

Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people" - henning
http://www.eldergame.com/2009/01/25/yes-the-industry-really-is-that-bad/

======
hoelle
I'm an MMO hacker that's shipped one unsuccessful game and one moderately
successful game, and I have to comment on some points made in this article.

-MMOs fail due to bad management, design

Partially true. All the elements need to be there, and bad technology seems to
be the biggest crippling force in games. We need more good hackers in the
field.

-Good MMO studios aren't hiring.

Not true, even today.

-MMO studios all have terrible quality of life, pay, benefits.

Not true. Startup studios might, but if you're going into that situation
you're either getting profit sharing, or a beginner getting a foot in the
door.

-MMO engines don't exist, tech isn't reused.

This is becoming less true, but the third party tech out there is still
untested. It's unlikely a great MMO company will sell its tech like Epic does
with Unreal, since we need long term customers, and can't afford to undercut
ourselves.

-Don't work in games unless you are a gaming fanatic.

Loving gameplay helps if you want to be a gameplay coder, but MMOs are vast.
Networking, graphics, AI, scalability, the problems to be solved are endless.
If you're bored at your job, I recommend giving the games industry a look.

------
johnyzee
Game industry job interview:

<http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2005/20050406l.jpg>

------
ricree
"There are no MMO engines for sale that can make robust games. They just
aren’t any good yet"

That's somewhat surprising to me. There's so many MMOs out there that have
failed for one reason or another that you'd think someone would be trying to
salvage their sunk costs by selling the engine.

Despite the competitiveness of the MMO market, there are still a lot of
companies trying to break in, so you'd think that there'd be a decent sized
market for a product which would shave years off of the development time.

I wonder if part of the problem comes from most MMO companies clinging to life
for as long as they can, and then not having the money to rework their
technology into something suitable for a third party. Certainly, there have
been quality(from a technical standpoint, anyways) games that got released,
got a few rounds of post launch patching, and then died from lack of users.
I'd bet that with a bit of polish, that sort of proven technology would be a
moneymaker.

~~~
thalur
Could a viable company be created with the goal of producing and selling an
MMO engine, rather than an actual MMO? You would be removing the expense and
risk of creating the gameplay side of things (models, textures, quests etc),
and could focus on getting the engine right. There would probably be some
issues in selling the engine though: there would be a certain chicken-and-egg
factor in selling an unproven engine to a new MMO-building company.

~~~
osi
they exist. i work for one. the engine was built as we developed worlds on
contracts for clients. once we got it to a certain point, we started licensing
it out.

we term it a platform, as its something to build with an upon. all of the
projects we've seen require extension and addition to the basic model we've
defined to customize it for the project at hand. but we've baked in things
that make doing so trivially easy.

<http://www.electrotank.com/corporate.electro>

------
blader
Most <any industry> companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people."

I'm guessing it's especially true in software - everybody is involved in
software nowadays but you can count the number of companies doing software
really well on two hands and two feet.

~~~
raganwald
Sturgeon's Revelation?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law>

------
stcredzero
Seems like there's plenty of room in the MMO industry, if most of them are
this bad. Is there some sort of pathological psychology that's involved with
wanting to make your own little world that works for bad group dynamics in MMO
dev teams?

~~~
pmjordan
Thankfully I've never worked on an MMO, but "AAA" console games are bad
enough. My take on the issue is similar to that in the article: management
sucks. These are usually well-meaning people, but as they say the road to hell
is paved with good intentions.

As far as I can tell there's a vicious cycle going on in the game industry:
they won't hire people who don't _love_ games and aren't in it _because they
are super-passionate about making games_. I'm not saying you shouldn't love
your job. I'm saying there's too strong a bias towards love of games in favour
of actual ability in hiring. Outsiders "wouldn't understand the business",
after all.

Personally, I've always cared more about the tech than anything else. I didn't
go into the industry because I wanted to design games, I just love the
technical challenges. I do also very much enjoy _playing_ games, but the
activities are completely separate for me, the fact that they both involve
games is more coincidental than anything else. I guess I managed to get past
the interview stage due to that coincidence or because I knew what to say. For
better or worse, it probably afforded me a different perspective than many
other people "on the inside".

In any case, I soon noticed there were few people like me in the industry.
It's no coincidence the creative director is the one everyone looks up to.
They _all_ want his job. They don't really want to be managing hordes of
programmers, artists, level designers and testers. They don't want to be
hacking away at the guts of the AI. Working on iterating continuously on just
1 or 2 levels for the duration of 2-3 years, again and again, is just one step
along the way. After all, they could still be stuck in QA like their friends,
playing the same game every day for 2-3 years. But soon, _they'll be designing
their own games!_

If you think hiring great programmers is hard and unquantifiable, try hiring
game designers. By the time you can tell if they're any good they'll have
scaled the ranks and be the object of worship somewhere _and who's going to
give that up_ or given up and left the industry. So the main selection
criterion is persistence despite terrible working conditions. It's not a big
step to plain delusion. So either they _really really_ love what they're
doing, or they're not skilled/talented enough to do similar work in an
industry that pays more and treats them better.

Now, to get back to the point: who are these people managing development teams
and large studios? They seem to be people who stuck around for long enough but
weren't awesome enough at whatever they were doing to become creative
director, technical director, whatever. They're not doing this because they
love managing people. They're doing this because they want to be creative
director, or because they're stuck. Worst of all, they don't seem to want to
run a business. I know people always complain that big business gets in the
way of making great games. I call bullshit. Not living in the real (business)
world gets in the way of making great games.

There are exceptions, of course, as always. As far as I can tell, few
companies encourage that kind of culture, though.

(FWIW, I still do game programming, but only as a contractor, for small
companies, and only about 50% of the time in order to preserve my sanity)

~~~
philwelch
"As far as I can tell there's a vicious cycle going on in the game industry:
they won't hire people who don't love games and aren't in it because they are
super-passionate about making games."

That's funny. The CS program at my school is filled with people who want to
work in the game industry because they love games. I have the same reaction as
you--just because _playing_ games is fun doesn't imply _making_ games is fun,
and vice versa. Someone might loathe actually playing a game but have a real
fun time writing the AI for it.

~~~
pmjordan
My point exactly. The majority of them are probably learning to program purely
as a means to an end. They don't really care about the tech, they just know
that if you're smart enough to be a good-enough programmer, it's the easiest
way into the industry. (there is often a certain mystique associated with
breaking into the game industry. As a decent C or C++ programmer it's really
not very hard at all)

------
sethg
I wonder if the "secure distributed persistent communication" protocol
developed by the E folks could be used to implement a virtual world running on
a network of clients. I.e., one central server would send a client some model
of a room, and the trust layer would prevent that client from moving walls
around. (I'm being handwavey here because I'm not familiar with either E or
MMOs, but maybe someone else can be inspired by this.)

<http://www.erights.org/>

------
TweedHeads
I am working on the first stages of a multiplayer online game.

Any tips on game hosting services with IRCD?

Between 500 and 1000 players is ok for a start.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

~~~
cubicle67
cool! Any more info on the game you can provide?

~~~
Harkins
I'm also building one, been blogging as I go: <http://push.cx/tag/athenge>

And, yeah, I have a similarly low opinion of the game industry as this
article. Looking at it from the outside I see no reason to be part of it, I'm
happier to be a software company that does games rather than a games company.
<http://push.cx/2009/the-game-industry>

