Digging their grave

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4 March 2005

by Mike Rozak

I am in the process of designing my virtual world. One of the questions I have recently asked myself is, "What happens after I ship?"

Of course, I will need to spend time fixing bugs and handling customer issues.

But what about new features? New content? Improvements to the graphics and sound engines? (A.k.a. "eye candy"). These questions lead to an even larger one: How long can I keep a virtual world alive by trickling in new features, content, and eye candy?

I have to update my features, content, and eye candy, since without the updates my virtual world would die a fairly quick death. Once all the content was consumed by current users, they would leave and never come back. New users would appear, but, over time, the outdated eye candy would reduce their numbers. (A top-10 MMORPG with state-of-the-art eye candy has approximately 100 times as many users as a top-10 text-MUD, with 25-year old eye-candy.) And even if I did manage to keep my eye candy up to date, I'd eventually run out of people that hadn't yet visited my world.

The "ever-expanding" world

Historically, virtual worlds release frequent feature, content, and eye-candy updates: MUDs are continually improved and expanded upon by their authors. MMORPGs release update CD-ROMs once every 6-12 months, with new clients, rendering engines, 3D models, textures, and sound effects.

One would expect a virtual world to live forever if it produced sufficient updates, but they don't seem to. Ultima Online came out around 1998, peaked at around 200K users a few years later, and its numbers have been gradually declining for the last five years. Everquest released a few years later, peaked at around 400K users, and its numbers are gradually declining. I suspect the same has happened to text MUDs, although I have no numbers.

Both Ultima Online and Everquest have shipped many expansion packs to keep their features, content, and eye-candy up-to date. As a result:

• Both have a very deep set of features, much deeper than the latest-and-greatest MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft, which has more than 700K users after only a few months, almost twice Everquest's peak.
  
  
• Both worlds have grown enormous, as large or larger than World of Warcraft.
  
  
• Neither has been able to keep up with the latest eye-candy standards, though. They do have vastly improved eye candy compared to when they were first released.

Yet they still die...

In fact, they're dying at a more rapid rate than their player numbers would indicate. The number of people that play virtual worlds has been growing at 30%-50% per year, yet Ultima Online and Everquest have only managed to keep their populations constant. If their populations were growing at the same rate as the market, they would merely be "treading water". They aren't even doing that. What happens when the virtual-world market growth stalls? If new players weren't continually streaming into the market then Ultima Online and Everquest would be shrinking at a rate of 20%-30% a year!

What is going on?

Both games have deeper feature sets and are larger than the latest-and-greatest. Everquest's eye candy isn't even that far behind World of Warcraft's. (WoW's eye candy is behind the times though, and far behind Everquest II. EQ II has only half the players, partly because its eye candy requires too high-end a computer.)

Digging their own graves

Why are Ultima Online's and Everquest's populations falling, let alone failing to grow by 30%-50% a year?

Here's my theory... Every time a virtual world releases an expansion pack, the following happens:

1. The cost of the game goes up since players now have to purchase yet another package. A more expensive game means fewer players. Companies easily counteract this by rolling the expansion packs into their main game box that new players purchase; only existing players need the expansion pack.
   
   
2. The new eye candy increases the user base. Of course, some users don't have the hardware necessary for the the new eye candy, but on the whole, eye candy is beneficial unless it's too bleeding edge, like Everquest II's.
   
   
3. New features are added, such as more player levels, pets, and player housing. The new features revive the interest of current players. Potentially new players, however, find new features to be a negative since they inevitably make the game more difficult to play. When too many features are added to a virtual world, the learning curve is enormous and new users shy away.
   
   To make matters worse, the players entering the virtual world market today are less "hard core" than previous waves of new players. Thus, they dislike complex UIs and feature sets even more than the old players. So, not only do the expansion packs dissuade potential hard core players, they are a huge negative for the newer wave of non-hardcore players.
   
   
4. The new content added by the expansion packs are enjoyed by existing players because they have already completed the old content. However, from the point of view of new players, the virtual world already had 400 hours of content before the expansion pack added another 100 hours. The virtual world now has 500 hours of content...
   
   The problem with so much content is that the virtual world becomes an insurmountable obstacle. More content just makes it that much harder to "finish" the world.
   
   For example, I am not a hard core gamer. I will play a game for 50-100 hours and then get bored. I end up finishing half the games I play, and leaving the other games 30%-50% from the end. If a virtual world has 400 hours of content, I'm only going to get through 25% of it, at most. Adding another 100 hours means that I'll only get through 20% of it, and will get bored soon after I've graduated from killing rats to killing giant rats. When I play a RPG, I want to be killing the evil overlord by the time I get bored, not just giant rats!
   
   Again, increasing the amount of content is doubly detrimental because the newest wave of virtual-world players are not hard core. I suspect they have longer attention spans that I do, with most playing between 100 and 200 hours.
   
