GameDaily BIZ: Can MMOs really be mainstream though? What's really going to get it accepted as a way that everyday people will spend their time and money?

Robert: To say, "Can they become mainstream?" or "Can they become mass market?" all you have to do is look at Asia, and look at the penetration over there.

BIZ: But there's a huge cultural gap between what goes on in Asia and what's happening here...

Robert: So are you asking, "Can they become mass market?" or "Can they become mass market in the U.S.?" which is a different question.

BIZ: In the U.S.

Richard: I believe it's easily demonstrable that digital entertainment can become mass market and being online only opens new features being available to you; it doesn't spoil anything that has come before, so to speak. So in my mind, the issue is not whether they can but "What are the feature sets that need to be included to make it be so?" And these, what I consider first generation games, in the mold of either Ultima Online or EverQuest and pretty much nothing else, they all tend to have the same basic structure of what I describe as the "level grind." If you look at most offline games, they're games where you, the player, get to be the pinnacle of existence and save the world or dominate the scenario that the offline game is describing.

In online games, the vast majority—pretty much all of them to date—are still in the mold of, "Hey come in here and level grind with us, where your life is pretty average and the whole point is to get stronger." There's nothing to win, there's nothing to accomplish, there's no point in time when you uniquely feel special compared to other people. And in fact, your day-to-day activity is to go get a mission that takes you out into the woods where the monsters continually respawn level 1 over here, level 2 over here and you "farm" them for your XP, you go back to town and buy something a little stronger and then http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=11979" target="_blank">More...