Everquest MMO designer reacts to Josh Strife Hayes on Why Old MMOs feel better

so what are we doing we're going to watch this video from josh streif hayes and it is uh why old mmos feel better many long time mmo players fondly reminisce about the days gone when mmos were far less optimized than they are now can giving the player a less optimized less immediately fun experience actually result in them remembering the game more fondly what do you guys think so this is this is something we've hit on quite a bit yes yes yep gunpo po said no answer is both yes and no yes and no you're you're both correct and incorrect tim foyle hat says disagree that difficult things are unpleasant but i think he says um they can be unpleasant it's not necessarily to say that all difficult things are unpleasant but then again there are those difficult things that we we do and sometimes really enjoy like if you were to ask me um you know do you enjoy working out or when he was talking about this stuff earlier uh i so many of the times i was just thinking about like training jiu jitsu over the years especially at the beginning where it was just like horrific right um but i've got so many good memories of you know those different the growth that comes from that but man there are so many days where i was on the way to the gym or it's the same thing like working out or whatever do i really want to do this day i don't want to do this today oh my god it's going to suck every run i do i mean every run i've learned that the first mile always sucks i'm 47 so like i i have to actually you know remind myself of the fact that like the first milestone it's always a random pain some weird [ __ ] and then after a mile i get warmed up and go and it's kind of like that i've always felt that way about a number of things where it's like oh man i don't want to do this today and then you know after i do it i'm like oh man that was so good so you had a friend who's a manifestation of that he absolutely loved every game he played for thousands of hours yeah i mean uh there was a there was a there's a saying in the army that uh i'll clean it up a little bit a complaining soldier is a happy soldier gunpopo said you think making the grind fun makes the reward less valuable but it's not like uh minecraft for example no i think you can make something fun and have it be valuable but there's something there's something to be said for certain personality types and again i don't think this is for everybody but they they enjoy the result of something that was a challenge or distinct time investment and partially because they know other people won't do it adversity creates memorable experiences you don't remember the mundane days correct um and nick said and it varies from game to game and what kind of mechanics and systems are involved but yeah more tedious and unpolished doesn't have to be absolutely awful gameplay especially if there's ways of overcoming some of this to be a player and social interaction older games had a lot of adversity within them with older mmos this wasn't a major problem for player retention because the players simply didn't have many other places to go but as more mmos were made i don't i don't know that i i don't know that i agree with that 100 percent though that comes up a lot like the idea that there weren't a lot of mmos back in the day so if you didn't didn't like it whatever you'd still deal with it there are a lot of people that were coming in they're coming in from other other games they're you know playing multiplayer death matches or whatever they could go back to those game and there was there was almost a steady like stream of mmos coming out in the early days of mmos up until some of the conveniences started getting added in i don't i don't know that the not a lot of choices thing is necessarily accurate there's yeah there are a ton of games to play there are more multiplayer and co-op games coming on line at the time there were plenty of mmos and each one was finding ways to kind of one-up the other all the way up until wow came up right so i don't know that there was a there was like this huge gap if anything on when when we were looking i mean because we would see it in our concurrent user accounts and we didn't really see it in our sub counts but you'd always see dips when the next uh either mmo came out or some big game came out or an expansion came out for another uh another mmo or whatever so i don't i don't think it's as much as uh people were just sort of trapped i think they generally enjoyed it or if they didn't they'd already churned so maybe i'm overstating his statement on people leaving but essentially i remember there was a lot of things coming together at once like for us and he's speaking about more than just like eq rev i was about to say he so you said he needs to say the most player sounds like his points are all about chasing the most money what we found was we were adding these sort of like convenience elements in eq not because well it wound up being um experimentation to see if we could accomplish other things right like so adding a graveyard in eq during pop was less about people complaining about not getting their corpses because we put it in raids first it was more about us wanting to be able to make certain types of raids that potentially could reset since we we wanted corpses out of the way we didn't want the corpse run potentially re-triggering the raid or keeping people in there we thought we could potentially make more difficult raids if we could get corpses out of