Hello everyone. My name is Jeff Strain, one of the co-founders of ArenaNet, the studio behind Guild Wars. It was an honor to be asked to speak about the MMO industry today at the GC Developer's Conference, which is among the most influential developer conferences in the world. It's an equal honor to be able to represent the talented team at ArenaNet and be able to convey some of the development philosophies of the world-class designers, artists, and programmers who built Guild Wars. And of course I am honored that those of you sitting here actually took the time to come hear what I have to say. Thank you.
When I initially accepted the invitation to speak today, I provided a generic topic "The Future of the MMO industry" because I had not written anything yet, and I wanted to give myself plenty of room to explore different topics. To those of you who chose to come today believing that I would make far-reaching predictions about the games we'll be creating ten years from now, I apologize. The truth is, I hope that I am completely ignorant about what kind of games we'll be making in ten years, because I hope some hotshot kid comes out of nowhere and changes everything out from under us before then. If that doesn't happen, we've all failed to embrace and protect the culture of innovation that made it possible for us to be here in the first place.
I ultimately decided to address something much more relevant to those of us in this room today, and that is what it takes to create a successful MMO in today's crowded and brutal market. The formula is not as simple as it was a few years ago, as the very visible failure of many recent high-profile MMOs makes clear. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I can share some of the beliefs that I and many of my peers at ArenaNet hold based on our experience with Guild Wars. These beliefs are guiding us in the development of Guild Wars 2, so I sure as hell hope we're right!
Most MMOs fail
Don't be fooled by the much-hyped success of the top MMOs on the market. The game industry is littered with the carnage of MMOs that have failed over the past few years. Due largely to the social nature of MMOs, gamers rarely commit to more than one or two MMOs at a time. This is in contrast to the traditional game market, in which there is room for many games to be successful, even within the same genre. You may play ten different action games this year, but you are very unlikely to play more than one or two MMOs. This means that it is not enough to make a great game instead you must make a game that is so overwhelmingly superior that it can actively break apart an established community and bring that community to your game. In today's market, that is a tall order.
Regardless of the business model, the primary factor that determines whether an MMO lives or dies is the size of its active player base. There appears to be a tipping point at around 150,000 players. MMOs that reach this critical mass within a few months of release tend to continue to grow and thrive, and those that do not tend to shrink and ultimately die. The majority of MMOs that are released into the market never reach this threshold.
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