Life After Metaplace: Somewhere Near Farmville

Posted on January 13, 2010 by Scott Jennings| 116 Comments

Metaplace launches a beta version of their new Facebook game.

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  • JeremyT

    I guess all the VCs who were drawn to the hand-wavey “clone WoW, make millions!” business model are moving on to the next big thing: “clone Farmville, make millions!”

    As a gamer, the WoW clone phenomenon was frustrating, since it seemed to completely stifle any innovation in a genre I really love. This time, though… I just don’t see any redeeming quality in facebook games, and I’m already feeling preemptive schadenfreude at the wave of failures I’m certain will wash ashore over the few years.

    But… when I see guys like Sid Meier and Raph Koster chasing what I think of as a completely bogus genre, I start to question my instincts. Could I be… wrong about this? Is there something worth looking at here after all? This can’t REALLY be the future of gaming?

    Can it?

  • Joe
  • http://www.raphkoster.com Raph

    Jeremy: yes, you could be wrong about this.

    Farmville is the most popular game in HISTORY.

    Facebook is the Atari 2600. Expect it to matter more, not less.

    AAA gaming is opera: high end stuff for a nichey group of snob fanatics, dwindling away. Get used to it.

    What’s more, I have been saying this for YEARS. I didn’t expect this to be the exact manifestation, but here it is.

  • http://www.cuppycake.org Cuppycake

    I wonder when people are going to stop saying “is this really the future?” and take the blindfolds off and realize that in fact, it’s not only the future but also the present.

    For every person who says “MMOs aren’t evolving”, there is a new multiplayer game evolving. Whether or not people open up their eyes and see it is a whole different story…..

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    I think it’s a good call. It’s clear there’s a lot more users on Facebook to stumble across and give your game a try than would stumble across you on random_internet_game_website_92341.

    Plus, it suits the demographic of the game a bit better, I think.

    Actually, assuming the kids are still into MySpace (I get the feeling a lot may have moved on by now) that might be an even better demographic to hook.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    BTW, I don’t like hearing this…

    AAA gaming is opera: high end stuff for a nichey group of snob fanatics, dwindling away. Get used to it.

    But damned if it isn’t true.

    It might not even be that it’s “dwindling away,” per say. It might just be that since gaming went mainstream there’s been so much shallow mainstream-focused crap piled atop the opera that it’s hard to find the maestros beneath the din of boy bands.

    If you look at the indy scene, or even learn to roll your own, you might be reasonably satisfied. But, as far as mainstream gaming is concerned, AAA it is not. X-COMs and Deus Ex’s making way for Cooking Mamas and Madden XXIV.

  • Goodgimp

    “AAA gaming is opera: high end stuff for a nichey group of snob fanatics, dwindling away. Get used to it.”

    Pretty disappointing to see that sentiment coming from you, Raph. I was sincerely unaware that enjoying my particular hobby over the past couple decades made me a snob.

    It’s amazing to me how game developers will gladly piss all over those who have provided them with a living for so many years at the hint of a possible new fad / gold mine that can be exploited.

  • http://www.eartheternal.com Matt Mihaly

    Raph: You sell AAA gaming short by comparing it to opera. No other type of gaming outsells AAA games. Modern Warfare 2 is already above $1 billion in revenue. WoW is far beyond that. That’s comparable to the very biggest mainstream movies, like Avatar or Star Wars, not opera.

    –matt

  • http://www.addictingentertainment.com m3mnoch

    today’s interesting nerd analogy:

    total music yearly revenue: $6.5 billion
    total classical music yearly revenue: $78 million

    total gaming yearly revenue: $45 billion
    aaa gaming yearly revenue: ?

    m3mnoch.

  • umbralraptor

    You, do know that Island Life doesn’t do anything, right?

    http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c128/raptor_87/islandlife.png

    (repeat for as many hours as you leave the tab open)

  • Brask Mumei

    If face book is the Atari 2600, which game is going to be the ET?

    And most popular game in HISTORY? I’d love to see the numbers/definition that justifies that hyperbole. Surely not most popular in terms of “would the average person on the street know this game?”

