = flakey. It is, however meant to imply that reality dictates that the average hobbyist project that is launched has a far, far higher chance of shutting down in the near future than does the average commercial project (though I'd argue that even in the commercial case, the likelihood is greater than 50%).

--matt

Re: Games as service
 

Had the servers been bought? We lease our servers, for instance, as do many MMO operators. Further, servers are only part of the NOC costs. You've got bandwidth, server support (servers fail after all), etc.


Those are all true, and it's also about brand. It's not to Turbine's advantage to just release an unsupported game, because the experience there tarnishes whatever value the Turbine brand has (I'm unsure how much it really has given their rather troubled track record, but the point remains)

That's one reason we spun off Sparkplay Media as a separate company to develop graphical games. One of the worries is that if we're successful with Sparkplay it will dwarf the size of Iron Realms, and if they were mushed together into one company the natural logic of the situation would end up dictating that the text MUDs get de-prioritized. By putting them into separate companies, we ensure that the success of Sparkplay doesn't end up minimizing the IRE text MUDs, which have a long life ahead of them.

Re: Games as service
 

We better hope it is a good thing yes :). The idea of a hybrid MUD is starting to sound a bit interesting to me. A MUD with both offline and online play. I don't think I had considered that before this thread.

Re: Games as service
 

Just consider that you're making two different experiences in that case, and that what you do while offline cannot really count towards what you do while online because of hacking issues. The client is always eminently hackable and if the game resolution is done client-side vs. server-side then you can't trust that anything that has been done was really done.

So, for example, gaining gold or xp while offline couldn't really translate to the online experience because you can't trust that they have actually been earned as opposed to hacked in.

--matt

Re: Games as service
 

There are certainly many muds that shut down soon after (or even before) they launch, but whether those muds would have eventually become commercial or not is something we can only speculate. A number of today's commercial text-based muds started out non-commercial, after all.

If you were to replace the word "hobbyist" with "stock" then I'd agree, but a mud doesn't suddenly become more difficult to develop just because the players start sending you cash.

While all it takes for a commercial mud to decide to shut down the world is that it's no longer profitable. The difference is that, while a hobbyist may never tire of their game, sooner or later every commercial mud will cease to be profitable.

Having said that, in my experience hobbyist muds are more likely to be handed down to someone else when the original owner gets bored. I imagine the same would be true for commercial muds, although the arrangement would likely involve a formal contract. Once again, however, if the objective of the mud is to turn a profit, then as soon as it stops doing so it will be cancelled.

Re: Games as service
 

A commercial MUD is far more than just the development effort. There are all sorts of things to deal with that you simply do not have to deal with as a hobbyist. Security certifications around storing credit card information, actual responsive customer service, the marketing and advertising chain (tracking conversions from ads and whatnot is trickier than it sounds), human resources (hiring processes), schedules (although Iron Realms is quite relaxed about scheduling due to the highly iterative nature of its process), etc. It's fundamentally not different but the devil's in the details.

Not at all. For instance, Mythic ran their text MUDs past the point where they were profitable. Further, I'm unsure where your data points are coming from on every commercial MUD ceasing to be profitable. The oldest operating text MUD (Gemstone I believe) is a commercial MUD, for instance. I could as easily claim that every hobbyist MUD will be shut down to due lack of interest eventually, but that's not really accurate.

Really? I suspect you're mainly thinking here about hobbyist MUDs that have gotten to a certain point in their life cycle. I'm including all hobbyist MUDs, which includes the kid who sets up a MUD and shuts it down a week later. The churn of hobbyist MUDs at the very low end is pretty high if you watch Mudconnector's listings.

Saying that the only objective of a commercial MUD is to turn a profit is as misleading as saying that the only objective of a hobbyist is to entertain himself. If profit was the only thing I was concerned with, for instance, I wouldn't have gotten into text MUDs. They're hardly a massive market, and never were. One gets into a niche market on the commercial end (in my experience) because of an all-consuming passion for it and the desire to focus on that passion rather than having to hold down a day job doing something less entertaining.

In the case of our MUDs for instance, it wouldn't matter if they weren't profitable. I'd just fund them out of my own pocket.

--matt

Re: Games as service
 

So is a hobbyist mud. But I was responding to your statement "It's so trivial to start a hobbyist MUD".

Well yes, the "commercial" parts - but hobbyist muds also have to deal with security issues, customer service, advertising, recruitment, schedules, etc. And even more difficult, they have to do so without a budget.

Ran, past tense. I'm not saying commercial muds automatically close down the instant they fail to make a profit, but that if they continually cost more money then they make, then after a certain point it no longer makes sense to run them as a commercial business.

Which is why I instead said "if the objective of the mud is to turn a profit..."

Which brings us back to your earlier comment "All it takes for a hobbyist to decide to shut down the world is that he's bored of it."

If the objective of the mud is to turn a profit, and it continually fails to do so, then after a certain point it will be shut down. Conversely, if you're working on the mud out of passion, and that passion turns into boredom, then after a certain point it will be shut down or passed on to someone else.

