MMO Development Lesson #4
Design the game for your audience, not for yourself. This is the hardest one in the world to follow, because all developers have opinions and preferences. Determine your game’s intended audience, and design the game according to what they will like, not what you will like. If you want to make a game for a broad audience, this is especially important, because game developers are generally extremely skilled and experienced gamers, and we are a limited audience.
Not entirely sure I can agree with you here. Maybe because I am not a game developer, but when I read what you wrote, I get visions of todays movie industry (scripts aren’t needed, focus groups are!), and development by committee without a real sense of vision. I remember reading one time about the animators at Termite Terrace being asked how they knew what to do the cartoons about…their answer was, ‘We just made what we wanted to see and thought was funny.’
I’d tend to question this theory too for the following reasons.
1) I think that as a designer you will understand and empathize with your subscriber’s views and opinions if you know where they’re coming from as far as the game model and desires for the world goes.
2) I think the passion for creating a game that you would enjoy to play is what really determines whether or not a designer makes a quality game in my opinion. I’d rather see a game in development that is geared towards a specific audience not because it will bring in the most cash or because its the majority – but because the developers and designers really wanted that particular kind of game to exist and feel passionately about it.
Make the sort of game you have wanted to make and one that you feel you could bring to the masses in a way that will please yourself and gamers alike. That’s just the way I feel about it. =)
I can see a point in looking at this matter by using a few different words. The fundamental principle would looks something like this: “Design a game that everyone can understand, not only game developers.” I have seen many fancy a feature provide zero product value because it was lacking an intuitive access point for players who didnt know how it worked from elsewhere. This is rather similar to the nichification which tends to strike sequels after many enough generations, but it can start from the first game if the devs import the problem from themselves into the mechanics.
The only reliable method that I use to avoid the problem is to always expose every stage of the Interactive Circuit (as I mentioned in the comments of lesson 3). If any stage dosnt make sense its broken and needing to be fixed. Most features designed with yourself as audience wont make the speak and the listen part of the interactive circuit work as it needs to if you design them for an “everyone audience”. Once properly exposed its also likely that the construction will obviously be out of place within the game, if not just make sure it works well and it will become good entertainment.
MMO Development Lesson#4
I think what Ryan is getting at here is more like if you are developing a Space-sim type MMO and you know that the majority of Space-sim players like a player controlled and defined economy, even though you personally may hate it you need to go with it for your audience.
The more you specifically design for yourself, the smaller your target audience. If you make a game that, for you, is the most perfect awesome game ever, most people are going to think its missing features or lacking fun.
… and then hope like h377 that you understand that audience …
You could use metrics of current games … but that only tells you what gamers enjoy today. WoW has brought millions of new players to the table … but these players probably won’t leave WoW for another WoW … wouldn’t they be more likely to leave because they’ve grown as players and are looking for something different?
You could use focus groups to understand your audience … but that didn’t bode well for at least one game (SWG). I would tend to think that there’s some value in having personal passion for what you’re building.
What other method is there to really understand your audience than to perhaps be a member of it?
Rigorous analysis.
In business-systems, this can produce acceptable results. It’s iterative refinement and a deep personal understanding of the business that makes for a great application. I don’t see why it would be any different for games.
“Know your audience” is the mantra of any market, any communication, and games are no exception. If your market is “a mirror image of myself”, then design away, and you will have record sales of 1.
Focus groups, surveys, informal conversations, trade shows, metrics, and blogs like this one are just a handful of tools for understanding your audience, but you must look at the spirit of the feedback, and not just the letter of it. Rectify the anecdotal and statistical evidence, and make sure your changes don’t stray from your vision.
There is a difference too between “design by committee” and “wisdom of the masses”. Ask six members of your intended audience about a feature. If three people hate it, but three love it, it’s worth closing the gap.** If all six say that it’s crap, it’s probably crap (but find out why).
**(Gladius is a good example. They could have left in the swing meter and alienated stategic players, or taken it out and alienated button-mashers. Instead they put in a toggle so that both play styles could enjoy it.)
I agree that you absolutely have to develop a game you will love, but you must always realize during development that you are making the game for someone else. If my audience is simply “casual gamers,” I can make a game that I’ll enjoy too, but if it really came down to it and I made a game specifically for myself, it would be so hardcore user-skill twitch PvP that it would have to be niche.
That’s not to say that I don’ t love playing more casual type MMOs like WoW. I really do enjoy playing them. But everyone has their own preferences, and game developers are often much more fluent in gaming as a whole than their prospective audience is. Meaning, you can’t make things so complex that only a game dev would understand how to play the game.
Personally, I’d like to see someone make a new network friendlyish version of Origin System’s OMEGA. With modern processors, the scripts could be unreal, and the designs pretty sophisticated.
(Now watch as someone tells me someone has….)
On the flip side, there is the ‘build it and they will come’ approach. If you put out a quality product, a solid, polished, fun game, people will play it regardless of the target audience. I think it is far more important that the developers focus on building a good game rather than a ‘popular’ game.
There are target audiences for just about any type of game out there – in this regards, deciding what type of game you are making determines your target audience. Addiotnally, a number of MMO players are looking for new things to try out, not a repeat of the last game they played with a few more bells and whistles. Because of this, I think it is more important for the developers to have a well defined idea of what sort of game they are designing.
> It’s iterative refinement and a deep personal understanding of the business that makes for a great application.
That’s not really the case. For example, if we look at many successful products which enjoy a majority-female market, we find that not only are those making and marketing the product not members of their target demographic but that competing products which ARE from the target demographic do comparitively poorly against them.
Cosmetics and hair-products immediately spring to mind. The marketing and production of these items is entirely driven by analysis and targetted focus-group usage. You have stated a previous use of focus groups in games which was counterproductive but i do not believe it is appropriate as an example: partly because the groups themselves were not composed of the games’ target market demographic, partly because they were run by LucasArts which has a longstanding tradition of selling geeks and fanbois turds with a Star Wars logo on them.
Hmmm. I would say that if you leave that stuff out rather you’ll end up with a niche, if you’re making a 3D multiplayer game.
Everybody’s heard of Pong. But did you know there was a PvE (tic-tac-toe) game built before pong? See. Niche.
Gears of War sold more copies in the states in like a week than WoW has, well, ever. Granted, Gears is also a killer solo PvE story game, but I doubt it would have sold half on that basis, alone, and vice versa.
By your logic people are only supposed to make Pogo and Mario clones. That’s no fun.
I get what you’re saying, though, it is a mark of a professional.
I thought Gears sold something like 2 million copies in six weeks? In the course of ‘ever’(years, you know), WoW has definitely sold more than that. Burning Crusade sold something on the order of 3 million copies in the first week, I think?
I enjoy crossovers, so while I typed this in his blog’s comment window, I cut the text and pasted it over here (also because it’s pertinent to a few other things). Answer to this. — I’d accept your reply if it was accurate against my point, but it isn’t. I’ve never represented that kind of critics that judge things based on personal aesthetics in spite of popular success. Instead I take into consideration