So, I was talking to some of my friends about the game. We all enjoyed it but they mentioned the limited replay ability and I had to kind of agree. I love the game, but I can only really play every few months.
What occurs to me is that, with the exception of what topics you start with, every game progresses the same way. Now, the topics available do have a pretty substantial impact on which direction you develop but the game still feels static. This makes sense, because you are essentially playing against yourself.
And I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be much more interesting and dynamic if I had actual competitors products to contend with? Now, obviously a straight MMO model wouldn’t fit very well. The games are too short and a global market would be too competitive and drain most of the fun. But an instanced model might be a lot of fun with, say, 20 to 100 players.
This could also provide a real market for the Sofware Developer Kits, giving players who go heavy into development a pay off and players who focus on developing their team access to more advanced innovations.
Now, a major hindrance to this, in my estimation, would be that some people just want to hop on for a half hour and others will sit there for six hours straight. In order to even this out, instances would need to have a ‘length’ metric, which I see as stretching out how long it takes for, say, a week to pass but not effect the length of time development takes. This means that binge players will be limited by the slowness of their income.and tend towards shorter style matches and drop-in-and-out kind of players can go for long matches, so they aren’t loosing too much ground.
And, of course, players that just want to play at their own pace should still have their single-player option.
Obviously, this is a hugely complicated mechanic that would rewrite a lot of the rules the game operates by, so I’m not so much hoping for a game update as I’m suggesting an idea for a possible GDT2 (PLEASE, I AM BEGGING YOU!).
Something else I’ve thought about is the MMO market. Specifically, ways to either increase revenue or lower costs but at the risk of losing players. In the game, there seems to be one monitization model that we’re stuck with, but one of the most interesting developments in the industry we’ve seen over the past 7-or-so-years is in the variety of monitization models being developed.
Are our MMO’s free to play with a cash-shop, or are they a subscription service? How balanced is that cash-shop? Why can’t I purge the accounts of inactive users and lower my over-head at the risk of pissing off a section of my fan-base? Is my game popular enough for me to afford to do that? Is my MMO good enough and does it have quality enough expansions to remain subscription in the face of free-to-play competition (an even more interesting question under the instanced game model, described previously)?
I say this, because I tend to ignore MMO’s until I have so much money that I don’t even care if my School-themed MMORPG (High School Desu) is profitable, I can just keep it as a vanity project. But I’d much more apt to wade into those waters if there were controls that went beyond ‘Rush out an expansion, send people on vacation, then rush out another expansion.’
Could I even have one specialist on my staff to help manage it, perhaps with occasional ‘decision moment’ type popups?