   Furthermore, the more content a virtual world has, the more expensive it becomes to upgrade its eye candy and features. After all, if a world has 1000 different 3D models for monsters, converting to a new 3D engine that supports more polygons and bump mapping could require 1000 models to be rebuilt and retextured. Likewise, adding a new feature could easily break one of the 1000 quests a world has, requiring the testing of all 1000 quests after a new feature has been added. A virtual world with only 500 monsters models and 500 quests has a much easier time adding new eye candy.

Virtual worlds are digging their own graves when they put out expansion packs because the expansion packs gradually focus the virtual world towards an ever-shrinking class of niche players: Those players who have already spent large amounts of time in the virtual world, and new players with huge amounts of time on their hands.

However, if virtual worlds don't put out out expansion packs, they'll die an even quicker death... It's like a war movie where the bad guy points a gun at the captured soldier and makes him dig his own grave. Soldiers inevitably dig their own grave, hoping that the delay will provide enough time for plot twist to occur.

The plot twist

At the moment, I can think of three answers to the "What happens after I ship?" question:

1. The ever-expanding world - The virtual world digs its own grave, as above.
   
   
2. The Phoenix approach - The virtual world refuses to put out expansion packs and accepts a quick death, fading to obscurity in a year or two. This solution isn't all bad because the virtual world company can take the money it would have spent building expansion packs, and put it into a new world, with the latest and greatest features, content, and eye candy. The approach mimics the mythical, Phoenix, which is reborn from its own ashes.
   
   The Phoenix approach is the one most commonly used by linear fiction and single-player games, with the profits from one movie/game being used finance the creation of an entirely different movie/game. I won't bother going into any more detail since it's such a common approach.
   
   
3. Continually remodelling - See below.

A "continually remodelling" world still releases frequent expansion packs, like an ever-expanding world, but with a twist:

1. The expansion packs would be free to all players, which inevitably means a free download.
   
   
2. They would include new eye candy, although the eye candy would never be able to keep up with the latest and greatest.
   
   
3. New features would be added, but other features would be removed. Introducing a ranger class that could own a pet, along with the pet feature, might cause the necromancer class to be removed. Removing existing features is needed to ensure that the world's learning curve doesn't become too steep.
   
   
4. Likewise, as new content is added, old content would be removed. Again, this ensures that the world is accessible to new players.

This approach is more like remodelling than adding on.

In architectural terms, the ever-expanding world approach begins with a normal-sized house and continually adds onto the house, eventually producing a monstrosity with 3 kitchens and 16 bathrooms. The continually-remodelling world approach keeps the house roughly the same size, but occasionally remodels the kitchens and bathrooms to keep up with the latest styles and gadgets. The Phoenix approach tears down the house once in awhile and rebuilds a new one on the same spot.

Ramifications of continually remodelling

Continually remodelling has some important ramifications to the virtual world:

• Players will quickly use up all the content; a new player will run out after 3-6 months and leave. Hard core players will get though in days. The low amount of content might prohibit monthly fees.
  
  
• However, the player could return 2 years later and experience a completely remodelled world. It would still resemble the previous world, but would be changed enough that it would be novel and fun once again.
  
  In some ways, visiting a virtual world every two years would be like visiting the Earth in 1940's, then the 1960's, then the 1980's, etc. It would be the same world, but because the technology and contents have changed, the experience would differ each visit. Conversely, a different set of players would be 12 months out of phase, visiting the earth in the 1950's, 1970's, 1990's, etc.
  
  
• The world would evolve over time, just as the real world has evolved since the 1940's. The past will work its way into the content, and players visiting two years after their first foray into the world will encounter content based on "historical events" that occurred two years earlier.
  
  Ultimately, this means that players will affect the history of the world. Their relationship with the world is one of reincarnation; they experience history through multiple lives.
  
  
• For "reincarnation" to work, the players' old characters would have to permanently die after 6-12 months, ensuring that the players have reason to visit the newly remodelled content, from low to high level.
  
  
• A continually evolving world is a nightmare for licensed properties like Star Wars, Middle Earth, and Star Trek. The players' actions and the game world will "demand" that content and features evolve in a particular direction. The IP owners, primarily concerned with their linear fiction, might prevent this evolution since it would cause the game world to diverge from the linear-fiction world. (Star Wars and Star Trek evolve according the the needs of the movies and TV shows, not the needs of the game. Middle Earth doesn't even evolve.) Without the ability to evolve, a continually remodelling world is impossible. I suspect that licensed worlds will end up "digging their own grave", since the IP owner won't like the "quick death" choice.
  
  
• Brand-new virtual worlds have a large problem with "flash crowds", where hundreds of thousands (to millions) of players suddenly want to play the latest and greatest game. The result is that a newly released world will mix untested code and stressful conditions, resulting in many crashes the first few months. It also requires an army of product support staff to cope with all inrush of new players, who need more product support than experienced players. As the player base becomes more experienced, they have fewer product support questions, and staff are laid off, wasting the training and experience they've gained. A world that continually remodels itself is less likely to have flash crowds since it can release quietly and when it's only partially complete, and remodel itself into a complete product.