I feel the need to continue the discussion, started yesterday by Dan Rubenfield on the SWG: NGE expansion that many credit with decimating the player base. A few, I hope salient, thoughts …
The idea was that we had the most valuable IP in the entire world, and we fucked it up to the point of having 200k subs.
Could this be termed hubris? Sure, the original Star Wars trilogy was revolutionary for it’s day. It’s definitely true that every nerd, geek and dork alive in the 70’s wanted to be a Jedi. Certainly the extended universe of Star Wars is amazing. Some of the characters are powerfully iconic.
But is it really the most valuable IP in the world? And what does that mean anyway?
IP is only worth what you can do with it. WoW proved that you can take a relatively little known franchise (in comparison to Star Wars), wrap it around a great game and make billions. SWG proved you can take an amazing IP, wrap it around a mediocre game and do, well, mediocre.
By way of a food analogy … IP isn’t the flavour of the food (that’s game mechanics) … it’s more akin to a food’s smell. The smell (the IP) complements the taste (the game-play). A pleasant smell might entice us to try a bite (that first month). But that’s it … it can’t overcome problems with game-play in the long run. Bad food is bad food.
Have you ever tried drinking vanilla? Sure it smells great, but the taste!
My issue here is that IP was apparently put first. The IP was too good for the game-play and mere 200,000 subscribers. The IP deserved better. Hubris.
So we were given the directive to make Galaxies better. Not just make Galaxies better, but make it succesful. [...] Not just small changes, but rebuild it. [...] And it was needed. When we were asked, we were bleeding subscribers. If I remember correctly, somewhere around 10k a month. LOSING 10,000 subs a month. Note – I think our subs were closer to 160-180 than 200k. It was a bad financial situation no matter how you look at it. WOW was out. SWG was niche and clunky. [...]
It’s a little hard to figure out the specifics of the ‘when’ in this quote. Later on in the article, it is revealed that the NGE was written in 2 or 3 months of crunch. I presume there was perhaps a bit of time prior to this for prototyping, thinking and discussion. So, maybe, the topic of radical change first came up 4 or 5 months prior to NGE launch: July-ish 2005???
Interestingly, the Wikipedia article on SWG suggests that during the CU to NGE period, subscriptions were actually rising. Perhaps (heaven forbid) the Wikipedia is wrong.
Was there ANY game, other than WoW, that was growing at this point in time. WoW (released at the end of November 2004) had effectively just cleared launch hurdles and was starting it’s epic growth.
At a glance at MMOGCharts (yes, I know, the data is not necessarily perfect), the only other game generally growing during this period is Runescape. And I wonder if even that owes something to WoW … a game for all those that want to play WoW but for whom a credit card subscription was inaccessible. It’s hindsight, but faced with the juggernaught WoW … other games couldn’t help but to bleed.
More specific to SWG, there was the also-infamous CU (Combat Upgrade), released at the end of April, 2005, that radically changed the game. Even before the NGE, the CU had dashed the hopes and dreams of many players. Even without WoW, there was cause for existing players to abandon SWG.
The subscription drop that SOE perceived as impetus to change drastically … could have been (and should have been) interpreted as the collective plea of the player-base to stop revolutionizing shit. Even at the time, I can remember many fellow players wishing that SOE would fix the known bugs and address customer service complaints rather than changing core system drastically.
Those majority of those that were in (or entering) the market for a MMO wanted WoW. The NGE did not make SWG into a viable alternative to WoW in the eyes of the marketplace. Nor could it have. Nothing, not even exactly cloning WoW, would have given SWG the subscriber numbers that WoW had. After all, all the cool kids were already in WoW … why go anywhere else.
Unless of course, WoW was not what you wanted. There was a reasonable group (apparently around 200K) that wanted SWG. It was an epic mis-read of the marketplace.
The NGE did not and could not make SWG more attractive to WoW’ers. The best SOE could have hoped for was to make SWG more attractive to the kinds of people that wanted to play a game like SWG. The could have focused on making SWG more of what it already was.
You know … things like fixing bugs, tweaking, adding content and providing customer service.
Hubris blinded SOE to reality. (Of course, it’s easy to say that in retrospect).
