MMO's to Mobile: My Live Service Journey - part 1

Games as a service is a normal, if not well-liked, part of gaming these days. Its roots reach far back before my start to the days of hourly charges for early online games. But, I have grown up in part of the live service evolution, and there are some stories to tell.

Perhaps, they can lend perspective to our ongoing search for eternal life...in games.

Everquest: I started as a line designer just after the Planes of Power expansion for EQ. At the time, EQ was the biggest MMO on the planet, and it not only charged a monthly subscription fee, it sold two expansions a year. This pace created a massive grind for both players and devs, chasing an insatiable need for content, and watering down the fun to thin soup that could last for months - as long as there wasn't competition.

These were the days before Horse Armor (let alone Sparkle Pony), so we didn't yet know about microtransactions. But, we took some shots at the concept with things like selling more storage slots as part of an expansion. This made a lot of money at first, spurring execs to seek more easy wins. Then, it hit subscriptions hard as players canceled the mule accounts they'd been using for extra storage.

There are obvious lessons to be learned here, but we've moved on significantly as a craft from those early days. The issue we still wrestle with, however, is how to generate the eternal revenue required for eternal games while keeping players happy. Some would say it's impossible to do without turning a game into something else entirely, that games are meant to be single purchases, not subscriptions.

It's a complicated topic, and since this is a story, not a sermon, I can only speak to what I learned from Everquest. Players were not yet attenuated to the mechanisms now common in live service games, and we literally didn't know what we were doing as devs. That said, we changed the implicit reality of the game just a bit with these early actions. We nudged player motivation from game actions to transactions, opening doors that still stand ajar.

It would be easy to simplify this as bad, as a canary call for things to come. The reality is entirely new kinds of games have been born from these early experiments. Dark patterns excepted, there are audiences for all of them and players who find fun in purchasing to play...just as much as others find it anathema.

Everquest taught me that players will pay for what they find valuable, but that devs will pay in turn for that shift of attention, often in unpredictable ways. Seeking more money without seeking more fun is where the biggest mistakes are made.

Next Up: DC Universe Online, Pokemon Trading Card Game Online, Elder Scrolls: Legends, Magic the Gathering Arena, and Dungeons & Dragons.