来源：youtube上优秀游戏设计栏目——额外加分，B站同步搬运号BV16s411N7TQ
仅作为个人兴趣和练习听写使用。
Question 1: Why do modern MMOs fail?
Principal reason: Money. (Usually 60-100 million dollars) A gamble of that size is usually a life or death risk.
They have to face the publishers or the investors.
The investors are usually looking for investing a company instead of a project. They look for stability but seldom a small game studio has.—— Many studios will try to develop multiple games at once or create a web porter or start publishing games before they have the first product.This seems to make sense on paper, but MMO developers are having to split their resources and focus in order to appease the investors.
Large publishers are usually conservative when it comes to game design. Historically they prefer to re-skin the game type that they know will work rather than trying to push the envelope. It’s a good policy, however it doesn’t work in MMO games. Why? Console games are launched and then done. They are not perpetual games.
However, MMORPGs thrive on how much of the game players time they consume. They are designed with exclusion of everything else. People just can’t play two MMORPGs at once.
Besides MMORPGs are perpetual by nature. They’re continued being updated and expanded, create illimitable content for players to explore.
Moreover with the social bond that connect the players that keeps them from leaving, usually MMORPGs has very limited market. Many MMO players spend a entire lifecycle on one game.
The market is limited, with a majority of WOW. Though it has a cap of 20 million users, blizzard makes a billion dollars every year through WOW so many studio decide to clone that. The problem with this strategy is that no amount of minor mechanical or graphical improvements will make a WOW clone better than WOW.
WOW has an enormous play base, a robust player-driven economy. It’s impossible to beat WOW by cloning WOW.
Question 2: What will the future MMOs look like?
Ditch the idea that the terms MMO and MMORPG are synonymous. Today all we have are MMORPGs.
MMO first-person-shooters.
MMO racing games.
MMO real-time-strategy
brawlers
puzzle games.
...
MMO can be brought to every genre.
Get a set of new high quality games with lower expense.
The next generation of social games will start to blur the line between themselves and web-based MMOs.
A trend for MMORPGs:
more uncharted worlds,
more emphasis on story (graduating to player-driven story lines),
a few ventures into user-generated-content which will meet with some limited success,
away from subscription based games.
more web-based MMOs,
More attempts to cross over between MMOs, the web, and reality.
These games will likely to move to micro transactions via in-game purchases and eventually evolve into more mutually beneficial systems like watch this ad for 30 sec or allow 3%of one’s CPU to crunch some data and you can play for free.
Key Point: 未来MMO游戏会更多的和其他游戏相结合，甚至与现实。同时会衍生出很多小交易（比如广告、允许CPU参与计算、与现实实现线下引流/交互等等），这一切都在实现中。