We were told to imagine something new and unique. To push it to the next level.[...] We scrambled [Emphasis mine] to come up with something more impressive. [...] We tested out a new combat system on a whim. I did a quick prototype and we discussed it internally. The difference was the control scheme, not the rules. You clicked, You shot. [...] If I remember the dates correctly, we did our NGE conversion in 2-3 months of solid crunch. It was some of the heaviest crunch I’ve ever done.
Any software developer will tell you … NO GOOD EVER COMES FROM CRUNCH. Software produced in crunch is almost always buggy, incomplete and not really what you wanted in the first place. Time and personal balance is required to achieve quality and completeness.
And fun, especially in MMO’s, is more art-form than science. Not art as in “high-art” with moral purpose or deeper meaning … art as in “craft”. Sure, there are rules of thumb to follow. But fun is a house of cards built on sandy soil on back of a moving van driven erratically down a pot-holed country road at high speeds by a drunk twelve-year-old that’s too short to see over the dash board … get just one card out of place and the whole structure might come down.
I don’t know a lot about MMO development, but I’ll guess that there are two reasons why MMO take so long to build. The shear volume of artwork, animations and textures takes time. But that time is also useful, I’d imagine, in trying out various mechanics and assessing their impact on the game … to rework those bits that subtract from the experience until you arrive at something which is actually fun.
How could anyone possibly believe that a small team could produce produce something fun and entirely new under duress and in only 2 or 3 months, based on a single prototype.
Hubris, blindness and sheer folly too.
As always Lum has an excellent article in response to Dan’s post.
Jeff Freeman, I believe, succinctly summarized the discussion here.
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I’m copying a post I made on Dan’s website that I think pretty much sums it up.
Let’s talk expectation management for a minute.
I’m sure the suits all thought that if you took one of the most valuable IPs around and partnered it with the folks who made EverQuest (keep in mind this was pre-WoW, and EQ was the shit), you couldn’t lose. You would have millions of subs and everyone involved would be buried under piles of cash.
With that expectation, a Star Wars MMO with 200k subs was considered a complete failure. Something had to be done, and it had to be done quickly. Everyone keeps talking about fixing bugs and adding content. While that may have slowed the cancellation rate, it wasn’t enough. It would be like putting a new muffler on your Celica. Sure, it would make it better, but the NGE was a freakin Ferrari! The execs were willing to sacrifice the 200k players they had, thinking they could bring in a million new ones. A risky move, but once again, in their eyes they didn’t have much to lose.
What they didn’t count on was how much damage those disaffected players could do. Their existing player base was so angry (and rightfully so) that they began screaming and yelling to anyone who would listen. The marketing and community folks were simply unable to counter all of the negative press coming from those players, but not from a lack of trying. They did the best they could, but they were unprepared for the ferocity of that backlash.
Did the NGE make it a better game? Yeah. Did it make it more accessible to the masses? Definitely. Had the NGE been the game they shipped at launch, would they have had their millions of subs? I don’t know. We’ll never know.
There are a lot of problems with the wikipedia article. I participated in a battle against sock-puppetry there ’til even *I* methunk I didst protest too much.
I think that comment from Valko there is the most astute observation from an outsider I’ve ever read.
That Family Guy clip is just too funny – or I’m too ornery – not to toss that out there.
Jeff Freeman wrote: “That Family Guy clip is just too funny – or I’m too ornery …”
Why must it be an either / or situation?
Valko… wrote: “The execs were willing to sacrifice the 200k players they had, thinking they could bring in a million new ones. A risky move, but once again, in their eyes they didn’t have much to lose.”
This is really the only statement I have problems with in Valko’s comment. Within SOE, it may have been perceived as a bold and risky move … with a chance at windfall.
But really it wasn’t. It was (from my perspective) guaranteed failure. At that point in time, WoW was sucking all the oxygen out of the room. Miracles would have been required to make it otherwise. Miracles aren’t born of 2-3 month crunches.
The best comment I read on the topic appears to have been deleted (in the original article). It was somewhat not culturally sensitive. But to paraphrase: “So you expected several million kids to quit WoW and come play your piece of shit cooked up in 2 months. Duh!”
