Programmer Joe

Last year went so well I figured I’d give it another shot.  Here’s what I think will happen in online games in 2009.

1. This will not be a big year for MMO launches. In 2008 we had a WoW expansion pack, two games with a ton of buzz, and one pirate game that wasn’t quite as big as those other two. This year will include Champions Online and Free Realms, but none of the huge releases of previous years. Star Trek Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic have no announced dates yet, but they won’t be in 2009. *
2. Champions Online, the first next-gen console MMO will launch this year. It will ignite a new interest in MMOs on console despite having more than a few console-related issues. I absolutely loved City of Heroes, so I’m likely to play this one a lot.
3. This will be a big year for announcing MMOs. We will likely see big announcements from Carbine, Red 5, 38 Studios, and Trion. We might even see that Fallout Online announcement from Zenimax everyone is expecting. None of these games will launch in 2009.
4. Somebody will buy Turbine.  I bet it’s a big media company of some sort, and not a game publisher. 
5. Just as the “hey everybody, let’s make an MMO” gravy train ended a few years ago, the “I know! MMOs for kids!” trend is also about to end.  A bunch of kids MMOs will come out in 2009 and none of them will approach Club Penguin’s numbers. It will be much harder to get this kind of game funded as a result.
6. The console manufacturers are going to start talking about the next generation of consoles in a very preliminary way. Nobody will get dev kits in 2009, but some details will start to come out about what’s going to be in the new consoles.  (Answer: More cores – probably around 20, and big hard drives. Digital distribution of non-game media will be a big part of the next gen game consoles.)
7. The economy will bottom out and start to rebound. We aren’t quite at the bottom yet, but the low point will come in 2009.
8. Not much is going to happen on the Augmented Reality front in 2009. We might see a few simple apps using smart phone camera and screens, but that will be about it, at least publically.
9. Microsoft will start making another MMO. They will cancel this MMO in 2010 when they discover it takes 5 years and tens of millions to make an MMO these days.
10. One of the XNA community games will hit the big time. It will be a top-ten downloadable for a while. Its name will be said at the following GDC at least a billion times.
11. A whole lot of web startups are going to fail in 2009. There have been a couple this fall, with quite a few more will go down in flames next year.  I’m not talking about the “90%” of companies that always fail; I’m talking about companies you might have actually heard of. Everybody had enough runway to get through the holidays… the real test comes in the spring when they can’t fund their next round.
12. The fallout from Sony Online moving under the rest of Sony’s gaming businesses will hit in 2009. This probably means significant management changes and cancelled projects. I suspect that either DC Universe or The Agency will get the axe. It could just as easily be some unannounced project we’ve never heard of, though. 
13. Warhammer Online will merge some servers together.  They are already offering free transfers. This will make some people at FLS laugh out loud (see the second from the last paragraph). The reason will be the same as the reason PotBS merged servers: it’s hard to predict exactly how many subscribers you will have Server merges are not the beginning of the end, it’s just a matter of starting with too many servers. FWIW, the hundreds of unofficial WAR forums are full of people asking for merges.

* Obviously Star Trek Online thinks it will ship in 2009. They set their game in 2409, after all.  I think the game is going to slip into 2010.

This is what I thought would happen a year ago.  Let’s see how I did.

[This is my second time writing this post.  For some reason WordPress or Firefox or somebody ate what I wrote on Thursday and was planning to publish today. *sigh*]

1.  Pirates did, in fact, launch. We launched in the US and Europe in January, then in Australia in February, and finally in Russia in September. What I didn’t predict a year ago was that I wouldn’t be at FLS anymore.
2. Warhammer slipped and then launched in the fall just as I (and everyone else) predicted. I was a bit off about the numbers, though. They seem to be doing well, but are definitely below the magic million. Lich King almost certainly put a dent in their numbers, though.  Personally, I enjoy Warhammer Online quite a bit and hope it keeps going well for them.
3. Age of Conan shipped in the spring, and while the first 20 levels were quite good, everything else fell flat. Quite a few people who left PotBS to play AoC came back a month or two later. Apparently boobs and gore aren’t enough to carry an MMO all by themselves.
4. NCsoft basically gutted their Austin studio, pushed out the Garriots, and moved power over everything outside Asia to the ArenaNet folks. That’s great news for Seattle, but not so great for all the people I know who were laid off. Wish I’d been wrong about this one.
5. Maybe it’s just me, but it actually seems like game journalism is getting better. Maybe that’s because we’re mainstream enough for real reporters to cover game stories?  It’s arguably still in the “suck” category, but I don’t think I’ll be making this prediction for next year.
6. At GDC08, Microsoft announced that community games would be available to people who weren’t members of the Creator’s Club. In July they announced more details. They also did it without requiring certification for every XNA game. Way to go, Microsoft!
7. Bioware announced Star Wars: The Old Republic. A few people noticed, including the few remaining Star Wars: Galaxies players.
   1. Red 5 hasn’t announced anything.
   2. NC Orange County changed its name to Carbine (or maybe was always Carbine and I was clueless), but hasn’t announced anything.
   3. Space-Time was cut loose in the first round of cuts at NCsoft, announced themselves, spent 6 months looking for a publisher, then laid everybody off and started hiring Flash developers. 
   4. King’s Isle announced, beta’d, and launched Wizard 101. I hear it’s pretty good.
   5. The thing that Sean and Scott are working on at NC Austin was killed and never announced. Fortunately they both seem to have landed on their feet.
   6. 38 Studios hasn’t announced anything.
8. Although lots of games have become fairly popular on Facebook and other social networks, none of they have blown the doors off. They’re still more about grabbing eyeballs than revenue. As ad rates continue to plumet thanks to the Economopalypse and funding becomes harder to secure, that may not bode well for the social game world in 2009.
9. Metaplace hasn’t launched exactly, but they’re in a beta where anybody can invite more testers. They have come pretty far during the year. Areae also renamed itself to the people-know-how-to-pronounce-and-spell-it Metaplace.
10. World of Warcraft actually hit 11 million subscribers a couple months ago. Wrath of the Lich King will probably give them a boost this winter too. Is this the peak?  We won’t know for quite a while; Blizzard is never going to announce a number under 11 million. [Update: Blizzard just announced 11.5M as the post Lich King number.]
11. It seems that Cheyenne Mountain is this year’s example. They reportedly raised their money from angels rather than venture capitalists, but the problem is still the same.  Trying to build more than one game at the same time with a brand new company is stupid.
12. I was right! Valve didn’t tell anyone they were working on an MMO in 2008!  Whether they actually are or not is more of a mystery.  They were recruiting at Austing GDC for what it’s worth.
13. I don’t have a fully automated nanotech powered flying car, do you?
14. (from the comments) Whirled launched. It got the Penny Arcade bump for Corpse Craft, and has quite a few people on there playing games. We’ll have to wait until Daniel shows us all the numbers at GDC to know how it’s really doing, but it seems pretty good from the outside.