there it's like all right so you've wiped potentially start to get you know after a certain amount of time instead of going in and just re-wiping re-wiping it's like get the trash out of the way and let someone come in and try to do it that could potentially do it um the whole plane of knowledge thing honestly you know and i know people keep remembering this differently but hop onto any tlp and tell me what those servers kind of look like in terms of low end population we just looked at the numbers and what we had was we had people coming into mmos for the first time and they were basically empty in all of the old zones so there was no there's no uh wizard or druid porting people around right like it just didn't exist and so it's like how do we consolidate players into one spot so that we have player friction basically let's just make that a center hub so it's got utility to get you to the cities if you did want to go to the other cities or if your friend made a dwarf and you made whatever a barbarian you could get together faster and play because it was it was more just a condition of the the population um spreading out and being stratified at the time right so some of that some of that was put in um but i would say uh the thing that i was thinking about as he was um and as he was talking about this this morning um there is the point though of one of the reasons why we changed the game that much was because we were still trying to bring new players in and we didn't really have a opportunity to like sit down sit down and basically take the time needed to really analyze the problem and look for a different solution zoidberg asked instead of making plenty of knowledge do you think there should have been a server consolidation it wouldn't have fixed the problem so if we well it wouldn't have fully fixed the problem and i believe it would have created other problems right because we would have had to do a mass server consolidation which the servers at the time still we still had 450 000 sub so it was still at the time our servers our subscriber base was as big as it had you know ever been i think it capped out like 450 000 to 500 000 but all of those players were distributed so far away from content and there's no utility in the cities there's nothing really pulling you back to the starting cities um so yeah we could have consolidated everything which would have pissed off all the high-end guilds would have basically made it so that um there's probably even you know like impossible conflict over certain things um so it would have been a massive disruption to the the player base that was established and it wouldn't have solved the problem for the low end people and so i mean i guess you could could you could we do an inverted pyramid consolidation or something we could not allow i think we did like recommended servers or something right like please go to this server i've worked on mmos since then that have had better automation and like putting new players into like basically load balancing in a sense yeah so that's kind of what we were facing at the time um and so it wasn't you know i i guess i guess i'm contradicting myself we were we were doing that stuff to create a better experience for new customers who have never had the experience before but the the better experience was basically a recreation of the original experience that the old customers had had we weren't necessarily trying to dumb the game down plane of knowledge solves a problem that should have never existed yes it's true in theory in theory in theory the old world should have always retained its value and players would have always been available in those areas for new players to experience i mean i think that's one solution i always wondered instead of making new content in the expansion making new content within the existing world like a fortnight season so that's another great point but the mandate from management was that we needed to make expansions because expansions could go on shelves expansions maintained so box expansions put a box on the best buy shelf that makes best buy happy because they get their cut um and so if we want to put an eq2 box on the best buy shelf later or dc universe online box on the best buy shelf then we need to give them an everquest expansion box or maybe two a year that they get their cup from to sort of you know remain maintain that relationship and that was what was controversial about legacy of akasha there was no box that went on their shelves and they're kind of hey what's going on with this there's that kind of there's that sort of understanding um you know and when we're sitting at e3 we're doing demos and stuff at e3 the vice president of sales would come in with the people from these brick and mortar shop to show them all the cool stuff that's going to go on their shelves to make them money right because we're there to make them money just as just as much as we're there to make us money right and for us not getting not getting all of the money from an expansion was fine because we'd sell you know even if you sell two expansions a year and you get 100 sort of uh uptake on it or whatever we're still making all of our money off of off of you know the subscribers mandates were probably so frustrating around i mean but it's a job right like that's uh we you know if you don't own the company um and you don't own all of the company um then there's mandates and so yeah that's that's a that's that's driving a lot of it and so instead of going hey everquest is making 80 to 90 million dollars