It’s hard from me NOT to comment on this topic. I tried though!
ValkoSipuliSuola wrote: “Did the NGE make it a better game? Yeah. Did it make it more accessible to the masses? Definitely.”
I don’t know if I can say it was a better, more accessible game. Not that I doubt the validity of the statement – I just can’t say I’m qualified to answer. What I can say is that the NGE was not the game I wanted to play, and it certainly was not the one I bought and had been paying a fee for every month. But for me, SWG wasn’t as much of a game as it was a virtual world. And when everything that happened, happened the world I loved changed. The people I logged in every day to play with left, and eventually so did I.
I’ve gone on to play WoW, but I NEVER would have tried that title if it hadn’t been for SWG. The people I became friends with in SWG ended up at WoW later on, and I joined them. They ended up quitting and so did I. For me, my SWG experience was about a lot of things, but the people I met and got to know where the most compelling.
I never left SWG for WoW because one was better than the other, it just became the best alternative.
> Could this be termed hubris?
Incidentally, I don’t think he meant it to sound that way. It might be hubris if that idea were just one idea, on the part of those who shared it. But it really was, back in the day, just as he wrote, *the* idea.
Check internet archives, etc… pretty interesting stuff, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. The million-player mark was like the 4-minute-mile: theoretically something that could be broken (and considered more of a hypothetical by some, along with a hypothesis that no game could or would ever do it by others).
TSO and SWG were in a race to be the first to break a million-subscribers. EQ at its peak had left the closest competitor a distant second place and wasn’t anywhere close.
And EQ didn’t hold the lead due to being first – it wasn’t – nor to being the latest – it wasn’t.
Older games seemed to be doomed when EQ’s redefined “successful” on them. They then seemed to be irrelevant when EQ’s numbers had no impact on those games regardless how large it grew.
Then there were the newer games which then either also fell into the irrelevant category (succeeding, but well below EQ’s level and without impacting EQ) or else failed.
Maybe it was only possible to consider the successful games’ as being irrelevant to EQ and vice versa because that was so inescapably obvious. Not so obvious nor inescapable was the idea that a game’s failure was absolutely unrelated to EQ, ridiculous as that sounds when I lay it out for comparison like this.
It was a foregone conclusion that there were a finite number of MMO players, and so any game that failed did so because it could not lure-away players from other MMOs (and weighted for import: that mostly meant EQ).
That conclusion was clearly wrong, but I don’t think it was based on hubris, least of all on the part of any one or several individuals. It was more like one of those conventional wisdom, “everybody knows”-sorts of things – like that the world is flat, or the Sun orbits the Earth – which just later turns out not to be the case, and possibly might not ever have been the case even when everyone thought that it was.
Humility, more than hubris, drove that. No one was saying there’d be a few million MMO players for one MMO, with more left-over than were currently playing all of them (combined)… or if anyone was saying that back then, they were a kook.
That MMOs which succeeded did so without impacting EQ would have been inescapable and obvious too, eventually, but more MMOs didn’t do all that well… so that was hard to see.
So there was only one question. “What beats EQ for EQ players, and also appeals to as many people not playing MMO’s right now as are?”
The Sims and Star Wars – as IPs – were it. Those were the IPs with lots of fans, the fans with lots of potential for MMO-player cross-over. The Sims, because it was a video game, and Star Wars, ’cause video games were an established branch of Star Wars fandom already. The new Star Wars trilogy wasn’t even out when we started.
Other IPs might have been larger, but the connection to video-games (let alone MMOs) wasn’t there for them. Gaming still wasn’t considered something normal people do (and still isn’t).
Example: NFL Fandom is much larger than Star Wars fandom, but there’s no NFL MMO in the works because no one thinks those fans would go for it. And that’s today. Years ago, the same thinking applied to everything (It is as wrong now for the potential of an NFL MMO as it was then for everything, IMO, but that’s a whole ‘nother topic: i.e. the largest IPs are the largest MMO IPs, and all this cross-over nonsense is just nonsense).
So then too, just in terms of what was in development, there was SWG and TSO with all their IPs’ mighty potential, and nothing else.
