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Are superhero mmo's a niche market?(Massively discussion)
gandales
Posts: 340 Arc User
I read this article about The Daily Grind: Are superhero MMOs doomed to be niche?
I think it is an interesting topic :biggrin:
I think it is an interesting topic :biggrin:
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I'll also be honest about something else: I just don't get why. The second I saw Champions Online that day so many years ago in Steam's "F2P" listings, my face did this "O3O" and I just couldn't install it fast enough.
Then again, there is one thing I would understand: why a Romantic Comedy MMO would fail. I mean hey, romantic comedies are popular right? But I don't think if you announced the creation of a Romantic Comedy MMO that you could really expect to be in business more than however long it takes for you to run out of money with no income. Would I be up for a romantic comedy MMO? I'll be honest, I'm giggling about the thought of it, and I would totally want to check it out... but I don't think many others would.
It might actually have less to do with movies, and more to do with board games. Mainly one board game... Dungeons and Dragons (yes, I called it a board game... feel free to magic missile me to death). Fantasy MMOs were basically just computerized versions of a board game, and that board game was practically made to be turned into a video game. Now yes, there have been super hero table-top RPGs, but if you go up to an average person on the street and say "Name a game that nerds play with dice in their basement", they're not going to say Abberant.. or some other super hero table-top RPG... I can't think of one... (feel free to beat me to death with your d6's
So okay, wtf does that have to do with mmos now right? I mean that all happened over five decades ago (feel free to beat me to death with your facts). Well again, if I go up to someone on the street and say "List off three MMOs", they're likely to, on average, list off three fantasy MMOs. If I mention that there are other types, they'll probably be surprised.. and then they'll probably excuse themselves and walk away before I can keep talking.
That might have something to do with why Superhero MMOs have trouble getting players. I mean it also might not, but it might. It might also be that people are too intimidated to try one... I mean look at these superhero movies, and the super difficult things the heroes in them have to do. You might get the impression that a game based on that stuff would actually be really really difficult. On the other hand, fantasy films feature wave after wave of giant battles where hundreds of combatants go toe to toe... even the wimpy hobbits get to join in! I mean that just screams accessibility - that game is gonna be the kind where you can depend on all the other people in your army and you won't have much personal responsibility or skill demand (feel free to beat me with your DKP).
Or maybe it's something else... maybe it's that fantasy always screams "beautiful women!", and for the most part super hero movies have been screaming "sausage fest..." (feel free to beat me with your...drawing a blank here... need a reference from a super hero movie with a female lead that wasn't terrible). That would drive away both the male and female gamers wouldn't it?
Well those are all just theories. The one thing that does seem to be clear is that for some reason for someone to be drawn to a super hero MMO they have to already be a fairly interested fan of the super hero genre. Fantasy MMOs on the other hand will pull in people who aren't big on fantasy, and in many cases won't even convert them to a fan of the genre after several years of play. What is it about elves and goblins that's so great anyway? Heck I saw an elf running around in ren-cen just a few minutes ago, so we have that too anyway...
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Dating sims / virtual significant others are popular in some places, so it might actually work.
Personally think this is just a way of excusing games that really just aren't great. "Oh, it's a super hero game, so it's niche." I doubt anyone gives a crap if the game has a super hero theme as long as the game is fun to play, has an appealing story, has lots of fun stuff to do, has a strong community, and developers show they care about it. If anything, not being a typical fantasy game could be an asset to be played upon. I know I'm sick of the classic fantasy setting.
No, Super Hero MMOs are not doomed to be niche, but they might be doomed to be sub-par and made excuses for.
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
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To answer the question: The most popular mainstream MMO genre with the widest demographic of players have always seemed to be the Tolkien-inspired fantasy-related ones, or hybrids of those mixed with steampunk / sci-fi elements. I guess players who want to seek an alternative that breaks away from that mainstream, like a superhero-themed MMO, can be considered a niche market.
This. A million times, this. Niche is a word used by those who want to make excuses for mediocrity.
Quality and a solid product are always in demand. Don't believe me? It really wasn't that long ago that fantasy (sword and sorcery), even in video games, was considered niche.
3 reason why yes.
1: We've never gotten a push, companies are scared to pull the trigger. And in the case of CoX they canceled while it was turning a profit because they had to trim something. We don't get advertisement.
2: A fractured community. Some vocal CoX members are attacking CO in favor of possible vaporware, when we can all absolutely live in the same space. For our part, some of us CO people are pretty outright convinced that the Phoenix Project will launch about the same time CO2 does, and we're not scared about mentioning it. You've got like 10 different companies trying to fight over the scraps of a canceled mmo.
