In the game industry fantasy has historically outdone sci-fi. Most of the Star Trek games were not successful, and some of the Star Wars games were very successful. But fantasy, on the other hand, has had a huge number of successes. When we created Dark Age of Camelot back in 1999, we were competing against companies like EA, Sony and Microsoft, and against games like Ultima, Everquest, and Asheron. People back then thought we were insane, but seven years later, Dark Age of Camelot is recognized as one of the most successful MMORPGs of all time.

I saw that same opportunity in fantasy three years ago with Warhammer, even though Blizzard was out there. I was like “fine, let’s compete with them.” I actually thank Blizzard every day I wake up because if it wasn’t for them, we’d still be looking at a few hundred thousand subscribers and going, “man, that was a successful game.” But because Blizzard expanded the market, we have seen a total paradigm shift in what is considered success within the market place. Prior to them no MMORPG had ever had a million monthly subscribers in North America and Europe.

But if I was a new developer or a publisher looking at a genre that might give me a better chance of succeeding in this market, it would be in science fiction. This is because if you do fantasy you’re competing against Blizzard, and you’re competing against us as well as some of the other major fantasy titles that are already are in development. I think Activision’s Bobby Kotick was serious when he said that it would cost a billion dollars to compete with Blizzard, and while I don’t believe that, I do think that if you’re going to compete in fantasy, it’s going to cost you a lot of money, time and resources.

If I was looking at it from the perspective of a guy who was a new developer, I would look at other opportunities in genres of MMOs that aren’t being as well covered. In sci-fi, you really only have Eve, what’s left of Star Wars, Tabula Rasa, and Star Trek Online, if and when that comes out (That’s not to be mean to Cryptic, but rather any time you go into development of a game there’s a good chance it won’t come out, just like our sci-fi MMORPG Imperator).
 

A scene from an early version of Imperator.

Horror is also wide open. If you’re an independent developer and don’t have a lot of money you should be looking at the wide open spaces that will let you get a decent share just because there’s no other game like it, right? If you’re the first one to come out with a great horror MMORPG it’s not like you’re competing against anyone.

There are also opportunities in the free-to-play space in the market in the West, but it depends on what genre you’re going for and also what demographic you’re going for. For example one interesting market right now is for  a light MMO that’s geared more to kids that’s totally free to play with some advertisements, or the ability for the kids to customize the character for a small fee. That’s a perfectly fine market and the right game can succeed in it. Advertising revenue hasn’t quite lived up to expectations in free-to-play, but many still think there’s a model there and there’s still money to make.

It’s very important to look at the world. Get out of the U.S. mindset, get out of the European mindset and look over at places like China and India. Here you have these enormous countries with enormous populations where the majority of people aren’t yet able to play these kinds of games, because they either don’t have the hardware or bandwidth at home, and in some cases like India, you don’t have the internet gaming rooms established like they are in China or in Korea either. We are barely in the infancy of the MMO subscription or even the MMO free-to-play industry. Whatever model you want to use, we are still in the infancy of the online market.