When Rights Go Wrong or Why Household Names Don't Always Sell Games

In the course of a post about Embracer Group and how its current financial difficulties might affect both Standing Stone's Lord of the Rings Online and Amazon Games' in-development title based on the works of JRR Tolkein, Wilhelm noted "there isn’t a track record of huge success for games based on the IP".

That tied into something I've been thinking about since I observed, in the thread on my own recent post about the move of Star Wars: The Old Republic to Broadsword Games, that "there's almost no synergy between huge, mainstream IPs and the mmorpg genre".

Has there ever been an mmorpg, based on a pre-existing IP not itself originating in gaming, which performed commercially to the same standard as other iterations on that same IP in other media? Or, if you'd like that in English, has any mmorpg based on a book or a movie ever been a runaway success?

I can't think of one. What's more, neither could Bard or ChatGPT. They were both bloody useless, frankly. Neither of them seemed capable of understanding what a "Non-gaming IP" might be, even when I gave them examples. 

For once, I won't derail  my own post by going on about AIs and their funny little ways. I didn't want to rely on my own dodgy memory, though, so without AI assistance I was thrown back on my own research skills, namely skimming through all sixty-six pages of the MMORPG.com list of games.

It wasn't much more help than the nonsense the AIs tried to fob me off with. The MMORPG.com list is stuffed with games that couldn't reasonably be described as MMORPGs even by the loosest of definitions. There were live games, dead games and games still in development that don't yet exist at all. I really need those AIs to get their act together so I don't have to keep trawling through this stuff. I have better things to do with my time. 

Oh, wait...

I did spot a handful of examples of games based on external IPs that I either didn't know about or had forgotten, so it wasn't a total bust. There were a couple of manga/anime inspired titles - Naruto Online ("an MMORPG turn-based browser-game that is set entirely in the NARUTO universe") and One Piece Online, which doesn't actually seem to be an MMORPG at all - but I don't feel qualified to comment on either so I'll pretend I didn't see them after all. 

I also probably ought to leave out the two Chinese titles I found on Wikipedia - Dragon Oath ("Based on the novel Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils by Jin Yong) and Fantasy Westward Journey ("Inspired by Journey to the West" - not least because to include the latter would scupper my entire thesis, given its probably one of the most successful - and profitable - MMORPGs in the world, at least if those old SuperData reports were to be believed. 

Sticking - mostly - with games released in the western hemisphere and/or based on "western" IPs then, here's the list I ended up with:

• Age of Conan
• Conan Exiles 
• DC Universe Online
  
• Hello Kitty Online 
• Lord of the Rings Online 
• Marvel Heroes 
• Otherland 
• Star Trek Online 
• Star Wars Galaxies 
• Star Wars: The Old Republic 
• The Matrix Online

It's surprisingly short, isn't it? Anyone think of any more? No? Actually, I can. That Lego MMO, for a start. Maybe Toontown? And wasn't there a Transformers MMO, briefly? 

Tough. Didn't think of them at the time and now it's too late. Anyway, all of those just shore up my argument so I don't need to shoehorn them in after the edit.

Let's go through the ones I did remember, one by one. 

Age of Conan - Main IP: Books and Movies.

Still running but in maintenance mode. Sold a lot of boxes but famously couldn't hold an audience much beyond the bait&switch tutorial. Honestly, I feel Conan is barely a well-enough known property to support an MMORPG to begin with, so it's incomprehensible to me that we also have...

Conan Exiles -  See above.

Okay, it's not really an mmorpg. Is it even an MMO? When I got ChatGPT to put the list into alphabetical order for me (Nice to find something it's good for, at last.) it prissily warned me "Please note that "Conan Exiles" and "Dune Awakening" are not MMORPGs but are included in the list you provided." I took Dune Awakening out to discuss separately, later (Which, as you'll see, I signally forgot to do.) but since the Steam page says "Conan Exiles can be played in full single-player, co-op, or persistent online multiplayer. (My emphasis.) I left it in. 

CE is doing okay. About 10k concurrent according to the Steam Charts, a population it's maintained remarkably consistently for several years now, putting it just barely in the Top 100. By no means a failure but also clearly no kind of mainstream breakout hit.

DCUO - Main IP: Comics and Movies.

According to the information that came out of the EG7 acquisition of Daybreak Games, quite a consistent performer. It makes money. People play it. For an IP that includes household names like Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, all of whom can and have been able to stand up multiple TV and movie series for decades, however, it can't be considered more than a modest success, if that.

