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?
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