The Daily Grind: Are there too many new MMOs?

YES!
I can't bloody keep up.
I want to play so many of them, but I always end up either doing something else entirely, or starting up the same old mmo's - because I know what an effort it takes to properly 'get into' a new mmo.

Yes and no... You'd think that over time good games would have accumulated, but between games that launched poorly and never recovered and games that had good launches but hadn't kept up with development over time, few good games are around. That's just my view though. Sometimes i feel there are 5 worthwhile games around and 5 in development. And maybe a couple i would probably describe as good if they were the sort of thing i like to play.

I'm not pressed about the number of MMOs per se... save that it's a symptom of companies trying to jump on the MMO bandwagon, most of whom rush an unfinished product off to market hoping to make quick gains.

I think the market is over saturated with new titles, especially in the last 2 years. We see more and more games closing shop early. And it doesn't help that some of the bigger launches aren't getting their concepts "Right" in the players eyes before they go live. And all this makes me fear for the genre. If investors don't get a return on investment, they won't invest period.

The indusrty is really it's own worst enemy in this now. The gaming population is growing, but not fast enough to populate all the games that are coming out. Bu then again, maybe this is the fleshing out the industry needs.

Not really, there are still only a few that fall under what I'm looking for. I'm not the type of person who has to try everything new just to try it. I know what I want, and I'm willing to wait for it. Ultimately, I think it just depends on the individual.

There are too many MMO's that cost 14.99. And since WOW is the 100 ton gorilla, no game can survive with that subscription model. If you make your game different from WOW then you've made a bad MMO. If you make your game similar as WOW then you're a WOW clone. You can't win. Even TOR is called a WOW clone even though it takes place in space and has glow sticks.

IF TOR is successful, it will further screw up the market. Only Blizzard and Sony have the cash to compete with their budget. But neither of them are willing to throw that kind of money into the ring because of the risk...Market could be headed for bad times in a year or two.

It's attack of the clones. It's process run amok.

Any wannabe group of developers can hack up an MMO clone now, but there's a good side to that -- out of all of the crap being flung at the wall, something is bound to stick.

I do hope something new comes along. The storyboard MMO is as overdone and repetitive as a Scooby Doo episode.

There are definitely too many games based on old PnP combat.
Yeah, so the original dream was to get inside D&D... done. Now let's move on. Computers are a completely different technology - let's have some new mechanics ideas.

As in all things when there is a healthy amount of competition, the wheat will be sorted from the chaff. The weak will die the strong will survive. C'est la vie.

Yes. MMOs (as well as FPSes) have become the new fighting games. By that I mean, years ago, there were soooo many fighting games that were sooo similar and they came out soooo fast that it created this bubble that just burst in no time. It reached a point where barely any dev thought about making fighting games and those that did served a very niche audience.

I feel like so many MMO devs want a piece of a pie that they can't have. The amount of people who play MMOs is a fraction of all gamers. The amount of those players who play more than one MMO is A LOT smaller. A lot of devs are essentially fighting for that piece of the pie that's already been bitten instead of trying for a whole new pie instead.

Confusing pie metaphor. Check.

At least its relatively easy to weed out the crap. If you see an oversized head or something that is obviously anime inspired, its clearly crap.

Its IS annoying that I need to spam filter Massively nowadays, but I understand you guys can't refuse news from all the crap MMO's because as soon as you do a few fans of crap will start complaining.

I would say yes and no there are to many new SHITY mmos not new good mmos-.

I have no problem with the mass of releases, but I would like to see more refinement of content.

it's kinda to be expected that we are seeing lots of releases but little appearance of progress. While these games may be coming hot and heavy to us right now, most of these titles have actually seen release spreads of years over in Korea.

by my count korea is on it's 4th generation of MMO development.

First gen = low quality 2D
second gen = moderate quality 2D / low quality 3D
Third gen = High quality 2D / moderate Quality 3D
Fourth gen = high quality 3D / actual "action" based combat.

now despite that, over he in the US we haven't been getting new releases in sequence relative to when they were initially released in Korea. any title that was high profile for it's time in Korea has seen a almost instantaneous release in the US, however low profile games have gotten stuck in queue.

so we have been seeing the cream of Korea's crop probably 2 years before the rest of that specific titles generation rolls into town.

the end result is that it appears like Korea has only got a few "good" titles while the rest of it is just shit because we are seeing the hyper great titles released at the same time as the moderately good titles of a few years ago.

There just isn't enough filtering. Less stories about crappy F2P MMOs and more focus on quality titles, even at the risk of longer intervals between blog posts would do a lot to alleviate this problem.

IMO there are way too many fantasy mmo's in general and not enough Sci-Fi ones. We also need more "out of the box" MMO's such as Secret World and WOD.

There are some real gems amongst the chaff.

But there are so many it becomes confusing.

I do wish there was a way of categorizing all of them. Not to mention the ones with very similar names.