    From http://boardgames.about.com/od/monopolyfaq/f/copies_sold.htm, hasbro claims to have sold 250 million copies of Monopoly and estimates 500 million have played it.

    Facebook claims, http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics, to have over 350 million active users. Thus would seem impossible for Farmville to be more popular in terms of “number of people who have played it”.

    If we restrict the field to computer games, my best guess for an easy competitor would be minesweeper/windows solitaire, but I have no idea how to get an estimate of that playerbase.

    Not that I disagree with your premise that the modern idea of “Video Game” == “FPS” is referring to an opera-like niche. But I might rather say that it is a “Disaster Movie”-like niche. I think it will retain good numbers, but in the long run will be seen as a minor-genre rather than the be-all of the field.

  • http://www.addictingentertainment.com m3mnoch

    damn. that should be $780 million for classical music…

    m3mnoch.

  • http://www.cuppycake.org Cuppycake

    umbralraptor :
    You, do know that Island Life doesn’t do anything, right?
    http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c128/raptor_87/islandlife.png
    (repeat for as many hours as you leave the tab open)

    We are working on that issue right now. It’s occurring for some people in some browsers. :) Thanks for the heads up!

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    today’s interesting nerd analogy:

    total music yearly revenue: $6.5 billion
    total classical music yearly revenue: $78 million

    total gaming yearly revenue: $45 billion
    aaa gaming yearly revenue: ?

    I could run the easy ratio calculation on that and come up with a number, but what good would it do me? Its like pointing at World of Warcraft’s 10+ millions of subscribers and calling EverQuest’s 550k a “failure.”

    The thing you’ve got to remember about classical music is that it’s still around, hundreds of years later, long after we’ve largely forgotten the Bojangles.

    The people who still make classical music won’t get paid as much as those who have managed to force a boy band down to throat of the majority of America, but that’s fine with them because they have a completely different motivation: they want to make excellence, not money — well, insofar as they’ve able to survive on what they do make.

    So when Raph it was, “dwindling away” he was perhaps exaggerating, or more likely (like anyone who appreciates AAA titles) bemoaning obvious injustices.

  • Imp

    Wow, thanks Ralph, for calling pretty much all the readers of this site snobs. My esteem of you just went down a notch.

  • Imp

    Make that several notches, it was pretty high, now not so much.

  • http://www.raphkoster.com Raph

    How else should I react to “a completely bogus genre” and “no redeeming qualities”? That IS snobbery.

    Look, I am not saying that everyone who plays AAA is a snob. After all, I play those games myself. :) So I apologize. I called you and others something that you are not.

    But you can’t deny there IS a lot of snobbery around this issue, just as there is around Flash gaming, or Wii games.

  • Brask Mumei

    What I don’t get is why people are offended at being characterized as highbrow opera snobs. From my viewpoint, Raph was merely accusing you of having taste :>

    Snobbery is a mental shortcut to dismiss out of hand those things you are unlikely to enjoy anyways. If your tastes are sufficiently cultivated, the logic goes, there is no point wasting the finite hours you have on this planet with $2 wine. Sure, this does mean you’ll miss the occasional gem, but you can also take some comfort that such gems will eventually be identified and be rebottled at $50 for your enjoyment.

    Now, clearly, if your goal is to maximize money, rather than enjoyment, snobbery is a very dangerous set of blinders. After all, this disjunction between prices is precisely where you can get into the rebottling business.

    Personally, I’ve never been able to use any Facebook App because I refuse to run an app that claims it needs to access all my personal information to operate when, clearly, it does not need that sort of access.

  • http://weblog.probablynot.com Jason

    Nothing wrong with Facebook games… just as long as they aren’t Amway/Pyramid schemes that REQUIRE me to friend a bunch of people (either by roping in my friends or friending a bunch of complete strangers) just to unlock aspects of play.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    But you can’t deny there IS a lot of snobbery around this issue, just as there is around Flash gaming, or Wii games.

