The Captive MMO Audience

Roger at Contains Moderate Peril suggests that MMO players tend to forget that they are also consumers.  He notes that we are fast to blame for-profit companies that kill games for monetary reasons, but slow to hold service providers we are otherwise fond of accountable for failure to provide services.  This sounds reasonable in the aggregate, but I don't find that I have either of these problems.  I also spend almost none of my time doing social activities, like raiding or PVP, that would tie me down to a specific product.  Perhaps these things are related? 

At issue are delays to the Riders of Rohan pre-purchase compensation package.  Roger correctly notes that Turbine accepted payment in full in advance for pre-purchase of a product with a promised date that Turbine failed to meet.  This might in most other circumstances be considered breach of contract.  Instead of complaining, I and various others actually praised the move as a way to deliver a more polished product at what may also be a more strategic time.   

The guys at Penny Arcade once quipped that Blizzard had developed a business model in which they rent players' friends to them on a monthly basis.  No matter how early or late, how buggy or how polished, everyone needs to buy the new content when it is released if they are to play together.  (This part isn't unique to MMO's - I've seen friends pester each other to buy new maps for FPS's, and I don't believe any of them ever received a cut from the games' publishers for this peer pressure marketing campaign.)  A player who does, as Roger suggests, feel that they are not getting acceptable service finds their friends held hostage - there may be various alternative games on the market, but the odds of reassembling the same group are low. 

By contrast, I have the luxury of acting like a pure consumer because there's no one waiting on me to get the new content to fill out their raid group.  I never considered pre-purchasing Rohan, because I know from past experience that Turbine will offer steep discounts within a month or two (the new date is not that far from Black Friday).  I'm not thrilled with Turbine's decision to bundle in a bunch of extras I don't want to justify a higher price tag for the expansion package, but I don't need to pay the premium that will be required of the captive portion of the audience. 

Ironically, the cost of expanding the MMO demographic beyond the traditional social, group-oriented player may have been that the market actually is less tolerant of the things that studios got away with in 2005 when it was a smaller but more loyal playerbase.  For good or for ill, perhaps millions of players are now free to quit games like WoW and SWTOR precisely because less of the MMO audience are captives.

What I've Been Working On: DCUO

DCUO gets the next slot in my Labor Day round-up in recognition of other news in comic MMORPG's.   I picked up all of the remaining DLC's when I was dumping my now generally useless Station Cash.  As a result, I now own the new Captain America shield weaponset for all characters, along with the Green/Yellow Lantern and the Earth powersets (if I make new characters), along with a few additional chunks of content. 

One of the newer additions - I can't tell if this required DLC or not - are soloable daily quests that award two of the tier two dungeon tokens daily.  On the plus side, this can help grind out the tokens needed to get the gear required to access some of the content I already owned - on the downside, this doesn't make the daily quest grind any less of a daily quest grind.  I'm keeping an open mind, but overall I'm not spending much time in game.

If you'd told me that one superhero MMO had abruptly announced plans to close today, I would have guessed DCUO over City of Heroes/Villians.  SOE is not NCsoft, but DCUO never really took off and is shackled with the costs of a licensed IP - the only significant scenario in which SOE has been forced to pull the plug on MMORPG's.  By contrast, Paragon Studios' offering was an original IP that recently went free to play, and had an eight and a half year history behind it.  I guess we finally have hard evidence that a business model change is not guaranteed to save every MMO that makes the attempt.