Mythic VP and lead "Warhammer Online" designer Mark Jacobs told MTV News the things needed to make a successful MMO and explained what went wrong with 'Hellgate,' why he wanted 'Age of Conan' to succeed.
The details are as below:
Mythic VP and lead "Warhammer Online" designer Mark Jacobs told me some of the
things needed to make a successful MMO. But he also said if you're looking to
make an online game nowadays, the odds are against you.
"If you look at
the numbers, MMOs have the highest failure rates of any entertainment product,"
Jacobs said. Going all the way back 11 years to the release of "Ultima Online,"
the first MMO to reach 100,000 subscribers, he said that there have only a been
handful of successful MMOs compared to the number of them being developed.
I mentioned how the measure of success nowadays might be if your game
still exists in a year. "It does seem that way," he said, "and it is just
tremendously sad when you look at the amount of money and effort that goes into
MMOs."
In our recent conversation about the state of online games, we
also touched on why last year's "Hellgate: London" went under, and what the
troubled "Age of Conan" can do to prevent the same fate.
First, we
discussed "Hellgate: London," the online action-RPG was made by Jacobs'
long-time friend Bill Roper. Though Roper had experience as VP of Blizzard North
working on the "Diablo" series, his company Flagship Studios recently closed its
doors following the release of "Hellgate," its first title, last October. So
what went wrong?
"I know for a fact that sometimes just having talent is
not enough," Jacobs said after a long sigh. "You need leadership and you need
patience. And what's most important - something that so many developers forget -
is you also need to deflate the ego a little bit. You really have to remember
that as good as you were then - 'Diablo' was a great game - you're not always
going to be right... I think for 'Hellgate,' that was part of the problem."
He also said that no matter how great you think your game is, developers
must listen to the community. "It doesn't mean you have to follow what they say,
but you always have to listen," he said. "The test of greatness is to know how
to look at it and either incorporate it or learn from it. We might listen to the
wrong advice, but we always listen. That's how I think all developers have to be
because nobody is that smart and nobody is right all the time."
On the
topic of the listening to the community, I wondered what Jacobs thought about
Funcom's May-released MMO "Age of Conan" and the trouble the company has had in
terms of delivering promises to its fanbase. Blizzard president Mike Morhaime
recently said that 40 percent of "WoW" players who left for "Conan" have since
returned.
"If I was a 'WoW' subscriber, and I played another game hoping
it would be great and it wasn't, of course I would come back," he said. "I'm not
saying 'Conan' sucks but obviously the people who left it thought it sucked,
otherwise they wouldn't have left it. And the same thing may happen to us...
'Conan' had great sales initially, but then [Funcom] failed to follow up with
continued great sales. If you're not selling boxes anymore, if players aren't
talking about how good your game is, then obviously people are not happy with
it."
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