    It’s mostly a matter of perspective, really.

    If you are into casually accessible games and apparently if you are developing for said games, you probably would look at these people as exhibiting snobbish behavior.

    On other hand, if you are one of these people, you’re getting pretty damn frustrated how hard it is to find a game with deep, satisfying mechanics when it’s easier to produce for the casuals (who outnumber these people so greatly this is apparently a more profitable model) that you would respond to these accusations with all the appeal of somebody telling you it’s wrong to have standards.

  • Blake

    I prefer what would probably be classified as AAA games (WoW currently, but just about everything else under the sun from UO onwards), but I’d never dismiss a genre/style of gaming as crap just because I don’t enjoy it.

    To each their own I guess is what I’m saying. Just because we (playing the collective card) enjoy the AAA type games that doesn’t make us any better than the millions of players who enjoy browser games, or in this case Facebook games.

    Raph, just do us all a favor. Get the rights to UO and do it over again, with a more modern engine. Please. :)

  • Mike Sellers

    My question is: is Metaplace now making FB games… or are you using this to do something like illustrate how you can use the tech you’ve created to allow other people to make FB games (and somehow monetize that)?

    Because while Farmville et al are staggeringly popular and commercially successful, I’m a bit surprised to see such a completely derivative game coming from your shop, Raph. And I think there are valid questions to be asked about the commercial viability of yet-another of the type of games flooding Facebook already.

    So if this is a stealth tech/biz demo, terrific! If this is the new direction of Metaplace as developer of games we’ve already seen… well like I said, I’m surprised.

    As to those who for whatever reason don’t believe accessible, more casual, free browser-based games are huge business, or that to succeed in it you have to “do every horrible thing in the book” (a quote that will not and should not go away), I think the time for that argument is over. This market has arrived, even for those businesses with ethics. PC-retail and console games are stumbling. EA estimates free online games will outsell console games in the next few years. The revenues in free-to-play are clearly there, and they’re broad based. If this isn’t games as you’ve known them, well, get ready for a change. Sticking your head in the sand won’t keep it away.

  • JeremyT

    Raph :
    How else should I react to “a completely bogus genre” and “no redeeming qualities”? That IS snobbery.
    Look, I am not saying that everyone who plays AAA is a snob. After all, I play those games myself. So I apologize. I called you and others something that you are not.
    But you can’t deny there IS a lot of snobbery around this issue, just as there is around Flash gaming, or Wii games.

    I don’t take any issue with the “snob” label, it’s a reasonably fair description. I used harsh language and I stand by what I said, although I should emphasize that while I see nothing of interest in any of these games (at least, not yet), I’m aware that millions of people would disagree, and I’m not going to tell them that they’re wrong.

    Looking at it a little more objectively – and not only as a snob who simply doesn’t value the sort of experience available from Facebook games – I have plenty of reason to wonder whether Facebook gaming is really “it” from a business perspective. Farmville is a success, but is there room for more than a few players in this market? How many Farmvilles can there really be? How do you compete with such a dominant player? Do you clone and extend (difficult, given the massive social inertia)? If not, do you try to create something completely different, with more depth? If so, how much complexity and depth will this market really tolerate? All of us snobs will still be off playing WoW and other traditional games, remember.

    I kind of wonder if it’s already too late, if Zynga has already set in stone its dominance. Of course I’m sure it’s relatively easy to become a financially viable niche player in the Facebook game market, since the barriers to entry are so much lower than in traditional games. But then, is “financially viable niche player” what facebook game developers and their backers are really hoping for when they see Zynga’s meteoric ascension?

  • http://www.raphkoster.com Raph

    Ah, well, we’re now into more interesting questions. I think the analyses by Tahdg Kelly on Gamasutra, by Daniel James on his blog, and by David Edery on his are all worth reading, for example.

    As far as the future of AAA, I think it boils down to “less of them” and “the bar ever higher” which go hand in hand. But that isn’t a new story, I have been saying that for years now, and nobody has ever liked the message, and yet it keeps coming truer every year. hell, *I* don’t like the message. I first used the opera analogy in a speech over a year ago.

