Kotaku
For those that lament the plethora of crappy MMOs and poorly-planned 'virtual worlds' of various stripes — fear not, a new report indicates that 90% are doomed to failure within a year and a half. Gartner, the research and advisory firm that produced the report, notes that the high rate of failure could be due to a number of factors; perhaps most importantly, the low cost of entry means that more experimentation is taking place (and like any experiment, a lot of virtual experiments fail). But it's not all doom and gloom:
... Gartner's analysis isn't nearly as dire as its headline. Gartner notes that throughout the process lessons have been learned, many of the attempts were relatively low-cost experiments, and there's still plenty of opportunity. "Businesses have learned some hard lessons," Steve Prentice, vice president and fellow at Gartner, said in a statement. "They need to realise that virtual worlds mark the transition from web pages to web places and a successful virtual presence starts with people, not physics. Realistic graphics and physical behaviour count for little unless the presence is valued by and engaging to a large audience."
The end of the report also has a reasonably sunny prediction: "By 2012, Gartner estimates that 70 per cent of organisations will have established their own private virtual worlds and predicts that these internal worlds will have greater success due to lower expectations, clearer objectives and better constraints." That could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective.
90% of Corporate Virtual World Efforts Fail in 18 Months (Chalk It Up to Experimentation?) [Virtual Worlds News]
Comments
I blame Galactus.
Every game compnay will have its own Matrix!
so ... by then , no more single player experiences ?
to bad the realy creative ones fail too...
hope this doesnt happen to age of connan
@laughingmangits: Lets hope not their own Matrix Online however, okay thats the closest I get to a joke this late at night
did he give names ?
giving names would be the easiest way to make an mmo to fail, because people don't want to invest time in stuff that won't last
Well, yeah...the MMO market alone is inundated with crap, crap, and more cash-shop crap. And Second Life panders to a pretty selective audience.
oh noes Gah Lak Tus is coming!
Low barriers to entry, delicious!
I'll be interested to see how the GTA MMO goes. I really hope it works, but it could be disasterous..
I don't "get" virtual worlds :-/
That doesn't bold well for Petz Dogz Univerze
Lets make our own kotaku mmo's, we can call the badguys flamers and the boss's can be trolls :D
virtual moon.
@Eltigro: win.
ok, so uh, when does WoW finally die out, then?
I hope WoW is in that 90% I've lost about 10 friends to it
@TheIrishNinja:
When people finally get tired of spending hours upon hours doing monotonous shit. But c'mon, when will that ever happen.
Don't they require a lot of back end like servers and things? Also, to even think about being successful have years of planning and development? I don't know if I'm wrong but I don't think there is a low cost of entry.
Everquest and Ultima need to return.
It's all WoW's fault
All the new "next gen" MMO's are either trying to copy wow and failing or doing the opposite of WoW and failing too.
That is to include AoC and WAR in the soon to be failed MMOs (too much of a niche market for those two games)
Everyone needs to stop trying and play WoW. Seriously. I hate the game, but it's a much better MMO than any of the others I've tried (Guild Wars comes close, though)
And yet STILL a more promising endeavour than opening a restaurant.
@z0phi3l: hi, you're wrong...about AoC at least (barring horrendous bugs/server lag). It's different enough from WoW and good enough that it will succeed.
It's 90% because of all the failing developers.
Most MMOs don't reach their second or even third year. Too many start-up developers make an ambitious MMO, but it fails in a year or two at best exactly because of that ambition.
In short, everyone's trying to make a MMO that's greater than WoW. They inevitably fail because they don't have the resources, let alone the programming skills, that Blizzard has.
In shorter form, most MMOs are made by developers who don't know what they're doing.
You can thank the WoW machine for that!
"By 2012, Gartner estimates that 70 per cent of organisations will have established their own private virtual worlds and predicts that these internal worlds will have greater success due to lower expectations, clearer objectives and better constraints."
I'll bet anyone here $20 that either this ends up being completely wrong or a majority of that 70% end up using Second Life's open sourced server software.
I think too many Kotakuites here automatically assume "virtual world" means MMORPG as I'm fairly sure Gartner was referring to MMO worlds that don't involve any RPG aspects. I especially believe this as MMORPGs are most definitely not cheap to start (art assets, goal development, writers, etc) whereas virtual world engines are and don't require the_same/as_many resources to start and maintain.