a year with the just the subscription right and you can take operating expenses out of that and it's still a shitload of money unless your operating expenses are basically unless you're paying for a company of 500 seven studios or five studios or whatever it was so if that money was just going back into eq for the most part then i think all sorts of stuff and i think there's a lot of hindsight as well right like if we knew that the game was going to be around for 20 years and blah blah blah then then they probably would have invested differently and then it could have been more of a investment in sort of some of the stuff that we're doing with like the zone revamps and things of that nature and some of the events if we think that's the right route then that's a benefit of hindsight right so that's what we're doing now bit of a tangent but yeah what was eq's plan lifespan three years um my understanding from back then and then the understanding that i think we've arrived at from having the different guests come on it was not it was not planned for more than a year so kunark was kind of a oh crap we need to add more to this if you go to the kevin mcpherson interview on my youtube or actually i think i've got a link there so if you go to kevin mcpherson interview is basically the way he explained it was that the team was like oh [ __ ] we need to keep this thing going because the original idea i thought was they they said if they get like 62 it was like i've heard between like 30 or 40 to 60 000 subs for a year then the game's profitable and we're done then we make a new game um because they didn't i think understand the the longevity there so it was something like that so the cool thing was um eq was extremely profitable almost immediately right like it was extremely profitable straight out of the gate so it's like money hats for investment into all sorts of other projects and you know the variant racing team uh line of parking spaces right outside the building we wound up buying like the whole cul-de-sac and [ __ ] in san diego and it was just rapid growth and that was only over the course of a couple of years we're constantly growing and then after constantly growing for a few years then we are constantly having rolling layoffs but yeah so um wild to think they expected eq to be a one-off i mean i guess there was just i don't know it's weird because it's not like there weren't muds in other you know i mean like yeah it's weird but so kunark wasn't planned per that discussion and velius was just a continuation of that same thing of like oh we need more after kunark is that when they dug up the street and saw new cable lines like they ever raised oh i wasn't there for that i don't know somebody probably mentions it in one of the interviews then the mini maps teleport spells fast travel and icons and quest helpers an auto run came along because players were leaving the game before even finding the quest due to the difficulty of the process and it had to be made easier to increase player retention or the players would leave for a game which was doing it again so so this kind of this gets into the and i don't i don't know that my my point of view is necessarily the right one or that i've got the right answer on this but this is something i've thought about for quite a while the idea that every player needs to be retained and not having kind of a good idea in mind and potentially good metrics in mind for what constitutes success and then realizing that there there can be there can be a clear marker of success that just because you you go past that marker does not then mean that you have to keep raising the bar uh with regards to like financial success or player base size or whatever it's it's almost like if if you say we need to have 30 000 subscribers and then we're we're good we're very successful right so we have a small game we have to have 30 000 subscribers and that actually puts us in a nice spot where there's profit blah blah i'm just grabbing that number so if that's kind of been the plan what i've what i've seen happen at companies is they go okay that's our target we need to have 30 000 subscribers and so then if you miss that if you get 10 000 subscribers then it's very easy to kind of look and go oh [ __ ] something's not right you know something is wrong and we need to basically figure out why there's that delta and see how we can close that gap right on the flip side i think it's just as easy to screw up a studio if you if you plan for 30 000 subscribers and all of a sudden you hit 50 because when that happens i think people start going oh [ __ ] look at us and you know break out the money hats and don't necessarily think all right what is a what is a responsible way to deal with the success that we're seeing that is above what our target was and what winds up happening is we go oh okay we planned for 30 we hit 50. so let's go out and buy all the things that when we are when we're getting you know getting ready to go we're very lean and we're like oh [ __ ] you know uh we're very budget conscious and we're we're everything's line item like oh man we've got to be careful because we don't have cash and then all of a sudden we get that money it's like the it's kind of like the people that win the lottery you know the the the various like reports or videos or whatever so until 120 million dollars at the mega millions in tallahassee florida let's check in on him a year later and see where he is now i spent all the money right it's like there's there's this what i've seen happen