The Hollywood Cycle: Comparing the MMO Industry with the Silver Screen - Page 4

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Updated Mon, Aug 10, 2009 by Cody Bye

But have MMOs really exploded? Throughout its history, Hollywood has seen several eras of significant growth, during which the industry would expand either the number of films produced, the theaters in operation, or the sizes of the audience they captured. In Hollywood, there were several veritable explosions of movie making, where hundreds (if not thousands) of films would be spat out for audiences to consume in mass quantities. Yet I wasn’t sure that sort of event had occurred in the MMO space, or if it was still coming.

So I turned to the experts. Unfortunately, their answers really didn’t lend to a pinpoint conclusion.

“Well, the fact that so many MMOs are being made means that it's not actually cost prohibitive,” Peterscheck said with a smile. “I think that we are in the middle of that explosion. When you look at China and Korea you can see where the full potential may lie, and WoW certainly shows how large the MMO market can be. That being said there has been and will continue to be lots of consolidation and failure. We're not actually that good at making these games yet because it takes a long time to make them and people burn out and go away at an alarming rate.”

“If you think that movies take a few months to a year to shoot, in a 10 year period you can have 10-15 iterations,” he continued. “If you consider that MMOs take 3-5 years to make we're really only on the third or maybe fourth generation of MMOs and the risks are very high now. The other problem is that it is hard to respond to market changes. If I discover today that players want a certain type of game and I start making that, but it's done 3-5 years from now, the whole market has shifted. We can see this happening now. There's tons of WoW clones coming out now based on market demand set by WoW 4 years ago. So the question is, do players want something else now? If so, what? Do the players themselves even know? If you asked people in 1976 if they want an epic sci-fi movie I'm not convinced they would have said yes, and yet....”

Alexander, on the other hand, wasn’t convinced and hedged his bets, just a little. “It depends on how you define MMOs. If you mean LOTRO, WoW, or EQ2 type games, than I think the answer is no. There are huge barriers of entry: cost, technology, design experience, etc,” he stated. “That said, the persistence and gameplay aspects that were pioneered in MMOs are appearing in all types of different games. With that in mind, I think there will be – and there is – a great deal of proliferation going on. Are they true MMOs? Again it depends on your definition of an MMO.”

“My belief is that, over time, there tends to be a consolidation. Entertainment experiences are pretty focused, and it seems like there’s always fewer of them. I don’t think there will be a ‘nickelodeon’ phase for MMOs, especially not on the premium MMO side of the fence.”

When I asked Steve Preeg a similar question, one oriented towards small companies ever being able to have a “smash hit” despite the flooding of the market with other small titles, his answer was...hopeful. The Oscar-winning special effects guru has been a longtime World of Warcraft player, especially when he isn't deep into movie projects like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and the remake of Tron. This is what he had to say:

I sure hope so. The production costs of these games have been going up significantly to where they're starting to approach film budgets. I don't think these smaller companies can do that. On top of that with the new next-gen consoles and the advancements in the latest video cards, the amount of production you have to put in something to make it look good is absolutely going through the ceiling.

Eventually you're going to have to make assets and models and everything that are at least television - if not film - quality. That takes time; you can't make a character anymore with a fifty polygon head. Unless, of course, you're playing Grand Theft Auto and all you want to do is beatdown gangsters and hookers. And even *that* is going to change to some extent, because as we continue to push our technological limitations, people are going to want to beat each other up in more realistic ways.

It's going to be really hard for the smaller game companies to continue to achieve any sort of competitive edge when the hardware continues to push the envelope. In Hollywood, there was a long, long stretch of time where there wasn't a big new studio before Dreamworks finally entered the scene.