When a World Dies

One wonders how many players remained playing Auto Assault. I’d actually be interested in the number, considering the fact that an MMO can be run on a skeleton crew for a pretty damn low number. I’d almost just let it run and have someone from one of my other games (this is NCSoft afterall, right?) keep an eye on the servers, maybe one dedicated developer and no phone support.

Of course, I also wonder what the effect IS on the remaining players, exactly. Do people identify and attach to a car the same way as they do to a humanoid character? I’m also sure there were several other factors involved. But NetDevil/NCSoft are MMO companies, so they’re not walking away from the game by any means.

While I can’t say that Auto Assault ever interested me other than the box art, I do feel there is room in the industry for games that are outside the ‘norm’. Games that offer a different game-play style.

I don’t know about many others, but I after playing MMO’s since 1999 am looking for a different combat model than DPS, and while DDO did offer a different experience in the way of combat, the game is very shallow in many of the other places a games needs to have depth to keep one engaged for months and years on end.

So I do hope that this will not discourage developers or publishers in to making ‘other’ games. WoW while hugely successful is not the holy grail of MMO game design.

They can be run on a skeleton crew for pretty cheap in financial terms, but it’s sort of an employees-market right now: the human resource costs are too high. You want your MMO people working on The Next Big Thing which is sure to make you bajillions of dollars, rather than collecting the meager pennies from your last embarrassing disappointment.

It’s not even really worthwhile to use it as a training platform to address the larger issue of experienced employees being scarce: the ungrateful wretches will take your training to a better job at another company before you think they are ready, but well after they do, where they’ll complete their training in live-fire and emerge a valuable employee (whether through positive or through negative experiences), but working for someone else.

Would be nice if GameTap or the like could scoop-up things like Earth & Beyond, Auto Assault, Fighting Legends; plus games in the twilight-phase of their life-cycle: Uh… Meridian 59? Maybe 2 to 8 years from now, EQ and UO?

Seems like that’d almost be a viable business model itself - if publishers can be convinced it’s in their best interest to hand over the game rather than canceling it, for a company that did nothing but run those sorts of games.

I’ve got to say, that sounds like a good idea.

The problem here is that the sale itself has a negative effect on accounts, and the selling company would probably almost always want more than the game is worth. I’d suggest becoming an expert on the game you’re purchasing really quickly and having a very solid plan for causing a large upswing in account numbers.