Introduction
| This book is for all experience levels. At times, we will focus on low-level issues. This may come across as pedantic or patronizing to those with years of experience in our industry. However, it seems to be the peculiar fate of online gaming that people who understand it the least have had ”and continue to have ”the most control over it. In other, more mature industries, this might not be such a problem. Decades of tradition, policy, and procedure, passed from person to person with changes in the employee roster, have tended to act as a sanity check and keep newcomers with initiative from reinventing the wheel every couple of years. Even completely incompetent executives who have risen to positions of power due to politics and contacts instead of through merit can fall back on such traditions and get by without ruining the company. In an industry as young as online gaming, however, having people in command positions who don't understand the industry or its customer base can be ”and has been ”disastrous. Back in the day, online games charged at hourly rates were significant profit centers for the old online services such as GEnie, America Online (AOL), and CompuServe. When the dominant service AOL turned to a flat-rate model in December 1996, everyone else had to follow suit or certainly perish. That opened the gates for the popularity of flat rates in online gaming, first with 3DO's Meridian 59 ( M59 ) in late 1996, and then with Electronic Arts' Ultima Online ( UO ) in late 1997. UO set the pricing trend until 2001 with the $9.95-per-month model. This was a pretty huge mistake, as even Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series and now a principal at NCSoft in Austin, Texas, admits; the flat rate should have been much higher, at least in the $20-per-month range. As these talented amateurs struggle in power dominance meta-games to control revenue from online gaming, the collateral damage has been extensive and nearly fatal. When the definitive history of online gaming is written years from now, the analysts will look back and note that the executives in charge of online gaming nearly killed it with their greed and incompetence . We're at a point where hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted since 1997. Some major publishers, such as THQ, won't touch a massively multiplayer game with a 10- foot pole right now. The incredibly bad launches of much-hyped products such as Anarchy Online and World War II Online have bruised the industry's reputation even more. That reputation was somewhat repaired with Mythic Entertainment's successful launch of Dark Age of Camelot in the Fall of 2001 and the stable launch of Microsoft and Turbine's Asheron's Call 2 in November 2002, but quite a few executives and people with money are just hanging back and biding their time. Depending on what happens with the launches of two highly anticipated games scheduled for late 2002 and early 2003, Sony Online's Star Wars: Galaxies and Electronic Arts' The Sims Online , we're likely to see one of two outcomes : either a renewed interest in the development of online gaming as a whole, with even more games being planned, or a retreat back into the wait-and-see period the industry went through from 1991 “1997. So once again, we're at a nexus in online gaming. A once-profitable niche of the proprietary online services industry is currently saddled with the reputation of being a money pit; whatever gets tossed in never seems to come back out. Hundreds of millions have been tossed away, yet you can't turn around without having one more press release shoved in your face, announcing another entry into the market. Annually, reports from the likes of Jupiter Communications, Forrester Research, and Dataquest trumpet that this will be a multi-billion-dollar industry "real soon now." The average estimate was $1.6 billion by 2001. If you go back and re-read the revenue estimates in those reports, you'll see we aren't even close . Why? Simply because the three most important facts about online gaming have been ignored or misconstrued by most game publishers and developers:
And therein lies the reason for this book. Although online games and especially persistent worlds are complex and expensive undertakings, they are not brain surgery or rocket science. The reason for so many high-profile failures (and I count underperforming financially in that description) has been a failure to learn from the history of online games development. Check the online game timeline in Appendix E, "Online World Timeline"; our history goes back to at least 1969. You would assume that in that time there would have been plenty of mistakes made and lessons learned, and you would be correct in that assumption. The thing is, these new guys and gals who run today's online games business never bothered to learn from those mistakes, so they keep making them over and over again. They think that it's all about the game , and that is so wrong that it continually boggles those of us who have been making and running these games for decades. The game is only a small part of it ”the hook to bring the customer to the table and sample your wares. Without understanding that 90% of the work begins after the launch, what that work is, and what it means to manage the expectations of the players, any online game is doomed before the first word of the design treatment is laid to paper. That work speaks to the game community and the service aspect of the product being provided. In this book, we will attempt to explain what all of this means. This book is not meant to be a perfect design, development, and management roadmap from A to Z, with all the waypoints noted in detail; if we tried to do that, you'd have to hire a couple of husky guys to carry the book out of the store for you, and they'd probably want additional hernia insurance before making the attempt. Rather, we will try to point out where others have made mistakes, where the hidden traps are that have snared so many in this industry, and how you can find and avoid them. We assume that you and your people know what it means to program, draw, and model in three dimensions and that you have only a hazy idea of the problems involved with building an online game. We will not assume, however, that you've ever built an online game before. Throughout the book, the "voice" in which Bridgette and I speak is aimed at leaders , such as team leads, producers , and senior management. That doesn't mean everyone involved or interested in the entire process won't find something that applies to them; it is a convenience used because many of the issues discussed start with leadership and maintaining just enough control of the process to keep things moving smoothly without stifling creativity or innovation. In that sense, this book is just as much about practical application as it is about theory; the two go hand in hand, with practical application springing from theory that has worked in the field. For me personally , this book is the culmination of 16 years of designing, developing, and managing online games, most of which was spent laboring in obscurity for barely more than food money out of pure love of the genre . In that, I was not alone; the people who did the real heavy lifting to build this industry ”the MUSEs, Mythics, Kangaroo Koncepts, Beyond Softwares, Kesmais, Simutronics, and ICIs ”at times could barely sustain themselves and keep the games up and running. It wasn't until quite recently in our history that the market was big enough for these independent, or " indie ," developers to actually make a decent profit. The sad part is that their contributions to making this industry what it is, and could be, are often ignored or unknown. In large part, it is to those pioneers who spent years dodging arrows for the pure love of it all that this book is dedicated. Without them, there would be no reason to write it. So, sincerely: Thanks, guys.  |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 230