February 19, 2007Robert Garriott on the Evolving MMO Market
At the same D.I.C.E. Summit where Richard Garriott was discussing Tabula Rasa™, his brother Robert, President and CEO of NCsoft® North America, sat with GameDaily to discuss all things massively multiplayer.
Here's an excerpt from the article:
BIZ: It seems as though an increasing number of people are getting tired of fantasy MMOs. Yet, at the same time, developers often argue that sci-fi games tend to be difficult for average players to engage with. How will Tabula Rasa (a sci-fi mmo) overcome this issue? What are your thoughts on the deluge of fantasy MMOs?
RG: Medieval fantasy has been a great genre for many, many years. The reason for that is because it's been easy for customers, people, game players to understand. They quickly relate to Robin Hood and the ideas and concepts of medieval fantasy and a lot of them played Dungeons & Dragons. So the concepts are all very quick and easy, and because of that, that's generally where people have gone. And, unfortunately, our industry is very much into "follow the success" so "Hey, you've got a successful game here, lets see what we can do in the same genre, how can we recreate that success?" What we're starting to see now is our industry broaden out. NCsoft is actually the largest manufacturer and producer of medieval fantasy role-playing games, but still that's not what we need to do to broaden the market.
Therefore, we're looking at other interesting genres, genres which are very popular in the single player area, like sci-fi. People are familiar with those genres, they just haven't figured out how to make them as intriguing and interesting from a multiplayer sense. So what we're trying to do is that we've taken a look at all the successful single-player genres and we've said, "How can we take that experience and move it into the mutiplayer world?" And it's because of that that we have products like City of Heroes, which is like a comic book game, and Tabula Rasa, which is a sci-fi game. We've got about 10-12 MMPs in development right now, about half in Korea and half in the U.S. So we're doing lots of MMP development and we've tried to target specific genres that we know are successful and can be successful, but we're trying to interpret them in a way that they will be successful from an MMP standpoint and that's why we're so excited about Tabula Rasa.
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