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Burning Sea Producer Laments Console MMO Barriers
by Nick Breckon, May 19, 2008 10:43am PDTIn a response to general industry criticism levied by a former Sony Online Entertainment developer, Pirates of the Burning Sea producer Joe Ludwig recently detailed several reasons why he feels console MMOs are currently too difficult of a venture.
Chief among these concerns is the take that platform holders would demand from an MMO revenue stream, seriously cutting down on the cash-flow to developers of smaller projects.
"Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo is going to demand their cut of all ongoing revenue, and that cut is rumored to be between 25% and 35%," wrote Ludwig on his blog. "With one more player getting a piece the revenues shrink for both the publisher and the developer and it becomes harder to turn a profit from a 'modest success'."
Ludwig also mentions that while there may be 19 million Xbox 360s sold worldwide, there are closer to ten times that number of PCs equipped with graphics processors, making the install base of a PC MMO far larger than your average console.
"This entirely discounts the fact that every single game console was purchased to play games and every PC was not," he clarified. "It also discounts all those GeForce 2s and 4s that a PC developer really should use as their min spec."
The lack of a built-in keyboard, long certification times for patches, and long development times that can potentially eclipse a console's lifespan round out Ludwig's points.
While few MMOs has been specifically developed for consoles, companies are beginning to explore the largely-untapped market. Sony Online Entertainment recently restructured with a focus on developing for the PlayStation market. SOE's The Agency is being developed for both a PC and PlayStation 3 release.
Titles such as Funcom's Age of Conan and Realtime Worlds' All Points Bulletin are both expected to receive Xbox 360 ports following their initial PC releases.
"Eventually MMOs are going to come to consoles," Ludwig concludes. "It's just going to take them a while to get there, and they will probably never emerge in the same numbers as they do on PCs."
Comments
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None of this 100 button crap, macros, and stuff; just a simple yet fun action combat system and some interesting social elements would really help.... not sure what to do about communication, especially with xbox live mutants.
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I think that you'll get console MMO's soon, but I also think that the console designers should think long and hard about whether they want that. Do you really want to get a large chunk of your playing demographic locked into one game, as we have seen with WoW? I wouldn't blame the console makers one bit for wanting a large part of that revenue stream as compensation for that. For an industry obsessed with attach rate, I can think of no better way to destroy the attach rate by making a single game that can be played for 3 years. Even factoring expansion packs, that would be ugly.
Remember: Unlike a PC, MSFT makes money for every game that sells. Dell doesn't have a dog in the game (pun intended). The only people who care how many games you buy for the PC are the game makers. Blizzard knows doesn't care how many games you buy a year. They just want you to buy theirs.
On the other hand, MSFT makes money with every game sold, and they control what goes onto their console. They prolly don't want you to buy one game a year, or even 3. They want you to buy 10. No % of a 15/month revenue stream is going to convince them that a pay-to-play MMO is a good idea.
As for functionality, I see 12 year olds texting on tiny keypads like champs. I am sure the Xbox 360 keypad attachment would work just great for them.