    But the fact is that just about nobody can make Uncharted 2, just like just about nobody can make WoW… and core gamers (some of them anyway) are calling this year a disappointment? Brace yourselves, it is going to get MUCH worse.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    Personally, a gamer and a fledgling Indy, I’ve been going back to fundamentals. I don’t think that it’s so much “the bar is even higher” so much as where we’ve decided to set it.

    Of course, the whole story behind that is that the more I go back to fundamentals, the more I see that much of this ground has already been tread and what we see today is perhaps a natural progression.

    However, I can’t shake the feeling that there were many forks on that path, and many paths less traveled that could lead to potentially lucrative results.

  • Freakazoid

    “I have been saying that for years” *only just now makes a facebook game*

    It’s hard to hate raph when really, this is just a grab for money. He kinda needs it. Although I doubt he’ll find the mega riches in facebook of all places, he stands a chance at a steady revenue. I’m chalking up his hate against the real gaming industry as bitterness.

  • http://www.raphkoster.com Raph

    Freakazoid, if you don’t believe me, you can go look at all the speeches and whatnot archived on my site. *shrug*

    As far as why didn’t I do one sooner? Well, I WAS doing something else, as you know. :P

  • Caller ID

    Freakazoid :
    “I have been saying that for years” *only just now makes a facebook game*
    It’s hard to hate raph when really, this is just a grab for money. He kinda needs it. Although I doubt he’ll find the mega riches in facebook of all places, he stands a chance at a steady revenue. I’m chalking up his hate against the real gaming industry as bitterness.

    I thjnk there may be a little bitterness there, but mostly it was just a reaction, probably to a lot more than just this blog.

    But I think Koster’s right, I think we’ll see our “AAA” games pushing their honed experience of Diku right off the edge of the cliff, and then simply shutting it down and moving to other sorts of game.

    We’ll never see another UO, unless an investor comes from outside the current industry and happens to hook up with someone whose got “the vision” and the talent to put it together. Not likely, but as they say…”that’s why they play the games”.

  • Matt Mihaly

    Raph wrote, “But the fact is that just about nobody can make Uncharted 2, just like just about nobody can make WoW”

    That’s true. Similarly, only one developer can make Farmville what it is. The rest of the pack can try to clone it (or, in the case of the island farming sub-genre, can try to clone Meteor Games’ Island Paradise, who reskinned Farmville, who cloned Farmtown), but so the closest anyone ELSE has gotten to a farm game in terms of popular is almost a magnitude away from Farmville.

    How’s that different from AAA, where you have one or two leaders in the fantasy MMO genre, in the FPS genre, the music game genre, etc and then a whole bunch of derivatives? Genuine question.

    –matt

  • Makaze

    AAA isn’t going anywhere since it is by definition whatever the biggest, shiniest, and costliest upper segment of the market is. It will always be there since it’s a relative turn. At the same time, the upward spiral on budgets simply cannot be sustained. Something has to give and so that has to begin to plateau. So next years AAA might look a lot like this years AAA as the rate of improvement shifts from being constrained almost solely by technology and towards being constrained by organizational and budgetary concerns. It’s been heading slowly in that direction for a while now and the rate is accelerating.

    I can’t say I’m a big fan of the opera analogy. Opera was and is a fairly static art form. It has been dismissed by the population at large because it has not changed, we’re still watching the same operas now that we did 100s of years ago. Games on the other hand, even AAA games, are always different year after year. They tend to evolve in most cases, revolutions happen seldomly, especially when you’re talking about years of development time 8 figure budgets. But still they change, they adapt, and they remain relevant to a significant number of people. A portion of the population that has continued to grow numerically even if it has shrunk proportionally.

