Part of MMO Fallout deals with the harsh reality of the current market: There are too many MMOs currently competing for players, and even more hit the market each day. For every MMO that dies here at MMO Fallout, another three or four take its place! Considering that MMOs are still releasing under the $50-60 client bracket, and with the increasing amount of free to play titles on the market, there is an overwhelming demand to know whether or not an MMO is worth investing in.

That being said, life expectancy can be very difficult to measure, especially before launch. Below I have a few items that should not be taken as exact, but rather observations of past trends that generally hold true.

1. Hacking Off Limbs Before Birth

This is a very important factor. Keep an eye on your MMO of choice and see if the developer starts discussing features that were planned for launch and had to be “suspended” due to budget restraints, but will be included later on once more funding comes in in the form of boxes and subscriptions. I’m not talking about easy to implement features like Looking For Group tools or cosmetic slots. I mean features that were once major parts of the game’s advertising, like Warhammer Online where each race would have its own living, breathing city. That announcement was in 2008, would anyone like to put money on Mythic ever releasing those cities?

If you see a game being advertised as releasing bare bones with no specific details for release, you can probably expect to see the cut features sometime in the year two thousand and never. Assuming of course the game doesn’t pull a Warhammer Online and go into maintenance mode quickly after launch. If your MMO exhibits these signs before launch, you might want to keep your friends close and your wallets closer.

2. How Many Times Has It Shut Down?

Market viability is very important when determining…well, market viability, and MMOs are like psychotic murderers: Once they’ve tasted blood, they can’t stop. So ask yourself before you make a purchase: Has this game killed a company?

Let’s take a look back, shall we? Perpetual Entertainment died with Star Trek Online and Gods & Heroes still in the oven. Star Trek Online went on to become a horrendously rushed release due to a licensing agreement and Gods & Heroes went on to pull in one of the smallest launches in MMO history. Flagship Studios died after Hellgate London and Mythos, the former spending a few years touring Asia while the latter went on to be picked up by Hanbitsoft where it was shut down in Europe under Frogster and eventually launched as a global edition.

There are plenty more to bring up, including All Points Bulletin killing Realtime Worlds, or Earth Eternal being shut down more times than I can count, but you should exercise caution around any game that has previously been shut down: Especially if the prior company went bankrupt.

3. Is The Developer A Known Face?

I apologize in advance to my dear friends in the independent field who will hate me for saying this: I love indie-gaming. I hate indie-MMO developers. Don’t get me wrong, your developers have a great big vision for the future where you can not only take a chunk of sand and turn it into a sword, but you can also use that sword to commit murder and theft. Assuming that the sand is ever fully implemented.

In order to buy into an indie-MMO, you need zen-like patience. The development team might be completely new to the genre, having never developed an MMO or even a full retail game for that matter. You should expect major features to be cut and not implemented for a good year or two, and for development to be slow and sloppy. If video games are an art, buying an indie MMO is not unlike buying a sculpture before it is completed, you assume the artist doesn’t die sometime in the process.

So, although it guarantees that the MMO will be delayed further, possibly by years, I have always suggested that my indie-developer friends create a game and release it first. It gives the developer credibility in the marketplace, not to mention extra cash in the bank, not to mention a successful product makes them much more appealing to investors.

4. Time Spent Trashing the Competition

I’ve seen this marketing strategy fail time and time again, but publishers still have a habit of spending more time trashing the competition than they do talking about the benefits of their own game. Some of you may remember the Global Agenda “No Elves” campaign which focused on how people were sick of elves and magic and wanted shooting and headshots. Global Agenda was to be everything these games weren’t, which ultimately included the desire to pay a subscription for it, because Global Agenda lost its subscription not long after launch and eventually lost its cover price. This is just one example, but around 2007-2008 there were quite a few MMOs released under the “WoW killer” brand that released with major features broken or delayed.

And as far as upcoming MMOs go, I will include TERA in this with their “Are You An MMOFO?” campaign. While somewhat funny, the fact that Enmasse has started directly naming games (DC Universe, Lord of the Rings Online, World of Warcraft) as boring crap (my words, not theirs), has me worried that the developer is writing a check they have no ability to cash.

5. You Know Who Is Working On It

I’m referring to several different people, and you all know who I am talking about. For the sake of MMO Fallout, however, I cannot name them on this page as these people have a habit for threatening to sue me every time I mention them by name. But you all know who they are, the names who are either head of the pack or somewhere in the middle when everything seems to upend and your big ship suddenly goes the way of the Titanic.

This person, you may not personally know them, but they are well known to you. They seem to pop up everywhere bankruptcy and turmoil follow, the games they work on or lead are released unfinished with a priority on selling cash shop items rather than fixing the broken parts of the game, and when pressed to fix them responds with “well since it was broken no one plays that portion so we won’t work on it because not enough people play it.” To these men, hypocrisy knows no boundary, and integrity is just something you sprinkle on a nice lasagna.

One thing you can always expect out of this man is that he will flee the ship before it sinks. When he leaves, you can expect that the end approaches.