Console MMOs from a reverse perspective: Can they succeed?

by Shawn Schuster on Sep 22nd 2008 7:00PM

Business models, Culture, MMO industry, Opinion, Consoles

In the first of a promised series of articles concerning MMOs on a console platform, Jim Pwnage of Xboxoz360gamer.com gives us a discussion on the importance of communications to a cross-platform MMO. He starts off by making a general introduction to MMOs, seemingly directed at console gamers. If this is the future of the genre, we might as well get used to it.

This first installment discusses how voice communication is essential to a console MMO. No one wants to be typing out their commands or guild chat on a console, and voice chat among 100+ people would be chaotic to say the least. So his solution is a way to join and leave smaller conversations more easily. Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of massively multiplayer though? It's an interesting thought, and we look forward to the next part of this series.

Source

Tags: communications, console-mmo, cross-platform, jim-pwnage, voice-chat, xbox-360

Reader Comments (3)

It's too bad that Blizzard completely failed to deliver a quality voice product. The vast majority of groups I get into will still use a ventrillo or teamspeak server rather than WoW voice chat.

Had things gone the other way there could have been a chance for console MMO gaming.

Thanks for the inclusion on your pages, nice to know we get read from a variety of sources.

I think with proper voice-chat, MMO's on consoles could work well, so long as there was some form of moderating etc.

Consoles are becoming very popular these days, and making huge in-roads into "general' gamers who may well not get exposure to such things a huge MMO's. So developers are now looking at how to expand their userbase, which is only fair given the high costs of games these days.