Hello Kitty Online - Main IP: Merchandising and cultural icon

This one deserves a post of its own. It appears to have been either abandoned or possibly even forgotten by its owners, Sanria. The game was last known to be playable over a decade ago but the website, which hasn't been updated since 2012, is still up. A sad and mystifying fate for such a global icon.

Lord of the Rings Online - Main IP: Books and Movies.

I think we all know about this one. Doing just about okay for an aging mmorpg but certainly no more than that. Signally failed to capitalize on the massive global interest in Tolkein following the Peter Jackson movies and the recent Amazon Prime series barely moved the dial, despite the hype. I suspect that, much though the fans still worship the man and all his myriad works, the general audience has had about as much Tolkein as it stand for now, which may not bode well for either Embracer Group or Amazon Games.

Marvel Heroes - Main IP - Comics and Movies

Seemed to be doing reasonably well, perhaps on a par with "rival" DCUO until it suddenly and unexpectedly closed down. Even at its peak, though, it could scarcely have been said to have done justice to what was, at the time, one of the best-known and most commercially successful IPs in the entire world. If you can't bring the punters in by the millions with Spider-Man and The Avengers, really, what do you think you're doing?

Otherland - Main IP: Books

This one's just weird. It was a left-field choice for an IP to begin with, being a fairly obscure SciFi trilogy by an author better-known for his fantasy novels. No-one's bothered to make a movie or a TV show out of anything Tad Williams ever wrote, so why anyone thought a game would sell is a mystery. The game never really got finished, never attracted an audience, changed hands a couple of times and finally closed down without anyone noticing. It wasn't a bad game, as far as it went, but the IP did it no favors at all.

Star Trek Online - Main IP: TV and Movies

I called this "The game time (And the world.) forgot" in a comment on the post I linked earlier. It's a Cryptic production, which means it's solid enough but a bit dull, making it, some might say, an ideal fit for the IP. I always feel that Star Trek somehow manages to be well-known by the mainstream yet still entirely niche. This is one game on the list that may even have done about as well as the IP deserved. At least it's still running and people play it. Or I guess they do...

Star Wars Galaxies - Main IP - Movies

This, on the other hand, is a truly world-class IP. One of the very biggest. As Raph Koster is always keen to point out, the game he made using the Star Wars setting and characters was a success - just not a big enough one to satisfy the IP's owners. It's worth reading that piece for Raph's observations on the core topic of this post, the value of a non-gaming IP to an MMORPG - or to any other video game genre, for that matter. 

Raph puts it like this: "if you look at the power of licensed IP game genres outside of sports, it’s really not very clear that a license can or will imply a massive increase in game trials or purchases."  That's really the crux of the problem except that, in the case of an IP like Star Wars, the expectations are also hyped to the skies. It's a recipe for failure because even success on the scale of SWG (Raph claims it was weight-for-weight more successful than EverQuest, the market leader at the time.) doesn't count as success in the eyes of either the fans or the investors.

Star Wars: The Old Republic - See above.

And that, of course, is why SWG is only available on emulator and private servers these days. Along came the second MMORPG based on the IP and even though they weren't making Highlander Online, there could only be one. Sony Online Entertainment bowed to the inevitable and cancelled SWG so SW:TOR could have a clear run... and BioWare fumbled the pass.

Once again, the game itself was fine and sales were good enough for the genre. Just not good enogh for the IP. With the endless publicity pumped out by Disney since then, along with the ongoing global success of many, if not all, of the movies and now TV shows, a middle-ranking MMORPG just doesn't cut it. If it was an original IP, it would be deemed a major success - it's not like we have a lot of SciFi PvE MMORPGs to choose from - but it's Star Wars so it was widely seen as a failure even before the move to the Broadsword Home for Elderly MMOs.

The Matrix Online - Main IP: Movies

Oh, boy! I guess at the time The Matrix was reckoned a pretty big thing? It also has something to do with virtual worlds, I think, so I suppose there was some synergy there? I don't know. I'm vague on the details because I've never seen the movies. 

I've also never played the game which, given that it was published by SOE and included in the All Access sub I was paying at the time, ought to tell you everything you need to know about the appeal of the IP outside its dedicated fanbase. I mean, back then I was at least trying out just about every MMORPG on the market and I still didn't make the time to take a look at TMO. 

