February will be a big month for sports. And not just in the United States, where much attention has been focused on Super Bowl XLIV. Next weekend, the Vancouver Olympics will draw the attention of the world for two weeks of the fastest, highest, strongest, and (in the case of curling) quirkiest. That being the case, we at Ten Ton Hammer thought it might be a good time to see what progress sports have made in MMO gaming.

Sports and MMO gaming might seem like a paradox, but more than a few noted professional athletes have bridged the geekdom gap in recent years. And none moreso than future Hall of Fame pitcher Kurt Schilling, who liked MMOGs so much he founded a game development company. Other athletes, like Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe and former New York Jets lineman Nick Smith, have entered the WoW fold. So if athletes like MMOGs and we have an international love affair with sports, why the dearth of MMO sports titles?

The Box Score

To set the stage, here's a little something for the football widows and sports haters among you. In 2007, video game revenue in the US alone was $21.3 billion (about $6.6B coming from the MMOG sector).

That's just a shade under the $21.7 billion in combined revenues from Major League Baseball ($6.1B), the National Football League ($6.7B), the National Basketball Association ($3.4B), the English Premier League ($3.15B), and the National Hockey League ($2.3B). 2007 is the last year for which we have solid numbers, since many 2007 sports seasons end in 2008 and are reported in 2009. And for novelty's sake (and because I love winning this argument with my movie buffs), we'll note that Hollywood raked in less than half of total video game revenues at $9.6 billion.

Given those fat figures, maybe the question we should be asking is why aren't sports making more use of the video game and MMO medium rather than the other way around. The answer might have more to do with eyeballs than dollar signs. Sticking with 2007 numbers, the NFL playoffs drew 33 million fans to the tube, for example. And just to up the ante I'll note that NBC expects 200 million folks to tune into some part of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games.

But to really knock your athletic socks off, take soccer, or un-American football if you prefer. We all know soccer has a much broader audience, but I was surprised to find out how broad exactly. International soccer's governing body, FIFA, is currently made up of 205 member associations with over 300,000 clubs and 240 million registered players worldwide. That's more than 2/3 the population of the United States playing the game in a member organization, let alone the fans spectating.

And what a fanbase it is: the FIFA website reports that over 715.1 million tuned in for the 2005 World Cup final, which is about 10% of the earth's total population*. So you get the picture: lots and lots of people like sports, especially soccer, and no doubt lots of those people are avid enough fans to want to see their sports made into games. But we're back to the starting point - why haven't we seen a breakthrough sports MMOG?

[protip]*Those numbers might, well, ever so slightly in doubt. The same page reports that 26.2 billion viewers watched some part of the 2005 World Cup tournament, though the earth's population is only about 6.8 billion.[/protip]

Nobody Beats the Neowiz

As it turns out, we have. Sort of. And by "we," I mean the human race, not necessarily its North American or European quotient. Korean games developer Neowiz, and its frighteningly huge 1,000 employee Seoul studios, has had a hand in a number of MMO sports titles. The one with the most brand familiarity is FIFA Online 2, which was co-developed with EA Singapore and saw its Korean launch in 2006.

FIFA Online 2

While an English language version of FIFA Online 2 exists, the game hasn't been published outside a select number of Pacific Rim territories, neither are there plans to do so. As for reasons why, some speculate that EA didn't want to put the game's recently updated but fairly weak 2007 graphics engine up against the kind of cutting edge graphics Western gamers associate with (fundamentally console based) sports titles. Toss in some rumblings from players about the state of the game's economy, and it seems EA decided to enter the Western market with FIFA Online 2's sequel, confusingly named FIFA Online, in June 2010.