firsthand at least a couple times and i don't want to get too too specific but what i see happen is that first game actually outpaces the original measures of success and then i think there's a bit of like ego or whatever it's like oh [ __ ] we plan for 30 we got 50 we can clearly get 70 or 100. let's push all right and so changes start being made money starts getting spent inevitably the studio will go from the 30 people that made it to 50 people all of a sudden some of it's justified because it's like okay well we need to have more customer service or something right but it's not that's not always the case what winds up happening is everybody on our team on eminem wears like 10 hats and so all of a sudden you know in in instead of nick wearing 10 hats and goblin wearing tin hats and pattis wearing 10 hats and zukin and ollie and everybody what we go is i'm going to take these hats off now that we've got the cash to do it and we're going to give these we're going to get nine more people i'm going to wear one hat or we're going to get like five more people and i'm only going to wear the five hats or whatever and some some kind sometimes that's that's good right because like people have been overloaded or whatever now all of a sudden you go from having a 30 person team to like an 80 person team or 70 person team which then yeah the so now you have a dilution of the the company culture that made the game people start to get more siloed people start to get more cliquish you establish you need a layer of middle management uh i mean even with 30 people there's there's middle management to you know to some degree right but then all of a sudden it's just like at 50 people so they say 60 people if you made a game with 30 which we're 11 people so three times our size i can only imagine communication issues and all of that stuff and then and then it's like goblin sorry you can't you can't touch that anymore you gotta focus strictly on concept art you can't have input here or you can't touch that or blah blah blah right like so there's all that [ __ ] that winds up happening and then it becomes like this uh this beast that has to feed itself and so what winds up happening is then you need more subs and and it just it's sort of self-perpetuating and the way to get more subs is to retain more people or to go out and get even more people that aren't necessarily the ones that were originally part of that core that like sort of discovered it and i think that has a really sort of underrated significant factor on what winds up happening um with you know some of the companies and then on the flip side there's just this understanding um more and more i would say in the last 15 years last 12 years of or this belief not understanding that in order to be competitive straight out of the gate we have to make a game of a certain scale otherwise it's not it's not even going to be worth putting out there right like if it's if it doesn't have a couple million subscribers or several million most of the time an unrealistic number of million if we don't have five to ten million subs which is increase it's so much money then it's not worth pursuing it's not worth investing in right because we we want to start seeing like returns of a certain scale immediately we don't want to we don't want to grow this thing for five years or ten years rather than a company taking a long-term view or investors taking a long-term view and going hey if if you if we give you the money to get this thing out in the next three years with a smaller team it's lower risk for us blah blah blah do you think it's feasible that you could grow this this subscriber basis community to be you know ten times the size over the next five years or something of that nature which if if it was true that like eq was looking for let's split the difference say if they had 50 000 subs um if that was a target 50 000 subs in a year and they're good and then they have 500 000 subs within five years of that happening then right like that's not that's not a bad target and that's a decent return on somebody's investment because if they're only having to invest a few million to get it out the door and then that game's making five six million a month sort of at that peak there's a decent amount of profit there especially if the company's built around the idea of managing that profit in sort of a responsible way and not going okay well how do we make all of the games now to try to get all of the players so you don't need six or seven studios within a four year period or three year period that's insane like how do you even manage that like how do you even maintain any semblance of a company culture why can't more people uh just make a good game that's profitable instead of having to keep chasing that there's nothing wrong with profit or chasing money it's the the question is are there ways to chase the money in a healthy manner both for the company and for the product and for the the community right we we tend to look at like a world of warcraft and then forget about the you know 10 years of the ip being built up prior to that massive hit so the the thing i look at is can we can we build reasonably successful products that establish ip for that we nurture over the course of five or ten years so that then at some point they're so beloved that we can do you know really really incredible things with them based on the situation at the time warcraft was being built up um and you know obviously dunwell hugely successful in it in their own right each of those products like a