I can't even say if it was reckoned a good game or a good version of the IP. I don't even recall reading much about it. I'd guess most Matrix fans  probably didn't even know it existed and most MMORPG players didn't care.

TMO is like the poster child for why hanging an MMORPG off an external IP is a bad idea. It sums up the innate and seemingly insurmountable problem that comes from draping your MMORPG over the scaffolding of an IP that's been successful in another medium: chances are really, really high that most of that pre-existing audience doesn't even know what an MMORPG is, far less want to play one, while at the same time you're limiting your MMORPG audience to a subset that finds the particular IP appealing.

And it gets worse. There may be a very large and well-established market for video games that reference already-familiar properties but those games generally don't require the kind of time commitment and long-term dedication of an MMORPG. It's one thing to buy a Batman game, play it, finish it and put it away; entirely another to commit to raiding Arkham Asylum from 9pm to 1am every Thursday, Friday and Saturday for perpetuity.

And still worse yet. Even if you successfully tap into the loyalty and affection of your chosen IP's dedicated fanbase, the people eager and willing to consume, own and live inside every possible aspect of their beloved obsession, you're going to be opening yourself to disappointment, disgruntlement and maybe even DDOSing and death threats from those same superfans, many of whom will inevitably see your interpretation of their dreams as an embarrassment, a disaster or a betrayal.

Finally and perhaps worst of all, as the IP's licensee, you'll have to pay for the privilege of piggybacking on someone else's success, likely handsomely, on the basis that the rights owner is doing you a favor by letting you hitch a ride on the back of their money-wagon. You'll just have to pray that, when they've taken their cut for doing nothing at all and you've paid all the development and running costs, there's enough left to make the whole thing feel like it hasn't been a complete waste of your time.

Almost all the big, successful western MMORPGs are based on IPs created and owned by the companies that developed and operate them. With barely a couple of exceptions, even the ones we call successful aren't much more than a few big fish in a fairly small pond. World of Warcraft had its cultural moment but, unlike Star Wars or Marvel Comics, it couldn't hold on to it. The Warcraft movie is evidence enough. 

MMORPGs are a niche genre. Expensive mainstream IPs are a terrible fit. If picking a strong IP and slapping an MMORPG back end on it was a guaranteed - or even a likely - way to make a fortune, we'd have massively multiple versions of every TV show, movie franchise and best-selling book series of the last fifty years. Just like we do with the TV shows, movies and books themselves. But we don't because MMORPGs are a niche market and even the successful ones don't make a ripple in the mainstream.

I wish it was otherwise. I could list, right off the top of my head, a couple of dozen IPs I'd love to see turned into MMORPGs - and I might, in another post. It's never going to happen because IP-led MMORPGs don't work unless, like WoW or Pokemon Go or Elder Scrolls Online or Final Fantasy XIV or Guild Wars 2, the IP itself comes from another game.

So, if you're waiting, like me, for Scooby Doo Online, where we all get to ride around in the Mystery Machine, solving mysteries and catching bad guys in a lighter, funnier version of The Secret World, then you're going to have a very long wait indeed.

Here's Where The Story Ends

Yesterday brought the somewhat sad news that Cryptic is shuttering its player-made content platform, The Foundry. Both Neverwinter and Star Trek Online used the engine to allow players to design, build and populate instances for other players to explore and enjoy.

I never tried the STO version but I did spend some time running Tipa's re-creations of classic EverQuest zones in NWO. My review of those experiences, particularly Tipa's "Newfallen" dungeon, positively gushes:

"It was great! At the end, when you get the chance to review and rate the Foundry you've just completed, I gave it five stars. For an old-time EQ player the nostalgia factor is through the roof. The physical reconstruction of Befallen is exemplary"

Tipa herself used regularly to review Neverwinter Foundries on her own, much-missed blog, West Karana. I loved reading those. Probably more than I would have loved playing them. The standard, as you'd imagine, was variable but there were gems to be discovered.

I'm a lot more familiar with EverQuest II's simplified take on the idea. There are nine posts tagged "Dungeon Maker" on this blog, dating back to when it was introduced as part of the controversial "features expansion, Age of Discovery.

I really liked the Dungeon Maker. I used it a lot when it was new and for quite a while afterwards. I made three full dungeons, all of which were quite silly and rather jolly. They were fun to make and  run.

They didn't take long to put together. I don't think any of them took me much longer than a Sunday afternoon. They were quick to run, too. I published them all in-game and they got some play but most people had their mind on something more than cute dialog and silliness when they opened that Dungeon Maker window.