Nonetheless, FIFA Online 2 quickly and quietly set a benchmark by which other sports MMOGs would judge themselves, and Neowiz followed up with Slugger, a heavily stylized yet fully featured baseball MMO that, according to Neowiz, is "on par" with a FO2-sized playerbase. Despite baseball's still-growing popularity in Asia, bringing Slugger to North America only made sense, and Neowiz partnered with GamesCampus for the task. GamesCampus, a California-based publisher that in early 2009 boasted an audience of two million players who play roughly 25 million game sessions a year, had previously published the online golf game Shot Online carved out an agreement with Major League Baseball Advanced Media to use player likenesses, team logos, ballpark images, and more licensed assets in November 2008. Their North American adaptation of the game, dubbed MLB Dugout Heroes, was launched to critical approbation in April 2009.

MLB Dugout Heroes

Franchise Tags

GamesCampus Executive VP of Marketing and Business Development David Chang noted that the licensing process hasn't been all sunshine and home runs, but paid dividends: "Dealing with Major League Baseball and the Players Association has been challenging at times, but ultimately very rewarding. MLB and the Players Association are very involved with how the league and their players are portrayed and they look after their rights aggressively. You need to have a first-class title and organization as both parties will do their homework because, as a business partner, you are also representing their brand and players."

The decision to license asssets from a major sports league is perhaps the toughest decision a sports games publisher has to make. There are precedents to a highly successful unlicensed sports game , but without the annual hype-fest of league authorized sports games a la Madden, unlicensed titles like Tecmo Bowl and Double Dribble were one-hit wonders and now belong to the NES's dusty past. However, the concept is by no means lost; the preeminent browser-based online football titles - Goal Line Blitz and Quick Hit Football - are two examples of low budget online titles that have found a compelling niche without the steep cost of a license, and many football fans anxiously await Backbreaker, a license-less, tech-driven footballer due in May.

A middling step is to do individual licensing deals with players rather than with professional leagues. Chang noted that GamesCampus felt this was the right approach for their premier title, which according to GC boasts 2 million players worldwide. "In Shot Online, historically people have created their own characters, but we have recently signed Anthony Kim, Camilo Villegas, and Y.E. Yang to be playable in the game as well, giving players a choice." That choice will come later this month, when the PGA players are introduced into the game, complete with individual movements and gear.

Camillo Villegas in Shot Online

The Game Outside the Game

But licenses and endorsements only go so far. Says Chang: "You need to get [the players] to connect with the content pretty quickly or you will lose their attention. Having professional players or licensed leagues help, but after the hundredth game, even hardcore players are looking to do something more with the content." That more is one of the biggest challenges of the sports MMOG, since sports fans are accustomed to enjoying their games especially at a remove, what with the trades, the deals, the second-guessing on radio and TV talk shows, the highlight reels, etc.

Nowhere is this more apparent in the US than with fantasy football, and depending on your definition of massively multiplayer, it could easily be the largest browser-based free-to-play / freemium MMOG in North America. Last year, ESPN claimed that 27 million take part in the online game of roster guessing game, and Yahoo! reported revenues of over $1 billion from its 13-15 million players in 2009. More than a few game developers and publishers have oggled those numbers, but the dependence of fantasy sports on verifiable, real-life statistics delivered in real time that likely prevents its beyond its current saturation.

While sports games, especially those that offer sideline modes such as Football Manager, MLB Front Office Manger, and the "franchise mode" of the Madden series, have a lot of simulation depth, online sports games have typically kept players heavily involved from play to play. Even if a game session lasts about 30 minutes, what's the secret to filling out a player's experience and making the game feel like a world rather than a series of matches? "Team and player training is an obvious answer," Chang answers, "but it’s not the final one. You need to keep people engaged in the content and game, and that means creating an all encompassing experience around the actual match that is being played."

Online sports games try to build up the social experience and metagame in different ways. Most have graphical lobby / chatroom areas, or particular note are the Paris and London city environments of Empire of Sports or the pub crawls and post-game paparazzi shoots of Football Superstars. But for MLB Dugout Heroes and many if not all sports MMOGs, that "all encompassing experience" goes hand-in-hand with the game's business model. Virtual items and skill-ups are microtransaction-based, that is, available for purchase with real currency (or for puchase with tokens bought with real money or, in some cases, earned). In MLB Dugout Heroes, for example, players can purchase cards that allow players to be drafted from many different baseball eras, as well as uniforms, bats, pitches, and more.