    Facebook games and their ilk do not seem to be the end all be all direction of things to come though. We all grew up on games, we’re all early adopters here, we’re used to having our feet wet. Simple games at first since that’s all that technology would allow but as those limitations were gradually removed we flowed into more complex offerings no longer satisfied with simpler fare. The 100s of millions of people playing Farmville right now on the other hand just got shoved into the pool. Over the last decade due to the sudden, to them, penetration of computers and the internet into their daily lives they find themselves in a potentially very deep pool without knowing how to swim. Is it any wonder that the vast majority of them head straight for the shallow end? But that doesn’t mean that they’re going to stay there. The Facebook crowd is going to tire of the trite offerings being thrust their way currently and move on to more substantial fare, eventually.

  • JeremyT

    Matt Mihaly :
    Raph wrote, “But the fact is that just about nobody can make Uncharted 2, just like just about nobody can make WoW”
    That’s true. Similarly, only one developer can make Farmville what it is. The rest of the pack can try to clone it (or, in the case of the island farming sub-genre, can try to clone Meteor Games’ Island Paradise, who reskinned Farmville, who cloned Farmtown), but so the closest anyone ELSE has gotten to a farm game in terms of popular is almost a magnitude away from Farmville.
    How’s that different from AAA, where you have one or two leaders in the fantasy MMO genre, in the FPS genre, the music game genre, etc and then a whole bunch of derivatives? Genuine question.
    –matt

    It’s different in at least one key aspect: it’s a hell of a lot cheaper to make a bad clone of Farmville than it is to make a bad clone of WoW (or Second Life). You can afford to throw a LOT more crap at the Facebook wall hoping something sticks before you run out of money and the VCs come by to rip the copper out of your walls.

    But here’s the thing I keep coming back to: if it’s that much easier to make games, then games become commodities that much more rapidly, and competition moves that much more quickly.

  • Matt Mihaly

    JeremyT wrote, “it’s a hell of a lot cheaper to make a bad clone of Farmville than it is to make a bad clone of WoW (or Second Life)”

    That’s why I wrote that only one developer can make Farmville what it is. Most or nearly all devs that could produce Farmville as a product couldn’t turn it into a 73 million person-per-month game. So far, it’s exactly 1 developer that’s been able to do that. The craft here is in the business side of the operation (marketing, business model, etc) rather than the creative side of the operation.

    That’ll probably change over time, but we’re aways from it yet I think. There’s a large new audience that has never really, demographically, been gamers before. There’s a lot of assumed knowledge, experience, and tropes that we gamers have built in that we take for granted. It’ll take time for the rest of the population to partly catch up (most of them will never be interested in games the way many of us are).

  • tmp

    Raph :AAA gaming is opera: high end stuff for a nichey group of snob fanatics, dwindling away. Get used to it.

    Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say AAA gaming is the movies, while the web game stuff is YouTube?

  • Mike Sellers

    Matt Mihaly :
    That’s why I wrote that only one developer can make Farmville what it is. Most or nearly all devs that could produce Farmville as a product couldn’t turn it into a 73 million person-per-month game. So far, it’s exactly 1 developer that’s been able to do that. The craft here is in the business side of the operation (marketing, business model, etc) rather than the creative side of the operation.

    Okay, but it depends on your definition of success. Why 73M? A few months ago no game had that number of players — and a few months before that 50M was stratospheric, and before that 20M was. IMO what matters here is commercial success (or design success, but that’s much more elusive). 73M isn’t the mark; whatever creates a sustainable, profitable business is — and that’s a much lower, much more attainable mark.

    To your earlier question:

    Matt Mihaly :
    How’s that different from AAA, where you have one or two leaders in the fantasy MMO genre, in the FPS genre, the music game genre, etc and then a whole bunch of derivatives? Genuine question.

    The key differences: orders of magnitude lower cost of development and marketing, much greater breadth of the channel (see the iPhone for the new narrow-channel), and overall an increased probability of maintaining a sustained business.

    At 20c ARPU on casual browser games (a number that is sure to rise, especially given where it is on free-to-play MMOs), you need about 500K MAU to have about $100K revenues per month — enough to sustain a small studio. (and of course that’s on a single game, but we’ll assume one game for now; the picture gets even better when you release a second or third).