Re: Games as service
 

From my understanding, the server system for AC is **vastly** superior in how it handles moving between servers than EQ or WoW have done, so maybe the next game to come along will at least realize that, and aquire the design. Ironically, this also means that its probably very hard to manage to replicate it, the way they did when creating stand alone EQ1 servers.

But yeah, I had kind of hoped, given some of what I heard of how much less zonish and prone to making you wait when moving from area to area, it was, that they would eventually use it to make something even better. Of course, given that I am an EQ2 player, I can't help but hope that Sony picks it up from them and builds a better EQ with it. lol

Really though, we are at a cross roads. On one hand, in theory, something like Second Life might continue forever, as long as the archetecture allowed for expanding the game design, like happened with the internet itself, though SL is "probably" not there yet, for a lot of reasons. On the other hand, systems that are stable, complex and strictly targetted at game play and the like cannot last forever, if for no other reason than because its damn hard to improve the technology that makes it work, without radical changes to the client, the servers, and even the data. Its unfortunate, but inevitable.

Re: Games as service
 

It is trivial to start a hobbyist MUD if you define it like the_logos has done. That anyone can start a finished one and then shut it down. If we look at the more serious attempts where the hobbyist wants to start a MUD and make it really good it starts to become more like the commercial MUDs, and then it is far from trivial. It is amazing we have decent quality MUDs out there made by hobbyists because there's so many things that needs to be solved. Unlike the commercial MUD the hobbyist does the work as a hobby. This means continue long hours of work after getting home from day-work. Even if it is a fun hobby it does require you to put energy and effort into it.

As a hobbyist you can be very uncertain about what to do. An angry builder might tell you to remove all his areas for some odd reason. Most hobbyists probably neither want nor can afford legal help. So they go to TMC and ask for help :). Also if your game is story intense with zones tightly connected, and you decide to remove the zones, this could mean effectively cutting a big hole in the plot line. It could take weeks to repair.

Also once the game starts to have players you have to handle player relations. Some players will login to your game just to tell you how much it sucks. Others will complain and make a scene every time you make a change they don't like. With more players there's more who find reasons to make a scene. I have even seen one case where players from another MUD started to login, just to harass some player.

If you get exhausted with your day-work and need to take it easier on the MUD side awhile, it can cause trouble ingame as the morale can suffer.

And what do you do if you find a serious bug that keep crash the game, but it is subtle and can require many hours of debugging? Meanwhile the players complain on forum that the game is more offline than online. As hobbyist you might only be able to work on your project 3-4 hours per day if even that.

Re: Games as service
 

Except that someone could start a commercial mud in exactly the same way - offhand I can think of at least two commercial muds running today that started out as stock muds.

Re: Games as service
 

Amen Brotha. Look at Ultima Online, which was HUGE and the powerhouse for a few years and now it is WoW and in a couple years it will be something else. Do we really care? That's business.

Same goes for Muds. There are many more Text RPG choices than GUI RPGs (I like the gui distinction rather than the lame MMORPG, because anything could be defined as Massive) so you will likely find what you want in a Text RPG. The reason for this is because Text RPG's can be hobby run, but try to run a competitive GUI RPG without paid high end graphic artists and proggers and you'll get jack.

But the bottom line is that GUI RPG's and Text RPG's will come and go as the market dictates and not because someone can't hop onto Battle.net and play.

Re: Games as service
 

If it was more difficult, there'd be a whole lot less hobbyist MUDs and a whole lot more commercial MUDs. I've done both and pressure in a hobbyist environment doesn't exist in the same way it does commercially. Things change when people are depending on the success of the MUD to pay their mortgages and feed their kids. I'm not trying to say that that makes commercial MUDs better, but the experience of running them successfully is different.

--matt

Re: Games as service
 

This thread seems to be going the way of that huge "Free vs. Pay" thread went. I have to say though, being one of the only "truly free" muds out there, I still agree with the_logos on the above statement: It is MUCH easier, less stressful, and an entirely different way of operating a commercial mud (or business) vs. a hobby/free for all Mud.

And I will continue to say that in many instances you get what you pay for. I can't imagine the difference in style of administration/advertising/tax issues/staffing/liability/credit/registrations/data base/cheating issues/ and on I would have to deal with if NW were to turn commercial.

Before everyone starts yelling "Hey, commercial doesn't make you better!" let me just say that EVERY game has it's advantages and disadvantages and the choice of better or more fun game is subjective by the consumer, but the statement still holds true in "most" situations and that is: "You get what you pay for." I can cite a hundred examples of this in the business arena, but I think everyone is smart enough to understand this concept.

So, for those that run commercial Muds, "Merry Holidays and I hope you do well this season and next year!" and for those that run hobbyist Muds, "Merry Holidays and let's all take a break for a couple weeks, kick back, put our feet up and do nothing...why not? No one is paying us to slave away over the holidays!"

Cheers!

Re: Games as service
 

My comments were made within the context of your earlier statement "It's so trivial to start a hobbyist MUD" (emphasis mine). As I pointed out before, it's certainly trivial to start a stock mud, but a game isn't suddenly going to become more difficult to create just because the players start sending you cash.