MLB Dugout Heroes

Given that so much of the play experience is bound up in the selection and worth of items, (plus the simple fact that the sports audience isn't used to the idea of a subscription beyond fees for magazines and cable), players are not likely to see a sports MMOG with a monthly subscription anytime soon. Chang notes that the seasonality of pro sports (and their popularity) is another issue. "Subscriptions present a unique problem with sports MMOs because professional sports are seasonal - so you have to account for that. What do you do in the off-season? Of course, people still play during the off-season, however, a significant portion take a break. Do you grant people a grace period? Just charge them anyway? That doesn't seem fair. It seems more logical to pay-as-you-go, and that is in essence the item-based, microtransaction model."

Fans and Gamers

David Chang explained that the audience for their two sports MMOGs, MLB Dugout Heroes and Shot Online, are in large part not only fans, but players of baseball and golf respectively. "Our Shot Online players play real golf on average of over 15 times a year and our MLB Dugout Heroes players regularly attend baseball games and play in high school baseball teams. So I would say that our players are fans of the sport first and foremost."

However, other online sports games developers, especially those seeking mass appeal beyond fans of the sport, take the MarioKart approach - seek to distinguish themselves by focusing on the entertainment aspect of the game rather than emulating the sport itself. Pangya, a casual online multiplayer golf game with an "anime-inspired style" and an "immersive fantastical storyline", is perhaps the most divergent of these crossover titles. "For some, golf can often be considered boring and slow," Ntreev's Operations / Project Manager Rhea Park noted. "We believe that in order to appeal to a wider audience, it is important that the game does not become a simulation, but rather reinvents the sport in a fun, casual way."

Pangya

Chang understands the impulse to stylize the game. "In a fantasy setting, you have a lot more creative freedom, in a sports setting, you have to deal with something that everyone knows and has probably experienced before. Want to create a football game where your quarterback can "tab" through his receivers and then click a button to rifle a pass? That seems too easy and unrealistic right? But that’s basically what every targeting MMO does . . . what would happen if your "targeting" action failed every once in a while in WOW? People would get nuts and report a bug or something."

The Future of Sports MMOGs

For the foreseeable future, pure sports games with impressive licenses and endorsements will continue to dominate the sales figures, and at the top of the pile is Madden, which routinely shifts two million copies in its first two weeks after release. But there are signs that the Madden formula may not be what it once was. Madden '10 sold 50k fewer copies on the Wii and about 263k less on the aging PlayStation 2 from Madden '09, with modest downticks on the Xbox 360 and PS3. This despite better ratings and reviews than in previous years.

FIFA Online

It should come as little surprise then that EA Sports is exploring new options. FIFA Online will represent EA's first toe in Western waters for microtransaction-driven online gaming when it launches later this year. Whether fans favor or reject the move could very well chart the course for EA Sports franchises in the near future, and as EA Sports goes, so goes a fat chunk of the North American and European sports games market. Chang offered his thoughts: "It will be up to EA to decide if they want to assert their dominance beyond the console in a meaningful way. I think there will always be a place for the brand 'Madden' but over time how you interact with that brand will change - and what EA probably thinks a lot about is trying to keep their margins up while diversifying into other gaming platforms like the iPhone, web, PC, etc."

"Will EA accept that the game industry is changing and embrace that change? I'm not sure to be honest, I think it’s hard for a large, public company like EA to come to terms with the fact that the industry that they were instrumental in creating may evolve into something that they are not currently well prepared for."

FIFA Online

In the meantime, regional publishers like GamesCampus will continue to walk where the mega-publishers fear to tread. And with increased acceptance of microtransaction-driven, free-to-play MMOGs following DDO's conversion last October, they might be harvesting the firstfruits of a burgeoning sports game migration.

Ten Ton Hammer thanks David Chang of GamesCampus and Ntreev's Rhea Park for contributing their comments to this article.
And we really do like curling, honest!