MMOre Insight

Well I’m sure you all know by now that Smedley plans on announcing a new MMO at Fan Faire which is set to release this month. I’m thinking this is going to be something of an experiment for SOE. Even announcing a game less than a month in advance in unprecedented in the MMO industry, or really the gaming industry in general. I think a policy more like this should be taken with MMO’s. While a month is a little short, I think it’s more reasonable to announce around 6-8 months prior to expected launch, or possibly beta rather than two or three years prior. This is enough time to get all the info out about your game to get people interested, but not overly hyped. Too much anticipation can breed extreme disappointment. I really don’t think that any amount of PR can build this game up enough to sell it at $50 a pop in just one month, though. Furthermore, if the game is getting released this month, that means there is likely to be no beta testing. (at least open, perhaps there was closed beta testing that was very hushed, but I doubt this, it would have leaked somehow. It’s more likely that it was all internal testing.) This all flies dead in the face of everything we’ve come to expect with MMO releases. What does this tell us? That they are trying something entirely new.

My primary belief is that this game is going to either be free to play with advertising (not so likely) or a free to play with an item mall of sorts. I think they want to turn some MMO concepts taken for granted on their heads, including how an alternate revenue system will work for a big-name western company, simply making enough money in the process to break even. That said, I have no idea what concepts they want to toy with, or even what genre the game will be. I could be completely wrong about this one, and they could release a full-fledged standard MMO (which I think would be equally as cool, since we won’t even have to wait to play it, and beating out all of the other competition on the way,) I just don’t think so. I suppose we’ll know soon enough whether either of these are the case, or whether I’m completely off-base.

~Kanthalos