If you were to only compare muds which had been started from scratch (rather than based on a stock engine), I'd be surprised if there was a huge difference between the number of hobbyist and commercial muds.

And before someone takes offence at that comment, please remember that we're explicitly talking about starting a mud - it's trivial to download, compile and start up a stock mud, and that is without doubt one of the main reasons why there are so many fly-by-night muds.

Sure, agreed (assuming we're talking about muds that are operated as a full business, rather than just selling a few trinkets to cover their hosting costs). But before you can start charging your players, you first need a running game for them to play - and the development phase is the hurdle where I've seen most muds fail.

I've seen numerous mud projects that had (what I felt was) great potential, but hardly any of them survived long enough to produce anything playable. Were they failed commercial muds, though, or failed hobbyist muds? Who knows - they never got that far. And the same could also be said of the muds that start from stock; most fail, but they never reached the point where going commercial was even an option.

That's why I think it's difficult to compare the number of failed hobbyist against the number of failed commercial muds - because many of the former might well have become commercial had they not failed. A common question you'll hear among hobbyist mudders is "If your game becomes successful, will you go commercial?"

Re: Games as service
 

I think the simple answer is, "Yes, if the costs of operation outweigh the benefits of staying non-commercial."

Re: Games as service
 

You could still have an offline campaign to play. It could also be possible to let the user modify things and then upload to the server. For example you could work on customizing parts of the game offline, e.g the character. Look at Neverwinter Nights. It is an offline game but you can also play it online on player run servers. Some servers even allow your offline character to be used online, others use "server vaults" only for characters.

So what I suggested is a bit of the opposit. An online game, that you also can play offline. You could download the character from the server to offline mode, however you wouldn't be able to upload everything to the server. Mainly customizations.

Re: Games as service
 

The first game I hacked when in my heavy hacker days was Dune. I tried to win it normally and found it impossible at the higher levels. Even with the hack it was very difficult.

Now adays most games on Xbox, gameboy, etc. have built in hacks to have invincible modes. I find this detrimental as the hard line rule of game progging has always been: "Never give away items, areas, or cheats as they will invariably destroy the excitement of play, ergo, destroy your playerbase."

Re: Games as service
 

Releasing source code or even binaries isn't necessarily that easy. Source code often depends on licensed code or binaries which you do not have a right to release and other people would have to license themselves to have a right to use. And these costs can be very expensive. Removing these licensed dependencies before the code is released can require a considerable expense, something the company cannot afford.

I have always thought about escrow services, companies could place game assets in escrow and players could play their game knowing there was some recourse if the company went out of business or did not meet some minimum level of reasonable service. Of course there would have to be some process where the dependencies were removed from whatever the escrow service released. There would be a lot of costs involved and who would pay them is questionable. The money this would require from the game developers would take away from the money available to develop the game. I know on the game I worked on, at the time of development the company didn't have the funds to spare for something like this and didn't really for a year or two past release.

But I wonder if assets placed in escrow are a vulnerability. What if the players knowing they had the escrow as a backup worked themselves up into a lather about how the changes the developers made were ruining the game. They would just have to quit until the escrow asset release conditions are met and the developer would have been shafted. Of course, the players would have shafted themselves by no longer having the same quality of service.. but they would find that out in due course.

Personally I'd want the escrow service for non-MMO games. That way when the company no longer supports the game and it doesn't stand up well to the advances of technology, you could get the source code released and do non-hacky upgrades to it.

Anyways..

Re: Games as service
 

Is that still the case, though? Now that we have a lot more casual gamers who want instant gratification - something that you could argue is everywhere throughout society - is "godmode" almost a necessity? I believe that games have been getting easier and easier. Compared to something like the original Mario which was huge and took forever, some modern games are a piece of cake and can be completed fully in less than a day.

I can definitely see this in MUDs and MMOs too, where a lot of players see "challenging" as a negative rather than a plus, especially where the gameplay itself is seen as secondary to the socialising. I think you can make the argument now that in terms of percentage of market share, more people want games to fulfill the role of making the player feel awesome and powerful, rather than being exciting and fulfilling in terms of completing something difficult.

Re: Games as service
 

You are definately right about the casual gamers and instant gratification. I think that Xbox, gameboy, and other such $50.00 games have been changed into simpler games for one huge reason: Profit. If it takes you 6 months to win a game will you buy another tomorrow? No. So, they let the kids win in a few days, a week on the outside and guess where the kid is next week? At the game shop buying another game.

Even so, since NW isn't in the market to satisfy these kids, but rather finding the players looking for what you described as, "..exciting and fulfilling in terms of completing something difficult.", I'm not so much concerned about that market trend, though I probably should be.

I can't argue with you at all though about the direction of games making a player "feel awesome and powerful". I logged onto a few games and was baffled at the stats of players: Level- 45,296, Wealth-25,592,092,092. You kill the rock troll and earn 25 million xp (ROFL). LEVELS into the 10's of thousands, and coins into the billions? Reminds me of what happened to pinball machines, they started out with winning a free game at 2,000 points and now are a 2 Billion points to win a free game. You have to laugh at that.

Re: Games as service
 

But......... ..... *confused*