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Mark Jacobs was the partner of an interview at EBgames about Dark Age of Camelot, the MMORPG that went live yesterday. It's a big one, and here's the first quuestion:
What’s your take on the massively multiplayer online audience? How many of these games does the world need, and what’s your perspective on who’s playing?
That’s a good question, and it’s one that has been debated in this industry almost from day one. Let’s start with the first part: How many of these games does the world need?
The world needs a hell of a lot more. If you look at the market, and you see how much it’s expanded in the last few years, you can trace the roots of these kinds of games back to the pay services like CompuServe, Genie and PLATO way, way, way back when, and only over the last five years has the market gone from a true niche to something that people are taking seriously.
With what is happening worldwide in terms of Internet connectivity, these kind of games are going to be the dominant form of play for certain types of gamers. For many years, and this applies to the dot-bombs as well, people have been saying, “all you need is eyeballs.” I’ve always come from the exact opposite, which is premium content for premium players. I think that if you have a lot of these kinds of games, you will nowhere near meet market saturation for a long, long time.
If you look at what is going on in Asia with connectivity, Korea has the most popular online game right now in terms of pure numbers with Lineage. It’s not paid, but it shows that there is an appetite for that kind of game.
If you look at Europe, they’re slowly coming online, except for certain countries such as Sweden, which has more high-speed users connected to the ‘net proportionally than any other country in Europe as well as the United States. The kinds of people that are playing these games right now are more of the “power gamers.” I don’t want to necessarily call them “hardcore,” because that’s not totally accurate either. You have a mix.
You’ve got a lot of players who like to “level” and like the whole power trip. Then a lot of these players are also social-type players. They use Dragon’s Gate, Gemstone, EverQuest and even Camelot, hopefully, as a place to meet and hang out with their friends. And that’s where I think companies like EA, which is trying with Sims Online to reach that segment of the market, might have a chance of bringing in even more users.
So, I think that we have not even scratched the surface of these kind of games in terms of how many will be out there, how popular they’ll be. The numbers that are coming out from the “unholy trinity,” as I’ve been referring to them for a while, are huge; they’re not going down. If you look at Ultima and EverQuest--it’s a little harder to tell what’s going on with Turbine and Asheron’s Call--these guys just keep adding new subscribers, and that’s fantastic.
We’re only at the beginning and things are going to get an awful lot better over the next few years as games like The Sims Online come on up, Star Wars Galaxies, of course, and other games that will serve to bring more people into the market. |
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Dark Age of Camelot Interview with Mark Jacobs
