My searching turned up nothing, but apparently Greg left Riot at some point and now has his own studio Fantastic Pixel Castle to work on an MMO project:
“MMO” these days has such a wide range of possible meanings…
Not in this case, he’s targeting a WoW killer, funded by NetEase.
I like Street a lot, from his interactions with the WoW community. He seems generally clueful, and while I frequently disagreed with his decisions they weren’t founded in arrogance or stupidity.
Yeah, he left last March. It’ll be a while.
Just started watching the video, and it seems like it will an MMO in the WoW sense.
Cool; I didn’t watch the video, was more commenting in general. But even then, I wonder how wise such a course of action may be… Is there a market for WoW-style these days?
A market? Certainly! Lots of recent MMOs have had tremendous launches, like New World and Lost Ark. The demand exists.
The trick, as always, is keeping people playing more than 3 months.
100% there’s a market. It’s not as big as it was, say, in 2010, but WoW is up to like 5 different live versions and they are all very popular. I think you could target a couple million paying users globally. More if NetEase can get you into China, which I imagine is the point.
It sounds like they are thinking of having something where it will have a combo of things where you do stuff like WoW dungeons/raids in some zones, along with private-ish shards where you can do some survival game like things with friends.
Can you support that statement? I see no reason to think the market has shrunk, quite the contrary. You just need to make a better game. That ain’t easy, though.
Yes, they’re trying to make a MMO with both theme park (ala WoW) and sandbox (ala UO) elements, in separate zones. It’s insanely ambitious and I would be very surprised if it succeeds. But I hope it does!
Are games like New World making money? I’m not arguing, I’m genuinely curious and simply do not know the answers to these questions. I would have thought no one wanted to pay a subscription fee, and it seems difficult in the non-mobile world to get enough transactional revenue to pay for a big MMO. But again, not my field of work, so I assume other folks actually making these sorts of games know more than I do!
I have no hard data, but I think it’d be hard to argue that WoW is as popular now as it was when Wrath launched. I think best guesses are that it’s down to 3-4 million players, right?
WoW is a positively ancient game. Certainly its userbase has fallen off. That doesn’t imply anything about a new MMO, though.
New World is one of those 3 month MMOs. So is Lost Ark in the US, although it’s pay2win, heavily monetized, and based on a Korean MMO that will be developed regardless so probably profitable.
Elder Scrolls Online is another quite old MMO and it makes money quite nicely.
Yeah, that’s fair. I think in general common wisdom is that the subscription MMO market isn’t as popular as it once was because of the rise of free-to-play (and buy-to-play, I guess). But I’d love for Street (or whomever) to prove that wisdom wrong!
And I think EA ended up making money on The Old Republic after they switched their model.
Even CCP is profitable on EVE Online with a relatively very small player base, but mostly because they keep their costs low.
It’s taken a (very) long time, but players are starting to get exhausted with monetization in F2P games. B2P less so, as they’re less aggressive.
My feeling is a B2P game with an optional QoL-type subscription like ESO is the smart way to go today. Also it must, absolutely MUST, be on consoles too.
Smaller niche MMOs like EVE online also make a great deal of sense. Street’s ambition will likely be the death of this project. But again, I hope I’m wrong.
I think this is where New World came up short, right? It feels like they never got monetization right, even though it seems like there’s a solid base game there.
I really don’t know enough about New World to speak authoritatively on the subject, I’m afraid. I know it isn’t P2W like Lost Ark, that’s about it.
If I was making a MMO I would absolutely pick a niche I’m passionate about and focus on that. Trying to beat WoW with its 20 years of content and powerful network effect and add sandbox stuff is batshit insane. But of course NetEase wouldn’t have been interested in a game with a couple hundred thousand $15/month subscriptions. They make big bets, not small or mid-sized.
So it’ll either own the world or be a punchline to jokes like every other MMO that tried to take down the king. And there have been many. Just not recently.
Is Riot’s game running into issues, or was there some other reason Greg left?
Family issues, as I recall.
I’m cautiously optimistic about the Riot MMO. That’s another wannabe WoW-killer, but there are a lot of LoL players ready to go. I was more optimistic when Street was working on it.
From what I’ve heard, Lost Ark could have been a WoW killer in the west. Its aggressive monetization and business model was the problem. I never even installed it (and that’s why!) but from what everybody said it was incredibly fun to play and had staying power too.
Then again predatory monetization can succeed here too. Look to Genshin Impact, speaking of MMOs soundly whooping WoW’s butt. Another one I would never even consider playing-- but I’m a crusty old dude now, it’s incredibly popular.