[MUD-Dev] Future of MMOGs

[Mike Shaver]

On Sun, Oct 06, 2002 at 09:40:19AM -0700, Koster, Raph wrote:

> The first difficulty would be making such a beast. It's not
> exactly simple (though it is *simpler* in that if it's truly
> non-commercial and so on, you don't need to invest the
> [significant] effort in making sure that it's hackproof and secure
> enough for commercial transactions).

I don't believe that to necessarily be true.  Whether they're paying
cash or not, players will invest their time, and I suspect that they
will want to avoid playing on compromised servers and the like.

(I also don't think that "non-commercial" is the interesting aspect
of this, but rather that the idea of "distributed control and
development" has a lot of interesting promise.  If only as a
discussion topic. =) )

> Then there's the issue of content and intellectual property. If
> you had a network like this, and people uploaded content freely,
> it's naive to suppose that it would be user-generated
> content. It'll be user-pirated content too. Basically--whatever
> the Web is, this would be. Expect to see alternate (and better!) 
> versions of Star Wars and Star Trek and Pern and Disney and
> whatever. Worse, expect to see areas for trading college papers or
> copyirhgted music or whatever. (Just like we have now). Oh, and
> porn, of course.

What's the issue here?  "[W]hatever the web is" turns out to be
extremely attractive to a very large number of users, who are
willing to pay an almost-always flat rate for access to some set of
"base" content -- that which is "free" on the Web -- and then in
some cases cough up additional fees for premium content, on a
case-by-case basis.

People host content for free (even, gasp, pornographic content),
through services such as Geocities and Tripod and Blogspot and a
thousand other places.  Organizations contribute untold _millions_
in developer and infrastructure support for various open-source
projects, from Mozilla to Linux to Twister and back through Perl,
because the existence of that infrastructure has value to them, and
they don't derive as much additional value from exclusive access to
the result as they derive from network effects of deployment, and
contributions from other like-minded organizations.  And these are
not charity cases: these are companies like AOL-TW and IBM and SAP
and Intel.

I should probably leave my open-source/open-development horse tied
to the post for now, though.

>> Given there is probably a market for quality content, there's
>> nothing to stop people selling quality content to the players of
>> such a public MMOG.
 
> How about, market forces? How many people succeed right now at
> selling quality content on the Web? Those who do succeed do so via
> the subscription model--eg, the commercial MMOG. Micropayments
> just aren't here yet, and the primary barrier to adopting them is
> how the credit card system works, with its near-fixed transaction
> cost.

The MMOG subscription model isn't just "access to content", though
-- it's access to the service, and in the rare cases where there is
PGC worth describing as such, it's access to the tools of creation
and publication.  Drop the base price for a UO sub to $2/month, or a
fixed fee for account creation and startup, make it as easy to link
servers as it is to create a webring or refer to someone else's
blog, and let the Origins and Sonys (I mean, the Salons and the
Economists and OEDs) charge a premium to access their
expensive-to-generate content.  There's perhaps some business-model
risk here for those pay-for-play members of the Brave New Network,
in that it's possible that one of the ten thousand people who think
they can make a better UO might be _right_.

>> However, as we see with the Web, it's difficult to sell quality
>> content (cf Salon et al) when there's so much quality content
>> provided for free already.

Will America's Army kill UT2K3?  Does broadcast TV kill HBO?  Did
the free MUDs and MOOs kill Achaea and The Eternal City?  Did the
GIMP kill Photoshop, or Blender kill Maya?  Fileplanet Free >
Fileplanet Personal Server?

Of course, again, I don't really care about whether people charge
for what they create.  I sort of like being paid for my time --
though usually not the specific product of it -- and I don't think
others should be denied the opportunity.

But if, in the eyes of the user, the free content -- with its flaky
servers and mis-spelled descriptions and suspiciously-like-quake1
models and all the other warts that may accompany it -- is
compelling enough that they don't feel the need to spend the extra
$10/month on a different service, that doesn't bother me.  If you're
not making a sale, you're not selling it "right".  Lots of people
are really happy with Counter-Strike, and who am I to say that
they're wrong?

> People are very able to do without content. Content I haven't
> already experienced is way off on the luxury end of the
> subsistence-luxury scale.

That part of the spectrum is really what we're here to discuss on
this list, though, unless there I missed some breakthrough on the
nutritional effects of levelling.

> I never miss reading IGN articles that I am not subscribed to. The
> classic means of getting people to subscribe to content is to give
> them a free taste first so as to make it feel valued.

If players are able to, without financial investment -- which always
seems to pale in comparison to the time investment, but that's
another discussion -- experiment with what's out there in terms of
UOFree, does that make it harder or easier to sell them the
additional services of guaranteed in-game support presence,
higher-speed and -availability servers, a manual and cloth map,
etc.?

> The classic model you're proposing is that each participant pony
> up their own money to be on the Park. But then you get the
> "popularity kills" effect--anyone who makes good free content is
> forced out of the Park because of their bandwidth costs spiking.

Well, this doesn't seem to happen on the web.  Sure, sometimes a
site gets slashdotted, or they go over their monthly/hourly
bandwidth allocation, and it's unavailable for some period of time.
But it's rare that those sites get shut down.  Think of all the
people on dollarhost or running fan-sites.  People spend money to
publish their content for free.  Maybe this is just a phase of
irrationality that will pass when people realize that they
_shouldn't_ be giving away the products of their labour gratis, but
I sort of hope not.

> Making a powerful distributed system whereby people can contribute
> their own content, maybe even make money off of it, link together,
> and form a big ol' Sprawl or Matrix or Park or Net or whatever is
> going to have to be commercially attractive or it won't
> happen. And once it's commercially attractive, it will also have
> to be IP-friendly, at least relatively so.

And yet, The Internet, home of child pornographers and terrorists
and -- worse yet -- music and movie swappers, has been able to
attract tons of large companies and tons of individuals into its
"PGC" world.

> Don't get me wrong. This is the game I want to make next, as it
> happens. But despite the hacker ethic and the dreams of freedom of
> information, it's gonna HAVE to be monetizable and *profitable* or
> it won't get made. Food isn't free. The real question is whether
> you think the content consumer should get a piece of the pie, or
> whether it should ONLY go to the host.

There's more question than that, I think.

 - Should there be a wide spectrum of prices and "qualities" of
 content, provided by a wide spectrum of people, or is it better for
 a game universe to be controlled by one organization?

 - Should the content producer pick the price of the content, or
 should they be limited to publishing it in an area where they have

     a) no IP rights, b) no control over what it's linked to, or who
     can experience it, c) no control over the availability of it
     (price, etc.)

   ?

 - Can it be monetizable -- profitable depends more on the
 organization than on the game or infrastructure, IMO -- without
 placing a financial barrier to entry in front of _all_ types of
 participation (both publication and consumptionr)?

It's quite possible that Sony or AOL can't make money on this model,
because their corporate-friction costs are high enough that clearing
a profit of $5K/month on a single server isn't enough to keep the
lights on.  But that doesn't mean that Skotos or a pair of
"hobbyists" can't make a decent living running a few nodes in this
Park.

Mike



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