That makes ten (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 14) correct predictions, two (8, 9) incorrect predictions, and two that are impossible to determine (10, 12). I’m pretty happy with those results. Maybe next time I’ll put in fewer gimmes (1, 5, 11, 13).

The big MMO event from 2008 that I missed completely is Atari acquiring Cryptic. It makes a lot of sense for publishers other than EA to want to get into the MMO space, and acquiring an experienced developer (like Cryptic or Mythic) is the best way to go about it.  I wonder if we’ll see similar news next year from Turbine.

About nine months ago I developed this intense fascination with Augmented Reality. I even wrote about it at one point. Well that fascination is still with me, so I thought I’d describe about what I’ve discovered in that time.

The first thing I found is that many AR advocates and researchers are pursuing things that seem a little pointless to me. For instance, this ad for the mini lets you see a 3D mini model by waving a magazine around in front of your webcam. It would be much easier to use if they just put a flash app on their site with a slider that let you spin the car. Then there are the games that you can only see through a cell phone. It’s like a regular 3D game only with unreliable flickering graphics and bad UI. The ad is at least commercially viable for the ad agency, if not for Mini. Nobody is going to buy the cell phone invisible train game.

“But that’s not the point!” you might be thinking.  To me commercial viability is exactly the point. The best way to be able to keep working on thing X is to make it worth buying. You sell v1.0 so you can use the money to make v2.0. If v1.0 is worthless even to early adopters, and you can’t trick some VC into giving you millions of dollars for no reason, you don’t get to make v2.0. I’m a fan of having a business model and I’m not afraid to admit it.

The second thing I’ve learned about AR is how close we are to having all the pieces while still remaining frustratingly far away. Computing power is cheap enough to fit a wearable in a relatively small bag. GPS receivers are less than $30, and that’s not in quantity. Cameras that are good enough to do basic feature tracking from are under a hundred bucks. Between WiMAX and 3G phone networks, mobile internet connections are widely available. That is most of the pieces of a real first person AR system available right now for under a couple hundred bucks. These guys are demonstrating a solution to many of the hard problems running in real time on a laptop.

Aside from integration, the biggest remaining hurdle for first person AR is displays. The two display vendors I’m keeping my eye on are Lumus and Microvision. Lumus was at CES in January showing off their glasses, but they are still not available for purchase. Up until August or so their website said “Fall 2008″, but that’s since switched to “Mid 2009″. Do they really have an impending product launch, or is it vaporware that will fall prey to the Econopolypse? Who knows, but I’m going to see if they’ll sell me a pair of glasses in 6 months. Microvision is working with the military on some wearable display stuff, and are looking for partners for their consumer products.

The third thing I’ve learned about the state of Augmented Reality is how little of the work is going into applications. It’s like the PC in the 1970s. Everybody working on AR starts by grabbing a computer vision library (of which there are about a dozen) and then putting together their own motion tracking or fiducial detection system. After a couple of years they get things working pretty well and then finish grad school and move on to something else. There is no standardized AR API to write against and no one has even started working on whatever the killer app for AR will be.

This last challenge is where I’ve been focusing my attention. Unfortunately the first step there is to get a motion tracking and scene mapping system of my own working. So I’ve been reading a lot about computer vision and boning up on linear algebra so I can actually understand what I’m reading. This is a part time personal project for me, so it’s not incredibly fast, but I am making progress. At this point I have no idea if this will lead me to start an open source project, found a company, or even throw up my hands and give up.  It’s been a very interesting learning experience so far though and I’m still very excited. I feel like I’m watching the early stages of a huge new industry. Hopefully I’ll have some worthwhile progress of my own to share before long.

Anyway, I’ll now return you to your very occasional reading about the game industry.