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MMO long tailsMay 29th, 2007 |
There’s been interesting discussion on the post about Argentum Online* and on the post about user-created content snobbery about the quality and quantity and potential popularity of user-created MMOs.
To recap, I commented that the barrier to entry for making your own MMO has been falling steadily. Given that just about any player can tell you exhaustively and in great detail exactly how their favorite MMO should be changed to make it 1000% better, this is bound to result in quite a lot more MMOs being created.
We have of course been here before. In the mud world, there were several different “server standards” so to speak — MUSH, MOO, LP, Diku, each available in multiple flavors. Of these various flavors, it was the Diku codebase that was the easiest to set up and resulted in the greatest proliferation of gameworlds. Why? Because it was template-based, and you could stage up a world by simply copying in some data. This led to the dreaded “stock mud syndrome,” where you could check a mud list and see endless Dikus with florid names all featuring exactly the same content.
The Diku gameplay went on to be the inspiration for EverQuest and World of Warcraft, of course, which is why so many mud vets say that they have played that sort of game to death.
Now, was most of this content crap? Yes, undoubtedly. But there were also a lot of really good Dikus, generally heavily customized. The lowering of the barrier to entry here not only created a somewhat horrifying landscape of zombie games shuffling along with the same Midgard starting city and the same bugs, but also essentially birthed the default MMO as we know it today.
At the time, of course, we all decried the endless parade of uninspired essentially identical muds. The commonest forms of “innovation” were to add munchkin-friendly stacks of levels, classes, and player races.
That’s a long and historically-oriented way of saying “we’ve seen piles of easy user-created content before, and most of it sucked, but not all.” But where does that lead us in today’s market?
Back in 2003 I did a presentation called “Small Worlds” based on scale-free network theory. Frankly, it’s a rather dense presentation that covers a wide variety of topics that are all loosely linked together, and the slides don’t really manage to convey everything that I was trying to get across.
One of the things in that presentation is the observation that the population distribution across MMOs tends to look like a classic “long tail” graph. This is a pattern that pops up again and again in all sorts of places. City sizes fall into this shape. Movie ticket sales. Book sales figures. Guild sizes. Popular posts on this site. Basically, anywhere that people have the choice to attach themselves to one choice over another, we see a tendency for popular things to become more popular. And then we get the phenomenon known as “the long tail,” which is that very long area that exists past the top end of the graph, where the curve falls off so slowly that there can be tens of thousands of nearly identically-sized elements in the graph.
One of the most fascinating things about this curve is that it tends to retain its shape. There is constant pressure to “smooth out the bumps.” The number two element in a graph “wants” to be at a specific ratio to the number one element, and so on. In fact, along the whole curve, each element wants to be at this logarithmic ratio to the elements above and below it. If a game starts to rise in popularity until it challenges #1, either it becomes lots more popular than #1, or #1 will fall to become way less popular than it used to be. Over time, market pressures push the games into this relationship.
This has been observed in city sizes in the U.S.; no matter which city was the largest city in the country, it was always around 2.1x the size of the next largest city. I suspect the same is probably true of MMO populations – whatever the size of the #1 game is, I bet that the #2 game in the same territory is probably some fixed ratio away in terms of population size. The shape of the curve never changes. You can probably predict the eventual size of a game by saying “will it be bigger than Game X? Smaller than Game Y?” Then just calculate that spot on the curve, and you’ll be in the ballpark of the eventual size of the game. As soon as we saw that WoW was going to be the #1 game in the West, it was pretty easy for me to say that it wasn’t just going to be #1, but that it was going to be larger by a significant margin, because that’s just “where the open slot falls.”
One implication of this, as with all power law distribution curves, is that no matter what you do there will always going to be a set number of winners and losers. And the typical world will be a loser. It will less population than the average world. As was discussed in the comment threads on the earlier posts, the typical world may well have only 5 users. And indeed, this is what we saw in the heyday of DikuMUDs as well.
This doesn’t, however, mean that the world must necessarily suck. Indeed, Chris Anderson argued in his book 
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More that one beauty of the items in that long tail is that they are very satisfying to a niche, whereas stuff at the head is moderately satisfying to lots of people. In the case of all these hypothetical user-created worlds, the people they are highly satisfying to may only be the few people who actually worked on making it. And to them, it may be just fine to have a small audience. As I said at GDC a few years ago,
The thing is that people want to express themselves, and they don’t really care that 99% of everything is crap, because they are positive that the 1% they made isn’t. Okay? And fundamentally, they get ecstatic as soon as five people see it, right?
But there’s even more to it than that. You see, as long as the network as a whole continues to grow, then a rising tide lifts all boats. The tail chunk slowly gets taller and longer. Even niche games start to grow. But if there are no niches — meaning, the games on offer are all pretty similar to one another — then the growth of the network can be capped. In effect, too many DikuMUD clones limits the total population of MMO players. People gravitate to the shiniest best one, and the tail starts to die off. The winner takes all, effectively monopolizing the audience.
The great promise of user-created MMOs in this case would be variety. The more varied the array of worlds on offer, the more online worlds in general will grow — even the clones. But if we all just start making class-and-level hack ‘n’ slash fantasy games, then there’s only one winner: World of Warcraft, or whoever supplants it. The tide of social networking always pulls towards the center.
In this sense, stuff the industry considers “fringe” is probably in many ways keeping the dominance of WoW from being even more impressive than it already is.
This all suggests that the real promise of user-created worlds may be less in the popularity or quality of individual worlds, and more in the fact that they unlock the variety that market pressures often work to prevent. We may need user content simply because it’ll be different from what we old-school folks would make — and the mere presence of difference means that our titles will also be more popular.
* y por cierto, si es que hay otros proyectos notables en el mundo hispanoparlante, aparte de Regnum que Daniel Benmergui ya me indico, me gustaria saber de ellos! Es obvio que mundos de diversas culturas tambien contribuyen a la diversidad de los mundos virtuales, y por tanto al crecimiento del genero entero.
Y ay, realmente tengo que instalar el teclado para espanol aqui en la oficina…
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