How to Create a Successful MMO

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.

Want to know how virtual worlds collide? ArenaNet cofounder Jeff Strain, who was previously the lead programmer for World of Warcraft, talks about the network effect and gaming as SaaS in a speech before the Games Convention in Leipzig entitled How to Create a Successful MMO. ArenaNet developed — I should say develops, since it’s SaaS — the four-million-selling Guild Wars, so Strain knows of what he speaks. Read the full speech here and find out why the need for innovation means there can be no such thing as a “WoW killer”.