    According to Appdata, the top 20 games on FB all have 8M MAU or more (so roughly revenues of $1.6M per month — that’s already a different world from AAA games, whether box or online). In addition, right now the top 132 games on FB all have at least 500K MAU — that number grows every month.

    While some are no doubt monetizing better than others, with those numbers any of these 100+ games could be supporting a small self-sustaining studio (without, note, any investment at the VC level with the pressures it brings). This is entirely different from the hit-driven AAA games industry as we’ve known it, and shows the truth of the long fat tail. How many independent studios make a sustainable business in AAA games? I’m pretty sure it’s nowhere near 100.

    The other interesting thing about this is that of the more than 100 games that have 500K MAU or more, few are ones any of us have likely heard of: Willy’s Sweet Shop, Quiztastic, Flying Dog, Bite Me, and, as they say, many many more.

    The sum of this is, new online games — social games, FB games, and others — are as different from AAA games for developers and publishers as they are for consumers. And I believe this change is only just getting started.

  • Matt Mihaly

    I’m all for measuring by financial success rather than comparatively, Mike. It doesn’t much matter to me how my competitors are doing as long as I’m doing ok.

    I was just challenging Raph’s claim that AAA games were different because just about only one dev can make Uncharted 2 or WoW. There are many other AAA games that are profitable without being Uncharted 2 or WoW.

    As for Farmville – they have spent millions and millions in promotion building it to 73 million users. I consider that just as much a part of building the product/service as paying the programmers. Yes, that is still an order of magnitude, at least, less than something like Modern Warfare 2, but then, the revenue and income from Farmville is at least a magnitude less than Modern Warfare 2 as well.

    I agree that Facebook currently offers a better opportunity for small studios but then, that’s not what Raph was talking about. He was comparing the biggest game in the social genre to the biggest games in the AAA genre……and they don’t look that different in the sense that both can be made into what it is by only one or two devs in the world (in Farmville’s case only 1 – others are trying with flat-out clones and not coming anywhere near to Farmville’s success).

    Yes, a ton of Facebook games can support a small, self-sustaining studio, but I don’t think that’s “the future of games” either. As you say, hardly anyone’s heard of something like Willy’s Sweet Shop, which says to me that it’s probably not the future of gaming. If you’re going to point at Facebook and say “future of gaming because Farmville is the most popular game ever” then I think you can’t look at games that have 1/100th as many players and put them in the same category any more than you can look at, say, Earth Eternal and put it in the same category as WoW.

    In other words, while Farmville may be the most popular video game in history (not sure that’s true, but willing to accept it for the sake of argument), its success is as virtually singular as that of WoW’s or Modern Warfare 2′s. There are many differences between FB games and AAA games, but the fact that only one or two studios can make the biggest game around is not one of those differences.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    There seems to be some ambiguity by what’s meant by “AAA gaming.”

    Maybe that’s mostly me: It’s fairly clear that what’s meant by a triple-A title in industry terms is a big-budget blockbuster, but when I heard it being related to snobbery, here I thought what was being referred to was deep, meaningful games… which, by and large, the average triple-A title is not.

    Gaming snobs/people with high standards would generally snub Madden or World of Warcraft on the grounds that they’re so highly derivative. Well, okay, dragging WoW into that is perhaps going a little too far – it did manage to do EverQuest significantly better than EverQuest by simply streamlining it into a good product.

    Anywho, I don’t think the line is so clearly drawn between games that exploit social networking and AAA titles. Indeed, they’re completely different tangents.

  • Mark Asher

    I’m happy enough to think of Facebook games as a new genre of games, but one that I’m completely uninterested in as a player.

    I also find it hard to believe that Raph and others (Brian Reynolds is also working on Facebook stuff) really dig making Facebook games. I’m sure the lure of the money is exciting, but I can’t believe that the guy behind UO and SWG really loves Farmville and wants to make games like that.

  • Mike Sellers

    Matt, agreed that comparisons between AAA and online social games are sort of apples and oranges. OTOH, both bear on the future of how games are developed and consumed. There, I suspect there’s not a singular answer: high-budget, high-risk games will continue to be made and consumed, as will low-budget, small-team games.

