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Postcard from GDC 2003: Gordon Walton's "10 Reasons You Don't Want to Make a Massively Multiplayer Game"
By Jennifer Olsen
Gamasutra
March 6, 2003

URL: http://www.gamasutra.com/gdc2003/features/20030306/olsen_01.htm

In terms of how long MMOGs have been a force in the gaming world, Gordon Walton has been making them since the equivalent of the cooling of the world's crust. Walton has been working on MMOGs exclusively since and has a long history with networked gaming before going persistent.

Gordon Walton

Walton is also a perennially popular speaker at the Game Developers Conference, a member of a dazzlingly exclusive cadre of developers who have spoken at every single GDC since the conference's inception a decade and a half ago. He is as affable as he is imposing with the sheer magnitude of his experience, which includes stints at Three-Sixty Pacific, Konami America, GameTek, Kesmai, Origin Systems (where he was VP of online services for Ultima Online), and most recently Maxis, where he executive-produced The Sims Online. If anyone at this conference is in a position to tell us a bunch of reasons not to make a massively multiplayer online game, Walton is surely that man.

If there needed to be any proof that the MMOG market is becoming increasingly crowded, it was the standing-room-only crowd in attendance. Walton began by polling the audience: Roughly two-thirds had launched an MMOG or worked on a Live team; perhaps three fourths professed to be currently involved in developing an MMOG project; the remaining quarter of the audience expressed that they were "thinking about" entering the market - the last group being that to which Walton primarily wanted to drive home his message: Don't do it, unless you know what you're doing better than the best out there.

Despite the negative-sounding title, Walton doesn't think people shouldn't make MMOG games at all, but he did express concern that the market is becoming oversaturated by similar-themed games going after an already overcommitted audience. He reckoned that there is currently in excess of 100 persistent worlds under development, of which he thinks 80 percent won't make it to launch, if for no other reason than ultimately launches can prove prohibitively expensive, and a disastrous one can often have a worse overall effect than never launching at all. The corollary to "the 10 Reasons You Don't Want to Make a Massively Multiplayer Game" is that the brass ring is still up for grabs for whoever is the first to get it all right, and that payoff stands to be huge.

Now, without futher ado, Gordon Walton's David Letterman-style list of "the Top Ten Reasons You Don't Want to Make a Massively Multiplayer Game":

#10. Too many are being built. Walton compared the current crop of in-development games to the "RTS frenzy" of a few years ago. It's a fine genre, but there are just too many in development.

#9. The craft requires mastery of too many disciplines. These include managing a huge team of dozens of people, customer service, community relations, network operations, billing, marketing, and communication and service coherency. Most MMOGs fail in at least two of these crucial areas, Walton supposed.

#8. It requires a huge time with multiple, diverse skill sets. These include client, server, database, and Web programming skills and generating gobs of content. Walton said a game that is three times bigger is at least 10 times harder to develop.

#7. Getting the credit card from the customer is hard. Not all customers have credit cards, and consumers are generally suspicious of online transactions. New customers don't always fathom the value proposition of an MMOG until they try it.

#6. Online games are completely counterintuitive to packaged-goods game company management. MMOGs are essentially launching all the time with staggered launches and new content being added, rather than centering around a single one-shot launch as packaged software is.

#5. Everything developers know from making single-player games is wrong in MMOGs. Well known formulas of discovery and secrets don't apply to online communities, and cheats that in a single-player game affect only the player who chooses to use one can ruin the experience of hundreds and even thousands of paying subscribers in a persistent world game. Walton also pointed out the importance of documentation and maintenance issues to MMOGs that often fall by the wayside in single-player-game development.

#4. The Internet sucks as a commercial delivery platform. Not only that, when players have a bad Internet experience, whatever the reason, they blame the game providers.

#3. Customer service is hard. Walton cited customer service as the single biggest cost variable in online game development, and the ramifications of the customer service strategy and project planning are far-reaching. Walton pointed out that whereas in most traditional businesses customer service is a cost center whose expense is to be minimized (like the call center you phone to complain about your cable bill), in MMOGs it is essentially the entire business. And that 24x7x365 business is extremely people-intensive, which by definition is costly and messy.

#2. There are lots of legal issues. These issues range from terms-of-service contracts to end user license agreements, frivolous lawsuits, the commonplace use of "volunteers" to help administer the game, IP protection, and the question of legal ownership of virtual "property." All these laws and regulations are in constant flux, which put legal issues so high up on Walton's list. His advice? Get good lawyers and be sure to budget to protect your IP.

And… Gordon Walton's #1 reason You Don't Want to Make a Massively Multiplayer Game…
#1. They cost too much money to build and launch! This of course is the ultimate gotcha that turns the best laid plans of mice and game developers to very costly muck. Development costs continue to rise, and, in Walton's words, "the faster you go, the slower you get there." The plus side of this damning assessment is that successful games can and do make a lot more money than they cost, and over a surprisingly long period of time. The better-known successful games have made or will make over $100 million over three to five years.

The next step, Walton said, is not to replicate past efforts in a crowded market, but to create much better and more compelling online games to build the medium to full legitimacy. His warnings come from his ultimate belief in the medium, and even though he feels in its current form the medium is stagnating and in jeopardy, in him as in many of the developers in attendance, "Hope springs eternal."