As Telwyn put it in a post about the closure of The Foundry:

"Sadly MMO players being what they so often are, min-maxers to the extreme, exploits were found and the system was heavily nerfed reward-wise... Players also made pits full of monsters that you could easily slaughter with ranged attacks from safety above as a way to speed farm experience."

Almost exactly what happened in EQII. From my own post on the latter days of the Dungeon Maker:

"The dungeons gave no loot per se, only a special currency, but the mobs you killed inside them did give xp. Very good xp. At least, it turned out it was very good if the dungeon-maker stuffed a few rooms with high-value, weak mobs, all piled up to be AE'd.

The most efficient mob slaughterhouses quickly rose to the top of the Dungeon Creator rankings and for the longest time almost all you could hear in /lfg was people forming groups to speed-run them. They had no story, no dialog, no script, no entertainment value of any kind. They were the definition of repetitive tedium but they were efficient so people did them. Over and over and over again."

It may not have mattered all that much when all games were offline and single player. If you want to cheat yourself, go ahead, knock yourself out. Who cares? In the context of a persistent shared space, though, where, whether you like it or not, elements of competetive play exist, such behaviors have an impact that can't be ignored.

In every case I've seen, developers, who one might, at best, call naive or optimistic, introduce systems and mechanics that experience and history should tell them will be exploited. And they are. Abusively, repeatedly and shamelessly.

Over time, if left unattended, these systems become a running sore. Some players gleefully indulge but far more grimly accept. When the widely-accepted understanding is that efficiency comes from doing something dull, repetitive and meaningless, that becomes the meta.

The demographic that enjoys and employs the tools in the way the developers intended - the creatives who put their own time and energy into making what they believe to be entertaining content and the explorers who consume it - find themselves heavily outnumbered by the achievers, who simply want to find the shortest route to the biggest reward.

At its worst, as happened in EQII, the exploits threaten to become a black hole that sucks the life out of the entire game. At which point the nerfs begin.

The developers always try to save their babies and they always fail. A succession of revisions incrementally reduce the attractiveness of the game mode, irritating both those exploiting it and those who want to see it gone, alike. Ever-resourceful, players find a way around the roadblocks. The nerfs intensify. Eventually the entire mechanic is reduced to a rewardless shell. That solves the problem: no-one makes any more content, no-one consumes any. Game over.

In EQII, I can confirm the Dungeon Maker died long ago, at least as a practical source of experience or reward. Holly Windstalker's Producer's Letter from December 2014 gives chapter and verse.  It's still there, should you want to see it. I ran one of my dungeons just now and it still works. You just don't get anything for doing it except the pleasure of my so-called jokes. Other than that, the Dungeon Maker's  mostly used for storage these days. You can stash a lot of house items in a Dungeon Maker dungeon.

I don't know if The Foundries in the two Cryptic games reached that nadir of decline before Cryptic pulled the plug. I don't play either game often and on the odd occasion I do I certainly don't visit the leaderboards to see if anyone's made any new dungeons lately.

The reason Cryptic give for closing The Foundry doesn't have anything to do with misuse or exploits, anyway. All that was dealt with long ago. It's merely that there's no longer anyone left working for the company who knows how the thing works. I imagine very few players are using it any more, either to entertain themselves or others. If it was still popular it would be worth training someone to keep it going.

Player-created content is an excellent idea in theory. It gives everyone more to do and it costs the company less. Unfortunately, players are, as always, their own worst enemies. There's no hope whatsoever that a substantial number won't ruin things for themselves and everyone else if they get the chance.

All of which sugests to me that game developers should think harder before introducing these systems and take much greater care to close all the loopholes beforehand. Yes, I know players will always find exploits no-one thought of but in most cases they're finding ones that anyone could have thought of. And should have.

Gaming has an incredible wealth and depth of talent just waiting to be tapped. No need to outsource or pay - all the resources you need are already there, playing the games, and they'll work for free. In fact, they'll probably pay you.

SOE/DBG's Player Studio shows how a more successful iteration can work. It, too, has had its problems, especially in recent times but it's still there, hanging on, and now Daybreak seem to be ready to blow some of the dust off and hang out a fresh shingle.

Maybe the Dungeon Maker will never make a comeback. Maybe submissions to Player Studio will continue to pile up and process slowly. It's still a better outlook than The Foundry's going to see, more's the pity.