You could say “such-n-such was bigger!” and even if you were right, S-n-S Online wasn’t in development, so that wouldn’t matter.
They were both spectacular failures when not only failing to beat the hypothetical million-sub barrier, but then seeing the illusion of such a barrier dispelled by WoW.
Not so much that compared to WoW, they were failures, but that compared to WoW, the expectations for them were pathetically low.
Failures, then, when they didn’t even live up to those timid projections.
So, I don’t think “hubris” the right term, so much, Lots of wrong-thinking was going on then, but humble ambitions kept (and continue to keep) IPs with broader appeal out of MMO development.
Or, well, just wrong-thinking across the board: projecting big hits here and narrow appeal there based on a misunderstanding of the actual shape and motion of the earth and sun.
In hindsight, all this. If I’d known years ago what is so obvious to everyone now… well, no one would have believed me and that’d have made me some kind of crazy mad, so I’m glad I didn’t.
Jeff Freeman wrote: “It might be hubris if that idea were just one idea, on the part of those who shared it. But it really was, back in the day, just as he wrote, *the* idea.”
Awww … I was all happy to use a fancy word. Ok, if it wasn’t Hubris, could we call it Hamartia?
Your point is well taken. It’s somewhat more difficult to call it a failing if everyone was thinking it.
But I wasn’t specifically referring to a personal hubris … I wasn’t suggesting there was undue pride in their abilities.
I was suggesting, and perhaps hubris isn’t the right word, that there was undue pride and belief in the Star Wars IP.
Edit: Nor was I referring to an individual belief. Realisitically, for an undue pride and belief to have any real impact on a major studio, it would have to be endemic and cultural.
A MMO is not like a toy, where the value is nearly entirely derived from the IP. A helmet is just a helmet. A Darth Vader helmet, is still just a helmet, but it’s soooooooo cooool (assuming you’re 30 something).
With a MMO, regardless of how great your IP is, the underlying game-play has to be good, or players wander away. Or worse, hear that it sucks, and never try in the first place.
I remember at the time there being *official* discussion that suggested the goal had been to make SWG more star-warsy. As if to suggest that the problem was that the game wasn’t living up to the IP.
What magic allowed the belief that 2 or 3 months work by a small team could change the fortunes of SWG. It sounded like the magic that would make it all work was the IP.
More-over it sounded like the IP was itself the valuable thing. That it was perceived as being so important that it was worth *risking* 160-200K players on the chance at a million mark *with* the SWG IP (rather than taking a shot at the million mark with *some other* IP).
I think it is a fault of some sort to assign so much value to the IP.
Had the IP been something else, Alien Colonies Online, or something like that, I wonder if a different strictly business decision would have been made. Reduce the team. Focus on maintenance and small improvements. Move on to the next project.
Or, if the cost of starting from scratch is too high … why not take a more reasonable amount of time to re-imagine SWG. Time to work out the bugs. Time to work in the game systems that NGE side-lined. Time to get feedback and conduct broader play-testing. Time to set up a marketing and launch campaign that doesn’t reek of H2S.
I wonder at the urgency of it all. What was pushing sooo hard. It’s not like SOE hasn’t had other less-than-stellar-successes. Was some Sr. exec’s job on the line? No body got canned.
From an outsider’s perspective, it really looks like an unnatural belief in the value of the SWG IP that blinded SOE to market realities and drove them to undertake an impossible (and unwise) task.
I think we might be underestimating the value of an IP. I mean, I end up reading reviews (at the very least) of every Star Wars game coming down the pike. And I play a lot of them. I even played Rebellion, and tried to like it — there, I said it. If it were in development, I’d read a couple reviews of “Star Wars: Imperial Poop Destroyer,” the game where you try to locate and use a toilet on an Imperial vessel, before I abandoned it as an awful game…
And that would be *very* important for a game where box sales is critical.
For MMO, the big money is in keeping people playing and paying long term. IP might get you to try, but it won’t get you to stay.
Case in point.
# of hard-core Star Wars Geeks here at WorldIV:
… 2.33 (I don’t think I really count).
# of people playing SWG here at WorldIV:
… 0