Ubisoft acquired full rights to the Tom Clancy name a few days ago for a reported 90 million dollars and has now announced a Tom Clancy MMO. Development on this new project has not yet started, but speculation is already putting the budget for this game at around 50 million.
It truly seems that the MMO rush is on and everyone wants a piece of the action. No doubt a Tom Clancy MMO would be a FPS, although I don’t know how you can take a spy/swat type gameplay and turn it into a MMO. How does that work? 50 spies all trying to steal the same suitcase? No, most likely it would follow in the footsteps of The Agency, which Sony is working on. You would create your team and signup for missions that are instanced.
Without a truly successful MMOFPS to date, its going to be interesting if any of these upcoming games can pull it off. Personally I’d be more interested in a MMOFPS like Planetside except good.
I don’t mean to pounce on your post, but I take issue with your implication that Planetside wasn’t successful. I think we need to be careful and quantify/define the different degrees of success.
Try to keep in mind that there are *still* people paying to play Planetside. Thousands of people, I think. Planetside was released in 2003 and since then has had hundreds of thousands of subscribers, a small group of which still play. But the point is, look at Sony’s tiny operating costs. They haven’t released new content for the game in *ages* and probably have a small handful of guys maintaining servers and what not. And yet each month, people shell out $15 to play the game. Yes, not many people, but it doesn’t have to be a bagllion people when the game has been running for 5+ years.
The game’s operating costs are tiny at this point. Though we don’t have access to the internal economics or budet of SOE’s studios, my guess is that from a financial perspective, the game has got to be considered a success.
I played and absolutely enjoyed Planetside, but thats irrelevant. I think dangerous thing World of Warcraft has got everybody thinking is that unless your game has ads on TV, or is mixed into a South Park episode, it’s not successful. With service-fee based games, this just isn’t the case. Companies can apply a fixed cost to develop the game, then slim down their operating cost – and as long as some people keep playing and paying, it’s bound to produce a return on the investment.
Granted, this is mostly all my idle speculation, but it’s grounded in principal. I’d love SOE’s business director to come on here and prove me wrong… Planetside wasn’t a hit top-selling game, but how ’successful’ it was is certainly something to be examined carefully.
BTW – I love your blog. Keep up the great work =)
I’m not saying Planteside wasn’t a success, I’m saying that it wasn’t very good, although I’m sure many will disagree with me. Planetside was a success in that it built a fanbase and was financially profitable, but it didn’t bring MMOFPS into the main stream like some MMORPG have.
The problem was that it was a continuous circle of never really winning or losing. The terrain was also very repetitive and lacked cities or basically anything interesting. When you know that you can never win and are just stuck in a limbo, it gets boring fast. Its like playing Counter Strike where the round never ends.
i’ve been loving PS since it went on the shelf about 6 years ago.
PS couldn’t go “mainstream” like WoW, because PS takes skill and cooperation to play well. WoW favors players who have no life, or more cash than common sense. PS doesn’t have n00b stomping, twinking, grinding and gold farming.
You mention never winning. No one wins in WoW either. If you bring back the head of the bandit king, the bandit king appears for the next player as if you’d never been there. The instances mean nothing to those outside of it. Win or lose, you just play again. In PS losing here causes problems for your allies there.
The theme of PS was an endless war. You “win” by your side winning while you’re online. You win that tower, that base, that continent. Just because someone retakes it later doesn’t mean you didn’t win. How can you have a territorial battle where the land stays yours forever? One side would win all the land and the MMO would be over. In the real world, the enemy CAN come back and retake lost ground.
If you were bored, you missed the point of the game. You were prolly in a crap outfit you didn’t care about, or didn’t develop the skills it takes to win.