diablo a warcraft starcraft all these things are contributing to each other as well because they're contributing to blizzard as a brand it's like wow these these guys make really wonderful games that each one is is strong and iconic ip that allowed them to make the game that was so successful then when the situation became mmos right it's like oh [ __ ] mmos cool let's make an mmo out of this thing that is already super beloved and reinforced by diablo reinforced by the success of starcraft right that are all feeding into the brand but that's kind of a that's a that's a long-term investment that's a patient's game and i think that's more typically found it kind of goes into a different mindset like remember back in the day when like somebody would build a business because they wanted to hand it down to their grandkid or their you know great grandkid we're going to build this business and it's going to be a family business we're going to run our way and we're going to do things that make us take pride in being associated with this business because it's our family name and it's i think it's just such a different dynamic when it's hey i've got a startup can i get seed money from these five different i don't even know like the xxx vanguard you know blackrock whatever uh seed uh incubator but it's like it's just hey i've got a startup in i need cash and we're gonna pursue growth and so then we're gonna and then we're gonna turn on the money spike and you're gonna get 10x your return right like the sort of startup [ __ ] that's out there as opposed to like how do we how do we build this thing up like from i think i said like vanguard xxx i don't know why there's a xxx in there i guess we're also getting porno money i don't know it's weird are we getting funded by blackrock no but it was interesting like jagex got bought by the carlyle group they're owned by the right i think they're wholly owned by carlyle which is interesting look them up money's got to come from somewhere all right the the money does have to come from somewhere or the value that the money is meant to provide has to come from somewhere so um if you look at the you can sit and look at what we've been doing with regards to everybody just pitching in their own time and us bootstrapping it you can you can associate a value on that time right and so essentially the sweat equity that's that's gone into this thing it's it's worth money it's why we didn't have to go out and borrow a million dollars to get to where we're at for the in the first year year and a half the approach can be people pitching in and building it the way we're doing it it can be you know somebody's got the cash to get the ball rolling and then you can find reasonable investors with uh people that are are sort of long-term in their their view on the company in theory i don't think it's as possible these days i think we've burned too many bridges with regards to crowdfunding and things of that nature there's probably different angles that could be taken there we haven't done it just because we can we know what the vibe is and we also feel an ethical like responsibility for showing you that there's a game in in going okay we want to make more of this but there really needs to be a game there that is going to be consistent with what you would basically a game that is consistent with what it's ultimately going to be before we'd even consider something like that i would be careful how i say it but like what what i mean is it's not a demo that's made out of like smoke and mirrors to then go hey now give us cash and then we're going to go back and actually rebuild this thing from scratch in a way that works right like those all those things have to be avoided i think so anyway um i feel like i've gotten way way off course but you can watch the whole thing uninterrupted if you go to josh's youtube which i'm sure you are already subscribed to it's not a vertical size it's an actual game well it's a it's a vertical slice and an actual game camry is the goal it's a vertical slice of the content of the game so it's a vertical slice of the game but it's the actual functional vertical slice it's not a demo of a vertical slice or it's not the bottom it's not the crust of the vertical slice of the cake if that makes sense we're making it in a way like i think i showed you we even have like bug reporting tool that was just added which i don't know if the team knows why i i get so excited about that but it's again thinking about all of the things that we would need in not taking them for granted it's like a live service btc retro said you basically want to build a mini version fully featured of the final game yeah yeah like that the the bug tool will text ali directly which is nice i don't know that that's true the lack of quest markers on your mini-map or indeed the lack of a detailed map at all or the lack of fast travel means you now face adversity of talking to every npc finding a quest memorizing the world learning the lay of the land and i think i mean these are also just different design choices like there's nothing that says you need to have a mini map there's nothing that says an npc needs to have a you know indication that they are a quest giver like those are strictly just design choices most players simply don't have a very long attention span or a great deal of patience to deal with failure he says most players that's that's the thing though you don't need all the players especially if you look at the total addressable market these days right like um i i think about