As Wilhelm points out in the comments at TAGN, maintaining legacy systems can be a trial and an expense. On the other hand, closing them down can make you look a little desparate. Here's hoping Cryptic's parsimony doesn't signal the beginning of a trend.

Bringing Things Up To Date

Having thought about doing it yesterday, today I bit the bullet and began patching all the MMORPGs on my desktop. What fun!

First up was Allods. That was neither alphabetical nor random. It was because, while I was choosing screenshots for yesterday's post, I came across a bunch of shots and it reminded me just how beautiful a game it is. With such great art design, rich with visual wit and flourish, plus very solid gameplay, unusual and appealing races, interesting classes and an all-round high level of polish I'm at a loss to explain either why Allods hasn't been more successful or indeed why I haven't played it more than I have.

I'm in a bit of a mess with Allods as it happens. I can't recall my old account details so I'm stuck with just the fresh account I set up to try the new starting zone. That I mostly played on my Windows 10 Tablet, where it works very well, but I very soon realized I don't want to play games in my lunch-break. I'd much rather read.

That's probably why, rather than just patch, the MY.com Games launcher decided to download the entire game to my PC. I didn't specifically use the launcher but it decided to get in on the act anyway.

This trend towards Launchers that supposedly manage updates for a company's full portfolio of games is very trying. SOE spent many years fiddling around with the concept and it never really worked better than just patching the games individually. Daybreak Games seem to have loosened up on that somewhat. There is still some kind of underlying unified launcher but I have all the individual game icons on my desktop and clicking those seems to start the update and log-in process just fine.

Trion has Glyph. What used to be Perfect World (and for all I know may still be Perfect World to the financial regulators) has ARC. Blizzard has BattleNet and so on. If it's supposed to make things easier...well it doesn't.

After Allods I patched WildStar, which went very smoothly, and then A Mystical Land aka Villagers and Heroes. That also took just a few minutes. I see from their launcher that they've had a level cap rise and added a new zone among other things. I wonder how my sheep is. Dead, probably.

From there I moved to Project : Gorgon but I actually updated that a couple of weeks back and apparently Eric hasn't added anything since then so it was playable immediately. I didn't play it. Instead I patched The Secret World and then EverQuest.

There was a time earlier this year when I was playing EQ quite regularly. Then I changed my All Access membership to the account where my EQ2 Berserker lives and that left the EQ character I was working on, my Magician, stranded on F2P. Well, legacy Silver, but it still locked her out of all the Double XP weekends that would have motivated me to log her in.

At least she's patched up and ready should a window of opportunity arise. I still harbor a theoretical desire to get her to 100 some day, even though the cap has moved past even that landmark now. And speaking of Landmark...

That's what I patched next. I'd been thinking about good old Landmark even before Tipa jogged my memory but I probably wouldn't have done anything about it. Given the total radio silence on the game for most of this year I didn't really expect it would need to patch but it downloaded almost 2GB of something. That sent me to the forums to check the Update Notes but I couldn't see that anything new had been added.

I did, however, find this news posted by Darrin "Talisker" McPherson just a week ago. Well, I call it "news". It's more like news that there might be news.

I'll get the details out to you all soon, but expect some new initiatives, team-up builds and changes to the adventuring side of things. Lets build some content together!

I have no idea what that means but at least it's some sign of life.

Elder Scrolls Online came next.  It set off at a furious pace as it downloaded a vast pile of files but it soon ground almost to a halt when I tried to save some time by patching Star Trek Online and Neverwinter on top.

They both use the aforementioned ARC portal these days and that didn't recognize either of my existing passwords. Resetting them was simple and both games patched at blistering speeds, apparently at the expense of ESO, which ground almost to a halt. There were several gigabytes of updates for both STO and NWO but together they were done in a few minutes. ESO is still patching as I write, well over an hour later.

That, really, is how I came to write this post. Something to do while ESO is patching. I thought I'd better not try any more until it finishes. It seems to be having hard enough time as it is.

Still to come I can see Rift and Trove (well, I can see Glyph but same difference), Dragon Nest Oracle, ArcheAge, DinoStorm and Lord of the Rings Online. Dragon Nest I actually do want to get back to playing. I was enjoying that one. Rift I've been having weird pangs over. I thought I was done with it for good but perhaps not quite yet. ArcheAge I always meant to get back to someday and DinoStorm I always do go back to, usually late at night on a whim.

