Thoughts on how to make a successful game franchise.
Ok I am by no means an expert here, but I have been playing games in various incarnations for over 20 years now. The games I am talking about are not "parlor games" like rummy or monopoly, but Role Playing Games, collectible Card Games, and Computer Games. I was thinking about this the other day and was wondering why some good games succeed and others wither up and die.
The first hit that comes to mind would have to be Dungeons and Dragons. Granted it filled a niche that before it came on the scene was not even really a niche. What Gary and Dave did right from the beginning was create a community. They encouraged folks to contribute and build on the lore of the game. They let other folks create products which helped increase the player base and expanded on the playability and life of the game. DnD has also had a long running magazine that supports the game with articles mostly contributed to by fans, however also developers submit things that just don't fit into actual products. Eventually DnD saw a decline and it can be tied to the owners of TSR (not Gary and Dave) who decided to lock the game down, believing they were losing money to these 3rd party producers of content. Even the content in Dragon suffered to this mentality. When the game was opened back up, it sprung back to life.
DnD spawned many variations on the theme with several other offerings, Warhammer, Traveller, RuneQuest, etc and on and on. In nearly all cases where a strong community was developed the games thrived, often coming back from the brink or actually demise.
Here lately the most elegant incarnation of a company doing things the "right way" in my opinion has to be Rakham producers of the beautiful miniatures game Confrontation and it's spin offs. They have some of the best production values out there right now, everything the put out can be considered nothing but wonderful. Another company who also has a great looking game with very stylized content is Privateer Press, makers of the Iron Kingdoms setting which is both a miniatures game and a D20 rpg setting. They started up magazine to support the world also so I have high hopes there as well. I confess when I started blogging this I had no clue about the magazine and was going to ding them for not having one.
This model works for many games, an example of a game that failed i really enjoyed is Magination. The game was of the CCG genre and was the only one of this type I activly played in tournaments. The company had a few failings but the biggest one I saw was that they tried to fake the community out by making it seem as tho they contributed when in reality they just went through the motions. They missed several oportunities to build the franchise and ended up stretching themselves thin because they tried to keep it all in house and thus maximize their profits up front. Same method TSR nearly killed DnD with. In this case the game died on the vine when its mechanics were fresh and quite good, the support just did not keep it viable.
Sorry if this seemed to go nowhere but the point of this is how can todays MMoRPGS take advantage of this method of keeping their games alive. Pretty much any game worth anything tries to develope a comunity around their forums for the game they are devoping/have released, however these are often populated by trolls looking for attention who drown out the real fans. Everquest 1 had a few core sites that had a huge following and provided lots and lots of info in the form of maps, quest walk throughs, item databases, etc. These sites themselves had a strong following and the game thrived on it. Each server developed their own community boards, guilds had their own forums they controlled, and so on. Sony knew this was a good thing and tried to foster it in house under thier own control and the result is genreally lackluster. They tied access to some of these resources to little charges on your subscription ot the game. I suppose it was not a terrible idea, however their support for the added serves has been poor at best. Things are broken and there is no sign that they will be fixed. They do a great job of keeping the in game content active and fresh, they just are paying the community portion not enough attention and it is going to cost them eventually I think. If you go out and look at the sites others have started the support is just not as rabbid. If SOE is smart they will free up these services and make them at least work better than they do now. It is something that pisses me off every time I try to go to my guilds forums and I can not even log on to them.
The first hit that comes to mind would have to be Dungeons and Dragons. Granted it filled a niche that before it came on the scene was not even really a niche. What Gary and Dave did right from the beginning was create a community. They encouraged folks to contribute and build on the lore of the game. They let other folks create products which helped increase the player base and expanded on the playability and life of the game. DnD has also had a long running magazine that supports the game with articles mostly contributed to by fans, however also developers submit things that just don't fit into actual products. Eventually DnD saw a decline and it can be tied to the owners of TSR (not Gary and Dave) who decided to lock the game down, believing they were losing money to these 3rd party producers of content. Even the content in Dragon suffered to this mentality. When the game was opened back up, it sprung back to life.
DnD spawned many variations on the theme with several other offerings, Warhammer, Traveller, RuneQuest, etc and on and on. In nearly all cases where a strong community was developed the games thrived, often coming back from the brink or actually demise.
Here lately the most elegant incarnation of a company doing things the "right way" in my opinion has to be Rakham producers of the beautiful miniatures game Confrontation and it's spin offs. They have some of the best production values out there right now, everything the put out can be considered nothing but wonderful. Another company who also has a great looking game with very stylized content is Privateer Press, makers of the Iron Kingdoms setting which is both a miniatures game and a D20 rpg setting. They started up magazine to support the world also so I have high hopes there as well. I confess when I started blogging this I had no clue about the magazine and was going to ding them for not having one.
This model works for many games, an example of a game that failed i really enjoyed is Magination. The game was of the CCG genre and was the only one of this type I activly played in tournaments. The company had a few failings but the biggest one I saw was that they tried to fake the community out by making it seem as tho they contributed when in reality they just went through the motions. They missed several oportunities to build the franchise and ended up stretching themselves thin because they tried to keep it all in house and thus maximize their profits up front. Same method TSR nearly killed DnD with. In this case the game died on the vine when its mechanics were fresh and quite good, the support just did not keep it viable.
Sorry if this seemed to go nowhere but the point of this is how can todays MMoRPGS take advantage of this method of keeping their games alive. Pretty much any game worth anything tries to develope a comunity around their forums for the game they are devoping/have released, however these are often populated by trolls looking for attention who drown out the real fans. Everquest 1 had a few core sites that had a huge following and provided lots and lots of info in the form of maps, quest walk throughs, item databases, etc. These sites themselves had a strong following and the game thrived on it. Each server developed their own community boards, guilds had their own forums they controlled, and so on. Sony knew this was a good thing and tried to foster it in house under thier own control and the result is genreally lackluster. They tied access to some of these resources to little charges on your subscription ot the game. I suppose it was not a terrible idea, however their support for the added serves has been poor at best. Things are broken and there is no sign that they will be fixed. They do a great job of keeping the in game content active and fresh, they just are paying the community portion not enough attention and it is going to cost them eventually I think. If you go out and look at the sites others have started the support is just not as rabbid. If SOE is smart they will free up these services and make them at least work better than they do now. It is something that pisses me off every time I try to go to my guilds forums and I can not even log on to them.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home