Summary
The three main points of this analysis are: Original IP does better than licensed IP in the MMO arena, so Marvel Universe has a tough row to hoe right out of the gate; Story-driven IPs such as the Marvel superhero universe are very hard to translate into the mainly non-story MMO genre of games; The superhero genre has unique issues for MMO development that will cost more and take longer to develop.
Analysis
The Gazillion/Marvel deal is all about online game and MMO development. While non-persistent, more casual online games may offer some relief for this deal, Marvel Universe has a tougher row to hoe: the history of the MMO industry is that original IP generally does better than licensed IP.
Assuming the Marvel Universe product is going to be a standard monthly subscription game, it comes down to two main issues:
· Story-driven media rarely translates well into the sandbox nature of MMOs;
· To do a credible job of making that transition, the developer needs to spend far more time developing individual stories, which means far more writers and designers than the average MMO.
Compare the large successes, such as World of Warcraft, SOE's EverQuest franchise and Netease's Westward Journey franchise in China, versus the relatively modest successes of such MMOs as the Star Wars-branded Galaxies from SOE/Lucasarts, EA/Mythic's Warhammer Online and Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online. None of the latter, licensed IP games have sustained subscriber numbers equal to Everquest at its height, around 450,000 subscribers. Although Warhammer online may equal the Everquest numbers sometime in 2009, no Western MMO based on a licensed IP is threatening to break even 1 million subscribers, much less WoW’s 11 million+. Those licensed IPs make respectable money, but don’t threaten to create breakout hits.
Part of the reason is that media such as books and movies, being highly story and character driven, don’t lend themselves well to current MMO game design and technology constraints. Any MMO based in the Marvel universe has the Hero Problem to contend with; just how heroic is it to rescue the same old ladies from the same muggers multiple times per day? Look at what happened to the NCsoft/Cryptic offering City of Heroes; players got bored with the lack of meaningful ‘heroic’ content and the mindless mission repetition and left the game. The Matrix Online, which at its heart was a superhero MMO, had the same problem.
For good or ill, today’s largest MMOs are giant sandboxes that depend on the ‘grind’ – missions and quests to allow players to level-up avatar abilities and skills, which then translate that into group raids or Player versus Player battlegrounds. The quests or missions are generally fairly simple; go here and get that, or kill ten rats and bring me the skins, or take this object to that NPC, get a new object from him, take it over there, exchange it for that other thing and then bring that other thing over here. While there is some nodding toward storyline or a back story, it mostly stays in the background; the objectives are simple and fairly straightforward.
However, as City of Heroes proved, this doesn’t cut it for the superhero genre. Using the superhero equivalent of “Kill ten rats…” was one reason City of Heroes failed to achieve major success. Superhero stories as presented in comics and graphic novels are involved, character-driven studies that are hard to translate into the MMO space. To translate them in to the MMO space, they need to be more involved than average MMO missions, have open-ended conclusions and include favorite characters from the superhero universe. These kinds of MMO missions take longer to design and build and can’t be accomplished without a much greater use – and number – of designers, writers and coders.
To build a proper superhero mission, I estimate that you’d need to use two or three times the resources as the typical MMO. Considering that players consume MMO content much faster than you can create it, the content needed for a superhero MMO that hopes to support millions of players would be expensive to produce.
So unless Gazillion is prepared to spend a LOT money on writers and designers and think in new ways about the ‘grind’ to create compelling content, their Marvel Universe MMO is likely to be headed for the same fate as City of Heroes: initial good numbers, followed almost immediately by stagnation and loss of subscribers.