this a lot if anybody can find a big flaw in the logic please i'm not bullshitting let me know like the total addressable market in a world in which 220 i think 205 we can look it up in a minute like 200 million kids play roblox that's and that's just kids playing roblox assuming that every one of the like 160 million monthly active users on minecraft are the exact same kids that are playing roadblock and this was a couple years ago 225 million in december 2021 for roblox yeah that's that's a significant number of players right like and so imagine imagine 10 of them decide that they want to play wow right only 10 of them for whatever reason it's only 10 everybody else uh half of them they they stop gaming when they hit like 15 16 they churn out of it because you can't age out like i guess they do have a problem with like players aging out of roblox but even that that's very that's interesting like one of the biggest problems with roblox i guess i might be talking on my ass if you work for roblox you can tell me or if you read the news uh more recently than i have but when they were talking about ipo and stuff like that one of their bigger risks was that their player base ages out where do they go it could be that 90 of them just stop playing games entirely because they they want a date or they want to you know work at the fast food restaurant or whatever or spend all their time becoming a professional youtuber but that's still that 10 still solid and there's new kids going into that funnel every year as they're churning out right like that's a decent number just on that one front and that's not counting any of the people that have outside of that you know group that are a bit older have played other games most of you are i think on your 30s and up the total addressable market when you when you look at a subset of these various groups that um you know are potentially interested or included in what what could be sort of cobbled together as a total addressable market for a just a say mmo generically speaking which is massive compared to where it used to be and so i think that in my opinion the challenge has actually been more on the front end of the problem and not the back end of the problem the challenge the the the problem has been more on designing or defining like a product in a business that is um essentially able to take a slice or sliver of that and and basically uh leverage that to have a profitable business capable of growing anyway uh d loves pudding sorry i saw this earlier um in your conversations regarding funding do you feel the prevailing economic conditions might present a more difficult time generating a great deal as opposed to a good deal in terms of funding i don't know because the limited the limited conversations we've had because we haven't been pursuing them i think there's a there's basically it's not the the current economic conditions haven't impacted that yet in any sort of reasonable way and if anything i think what we're going to find in our sector is that it's an area that is kind of a it's a it's a fallback position for a lot of folks because when stuff gets more expensive when people don't feel that they can go out as much if we see either a crisis or economic contraction i think there are certain services that people look at and finally realize the value of their money so if it's 15 a month sure it's 15 a month but it's 15 a month for a uh experience with a significant amount of content to be absorbed um where there's a higher degree of autonomy and like autonomy and creating content for yourself as a customer than like netflix you know i mean um there's it's interactive which i think has a bigger sort of naturally has a bigger impact than just passively consuming content it's social which when the [ __ ] hits the fan and things are kind of shitty these social experiences having a place to go um are actually pretty pretty important right like so i think that investors will recognize that i think bigger investors may not recognize that i think smart investors will recognize that what we've been seeing with regards to investments d loves putting you actually you probably know this more better than i do at this point but what i think we've seen over the last five years with various mergers and acquisitions and with um game investment in general is the bigger companies are looking for anything that's generating a bit of revenue and especially profit and they're just because i understand that they've essentially had free money to make those investments um and it's better than like it's sitting there and not getting um you know there's no like sort of interest on it or whatever but instead we can buy this thing that's then going to generate a mild sort of return you know the bigger companies have been gobbling up everything i'm i'm wondering if the the problem that we've had is that there's been so much money and there's been so many big acquisitions that they really haven't had to look at like smaller investments um all that said i i still to me it would be hard to find a investor that would actually be good for us if that makes sense like i think it would take a very sort of special kind of investor because like we've had a discussion and if the person that we discuss it with is out there watches us or whatever um not saying anything ill of the interaction or anything like that but there was you know the we recently had a discussion and the the comment was made you know like um essentially an example was given for like a marketing spend it's like oh well