Too Crowded

Even though PAX happened over the course of last weekend and is now over, most of the press sites are continuing print stories, game play trailers, and interviews from the event.

Remember Me, got another 10 minute gameplay demo, the Last of Us has a 15 minute walk through, and so on and so forth. But what I was surprised to see was the emergence of another new Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO)  game called RaiderZ and an announcement that Everquest II is getting another expansion pack as is Rift.

For those who don’t know Everquest (1999) was basically the first MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) to really take off. It hosted millions of players and had literally thousands of hours of content. Everquest II came out in 2004 and was eclipsed by the industry giant, World of Warcraft (WoW) in .

These MMO’s are huge projects, taking several years and hundreds of developers to not only create the content, but to support it throughout its lifestyle. Games like WoW and Everquest are so massive in scope that players can sometimes spend years in these virtual spaces.

Guild Wars II just launched two weeks ago and added itself to the growing list of current MMO’s out there, Everquest II, WoW, Age of Conan, The Secret World, Rift, SWTOR, LOTRO, ect. There are so many of these games that, when you boil them down, offer the same thing. The market is extremely competitive because of the time players must sink into them in order to get the full experience.

And the result is that a few, really polished, fan driven games rise to the top while the others struggle to get by. Star Wars the Old Republic (SWTOR) was one of the largest projects costing somewhere in the realm of $200 million dollars, within six months of its release it had to switch over to a free-to-play model because of the lack of players. The Secret World’s developer Funcom announced recently that because of the poor press reviews it had to let nearly 200 people, about half of its staff, go.

Before closing its doors permanently, 38 Studios was working on a project named Copernicus, an MMO based in the world they had established with their first title. It was another just another reason why they slid into bankruptcy.

While there is some serious money to be made in this genre, there is also an inherit danger. Developers are not just building games, they are creating worlds.