[Lyrical]

A picture is worth a thousand words. Fantasy MMO's dominate the MMO market now. Personally, if I kill another moss snake, orc or gnoll, I am going to puke.

Will we ever see some decent non-fantasy MMO's that get decent subscriber bases? When will we see a higher market share for non-fantasy MMO's? Other than City of Heroes (and maybe Eve Online), I don't think any MMO in the non-fantasy genre is above 100k subs presently.

Lately, both SOE and Blizzard have spoken about the rising cost of MMO's. I think Smed said an MMO like Eq2 would run in the range of $40 million, and Blizzard has issued press releases saying that the cost of new MMO's is about $55 million (after the euro to dollar translation). Correct me on this if I am wrong, since I am remembering these numbers from memory.

I am thinking we are going to see less entrants in the non-fantasy genre, as the cost of MMO's keeps going up. Businesspeople (i.e., the ones with the funding for MMO's) tend to go with the herd. Why take a risk in a growing market, when games with large sub bases (WoW, Lineage 1 and 2 and Final Fantasy) have proven you can do well with the fantasy genre? Along the same lines, as MMO development costs go up, won't we start seeing less diversity in general? If I am funding a few million dollars, won't I be less risk averse than if I am funding $50 million for a product that won't hit the market for four years?

If you are a developer with an idea for a non-fantasy MMO, how do you convince the businesspeople to commit $40M to 55M on your new idea? You don't have too many success stories to point out. Those with the funds have a ton of projects they can choose from, but a limited amount of funds. They look at things like ROI and projected time to payback. How the hell do you payback $40M with under 100k subs? I know some people on this board seem to think that number of subs doesn't matter as long as you can pay your current costs. In the real world, if you consistently do not meet ROI or payback, you won't be working in the MMO industry for long.

Personally, I would like to see an MMO with just martial arts. Instead of classes, you get different fighting styles. I would love to see a good futuristic MMO with cyborgs, cybernetic implants and lots of lasers. Please don't say AO. I have an AO account, and every time I look at the graphics, I want to stab my eyes out with a rusty fork. Also, how about some twitch based MMO's? The list goes on and on about what can be done, but when you have new MMO's like Auto Assault being released (and rumored to not have reached 10k subs), it doesn't bode well for non-fantasy games imho.