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Asherons Call: Online Worlds Roundtable Discussion
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The original topic question was this:
Over the past few years, we've seen a lot of talk about the potential of online worlds to attract millions of players including the hazily defined "casual gamers" and the even more vague "mass market". Within a reasonable time frame, to what extent do you regard this as being achievable? What do you see as the keys to the online world category as a whole achieving its full potential in terms of reaching the largest possible audience, and what do you regard as the major barriers to be overcome?
Here's an excerpt from Jeffrey Anderson's reply:
For me, the casual gamer is someone who purchased at least one PC or video game in the last year. (Turbine does not include the "online hearts" demographic since they are so far away from our business model as to define their profile as mass market.) Nonetheless, the casual gaming audience is an enormous one with tens of millions of potential players worldwide, but the difficulties in effectively reaching this market are many and diverse. The casual consumer doesn't play online worlds today because of personal and economic barriers like hardware restrictions, connectivity limitations, time commitment, the current business model, customer service quality, lack of payment options, fear, embarrassment, play style differences, visual presentation, and many others. In order to successfully reach this audience, developers need to be addressing all of these weaknesses. There is no single prescription that can be applied; rather, this is an epidemic of issues.
There are some fascinating ideas in these articles, and they can give you a glimpse of where these companies will be taking the MMORPG genre in the future!
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