I choked on my cornflakes this morning when I discovered that the latest casualty in the train wreck that is MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing games) was the home-grown Dragon Empires, only weeks after the announcement of the Climax Studios-generated Warhammer Online stopped production.
Dragon Empires has been in development for at least three years at the Midlands-based Codemasters, and has had unbelievable delays and problems, gobbling talent from other teams to create the pervasive, internet-based world. The game has reportedly now been discontinued due to "technical problems". For more details head to gamesindustry.biz.
This latest stoppage points towards rumours of the continued deflation of the virtual worlds bubble, a genre which could ostensibly make publishers very wealthy. Indeed, over the past few years games of this ilk have been viewed as certain cash cows, bringing dough in the form of monthly subscriptions in their hundreds of thousands, with little work after release except to provide a minimum of player support.
Hundreds of companies across the globe have visualised generating enough lucre to repeat the unbelievable successes of well-established titles like EverQuest, Ultima Online, The Sims Online, Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes – the latter from MMOPRG publishing giant NCSoft, whose Korean-heavy game Lineage supposedly boasts more players in its native country than TV-viewers. However, the market appears to be saturated with a glut of similar titles, berated for their time-consuming nature and lack of originality.
Many of these issues will certainly be discussed at this week's massively multiplayer-centred Austin Games Conference. If you can't wait for my reports from there and must know more about this fascinating genre NOW, head to terranova for a lively debate on the real world implications of these virtual environments. If you're still not satiated, check out last year's papers from the State of Play conference, which discuss the implications for online gaming on real world politics, governments, economics and ethics. Prepare to have your mind bent. This is the stuff that madness is made of.
