All Your History: MMO Part 3 – High Level

At the start of the new millennium, the Massively Multiplayer Online genre was growing fast.  Big hits like Ultima Online and EverQuest had gathered hundreds of thousands of players in North America and Europe, and Lineage had gained millions of followers in Asia.  While these numbers didn’t reach the same heights as the biggest selling titles of the day, their unique business model proved profitable to an extent unheard of before.  Where other games only received money from their customers from the initial purchase, MMOs would continue to charge customers a monthly fee.  These games kept making money for us long as gamers played it.  Going into the next decade, the business model would hit a fork in the road, as one game drove the old model to its furthest extent yet, while another would make a fortune without charging a cent.

High Level

In Two Thousand One, Andrew and Paul Gower, along with Constant Tedder, created Jagex Games Studio in their native England.  They had a simple idea: do the opposite of what everyone else was doing.  The rest of the gaming industry was trying to pump out the best-looking graphics for games they charged fifty dollars for.  The Jagex team saw this as a problem: it left people with older machines behind, and the price tag meant a lot of people might not even try the game.  What if there was a game that had graphics so simple, that even a standard web browser could render them?  And what if, just like every other program on the internet, that game was free to use?

RuneScape released into beta in January Two Thousand One, available in any web browser running Java.  The game was spot free to use, paid for by an advertising banner at the top of the screen.  It conformed to the basic role-playing game mechanics of other MMOs: players would create their own avatar to adventure through a fantasy world, gain experience, and gather loot.  True to its basic philosophy, the gameplay was relatively simple compared to other games, but more accessible.  It was a casual game meant for non-hardcore players and those with slower computers and connections.

And it worked.  RuneScape, together with its follow-up, RuneScape — yup, the sequel kept the same name — quickly became a phenomenon, the most played free MMO in the world.  To this day it remains entirely free, paid for by advertising, although more content is available for players who pay a monthly subscription.  Still, the vast majority of RuneScape’s users don’t pay a dime, happy to let advertisers pay the bills.  For reference, Lineage was an unprecedented success in Asia with three million customers.  RuneScape would eventually reach ten million active players per month.  It kicked off a rush of free-to-play MMOs, which became a burgeoning genre around the world and especially in Asia.

The following years saw an explosion in the MMO marketplace, as seemingly every studio tried to cash in on the genre’s success.  Not surprisingly, most major publishers were wary of free, and preferred the more understandable subscription model.  In Two Thousand Two, Japanese juggernaut Square released Final Fantasy XI, the first entry in the legendary series to go online, and massively so.  Notably, it was the first MMO for consoles, releasing for the PlayStation 2 as well as the PC, later coming to the Xbox 360 as well.  The console strategy worked, and in total FFXI gained a steady five hundred thousand subscribers, making it one of the biggest names in the genre.

Two Thousand Three saw the release of Eve Online by Crowd Control Productions in Iceland.  On the surface it seemed like a space combat game, a cool twist on the genre.  Instead of leveling up a powerful character, players would improve their starships with better and better equipment.  However, the game’s primary draw quickly became it’s incredibly complex and realistic economy.  Very soon, concepts like supply and demand, inflation, interest, free trade, and even embezzlement became central to the experience.  Both in its setting and its gameplay, Eve Online has stood out from the crowd since its launch and remains one of the most popular MMOs around.

More genre mixing came from Sony Online Entertainment that same year.  SOE had already dominated the MMORPG market with EverQuest.  So now, they chose to establish the MMOFPS market.  First-person shooters had proven to be one of the most popular genres in all of gaming.  Combining the appealing action of shooters with the persistent addictiveness of MMOs seemed a sure bet, and PlanetSide hoped to capture both audiences and charge them monthly fees.  Unfortunately, the game never took off.  Shooters had always featured top-notch graphics, but to allow for a steady connection, graphics in MMOs had to be much weaker.  PlanetSide didn’t look good to hardcore shooter fans.  Worse, since many shooters featured a multiplayer component for free, many players didn’t see the need to pay a monthly fee.  For the next few years, the reaction to PlanetSide solidified the dominance of the RPG in the MMO.

