Paul Barnett predicts the decline of future asset-heavy MMOs

His predicting the decline in asset-heavy MMO's is like my predicting whether North Korea will nuke South Korea.

It is painful to watch a site like Massively engage in this sort of log-rolling. This guy is full of cliches and is using this site to obviously leverage something he has on the horizon.

Reminds me of reports I used to get from Gartner touting the next new big thing with those reports being sponsored by....wait for it....the next new big thing.

Take apart the WAR aspect of his past, pretend he has never had anything to do with any MMO, he's just an industry analyst, and you have to admit he makes some sense.

He could be totally wrong on the decline of asset-heavy MMOs, but they DO requier alot of work and capital to produce, and since WoW, we've not really seen alot of big success. I can very much see how the men with the money will become very leery about investing in something that has that much risk involved.

I believe he could be wrong, however. I believe if a Triple-A title ships, with polish and great gameplay, that we could see more moderate successes. But I personally think that chasing the same tired old model with a slightly different skin and/or story is NOT going to be the way to go, and IS why we've seen the lackluster performance of AAA titles of late.

I wouldnt argue that his opinions count or dont count on how sucsessful his company is, his predictions are just innacurate.. and wrong.

I first want to thank Massively for posting our story, AbleGamers is a site dedicated to disabled people that want to game, so our "mainstream" content is rare.

We are posting part II of the interview Thursday, there is more about his thoughts. I think Paul is right in some of these. He says that there will always be asset-heavy games, but that they are going to be fewer and farther between. As the processing power leaves the PC/consoles and moves more and more into phones and handhelds we are going to see more smaller, cheaper games, with a high fun factor, but lacks replayability. They are cheap to make, cheap to buy, and fun to play.

I do not think he says that there is going to be NO asset heavy games (if I recall... because I was there) but that there will be less of them.

If he is right, I think this can only be a HUGE win for gamers like me that enjoy epic games, because the asset-heavy games that do release are going to have to have great gameplay, great stories, and great everything to compete against the 1000's of casual games that are flooding the market. I think this trend will shake up a very stale gaming industry.

Mark Barlet
AbleGamers.com

I'll tell you why Paul is wrong. Blizz's next MMO will have 10+ million subscribers also. It has everything to do with quality and little to do with perceived, hindsight market demands. Do you think Blizz sat there in 2002 saying, "people want an asset heavy MMO and we can get 10x more subs than EQ!" not a chance. They made a monstrous MMO with more features, and more easily approachable features by more market segments, than any other mmo, before or since. WAR was hinderered by Jacob's insistence on using his antiquated game engine which can be blamed for a lot of the core problems (LOS, poor feedback, lag, etc) and their arbitrary self imposed short development time, which left it feature poor and poorly polished. Anyone who played DAOC knows they have no idea how to balance classes. Expecting WAR to be any different would have been a mistake until proven differently.

But, that's besides my point, quality brings people in the door. period. I don't care if you develop MMOs, bake pizza pies, or cut hair; quality keeps people coming back. Paul's argument about light assets suggests ONLY that the industry can more easily MAKE MORE MONEY by going the light asset route. That is not a specific requirement of the future of MMOs.

I wouldn't put too much store in anything this guy says. After all, he's the douche that took Warhammer, a truly wonderful setting, and twisted it into the garbage that is Warhammer Online today, where it almost doesn't resemble the original Warhammer setting at all.