how long do you think 14 will last?

[Xatsh]

FFXIV will last until the next good mmo is released that draws the attention.

XIV is a themepark, so it will do well until a better themepark is built. There is not much stay power in XIV in my opinion, but there is nothing besides this that has been this polished and featured since WoW launched.

From the looks of the genre atm... it will last awhile because most games are being made by Indy companys who have 1/100th the funding needed to make a good full featured mmo. Genre is dying, Yoshida is right. But it is not because players do not want mmo the devs of the mmos are feeding the genre poison and wondering why it is dying off slowly.

[Saziel]

FFXIV will last until the next good mmo is released that draws the attention.

XIV is a themepark, so it will do well until a better themepark is built. There is not much stay power in XIV in my opinion, but there is nothing besides this that has been this polished and featured since WoW launched.

From the looks of the genre atm... it will last awhile because most games are being made by Indy companys who have 1/100th the funding needed to make a good full featured mmo. Genre is dying, Yoshida is right. But it is not because players do not want mmo the devs of the mmos are feeding the genre poison and wondering why it is dying off slowly.

Agreed. MMO devs are so afraid of innovation.

[Sapphic]

Agreed. MMO devs are so afraid of innovation.

Look at the last couple of MMOs which tried to innovate. Wildstar and Elderscrolls. Both went free to play.

I don't think it's as much the devs that are afraid to innovate, but the highest part of the playerbase that is scared of innovation. Add in how much capital is now required to produce a AAA title, millions, then add on the constant investments that have to be made with MMOs, maintaing the staff for updates and content, server, server housing and bandwidth costs etc then the fear is justified. Just like any company, software houses want to try to minimize loss and make a profit.

Look at the most succesful game franchises, they are pretty much a yearly clone with a slightly different sub standard story, or just slight tweaks. Talking CoD, any EA sports games, The Sims. Assassins Creed. Just have to look any MMO forums at how many posts you get asking for it to have x, y and z features from the posters previous MMO.

Indy games is the only place where you see innovation in games design which have a limited player base appeal. But the investment they put in (small team, low budget) is like a drop of water in comparison to what SE, for example, had to invest into redeveloping FFXIV.

Simple fact is, if the market was out there for true innovation in games design then AAA companies would invest into it. But until the majority of the gamers actually opened upto instead of sticking within their "safety zone" we will never see large scale innovation.

[KisaiTenshi]

Look at the last couple of MMOs which tried to innovate. Wildstar and Elderscrolls. Both went free to play.

I think, the greater sense of the problem is that there are simply "too many" MMO's and instead of 100 companies trying to produce their own copy, what should happen is the same thing that has happened with Smart Phones, is that 2 or 3 companies (eg SE and Blizzard) continue to produce the Themepark AAA MMO's, and everyone else bring their best bits and ideas to form "The World" as a (cloud) open platform where each company who wants to be part of "The World" donates the hardware required to run their idea, while every "game" has a pooled playerbase.

So no progress is "lost" by switching "themeparks" so to speak. The investment on the player-side is just enough CPU and memory resources "in the cloud" so that they have their own personal instance equivalent to an apartment. They choose where "the door" of their apartment leads to (Eg a MMORPG, a MMOTPS, etc.) If bad game ideas perish, the hardware remains part of the cloud for that company to try again, or can be "set free" to expand someone elses idea.

As for how a company makes extra money from this, is by leveraging the less damaging part of the existing "Freemium" model where outfits and dyes can be bought to change assets, or having players send 3D models of themselves or objects to place in "The World" , the basic parts would simply be supported by a type of pay-what-you-want structure.

Some places will be free to play in, other places are "pay what you want, next milestone at $$$$$"

And before anyone jumps in and says "you're describing SL", no I'm not. SL is more of a balkanized sandbox where nothing you do in SL matters, just keep paying money to maintain your private island. What I'm describing is a world that anyone can jump into and find their comfort zone, without having to lose "time sunk" due to a subscription, but rather you pay to play the portions you want to support, and you can always stop paying if other commitments come up and still be able to play with the game at any time.

But this is probably not feasable due to a propensity to "Not-invented-here"

[BubblyBoar]

Agreed. MMO devs are so afraid of innovation.

I get so tired of comments like this when it's been proven time and time and time again that people don't really want innovation when they say they do. And very rarely do innovative concepts actually do well. This is especially true with gaming.

[AzraelX]

FFXIV will last until the next good mmo is released that draws the attention.

XIV is a themepark, so it will do well until a better themepark is built. There is not much stay power in XIV in my opinion, but there is nothing besides this that has been this polished and featured since WoW launched.