3: The big names are all tied to some rather bad or boring games. Diablo Heroes 2015 feels 10 years old already. DCUO is a console game pretending to work on PC, where you can totally be the sidekick you always wanted. The *biggest* blow to super hero gaming in the last 15 years was this game losing the marvel license. Can you imagine how much different the gaming landscape would be if cryptic had Marvel Online (CO with dev support), STO, AND Neverwinter?
RIP Caine
Disclaimer - stats are always manipulated, but within the +/-, and provides a better reference point than opinions.
There's roughly only 100 million Hardcore gamers in the world
This is an estimate used by the industry, used as a ref point for sales forecasts. We're Hardcore, our key hobby is gaming. Most ppl are Casuals; they bought their consoles for BluRay and Football games, but they don't play as much as us.
There's roughly only 20 million MMO players in the world
This is the scary number. MMO players only account for 20% of the Hardcore gamers. We think we're more, but only because we are in MMOs and surrounded by other MMO players. A sampling bias. WoW itself accounts for 10 mil of this.
Any single Call of Duty, GTA, Minecraft, even Xbox Kinect Adventures title outnumber all MMOs
Any time a title comes out from these famous (not saying good or bad, just popular) franchises, they sell more MORE than 20 mil copies. Not the whole franchise, just any 1 game, outnumbers all MMO players put together.
My realisation
If you were to call something a niche, even MMOs in general can be considered a niche market considering how we're outdone by even Kinect Adventures. Continue discussing, but realise we're a speck on a drop in the bucket.
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When you look at the games that sell a f-ton of copies they tend to have things that many MMOs do not. Even WoW has the backing of Blizzard, who made their name with quality games. I'm pretty sure SOE devotes far more resources and love to their flagship games than anything else, including DCUO. CoD is known for being a fun, multiplayer FPS. It revolves around the gameplay not the story.
Minecraft is unique in that it's a sandbox that people want but don't have a lot of choices over. That's also why you're seeing Terraria pop onto every platform ever and still being developed for. GTA also falls into the sandbox area. Minecraft and GTA are also always streamed by Smosh, one of the most popular channels on all of YouTube. Every week those videos pull a million views.
Most of the MMOs out now can't even compare to the quality of games like WoW or EverQuest let alone something like Minecraft or GTA.
Stuff like Kinetic Adventures probably appeals to the casual gamer that just wants to have some fun, but may not have the time commitment / interest for core games. These are probably also the same people that don't consider themselves gamers.
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
The games I played were stuff like Gamma World, PSI-World, Shadowrun,The old Marvel Super Hero (TSR) gmae, and Champions. That was back in 1986 - and even then those games were considered niche.
The game that was most popular was Dungeons and Dragons.. it was the go to game for the nerd crowd. So factor in that a few of those old DnD players grew up and founded gaming companies. Of course they patterned the games they produced along the same lines.
So in my opinion Super Hero games have been niche since people have been playing rpgs. They will also probably stay niche.. for some time to come.
I'd say Cryptic needs to take a better use of that advantage while it's still there.
Lack of DR content is a big plus so not all lack of content is bad.
There's no question that superheroes have historically been niche in RPGs, MMOs, and video games, but fads change, and it's not obvious that superheroes are forced to be a niche, they're currently big in cinema and plenty of developers are willing to give it the occasional additional try. However, they are certainly currently a niche.
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Merely allowing greater-than-normal abilities to define "superhero" leaves us potentially calling WoW a superhero game, or Shadowrun. Both have characters with powers beyond those of the man on the street, but in neither case would any reasonable person regard, say, a Paladin of the Light or a half-orc netrunner as a "superhero".
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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i think that aesthetics are important in determining a genre entertainment as well, avergers would not be considered a "martial arts" film despite both black widow and cap using conventional martial arts tactics. as much as i dislike spandex, it is a frequent visual cue for the genre, similarly one thing about the general superhero theme, though by no means applying to every superheroic theme, is the lack of a single specific unified "power" source. co apparently breaks this that somehow magic powers the tech and ultrascience, but one thing that has always drawn me to genre is how the antagonists can come from multiple possible origins, , paramilitary, magical, extra-dimensional, alien, robotic, exaggerated eastern martial arts, it all works without anyone complaining something doesn't belong.
now all that said, sadly it seems to be niche for the same reason a lot of things in gaming are currently niche, nobody has made it popular yet, and risk averse publishers wont bet on an unproven idea with the massively ballooning budgets.. I strongly believe that if midway had not died and "hero" had come out with a proper budget, it would have done a lot of good. the infamous series and saints row IV both made games with elements of super heroic powers, but the themes were more gritty sci fi and comic mayhem. but i think the gaming market these days is more and more dependent on the publishers to tell them what to play, AAA games come with a dedicated fanbase less based on real quality and more on the perceived quality they must have based on their budgets. and just there being a big budget superhero game would have built a demand. I often say, the majority of the millions that watched avengers likely never seriously cared about any of those characters, but a sufficient budget and easy to follow plat drew people in and made fans of them.