And LotRO? Well it's always there, although some of the numbers Ravanel mentions in her recent post make me wonder for how much longer.  LotRO has always been a nightmare to patch so I'm leaving it til last.

I tried to limit myself to MMOs I have at least a glancing blow's chance of playing in the next month or three, although by "playing" I really mean logging in, looking at my inventory, wandering around the main city for a few minutes and logging off again. That still leaves a few icons on my desktop that go to MMOs I really can't see myself getting back to any time soon - Istaria, Eldevin, Ryzom - although even though as I type those names I can feel interest stirring anew.

There's also City of Steam, which, being browser-based, doesn't need a specific update and whose main storyline I am determined to finish before they finally shut the servers down, assuming they haven't already - I didn't check. Then, naturally, while patching I saw at least two newish MMOs I hadn't previously heard of that I almost began downloading and as I write I've thought of another four or five that I thought I had installed but which don't seem to have desktop presence any more.

Enough! That way madness lies. And ESO is at 75% now. By the time I choose some screenshots and a title it should be done.

Learning To Fly

Tutorials. Don't you just hate them? Okay, okay! Leading question. I withdraw.

I do purely loathe tutorials though. There's no way round it, I just can't stand 'em. I appreciate that even though everyone in global chat is banging on about how every one of the dozens of MMOs they already played was way better than this current POS they just made the cardinal error of downloading, still every MMO must have at least one person playing who just started today and who never played an MMO before. I appreciate that though most MMOs look and play exactly like most other MMOs they are are all in fact utterly different and hardly like each other at all when you really think about it. Let alone when you don't think about it and let's face it, who really thinks when they play an MMO?

Moreover, I recognize that MMOs are ferociously over-complicated compared to almost any other form of popular entertainment. If you intend to make sense of the tottering stack of stats and skills, functions and commands in even the supposedly dumbedest-down (dumbed-downest?) MMO, the potential learning curve is a sheer cliff face looming over you. And up at the top of the cliff the hardcore seagulls circle, taking aim right at your eye.

Have Flares, Will Travel

Yes, I appreciate and recognize all of that. It's still no excuse for the existence of tutorials.

Wait, let me clarify. It's no excuse for the existence of tutorial zones. Separate instances where all the new players can ride around the play-park on their tricycles with the stabilizers down, caroming off the softened, rounded corners of the scenery, batting at the de-clawed, de-fanged herbivores in the petting zoo with their spongebats, while Captain Nanny of the Toytown Guard trails along behind reading out the rules from The Big Book of How To Play.

We're all endlessly arguing about sandboxes versus theme-parks here in MMO Blogland. It's always been something of a false dichotomy or at least a more granulated scale than the bipolar argument would have it and my position has always been that the sandbox is largely in your head and that just because your park has a theme doesn't mean you have hum along. Well, none of that applies to to tutorial zones.

Tutorial zones are the MMO boot camps where your individuality gets beaten out of you. Oh, its a nice, polite, gentle beating. No name-calling, no shouting, no having your bed turned upside down in the middle of the night, but that individuality has just got to go. You're not leaving the tutorial until you learn to be just like everybody else.

I remember when it was all buildings around here

There's a trick novelists use called in media res. Happens in movies too. Dumping you into the middle of the action and letting you figure things out for yourself. It runs the risk of alienating the audience but when it works it's dynamite because it makes you feel respected, trusted, intelligent. Like when your dad drops you in the deep end of the pool and calls it your first swimming lesson, only with less yelling when you come home and tell your mother and no one has to sleep in the spare room for a week.

And really no-one is going to drown because they couldn't figure out some gameplay mechanic in an MMO. Alright, if they fall off the raft from Halas to Everfrost and don't know about pushing the mouse forward while holding down the left mouse button and W on the keyboard simultaneously then yes someone might drown. Bad example. But it would only be a virtual drowning, and a barbarian to boot so, hey, no harm done, right?

It was a long trip Ma, but we made it! Me and Rocky outside Sanctum!

People that play MMOs are generally not complete idiots (go with me...). They had to be able to download and install the game and register an account. They have to be literate, since most of the instructions and communication in-game will be written down. (And with all due respect to TOR, having every quest voice-acted is not going to be the way of the future, for cost reasons if for no other). It seems to me that people who are able to do all that can be trusted to work out how to play the blasted game by playing it.

