there’s definitely a compelling business model that is sustainable even if a game begins to get old (technically, visually). we just need to look at the new markets i.e. WoW has opened (figuratively speaking: fat kids buying digital money of asian hot shots).
That’s not a business model, that’s just a niche leeching over WoW’s market. A monthly subscription is the best way to go about this as you simply make people forget they’re paying for the game. In-game ware sold for cash money constantly reminds people that they’re paying money for content.
I paid some cash for the World of Tanks gold, 10 dollars to speed me through the first phases of the game which would otherwise take me months. But after that I found it really hard to justify any more investment in that game even though I still play it regularly.
But I wasn’t even talking about a distribution model. I was talking about effectively building content. 90% of all WoW’s content isn’t played any more by most of the playerbase. It’s old stuff that even new players can rush past if they want to.
However, if you build a system that allows people to generate the content themselves. Start with basic objectives, let them buy walls, barricades, machine gun nests, towers and whatnot and let them compose a stronghold with that. Then all you need to do is add building blocks to the mix.
Naturally a world in which players have such an impact really requires a lot of server resources and it will be much harder to balance. You’d need to impose limitations to make such player-made objectives playable. But in return you get the fact that your game will never run stale and that a constant supply of new content isn’t needed to keep the game satiated.
Even if the player influences proves to be too much, you can let the game procedurally click the building blocks together. That would give the developer more power to regulate the game. And then there’s even a compromise possible. Let the player invest his resources, turn some knobs in the ‘stronghold machine’ and then let the game generate one procedurally based on the parameters given by the player.
another idea of mine is that certain games can and will be overlapping: blurring the lines between RTS and FPS. i googled, but wasn’t lucky on my first try, but i do recall a game where you were 1on1 vs the computer. you could send out troops (jets, tanks, etc) from your HQ and switch anytime back and forth between map and first person view. in FP view of the units you could go all out in battle. and that’s been still back in the 90s.
Naturally. The above described idea already is a RTS regardless of the perspective you use (though for the sake of immersion I think it should stick to first person). It’s a conquest within a sandbox over resources, the conquest itself is determined by teams of players warring over the settlements and structures that generate these resources.
The universe of Rage would lend itself perfectly for this. A barren wasteland in which anything is possible.
However, even Brink’s universe would be great for a MMOFPS. It would even require less NASA technology to pull off.
Brink takes place on an ocean! Oceans don’t require much resources to build, generate and to play on. Nintendo already found this out with Zelda the Wind Waker. A modest console like the Gamecube could render a vast plane of sea on which tiny islands were scattered. To the player it doesn’t matter, there’s still this huge world. But for the production process the difference between land and sea matters a lot!
Brink’s MMOFPS would be a sea full with drifting colonies, hi-tech and lo-tech. Arks, shanty towns, research facilities, oil rigs, geo-engineering projects, floating shipwrecks and perhaps even small natural islands (obligatory homage to volcano here). Players would be able to start their own settlements and expand on them. They would be able to explore the ocean and launch raids to plunder other colonies.
It’s the perfect next step. The ocean is a perfect place to kick off this genre.
that’d be a blast.