you know for example we could we could provide like a few million in marketing and return for like a 50 rev share or whatever and to me that's like yeah we wouldn't we wouldn't do that just because we don't want a few million in marketing that makes no sense for us i don't think we've had a you know a previous like uh somebody i know in the industry that works at a big company it also mentioned like oh well there might be a deal to be had with giant corporation but it would be essentially to the the deal would be like investment and then in order to get us on a platform so that as many eyeballs could see us as possible but the target isn't for as many eyeballs to see us as as possible and then for us to have to change our game in order to facilitate that or in order to maximize like the the kpis as part of some deal it's like oh here we can make sure that 30 million people see you okay but then what are your expectations like how many of those people are we going to be expected to retain in order for this deal to be valid and if we are expected to retain a decent portion of those 30 million then how mainstream do we have to make the game okay well that's not the game we're making so why are we even having the conversation you know for us the most important thing is getting getting a core audience that understands what we're wanting to make and having good um you know having an opportunity for us to look and uh see if that core audience is then capable of us grinding forward in a way where then word of mouth and uh less conventional sort of advertising like us i mean we all stream and things like that um instead of then throwing seventy thousand dollars out of streamer dee says what i'm hearing is investors are saying uh what type of game they would be comfortable funding and it sounds like it doesn't mesh well with the more almost lifestyle business with your core audience you're seeking to expand into yeah i'm not shocked but the interesting thing is again like it's a very self-serving statement because we at the end of the day have to make a game i think a lot of those investors are looking for a sort of a scale of return and a pace of return that then has them making riskier bets than they need to and i know i know there are some companies out there that are basically trying to help uh indie studios get the game out but like and again not to speak ill of these companies i think it's fine for teams that want to do this but like there there's a company that uh in theory we could have uh spoken more with or whatever that's like essentially we would get to make the game that we want in theory they would own it and then we would get a decent sort of payout of the game that they own that we made right they they basically they own it and they they help run the production and they deal with all the adult stuff and all that stuff and it's like yeah that's it's a non-starter that doesn't make sense to me crow said in the early days of mmos it was about player retention it was about well anybody play this game we love the devs were literally rolling the dice with something that was a massive passion project just uh hoping to share it with enough people to keep it alive kuros i think that was true in the early early early days but then as soon as they started making a lot of money it started to become a little bit more about we started thinking we weren't doing it in a very sophisticated manner but we are definitely thinking more about things like retention nowhere like in no way similar to the level to which that gets analyzed um these days and i i do think there's a point in what you're saying with regards to will anybody play this game we love um i've i've definitely seen the shift towards um the attitude of game developers should not make games for themselves right i've heard that statement and plenty of management you know in plenty of meetings with executive management you know uh c-level management we can't make games for ourselves we need to we need to identify our target customer and then we need to dissect what makes them think and then we need to make the game for them okay and we need the we need the um team to be passionate about making that game that they're not making for themselves so anyways kuros to your to your point i think we're we're trying to do both right like if we're going to be real about what we're doing the the team isn't dedicating their their time i don't know i don't want to speak for the whole team but i would i would say that i believe it's got to be a mix of both the the teams got to feel proud of the thing that they're working on um and you know want this thing that they're making to feel like it's theirs and um it's a expression of the you know the the kind of work that they want to do and the kind of game that they want to play on the flip side they have to also be expecting that there is an opportunity for us to be successful and have um you know more than just like a a sustenance level of success like the idea is oh we should do better than expecting you know we're modestly sort of projecting and then we should do that in a way where we share in those those profits in a way that makes it well worth our while for everything that we've invested up until then

Channel: Mandrake Farms

Views: 12,897

Keywords: monsters and memories, mnm, p99, project1999, project 1999, everquest, mmo, massive multiplayer online, rpg, role playing game, playable mandrake

Id: UXEZGqcRZeo

Length: 38min 17sec (2297 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 25 2022