Hints, mouseover tips, introductory quests, helpful NPCs or companions, all fine. Adds to the gaiety of nations. Just put them in the same virtual space, virtual time-frame and if you possibly can manage it the same centre of population where everyone who started two hours before you has already arrived. Not in an exploding spaceship, not in a pocket dimension, not 20 years in the future or the past, not in an underground prison or on an island you'll never see again.

Is this Pay-and-Display or On Exit?

Just let us start as we mean to go on. And what brought all this on out of the blue, you may well be asking. I downloaded Star Trek Online and played through the tutorial yesterday, that's what. And it's not even a bad tutorial!

Last Stop, Everybody Off!

A couple of news items turned up in my reader yesterday and started me thinking. Rift decided to flag some servers for "large scale trial programs" and asked everyone on them if they wouldn't kindly mind leaving and Gods and Heroes went F2P. 

I've done quite a few betas over the years and I'd become used to having one or two icons on my desktop that offered me something for nothing but my time and goodwill. When it came to playing a game full-time and having ownership of my characters, though, I knew I'd have to put my virtual hand in my virtual pocket and come up with a credit card number. That had an obvious downside: I only have so much money so I could only justify subscribing to one or two MMOs at a time. Which was also the upside: the subscription fee acted as a kind of quality control.

Back when I began playing MMOs trying a new one meant buying a box and paying every month if you wanted to stick with it. That wasn't so much of a problem because there weren't that many MMOs to try and every new one that came along was something of an event in itself. It was worth shelling out just to say you'd been there when it happened.

Shadefallen - last Defiant out please turn off the lights

A few years on there were a lot more MMOs and few people would have wanted to stump up cash just to try them all. How lucky we were that free trials turned up, then! What a co-incidence! Free trials meant a week or two of low-level play to give you a taste of a game in the hope you'd buy the box and sub if you got hooked. That was better in some ways, because you knew going in you'd probably be done with the game before the trial ended and you wouldn't have wasted a penny. Still, there was the nagging worry that the new game might sink its claws in and you'd be stuck paying after all, which acted as some sort of a brake.

Millrush - lalala! We can't hear you!

Now there are hundreds of MMOs and most of them don't ask for any money at all. There's all kinds, too. Fantasy, Science Fiction, Super Heroes, Funny Animals, Crime. It's like being at the comic store all over again. And quite a lot of them are good. Good enough that once upon a time they thought they'd be able to sell you a box and charge you a monthly fee.  Only that didn't work out so well, or maybe it didn't work out as badly as all that but even so the other guys who'd dropped the fee were doing even better... Whatever, everyone went whaling.

Faeblight - There goes the neighborhood...

All of which brings me back to Rift and Gods and Heroes. Scott Hartsman nailed his colors to the subscription mast a long time back. In fact he pretty much scrambled up after them and nailed himself up there as well. I sense a retrenchment in recent months, however. It's going to be awfully painful if he has to pull out those nails and climb back down, but he's leaving clear wiggle-room with his "Right now, absolutely no plans whatsoever" reply to Eurogamer back in November when they asked if Rift had any contingency plans to move away from subs.

 Rift's done well with its subscription model, though. Can't argue that. If one day it does flip over and go Free to Play (and I'd bet it will although probably later rather than sooner) Trion can expect a massive surge of interest and publicity and a tsunami of returning exes. It's a solid gold game and it will be around for a long time. How it raises funds is the least interesting thing about it.

So? I can buy those and put them on a rat!

Gods and Heroes on the other hand never really got off the ground. I was in the beta and I could never even get the client to run. Sentiment was strongly against the game even being ready to launch when it did, let alone charging both a box fee and a subscription. When I saw the Massively article yesterday my first thought was "Is that thing still going?" Now it's free to play, will I try it? Well, there's a nominal fee for the client, so not yet. But even if that last barrier wasn't standing in my way, then no I probably wouldn't.

STO : You can walk about! Outdoors even!

Because I just don't have the time! This is the thing about all these great MMOs moving away from the old pay to play deal. Now I have all these extra games I could be playing but no-one gave me any more hours in the day. On my list of AAA F2P MMOs that I haven't yet even tried out yet there's Age of Conan, City of Heroes and Lineage2, with Star Trek Online due in a few days and Aion next month. Any one of those would justify a full month of concentrated play just to decide if it was worth carrying on.

Here's the thing. I'm paying to play Rift right now and I'm still not logging in. Forget Free-to-Play, I'll be happy if more games just go Free-to-Forget-to-Play !