That turned out to be an especially foolish thing to say, because three years later a certain World of Warcraft came along and flipped the whole table…
In his latest interview with MinnMax, Matt Firor, the founder of ZeniMax Online Studios, spoke about the collapse of their new MMO, Project Blackbird, and shared his thoughts on the gaming industry’s current economic crisis. What is the takeaway? Even though the situation is ugly, he still believes the industry is moving through another boom-and-bust cycle and that the sector will grow again once that phase runs its course. He also pointed out that he has heard this kind of pessimism before. MinnMax host Ben Hanson asked Firor whether he had any recent revelation about working in the industry, and Firor responded by making it clear that he does not agree with analyst Matthew Ball’s dramatic take on the state of the business.
Ball argues that gaming has reached saturation point: fewer new people are entering the hobby, and companies are no longer just fighting each other, but also social media, for what attention remains. In Ball’s reading, the industry is losing that war for attention, and short-form video in particular poses one of the biggest threats to gaming’s long-term growth and health. Hanson then asked whether a new MMO could still succeed, regardless of market conditions, if it were simply good enough. Firor gave a more restrained, and perhaps less rosy, answer.
“It felt eerily similar to E3 2001, when we went there with Dark Age of Camelot and no publisher. We met with, let’s say, 18, though it was probably more like five publishers. Four of them told us there were already enough MMOs on the market and that no one was ever going to play a new one. There was EverQuest, Ultima Online, Asheron’s Call. I mean, really, what were we doing that they weren’t? Thankfully the fifth one was Vivendi, and they ended up publishing Camelot. It’s cyclical. It always is. There’s always a boom and a bust, and right now we’re inside a pretty weird tech bubble, but I’ve seen this before. I’d like to believe that’s still true, though there are a lot of genuinely great games out there that nobody hears about. Discoverability is a huge issue. But in general, if you have the right game, the right features, and the right team helping put it in front of the world, that’s the recipe for success. There are no guarantees, but nearly every successful game has followed that model”, Firor said.
We would like to share Firor’s optimism about the cyclical nature of layoffs, especially because he has lived through earlier versions of this kind of downturn himself, and because the comparison he draws between Ball’s “saturation point” theory, the identical line publishers were already using at E3 2001, and the current long-running layoff crisis is a compelling one. Even so, the broader situation still gives pause. This slump has dragged on for three years, and there is no clear sign that it is easing. We do not think the games industry is too big to fail, but it is certainly too spread out for new games to simply stop appearing: there are too many developers, on too many continents, building projects of wildly different scale and ambition.
What still feels unresolved is whether making games can reliably provide a good and dignified living, something a recent games industry executive described as a romantic idea rather than a realistic one…
Source: PCGamer
