Ashes To Ashes

A very unexpected development in the MMORPG sphere yesterday was the news that Steven Sharif, founder and CEO of Intrepid Games, developers of Ashes of Creation, had resigned from his own company. He issued a statement on Discord to say that "control of the company had shifted away" from him and "the Board began directing actions" he "could not ethically agree with or carry out", which seemed to mean making mass lay-offs to his team of two-hundred plus, with some reports suggesting every single employee had been let-go, meaning the company was done.

This generated a lengthy comment thread on MassivelyOP that made much of previous statements from Sharif in which he seemed to be saying he had no Board and answered to no-one but himself. A number of supposedly informed people attempted to clarify that with various legal and administrative interpretations but the general consensus seemed to be that whatever the official set-up, the people pulling the strings must be investors to whom substantial ownership of the company would have devolved in previous funding rounds.

I guess the exact definition doesn't make an awful lot of difference. The point is, Steven Sharif, who began the whole Ashes of Creation project and at least partially funded it out of his own pocket, has now had enough. His vision has not been realized and he no longer has the capacity to veto changes in direction he disapproves of, so he's walking away. 

He isn't taking his ball with him, though. Everyone seems to be treating this as the end for Ashes of Creation but there hasn't, as yet, been a closure announcement, let alone a sunset date. The game is up and running as I type this, with over three thousand people playing. I guess if they have really sacked the entire workforce, the servers won't be up for long...

Three thousand players is three times as many as there are playing Project: Gorgon, which we're all looking at as a success. The big difference, of course, is that Steven Sharif had a couple of hundred people on staff before the layoffs while P:G's Eric Heimburg had maybe a couple of people helping him, part-time. 

The two games, together with other recent, high-profile examples like New World and Ship of Heroes, suggest a few minimum requirements for a new MMORPG, such as don't spend more money than you have and make a game that works. New World spent a lot of Amazon's money and took a very long time to get it working, by when it was too deep in the red and far too late. Ship of Heroes seems to have at least tried to live within its means but at the all-important expense of making a game that worked, let alone one anyone wanted to play.

Ashes of Creation kind of worked although not at anything like the level it was always supposed to. At a nuts-and-bolts level it functioned well enough but many of the tent-pole systems on which the game was sold weren't even in the build that went into Early Access on Steam. Crucially, to get it even that far took a very large crew. The possibility of getting it the rest of way appears not to have been considered financially sustainable by the people who'd have been spending the money.

Project: Gorgon, on the other hand, began with a playable build and kept a very enjoyably-playable version of the game up and running for the entirety of the development process. Only the minimum number of people were ever employed to keep development going and only small amounts of money were ever raised and then only for specific, hypothecated purposes. 

As a result of the way development was handled, those thousand concurrent players may well represent a sufficient number to keep the game running and to allow development to continue, as it always must in a live MMORPG. Paying more than a couple of hundred people every month to do the same for Ashes of Creation never seemed like it was going to work.

What does all of this say about the MMORPG genre as a whole? 

Throw in a couple of other examples like Pantheon and Monsters and Memories, too, and what it looks like to me is that, as far as traditional, Western MMORPGs are concerned, the days of glory are long, long gone. Success now has to be judged by how well a  team can define a project and then pitch it to a very specific audience. The idea that you can build it and they will come, a philosophy that saw the creation of a whole slew of games in the post World of Warcraft era, has no tenancy any more, if indeed it ever did.

It's hard to claim interest in MMORPGs has dissipated entirely. Lots of very successful, mass-market games either claim to be - or do their best to pretend not to be - part of the genre. There's a huge difference, though, between what currently passes for an MMORPG and what any of the games I've named in this post so far are - or were - trying to do.

One of the biggest problems for all MMORPGs and especially for those whose funding is not as reliable as it could be is the extraordinary length of time it takes to get from the first excitable announcements to something that passes for a finished game. Development time is a problem throughout the Western gaming industry, not just for MMORPGs, with numerous single-player sequels occupying the time and resources of whole studios for five, six, seven or even more years but MMORPGs somehow manage to double even that. In either case, if the game that comes out flops, that's usually it for the studio. 

Ashes of Creation, often described as a Western version of Black Desert Online or ArcheAge, has been in development for a decade. Back in 2016, BDO was just a year old and AA only a couple of years older. A home-grown take on those then-popular games, made more culturally appealing to a Western audience, must have seemed like a decent bet. One that might have paid off had the game released in 2017 or 2018.

Unfortunately, AoC didn't even go into Early Access until a few weeks ago, by which time ArcheAge had completed its entire life-cycle and closed down. BDO is still up and running with over twenty thousand players logged in through Steam as I write but no-one is talking about it any more, let alone suggesting it should be the model for a new game. It's joined the great parade of legacy MMORPGs that trundle on, unnoticed, played by their hardcore fans and no-one else.

What happens to most would-be new MMORPGs is that they take so long to develop, by the time they're ready to play they already look long out of date. If you're making a retro game that's supposed to look old-fashioned, like Pantheon or M&M, that's fine, so long as you make a good job of it and market effectively to the right niche audience, but if you're trying to push your way to the top table and claim your hundreds of thousands, if not millions of players, you'd better have something that doesn't look (Or play.) like it should have come out ten or twenty years ago.

And even then it almost certainly won't work. New World looked fresh and had the buzz to pull in millions and it still failed. Partly that was because the team behind it kept making mistakes but in my opinion it was mostly because traditional MMORPGs have outlived their time. I suspect even a really good one would fail to hold the kind of audience the first two waves managed with ease. The gameplay just isn't fun any more for most players.

The genre was infamously built on the psychology of the Skinner Box and dopamine hits. One of EverQuest's nicknames was EverCrack. There were countless jokes and insults built around the addictiveness of the games and serious concern expressed by health-care professionals and even governments about the deleterious effect playing MMORPGs was having on the health of young people.

No-one talks about that any more. MMO addiction seems to be a thing of the past, at least as far as the media is concerned. And gamers have entirely different ways of getting their thrills in this era of action gaming and Souls-Likes. What gamers, these days, are devoting tens of thousands of hours to the same game just to get those increasingly infrequent dings and drops? 

Probably only a small subset of the same demographic that was obsessively doing it fifteen to twenty-five years ago, I'd guess. They and very few others. To be successful these days, MMORPGs have to cater for bite-size sessions and casual involvement. Players today think a hundred hours is a huge investment of time. In an MMORPG, a hundred hours is nothing!

If you can't get the players, you can't carry on with the game. With a staff of more than two hundred to support, how many players would Ashes of Creation have needed to continue? I have no idea but I'd bet it would be more than the tens of thousands they had. A lot more. Estimates for WoW's team generally run at around five hundred. WoW may not have as many players as it once had but it's safe to say it still has millions. It can afford that level of investment in people. AoC could not.

Steven Sharif may not like it but Intrepid was clearly living beyond its means. The chances of development continuing at the required level to make the game he imagined a decade ago a reality must have looked very slim indeed by the end. And even if it had been possible, would it ever have attracted enough people not just to try it out of curiosity but to stick with it for years?

It looks as if we'll never know for sure. All the news items I've seen assume the servers will now close although, as I said earlier, they're still up today. 

To take a more optimistic view, Ashes of Creation does at least exist in a playable form. It would certainly take a lot fewer developers to keep it running and gradually add to it over time. It won't be the game it was meant to be but it would be a game and it might even be a game some people would want to play. 

Maybe it does have some kind of future. Just not the one we were promised.