as it stands i wonder if even the mmo market is now "nicher" these days, wow was an anomaly that caused a lot of publishers to behave irresponsibly and close down respectable mmos that had respectable fanbase sizes. and worse, companies took the cheap route and instituted the bare-bones content delivery of free to play games to try and grab the table scraps. they just aren't the same anymore, and i really cant see that any big anticipated mmos are even currently being discussed...maybe ever-quest next but that has even cooled in the presses. so yeah, it all is niche these days, outside of one outlier that has long ago stagnated.
My suspicions is that the defunct Project Titan was going to be a superhero MMO, and its cancellation made me very depressed after seeing the salvaged game assets.
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Although I guess the takeaway from Overwatch is that the Superhero part of Superhero MMOs isn't the niche part. What's niche is MMOs themselves, which cost a lot of money to develop and are much higher risk compared to Angry Birds/Flappy Bird/Candy Crush Saga :x
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So what's wrong with superhero MMOs?
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
I guess the problem only starts when you ask people to play super heroes in a persistent online world with other players.. Maybe people instinctively perceive the flaw about a game like that being based in a genre that revolves around power fantasies where the player is "the strongest".
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While it is prevalent the concept of the overpower hero. I like a bit better the anime version of the underdog who tries hard and never give up. When you see Batman in the context of the Justice League I empathize with him better since he is the one always at disadvantage.
And yet he always wins when fighting anybody.
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sorta kinda, now i loved sr4 despite the fact that you are playing an amoral sociopath who causes absurd amounts of collateral damage, but thats one game, and really its a branch off of a series that was originally a gta ripoff. there are a few "superpower" games, sr4, prototype, and infamous, but i dont know if they fit what i want from a superhero game. most feature a linear progression of powers, there is no making an "ice controller" or a fire melee specialist, in sr you get all the abilities that you collect the nodes for, and almost everyone's character winds up having the same loadout, minus prioritization of the weapons you upgraded.
infamous had some more variety and you can decide to be an **** or a hero, but its a fixed protagonist, so you dont get the "make your own hero" thing that coh and co had. and both cole and whatever his name was were confined to a small pool of concepts, cole is a lightning only character and later elarend fire and ice stuff, and whats his name starts with smoke and then gets some weird powers, but lacks the iconic powers of coh and co. and prototype pretty much is a game that makes you a movie monster and you are stuck with a fixed protagonist. so i dunno, there are small flckerings of superhero games here and there, but from a publishers eye view, still no dice. and worse, the one good hope for us getting an offline game with customization and varied load-outs, project awakened, was utterly failed by the gamer community. so yeah that's the view form the ground,
Saint's Row's popularity has little to do with it being perceived as a superhero game. It has more to do with its open-world over-the-top gameplay and the kind of environmental mayhem you can wreak in it that's similar to games like GTA.
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
Saints Row belongs to a certain genre with relevant gameplay mechanics that CO does not. The genre has been arguably made extremely popular by GTA. There's also the fact that the Saint's Row franchise has been built over the years across four games and expectedly has much more exposure and has built a bigger playerbase than CO has. There's also a preference difference between a single player action adventure style game and a MMORPG.
There are more factors involved as to why it "works" for Saints Row than just "it's fun as hell" and with people thinking that it's a superhero game (something I highly disagree with). Even the "fun as hell" factor is subjective according to people's preferences.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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CoH was absolutely massive for about a year, it had a huge population. It lost its major population from the double whammy of WoW and ED.
CO itself had a huge uptake for the first few months.
So it's not that there isn't the interest out there, it's more that the interest is fragile somehow, and is maybe looking for a higher quality game than has really been offered so far (except possibly CoH initially).
Fundamentally, the problem is that all the big ones, like CoH and CO (and even DUO) have gotten a lot of it right - mainly the combat, all three have had combat systems that have been engaging and suitably flashy in their own way - but they haven't produced games that have enough depth to sustain interest past taking a few heroes to cap.
The games as they are attract and keep real superhero fans who have a dozen superhero ideas before breakfast. But I think most people maybe have one or two ideas in mind, and they'd rather pursue a game that lets them take their cherished character into some deep, long-lasting endgame gameplay.
That's really where all the superhero MMOs have fallen down - in simply not being big enough or good enough endgame-wise.