@RPharazonius:
Or the huge fanbase that started WoW up. What makes me made about most WoW players is that they've never even picked up one of the previous WarCraft games and played it.
I've been playing since Orcs and Humans and I'm sure half the bloody population that regularly subscribe to WoW can't even name half of the factions that were introduced in Tides of Darkness.
i've played more mmos then i care to mention but i rarely see them die off, some crazed fan boy at least runs a private server to extend its lifespan by at least a year. i tend to disagree with this article
I blame global warming.
I guess WoW was the Ten-Percenter.
@Ignatius:
how does that matter? most people dont start playing a games of a series until its popular. also i would have played the other warcraft games, but i dont like rts. wow piqued my interest, so thats the first warcraft game im playing. maybe if they make a warcraft platformer or something, people who play mostly platformers will get into warcraft.
I want more MMOFPS. Planetside was great.
Shoot kill pvp is much better than shoot dice, maybe kill.
Problem most fps players wont pay a monthly sub and PS didnt have enough player advancement and customizations. Also, it didnt have any none Pvp content.
@OldManGaming:
Me too. Sure I get that raids are fun and all. What I don't understand from MMORPGS is, when will it end? I mean, Maybe it's just me but when I play an RPG or any game for that matter. I know what I'm playing is amounting to something. That something meaning I get to kill the insanely powerful end-game boss at the end. And hopefully get a spiffy end game cinematic or story out of it.
Be it for RPGs or Action-adventures or shooters. There's level-grinding for RPGs, for action-adventure there's the orbs or whatever that updates your skill and combos and etc.
OF course I do understand that if an MMORPG had a final boss that would end the game, it wouldn't make much financial sense from the publishers point of view.
I tried WoW before and I must say I didn't get hooked. What with all the level-grinding and all the time you have to invest.
Anyway, I do think that Gartner may have a point there. Here in Asia, MMORPGs or other Virtual,Online-Social worlds are a dime a dozen. A new one sprouting each month. At the end of the day, there's only so much of the gaming population that can invest their time and money to support all of them.
@RPharazonius: Completely agreed.
It's the same with every new genre I would think. FPS, MMO, Myst clones... it's all been done before, and it always turns out just how you described it.
If you ask me, it's because people can sense an imitation right from the get-go, and would rather have the established, tried-and-true video game for their hard-earned money.
Damn, I wish i got paid to come up with random numbers that were high and make a very low failure rate for wow.
what a great job. it would almost seem as i wasn't pulling it from my ass.
What MMO's have failed lately in the last..six years though? I haven't heard of any of them going bust save for NCsoft's Car based MMO and the EA killed Earth and Beyond.
@Foxstar Sixtail:
Auto Assault, Earth and Beyond, The Sims Online, Motor City Online, Asheron's Call II off the top of my head.
And another half dozen cancelled or in limbo (as far as we know)... Gods and Heroes, Marvel Universe Online, Huxley, Wiki, Shenmue Online, Star Trek Online...
And a lot more are slowly dying out. I wouldn't be surprised to see Planetside and Star Wars Galaxies join the growing dead.
@Ignatius:Thank you!
One reason that most MMOs die soon after the first couple of years is that most of players cannot afford paying more than one subscription fee.Think that most MMOs cost around 13 euros.To play two or three MMOs in a monthly basis means at least 30 euros.No family with f.e. 2 kids will be happy to pay that bill.So the kids stick to their most beloved game (that usually is WoW)and quit the others).The best and more risky idea that only Guild Wars adopted with success is the "no subscription" paying plan.Wich means that you have to wait for the (paid) expansion for new content.I am ok with that if you want my opinion
90 percent of Facebook clones die off too.
@Sullyville: And then came Myspace... I know, speaking the unspoken... But most people on here won't get what you said, I guarantee it.
Basically, games fail because they all think up of an idea, and then the boss goes "LETS BE LIKE WOW", not realizing that niche has already been filled...by WoW.
Now what they need to do to make this "70 per cent of organisations [with] established [private] virtual worlds" work is to create a universal standard avatar medium.
I vote Mii v2.0 ^_^
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