The Hollywood Cycle: Comparing the MMO Industry with the Silver Screen - Page 2

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Updated Mon, Aug 10, 2009 by Cody Bye

When I first set out to write an article comparing Hollywood to the MMO industry, I knew that there were going to be some obvious similarities due to the fact that both industries focus on entertainment. But with only a decade or two to work with, the MMO industry is – in many ways – much more akin to the early throes of Hollywood than the enormous conglomeration that it’s become today. While the larger video game publisher have eagerly gobbled up any small independent studio that has proven their ability to make money, the early days of MMOing were full of these small time players that worked on low budget to produce that games that set the standard for the industry.

After I presented the question to the panelists, each confirmed this sentiment to some degree, showing just how universal this idea is to not only both entertainment industries, but the collective “diversionary” spectrum.

“When movies first started there were a lot of independent companies making low budget, short films,” Turbine's Craig Alexander began. “They ran out of little nickelodeon arcades and that sort of thing. Over time, they consolidated until there were only a handful of major players. There were consistently fewer – and bigger – bets, and that continues today.”

“I think the MMO space is very similar,” he continued. “There are fewer and fewer titles, and they’re bigger and bigger bets for the respective publishers that hope to have these franchises out on the market for continually growing periods of time. I expect that to continue.”

The conglomeration of the studios is certainly apparent to special effects master and long-time gamer, Preeg. From his point-of-view, there’s a lot of correlation between the newly forming mega game studios and the long running movie publishers with well-known names…like Disney.

“Ten years ago when you were looking for a game to play, you would pick up the latest game magazine and see what the reviews were. It wasn't so much about knowing who the publisher was, it was about the word of mouth and game reviews and whether or not you liked a particular style of game,” he explains. Now it almost seems like the smaller publishers don't have any sort of a chance anymore. You're pretty much playing "this" Blizzard game until the "next" Blizzard game comes out. I have some friends that work at Blizzard and smaller companies, and every time I talk to someone that works at one of the smaller companies, their game may be good, but it just gets overpowered by the bigger publishers. It's like Disney - no one could release anything done in animation to compete with them - at least in the beginning.”

But for movies and games alike, it seems that those early, small independent studios were the companies that laid the groundwork and techniques for all the products that came after. It was that “breakout hit” that drives people – and money – towards the medium, making it more popular and more diverse in the process. Yet the core techniques behind the product often remain the same. NetDevil’s Hermann Peterscheck explains this concept in detail:

In many ways this duplicates the commercial biography of most entertainment media. When new technology is first introduced it always leads to some kind of new form of entertainment. In the beginning the adoption and availability of the new technology is low, which means the market is small. This means that you have small independent people kind of banging away and trying to figure out what can be done. At some point the market size explodes unpredictably and you get a kind of breakout hit. In MMOs this is probably Ultima Online in the west (I suppose Lineage in the East). At that point large commercial entities notice this "new thing" and start to pour more money into it. They usually end up copying what works and doing small iterative improvement to increase market share. This then leads to an increase in production quality, and increase in development cost and eventually consolidation due to the customer demand leveling out.

I think MMOs are kind of between the growth and leveling out phase; though it's impossible to predict such things. The one thing that is different with games, at least so far, is that movie companies don't tend to do things like invent their own cameras and lights for every movie they make. The tech to make movies is much slower than games - same with music recording, radio and television. Games are unique in that we make the tools as well as the product. While there is a strong movement in the industry to make a kind of "super development tool" no one has been able to do that, and I'm skeptical that it can be done. As for setting standards, there are many that seem to be very sticky and those will persist. I expect as time goes on more will be discovered and still more will be improved.

The standards many of the early MMOs set include sharding, multiple methods of progression outside of a standard experience point generation, instancing, user interface layouts, and a focus on service-based entertainment. For Sony Online Entertainment, many of today’s current standards were set by their ten-year-old classic, EverQuest. SOE’s Senior Creative Director on EQII, Rich Waters, shared some of his thoughts on some of the longtime influences seen in MMO gaming.

“MUDs, MOOs and “pen and paper” RPGs set a lot of standards we still see in MMO gaming today,” he explained. “From stat-based combat, characters that gain levels and chase their +5 Helmet of Doom, to the very basic interaction with the game world that still prevails today.”

“Tools and technologies have advanced tremendously since MMORPGs hit the scene, but what players can do in today’s games, and how they do it is still pretty traditional,” he continued. “There are a ton of innovations in online gaming as a whole, but MMORPGs as a category are refining the details but staying bizarrely true to their old-school predecessors.”