Some other popular releases in this era include Star Wars Galaxies from SOE and LucasArts, and City of Heroes from Cryptic Studios and NCsoft.  Galaxies took place during the original film trilogy, letting fans act out the fantasy of living in the myth.  Unfortunately, the game itself wasn’t considered very good, and the initial audience evaporated pretty quickly.  City of Heroes mixed classic MMO gameplay with superheroes, a twist that did draw in some fans, though the game never quite reached EverQuest’s level of success.

Meanwhile, the two biggest names in the genre were each prepping their sequels.  Lineage II released in Two Thousand Three from NCsoft, and EverQuest II in Two Thousand Four from SOE.  In doing so, both publishers were following the typical game business model of frequent iterations.  Unfortunately, both companies soon came to realize that in a community-based genre like MMOs, having two separate games in a franchise just splits the audience.  Neither sequel ever reached the subscription highs of its original, and worse, in each case the original’s numbers plummeted on the sequel’s release.  EverQuest and Lineage each became their own worst competition.

Except, of course, for one other game.  In November Two Thousand Four, Blizzard Entertainment in Irvine, California, also decided to try and enter the MMO space.  They would be using their popular Warcraft franchise to do it, an odd choice considering Warcraft only had strategy games to its name, no RPGs.  Still, the Blizzard and Warcraft brands were some of the most respected and trusted in gaming, so the guys at Irvine figured they’d have a success on their hands.  Given the established size of the market, and the popularity of the big MMOs, Blizzard figured that their World of Warcraft game would sell four hundred thousand copies in a year.  If they were lucky, they hoped they might one day even gain one million active paying customers, second place to only Lineage.

As it turned out, Blizzard had dramatically underestimated their own power.  Customers blew through four hundred thousand copies in a month, not a year.  In fact, one year on,  World of Warcraft had four million active subscribers, ten times Blizzard’s estimate.  That also made it the biggest MMO ever up to that time, and it did it with a monthly fee, not a free model like RuneScape.  In time, WOW would grow to have twelve million active subscribers, an astonishing feat that no one else has come close to matching.

While its popularity can be partly ascribed to brand recognition, more important were its relatively simple user interface and accessibility.  The game featured much less time recovering from battles or repeating simple quests just to get to the next level.  It was also a heavily directed experience, with a far more quests than any other game in the genre.  Criticially, there were a multitude of quests available to players at any level, something no other game had done to the same extent.  It meant that, instead of leaving it up to players to figure out what to do, the game always gave them something exciting to try.  To be fair, old genre complaints of similar mission structures and long travel times returned.  But WOW did it all with a better sense of gameplay than anybody, all on top of a beautiful and varied world.

Beyond this, Blizzard learned the lessons of the Lineage and EverQuest sequels by not making one of their own.  Instead, the developer kept WOW fresh with large expansion packs that extended the world and gameplay of the core game.  This way, the audience was never split, even though better graphics and mechanics were constantly being introduced and tweaked.  And since popularity in MMOs was an exponential thing, a game that everyone’s friends were playing became the game that everyone was playing.

To put it simply, WOW reshaped the MMO landscape.  It was so huge that subscription rates for virtually every other game in the genre tanked — WOW stole them away.  Its sales in Europe soon exceeded the entire projected market of the continent.  WOW proved that MMOs weren’t a niche genre with a high margin — they were among the single most powerful forces in gaming.  World of Warcraft nets Blizzard an estimated billion dollars per year in subscription fees alone.  As a social phenomenon, as a business model, as an icon of art form, WOW’s importance cannot be understated.

Towards the end of the decade, the twin giants of World of Warcraft and RuneScape ruled the landscape.  No other subscription MMO could rival Blizzard’s juggernaut, and RuneScape’s continued and mammoth success changed how business executives looked at their models.  As time went on, the seeming invincibility of WOW and the appeal of the free model combined into a seachange for the entire genre.

Tune in next time to see MMO’s change their tune

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