Deal Breakers
MMOHub has a brief article up on in-browser versus downloadable MMO’s.
My biggest problem isn’t with a download per se, but with downloads that run a very long time or downloads which don’t come direct from a link on the game company’s site. Torrents are sometimes ok and often a pain. Going to a 3rd party download site and having to sign up sucks. Any requirement to pay to download is an absolute deal breaker.
In the free to play market, poor distribution strategies have a seemingly huge impact. The most successful games are browser based or have very small downloads, like Dofus and Runescape. Other free-to-play games, those with multi-gig downloads via torrent or through download sites, generally seem to wallow in obscurity.
A download site that requires payment to get reasonable download times is an absolute deal breaker for me. Your free-to-play game had better be amazing if you think I’ll wait 5 hours from the time I get the itch to play to the point when I actually get to whack something.
Look What’s Sprung Up Overnight
While we’re on the topic of browser MMO’s … while I was sleeping last night a carpet of browser based persistant multi-player games magically sprung up like mushrooms. If you’d asked me yesterday, I would have listed Kingdom of Loathing, Nile Online and Neopets (sorry, I don’t really count Habbo as a game). MMOHub has a huge list. There’s something for everyone, from the Wild West to Galactic Empires.
For the Active Couch Potato
Now, with all this free-to-play gaming you might get a little out of shape? Not to worry. You can pretend to be active and athletic with any of these new sports MMO’s.
I’m *sure* none of this existed a year ago.
– Tuebit
P.S. Really, I should have titled this article ‘A Nod to MMOHub’. It’s a great place to get links to a variety of online persistant multiplayer games.
5 Comments
I’m going to argue about Habbo. Habbo is a game, much like when you were playing with your GI Joe action figures… The “Games” that are played are largely imaginative and devoid of formal rulesets and systems for enforcing them. But you WILL see people forming queues, blocking areas, etc…
I think it may be worthy of another post, but I really think this will be a year where we see a rise in a fusion of buzzwords: the Web 2.0 / Social / Casual / Browser-based game. Only with more MMO.
Tachevert pronounced: Habbo is a game, much like when you were playing with your GI Joe action figures…
This is getting perilously close to the whole “it’s a toy” vs “it’s a game” argument. Your point is understood.
Neopets, Kingdom of Loathing and Nile Online each have set goals, rules governing the achievement of those goals and backstory. These characteristics make them somewhat MMO-like.
If Habbo has these characteristics, I wasn’t aware of it (not that I’ve ever spent much time with Habbo). My sense is that Habbo is much less MMO-like (in terms of these characteristics) than other browser based games.
I don’t know… they seem to have a great game going where you give them real money, receive fake money, and buy pretend decorative items with said fake money. Or at least, if that’s a game, I’m pretty sure that the Habbo company is winning
As far as downloadability goes, it’s a breaker for me more often than not. I hesitate on installing Shockwave or similar well-known plugins. I’ll only download something else (whether it’s a plug-in or standalone) if I’m REALLY motivated, and I might have used a third-party download site literally once in a decade. (And I think that was actually for a beta of a standard, subscription AAA game.)
thnks for the post.
we launched more sites;
http://www.mmogames.com, http://www.mmorpgmmorpg.com, http://www.mmohub.org and http://www.mmocluster.com