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'Marvel Universe' MMO Coming to PC, Consoles
by Chris Faylor, Mar 17, 2009 7:35am PDTFollowing yesterday's surprise revelation of a ten-year MMO licensing agreement between comic publisher Marvel and relatively unknown game publisher Gazillion, the two companies have announced the first two MMOs to be made under the deal.
The first game, Marvel Super Hero Squad, is a casual MMO aimed at younger folk.
The second, Marvel Universe, is in development for PC and consoles. Gazillion will develop and publish the game, with more details to arrive in the coming months.
City of Heroes developer Cryptic Studios previously worked on an MMO titled Marvel Universe Online, though it was later cancelled due to World of Warcraft-related fears.
According to today's announcement, Gazillion has been "operating in stealth mode" under the name NR2B Research. The publisher has four wholly-owned MMO development studios: Amazing Society (Super Hero Squad), Gargantuan (Marvel Universe), NetDevil (LEGO Universe, Jumpgate Evolution), and id co-founder John Romero's Slipgate studio, which is working on an original MMO.
Comments
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One of the major hurdles for MMOs seems to be releasing a finished game. One would think that the long trail of burning mumorpugers would demonstrate that if your game is unfinished and/or buggy your chances of success are going to drop, but nevertheless this continues to be a problem. If release day sales were the measure of success this wouldn't be the case, but you are going for long-term subscriptions and therefore need to make sure players don't just bail after the free month.
As for getting the customers to compete with WoW....that's the hard part. If all we have to work with are WoW players, ex-WoW players and past/present players of other MMOs, then you have an uphill battle to usurp WoW from its throne of money. To attract current MMO-players you are going to have to deal with player investment since someone who still plays their MMO with a decked out max level character and a guild of friends is going to need something pretty major to draw him or her away from their game. With WoW holding such a large chunk of current MMO subscribers, if you really want to seize the MMO crown you can't afford to ignore these possible customers, but as long as Blizzard keeps injecting content to entertain their subscribers it will remain quite difficult to do.
Attracting ex-MMO players and bored WoW players is probably an easier task, but its not without its problems. The size of this group of possible customers isn't exactly known. Is it big enough to compete with WoW by itself? If this group is big enough, is it cohesive enough in it's desires that it could be turned into a reliable group of subscribers? If not, by appealing to a segment of these players, do you run the risk of falling into a gameplay niche that simply would not be appealing enough to draw in a competitive chunk of WoW subscribers?
Of course, maybe there is an untapped segment of people out there that have yet to be brought into a MMO world. One thing to remember is that WoW drew in a lot of new players into the MMO market through keeping their initial influx of players subscribing who in turn drew in others through tales of their "fun times". Are there more people out there who don't play MMOs and could be enticed to play? My first reaction is no, but then again if you had told me in 2000 that over 11 million would be playing a single MMO in 2008 I would have called you a filthy liar.
I'd think the better bet for MMOs is to aim small, releasing a finished game that is appealing enough to draw in a group of subscribers suitable for the game's needs. The goal is to retain those initial subscribers so that you have a stable population to bring in profit and possibly gradually increase your subscriber numbers through word of mouth. Unrestrained hype is not your friend as the presence of players who are not going to subscribe is going to simply add to the release day overcrowding that will drive away customers who would have subscribed. Instead you'll be left with too many servers which are too thinly populated and will hemorrhage even more customers who would have continued their subscription.
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