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Originally Posted by Itzena Why'd Mythic want to do that?
Number's one through five of MMOG subs are fantasy based - why should Mythic avoid the genre where the money obviously is? |
Indeed. The market research data that I've seen in the past indicated that where RPGs are concerned (and I'd think this was true for MMORPGs as well) that fantasy just dominates the interest of the potential customer. The average RPG fan would much rather play swords-n-sorcery than laser guns and spaceships. So, in a vacuum of no other factors, you're better off making Warhammer Fantasy MMORPG even it's popularity significantly falls behind WoW's and even a couple other fantasy MMOs, instead of an Imperator that falls sharply behind a single other sf competitor.
The numbers I've seen indicated that if you didnt have the Star Wars IP to boost you (and I won't bring up how Star Wars is a lot like fantasy anyway), you're better off being the tenth-most-popular fantasy RPG than the second-most-popular sf rpg.
I can't give a full analysis of why that's true today, but if I were to hazard some guesses, the list of big factors would go something like this: (1) The popularity of Dungeons & Dragons, historically. (2) Fantasy IPs basically share an understandable set of concepts and shared expectations. Papa Tolkein gave us our elves, dwarves, and wizards, and we've been running with that ever since. Sf settings, on the other hand, have a lot of explaining to do, and they don't really share anything between one another. So it's harder to approach them and transfer your interest. (3) RPG structure. The structure of tank/dps/healer/etc. is something that we've never managed to break out of in RPGs and MMOs. And that structure just works better in fantasy games than in sf ones.