[MUD-Dev] Re: MMO Communities

[Mike Rozak]

Matt Mihaly wrote:

> The design team is usually not the ones setting the goals for an
> MMO design. They're usually hired guns, though I'll grant that I'm
> not intimately familiar with how EQ got started. I seriously doubt
> SOE's corporate parents sit down and ask for a game with artistic
> quality, with profit coming second (and yes, I know SOE grew out
> of Verant).

My experience (not in games) has been that upper management is
interested in a) profits, and b) a strategic product. They don't
immediately constrain the development team's design, but if the
development team comes back with something that doesn't look like it
will sell, or won't fit the strategy, management jumps in and starts
demanding (or cancels the project). Of course, the development team
knows this, so they do their best to design what they think
management will want. As stated before, the new design often ends up
being a clone of a prexisting product with a few extra features
added... revolutionary products are too risky.

>>From a large corporation's standpoint there's no need to do a
revolutionary product. They just see what's on the market already,
find a product they can clone, and then apply their own skillbase to
improve it. Alternatively, a large corporation may decide to buy an
exsiting company (usually the one in 2nd or 3rd place) and pump
money into them.

> I'd even go so far as to say that when it comes to a public
> company, it's downright unethical to EVER have any goal but
> increased profit for your shareholders. Indulging personal desires
> is very poor form when you're spending other people's money.

People in the development team all have their own pet goals, and
each one varies from person to person. Most people in the team would
rank profits below their pet goal. (This is one of the reasons why
the Mythical Man-Month warns about bringing people in later on in
the project, because they introduce new sub-goals that ultimately
slip the product.) The development team's leaders tend to rank
profit as their most important goal though...  that's one reason why
upper management put them in control.

> I'll back off this and say that the entire purpose of an MMO being
> published/produced by a public company should be to make
> money. I'll grant that this may mean that the MMO itself loses
> money while acting as a loss leader or fueling research for future
> money-making enterprises though, so I shouldn't have been so hasty
> or overly-broad in my declaration.

I'll go a step further: Virtual Worlds are not typical games in a
business sense. They are not only an annuity (producing stable
revenues over a long period of time), but they're a platform (A game
upon which other games can be built). As a result they are
strategically valuable.

Mike Rozak
http://www.mxac.com.au
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