    What I see overall is that there are more small teams succeeding today (whether or not we’ve heard of them) than ever before — and thus, by population numbers if nothing else, such teams are (a significant part of) the present and future of game development. At least until the cultural and technological landscape changes again as it has multiple times over the past thirty years or so.

    In other words, the existence of Farmville doesn’t make Facebook as a platform significant. Farmville is a predictable outlier (not the game itself, but that one game will garner a singular number of players). What’s significant to me is instead the overall body of games on Facebook as a whole, and the shape of the usage curve: there are well over a hundred games that are likely pulling in commercially significant revenue, rather than a revenue curve where only the top 5 or so AAA games make sustainable revenues.

    Most of those smaller games were made by tiny teams with equally tiny budgets. And yet they have access to a potential player base measuring in the hundreds of millions. That is a significant change in the rules of commercial success in developing games: you no longer have to be (or even compete head-to-head against) EA — or even Zynga — to be commercially successful on a sustainable scale.

  • Mike Sellers

    Mark Asher :
    I also find it hard to believe that Raph and others (Brian Reynolds is also working on Facebook stuff) really dig making Facebook games. I’m sure the lure of the money is exciting, but I can’t believe that the guy behind UO and SWG really loves Farmville and wants to make games like that.

    Don’t look at the Farmville-class of games as the future: they’re the past. What you’re seeing in play right now is like looking in a rear-view mirror. Online games, whether on FB or on the web, are moving from that kind of game, not toward it.

  • Baroo

    [quote]I’m sure the lure of the money is exciting, but I can’t believe that the guy behind UO and SWG really loves Farmville and wants to make games like that.[/quote]

    Agreed. It all seems a bit disingenuous — like a Michelin-starred chef deciding to run a hamburger stand.

  • Caller ID

    Baroo :
    [quote]I’m sure the lure of the money is exciting, but I can’t believe that the guy behind UO and SWG really loves Farmville and wants to make games like that.[/quote]
    Agreed. It all seems a bit disingenuous — like a Michelin-starred chef deciding to run a hamburger stand.

    It probably had more to do with the investors than him. But we’ll probably never know, he seems to be behind the ideas pretty strongly. And I doubt he’d feel right about saying otherwise.

  • Mark Asher

    Mike Sellers :

    Mark Asher :
    I also find it hard to believe that Raph and others (Brian Reynolds is also working on Facebook stuff) really dig making Facebook games. I’m sure the lure of the money is exciting, but I can’t believe that the guy behind UO and SWG really loves Farmville and wants to make games like that.

    Don’t look at the Farmville-class of games as the future: they’re the past. What you’re seeing in play right now is like looking in a rear-view mirror. Online games, whether on FB or on the web, are moving from that kind of game, not toward it.

    That may be, but I’m not convinced that newer kinds of games will prosper the way Farmville has. I think the Facebook masses want really simple games. Very easy to understand, very easy to play, and not time-consuming unless you want to be obsessive, and a social element to help them go viral.

  • Innoe

    I have bought pretty much every p2p MMo thats been released in the last 10 years, and at least gave them a try .

    But 1 thing I wont do is support f2p or facebook type games in any form.

    It seems like these types of games are absolutely made for the lowest common denominator and self absorbed types. Yes that market is bigger than the AAA type market but seriously, is the grab for cash that appealing? Its a gigantic step down from being a dev of UO to being a facebook one.

    Its like the movie “Idiocracy” is not really a movie after all. Its a giant friggin crystal ball.

  • Montague

    “Facebook is the Atari 2600. Expect it to matter more, not less”

    No, Facebook is the newfangled mall center that everyone is hanging out in. Farmville is a guy who had the foresight to put neat little candy vending machines in the mall and is making good money with low overhead. You are the guy that’s yelling that the mall is going to make restaurants obsolete.

  • JuJutsu

    “…seriously, is the grab for cash that appealing?”

