Some of the top personalities in the gaming industry recently sat down for a roundtable discussion with MCV to talk about the growing MMOG market and the future of the genre. The roundtable discussion included a number of MMOG developer personalities such as Funcom's Erling Ellingsen, Rob Smith of Jagex, NCsoft's Jaeho Lee, and many others.

The first part of the discussion focused on the success and failures of the MMOG genre and why so few games seem to succeed in today's market. Funcom's Erling Ellingsen chimed in first to explain that if you define success in terms of sales, MMOGs are doing better than ever, noting that Age of Conan shipped over 1.2 million copies at its release. Ellingsen goes on to explain that a measurement of success by subscriptions is a different matter as convincing a player to dedicate huge chunks of time to one game alone is a big challenge.

The others on the panel followed Ellingsen with their thoughts, but all seem to agree that retention and creating an MMOG that can hold a player's interest and bring new players in to expand the genre is no small task.

EJ Moreland of Realtime Worlds brought up one good point as it pertains to the sometimes perceived lack of innovation in the MMOG genre.

Convincing whoever handles the purse string to take a significant fiscal risk on an unproven formula and be patient enough to see it through to polished execution is itself a rare and difficult undertaking.

The discussion is a good read for anyone interested in our little corner of the gaming spectrum. And the panel has some interesting thoughts on the development of MMOGs and how they can succeed or fail for many reasons ranging from good planning to launching with too many bugs and insufficient testing and bad community support. You can read the three part roundtable discussion here.