And re. the "big enough", sadly this may actually be an inherent flaw in the genre on account of the psychological effect of travel powers on perceived zone/map size. In most MMOs, you can make paltry little areas that seem big because you're perforce walking for about a third of the game, and don't get a mount till then, and even then it's only slightly faster than walking. CoH's own Atlas Park was a tiny zone compared to the rest of the zones in the game, but it seemed big when you first played CoH because you were basically walking/running. But as soon as you got your travel powers, the size of the game world started to shrink psychologically, and even very large zones like the Hollows, Steel Canyon, etc., felt psychologically small.
I recall a controversy re. this game, when someone was moaning about Millennium City being a tiny zone, and someone else pointed out that it takes the same time to walk across as it takes to walk across one of WoW's main landmasses.
IOW, part of the problem may be that a superhero game needs such a vast amount of assets like this, such huge zones for the basic game, that part of the problem is the developers can barely do that, they have little time left to get into endgame stuff before they have to shove the game out.
I think this may be partly why the genre hasn't been so popular - not with players (as I say for players the desire for good superhero MMOs is proven by the large initial uptake of CoH, CO and DCUO), but with developers. IOW, perhaps most developers feel it's a mug's game to make a superhero MMO, because it's effectively making the workload much higher than it would be with an "ordinary" fantasy game.
Batman's powers are time control;
he runs a business empire. - a full time job
he trains for hours a day in physical fitness
he makes his own gadgets.
and he find s time for a social life.
oh and eating and sleeping.
he uses all 48hrs in a day.
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Champions main selling point is make your own hero but the thing is Saints Row and Lego Marvel do the whole make your own hero thing no internets needed and are troll free.
I like CO and will play it till it sunsets but why would someone play a mmo to play make a hero thats sorta like Batman or the Hulk when they could just buy a Batman or Hulk game.
CO and DCUO havent really taken off because normal offline super hero games have been so good of late.
Might be a good idea for PWI to use the Champs IP to make offline games also. They have pay rolled offline games before.
Look at that video game Injustice. An alternate universe Batman transports half of the JLA to another dimension. Batman has to be the most powerful super in the DCU the stuff he pulls off without powers is insane. Look at the recent Batman and Robin story arc he travels through space to beat up a demi god and then resurects his dead son.
Like a boss.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
id say why a person would play a superhero game rather than one of the existing games is if they dont want to play the hulk or batman. i want to play rian frostdrake, and there isnt any game starring him. existing characters are someone else's thing, so if you want champs strength, then playing a game about someone else's hero aint gonna cut it. It was something brought up a lot at the end of coh, people had their own heroes, they didnt want to play some lame hero like superman or the flash, those weren't their heroes, they wanted their creation and their iteration of their powers. Its similar to why i prefer my skyrim hero over talion from shadow of morder, because he is my character. hell,, my character from alpha protocol is closer to my prefered superhero than batman was, he is too much someone else's creation for me.
as for speculation about co and dcou doing poorly because of superior competition, i dunno, it seems more gamers are averse to different ideas, mmo meant everquest and ultima online till it meant wow, and the average gamer who doesn't really follow gaming much wouldnt know to try anything different, they follow the herd and play wow and then, having played what they feel is representative of all mmos, they go on their way.
now as for your final idea baout taking the champions offline, its pretty clear that cryptic is finished caring about champions and has been for years, but if someone would make a offline superhero game(like my much lamented "project awakened" which appears fully dead since people can kickstart a @#$%ing potato salad, but cant crowdfund a flexible superhero game) then i would be the first one in line to buy it.
What would any PW made game have to do with Cryptic. PW owns the Champs IP and can do what ever they want with it. Heck I'd pay good money for a Torchlight style Champs game made by Runic
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
lol? people who actually believe this live in a dank dusty fantasy world.
listen, just because mom has your 2 baby sisters to look after now and doesn't have as much time for you, her teenage son, doesn't mean she doesn't love you anymore. now dry those tears, no girl wants to take a big cry babby to prom.
There's been a whole bunch of offline superhero games, some of them pretty good. I think X-Men Origins: Wolverine was my fave. The batman ones are okay too.
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as for the first point, how you liking all the new game mechanics introduced this year? the game is still online, but are you seriously saying that cryptic has done anything to prioritize the growth of co since reloaded?
Actually, it would matter if the mom made her teenager daughter to drop out school so it won't spend too much money on her while putting her baby sisters in an expensive preschool program. However, I don't blame nwo or sto, they are respectable games which has good investment, you get a lot of more for your bucks there than here.
It has been this trend of thought in CoX/CO that a superhero mmo has to be extremelly focus on costumes. Management discovers that making costumes and vehicles are cheaper to make than actual content and it is easier to charge more for them(lockboxes). I am guessing that we will continue receiving new costumes/vehicles and less content. Sad thing, but money talks.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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