From the looks of the genre atm... it will last awhile because most games are being made by Indy companys who have 1/100th the funding needed to make a good full featured mmo. Genre is dying, Yoshida is right. But it is not because players do not want mmo the devs of the mmos are feeding the genre poison and wondering why it is dying off slowly.

I disagree in the staying power of ff14...i think the fact that it HAS the staying power of being a final fnatasy ittle with all its elements gives this game its staying power.

[KisaiTenshi]

From the looks of the genre atm... it will last awhile because most games are being made by Indy companys who have 1/100th the funding needed to make a good full featured mmo. Genre is dying, Yoshida is right. But it is not because players do not want mmo the devs of the mmos are feeding the genre poison and wondering why it is dying off slowly.

FFXIV, like FFXI has the staying power of a Final Fantasy game. No "Elder Scrolls", "Star Wars" or "Lord of the Rings" game has that.

The only thing that could turn MMO games on it's side is for a game to be a better EVE+UO+Minecraft as one coherent functioning game world, not a bunch of themepark rides. Whatever comes next will be "rendered at the server" so the fun is no longer strip-mined by RMT at launch.

The biggest obstacles to producing a new MMO can be seen in current freemium games:
- AI is dumb, very dumb, mobs exist as a resource to be monopolized.
- Free games only keep people playing by constantly offering them new cash shop outfits or "gachapon" items instead of earning them
- Actual game play once the storyline is completed is relegated to "dailies" (aka chores) in some blind hope that the next piece of content is actually worth doing with those rewards and not simply a gating tactic.

Like there's things we will never see in FFXIV mainly because there is not much breathing room left in new hardware. CPU power has been relatively flat since CPU's went multi-core. The most expensive CPU's cost nearly 5000$ and are not any more powerful per-thread than a CPU that costs one tenth of it. GPU power has a tiny bit of room left because most of them are still on 28nm process.

With proposed "VR" hardware needing 120fps "per eye" to not get motion sickness, this isn't even viable on the most high end current systems. Think about the network design that is required for 120fps. Current MMORPG's assume 60fps and thus send data every 16ms with latencies of between 40ms and 170ms. To do 120fps requires 8ms updates, and latency needs to stop being an issue otherwise even the "prettiest" VR game will be a nausea-joke when you "swing your sword" but the motions are delayed just enough to bring back motion sickness as the brain can't connect your action with the motion. I really do think what is going to happen is that the games will be rendered at the server end to get rid of the widely-deficient end-user hardware as a bottleneck, and instead a "VR" stream will be sent as a video stream.

Wildstar had the hardcore appeal but many people found the "only slightly better looking than WoW with an extra helping of cartoon" graphics to be a turn off (myself included. I liked my fat bunny girl but the world was so uninteresting after the first few days I just stopped caring.) Other games come out with what appears to be the polish necessary, but then you see actual gameplay and realize the press team glossed up the graphics and gameplay and didn't show you any of the ugly parts, which were 99% of the game. ESO didn't try to be pretty, but then it dropped the ball hard at endgame so people got bored.

Just looking at screenshots of Wildstar suggests it tried to copy WoW's look but the races are derived entirely from Guardians of the Galaxy. But samey-old biped "short cute thing, furry-thing, our-elves-are-different, our-giants-are-different, and boring old human" divisions with the models not being terribly different from each other.

I'll admit that I don't like the look of WoW, so had I even heard of this before Archeage I'd have likely not tried it either. The type of visual style I like is what is present in FFXIV, where it's highly detailed but not "gritty" or "boobs everywhere"

[Saziel]

snip.

LOTRO has been extremely successful since it went F2P many years ago. It is going very strongly. Otherwise, I agree.

[Assirra]

FFXIV will last until the next good mmo is released that draws the attention.

XIV is a themepark, so it will do well until a better themepark is built. There is not much stay power in XIV in my opinion, but there is nothing besides this that has been this polished and featured since WoW launched.

From the looks of the genre atm... it will last awhile because most games are being made by Indy companys who have 1/100th the funding needed to make a good full featured mmo. Genre is dying, Yoshida is right. But it is not because players do not want mmo the devs of the mmos are feeding the genre poison and wondering why it is dying off slowly.

I would agree with this, had it not been Final Fantasy.
The name alone will carry it a lot further then your typical themepark mmo.

[Sapphic]

I would agree with this, had it not been Final Fantasy.
The name alone will carry it a lot further then your typical themepark mmo.

Tell that to SWTOR, the Star Wars franchise didn't save it from a massive decline in the player base prior to going free to play. Same with Elder scrolls Online, DC universe. IP is just the hook.