    LOL

  • Innoe

    Ever heard the phrase, The pursuit of money is the root of all evil? Did my statement in the form of a question stump ya?

  • Vetarnias

    Despite all the posts dissecting Raph’s opera comparison, I still don’t know what to make of it. What I know is that it bothers me. Why exactly? Because we know Raph’s pedigree and legacy, and it’s as though he grabbed all of it and dropped it in the trash can. Not a bad thing in itself; it takes quite a fair amount of cojones to finally admit, after years of work on one subject, that your time might have been better spent elsewhere, and it’s folly to cling to, say, a theory, model, etc. that has clearly been disproved purely because you happened to formulate it. But what bothers me here is how casually Raph places it in the trash, only to embrace something else that promises to be the next big thing — which may or may not be true.

    If anything, Raph is a pioneer of MMO’s, back when it was cool and niche, and when developers were still sailing on uncharted oceans without really knowing what they were unleashing. But something seems to have happened in that decade or so that saw the evolution of MMO’s from the niche to the stultifyingly mainstream: the sense of exploration, discovery, and tinkering has vanished. You’re just copying what the other guy is doing because he is successful, and rising budgets for games means you can’t risk being innovative.

    And the problem with pioneers is that they are looked at with suspicion when they are too successful in remaining in the industry they started. Pioneers are expected to be “rolling over in their grave” over what they have started, or if they happen to still be alive, they must look upon it with a mix of horror and regret, better still if they express their guilt publicly. If they try to remain a major player in an industry that has succeeded financially but otherwise gone downhill, poetic justice dictates that their failure must provide the industry at large with a proper cautionary tale about the loss of its roots (that is to be promptly forgotten by all concerned anyway).

    Raph’s eagerness to forgo the niche period of his industry to which he contributed, only to pursue ventures where the lowest common denominator can be found nowadays (not even that of WoW, which can’t be beaten on its own terms) is what makes it difficult for me to accept his dismissal of AAA titles as “snobbery” — he had no qualms with being in this industry when MMO’s were niche and for the tech version of snobs, but now he derides their direct descendents as still catering to a snob niche. It’s like MMO’s with subscriptions, WoW notwithstanding, never entered the mainstream, and somehow I’d agree, considering WoW got its popularity from the Blizzard fanboys and the rest are pretty much niche, but nowhere near the levels of snobbery involved when internet games were new (all these years, I have kept a news clipping of a poll from 1996, where 85% of respondents said they had never been on the internet). But it’s somehow not right to work in a genuinely snobbish industry before 2000 only to denounce it as such a decade later, especially when you’re moving closer to where the masses are to be found.

    Geldon is right, by the way: AAA game titles aren’t opera, they’re Hollywood blockbusters; however, unlike blockbusters, they are still niche in a way, as they require you to have all the trappings of the gamer, beginning with a proper computer, to play them.

  • Slyfeind

    I wonder why it even matters. “We” have our AAA titles, and “they” have their Facebook games.

  • http://world-create.blogspot.com Dave

    Such a shame. I had really high hopes for Metaplace when I was beta testing it. They had some great ideas at the start, but they couldn’t seem to nail the execution.

    It would be sad to see them end up as simple Farmville cloners.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich
    Facebook is the Atari 2600. Expect it to matter more, not less

    No, Facebook is the newfangled mall center that everyone is hanging out in.

    Personally, I’d say it’s neither. Academically (and a trapped student is naught but a hopeless academic) facebook is looked at as a whole new entity: a social networking site.

    Discard it as little more than a crappy console everybody has before something better came along, or as a mere commercial venue, and you discard all the things that academics find so exciting about it.

    Facebook (and social networking sites like it) is relatively cutting edge (insofar as anything a few years old is cutting edge in technology) offering levels of interaction that may mirror innovations before it, such as the invention of the telephone.

    Attaching a game onto that, lamprey-like, was Farmville’s trick. If Raph can master the knack for doing the same, perhaps his next trick will be giving Ultima a second (well, lets face it, early STO was the second, this would be at least the third) run.

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