Console MMOG: Will It Be the Mainstream in the Future?

In the latest AGDC 2009, Jeff Steelfel from Turbine who is in charge of The Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) posted an article entitled “MMOs to Consoles - Challenges, Opportunities, Emerging Trends”. Jeff disclosed in this article that Turbine had been developing a console MMOG for one and a half years. Everyone guessed that the console MMOG must be the console version of LotRO, since he's just responsible for LotRO. But he smiled: "It's a secret!" “We' re really not talking about what our console product plans are, but we will be soon," Jeff said when asked specifically if we're going to see a console version of LotRO. According to him, this new console game will be made available in 2010.

Surely, the console MMOG is not a new product actually. There were once three console MMOGs in the game history, i.e. Final Fantasy XI, Phantasy Star Universe and EverQuest Online Adventures. The three did make history, but all ended up with miserable results unfortunately.

However, the failure of the three games never frightens away the game developers. Over more than ten years of development, PC online games (e.g. UO & EQ at the earliest stage and the current WoW & Aion) have reached an unprecedented peak. No matter from the perspective of market value or the number of players, great progress has indeed been made. But later, developers find that there are fewer and fewer materials for game development. Resources that they could think of have all been adapted to online games, including films, comic books, novels and even console games. They’ve taken numerous TV play fans, film fans, console game fans and cartoon fans to the MMO gaming world. Now, they’re just aiming at the console MMOs long-coveted. So, console MMOGs just came into being not by accident but with a systematic plan. Not only Turbine but also many other game producers unveiled their development plan of console MMOs in AGCD 2009. For example:

1. Blizzard and its sci-fi dream

As the developer of WoW, the most successful MMO in history, Blizzard will surely never miss the big business opportunities granted by console MMOGs. It has been doing research on the games that are able to be run on various platforms for long.

In BlizzCon 2008, when being asked if they were developing some console MMOGs secretly,"Well, we definitely aren't adapting 'World of Warcraft' to the console at this time," Jeffrey Kaplan, game director of WoW replied. He explained that people think Blizzard developers only play and like PC games, but that's not the case; the games they chose to make just happened to work better for the PC.

"So I don't think 'World of Warcraft would really work that well on the console," he continued, "but that's not to say that other MMOs couldn't. And we have a pretty savvy group of console developers -- a lot of the guys we inherited from Swingin' Ape really know what they're doing on next-gen consoles. So we might have a few tricks up our sleeves in that regard."

Please pay attention to his words! Though WoW is less likely to work well on the console, it’s not to say that other MMOs couldn’t. And he also disclosed that they’d begun to develop their next-gen MMOs long before.

Let’s guess what their next-gen MMOs would be?