There is a lot to make fun of when it comes to New World, and it comes in many forms, from excusing bad decisions made by Amazon to giving bonus points where they aren’t deserved, to say nothing of the unforced errors from launch on forward. I have not, however, made a point of making fun of New World past a single column about mounts that wasn’t really making fun of the game. Why would I? I’m not playing it, and quite frankly, it doesn’t need my kicking at it.
But I have been paying attention, and that includes to the way the game’s marketing department has tried to brand it as anything other than an MMORPG. So now that we’re on the back half of the Aeternum launch, I’ve been thinking about that. Because while we (justifiably) make fun of the marketing team for doing that, I also think it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees there. Yes, marketing departments can be feckless at times, but there’s more going on here than just studios trying to play definition games.
Of course, arguments about genre and definition are nothing new; there are still people trying to re-litigate various corner cases of “well, that’s not really an MMO” because of arbitrary signifiers or using “MMO” and “MMORPG” as the same term. (Which is a bit like choosing to assume “car” and “sports car” mean the same thing and then getting very insistent that any non-sports car isn’t really a car, but now I’m getting off-topic in a column already built around getting off-topic.) On some level, you can understand why marketing teams might decide to just eschew the whole drama and call the game something else.
And let’s face it, genre terms are descriptive rather than prescriptive. Doom was not developed as a first-person shooter; the term did not exist at the time. The phrase came into existence to describe games that were aping Doom’s design. That doesn’t make the game any less a first-person shooter, although it does mean that you can make some videos about it that inflict psychic damage.
So why is it that so many marketing teams try to avoid MMORPG as a term? The usual consensus seems to be that it’s a result of marketers making poor decisions and completely failing to sell the game based on what it actually is, and if there’s a little more thought behind it, there’s the understanding that maybe “MMORPG” doesn’t sell to The Average Gamer.
This is, however… kinda ridiculous. Leaving aside the idea that the Average Gamer does not exist any more than does a frictionless plane for running basic physics experiments (“For this marketing exercise, assume a perfectly spherical video game fan”), it presumes some weird world in which you can trick people into playing a game by calling it something else. My mother, who generally hates RPGs, was not somehow fooled by Paper Mario into thinking it was something else. She actually enjoyed the game, but she described it as an RPG she actually found fun rather than as… not being an RPG.
If your video game requires an online connection, involves playing with lots of other people in a shared world, and has a persistent landscape of some kind, people are going to realize they’re dealing with an MMORPG. The term “looter-shooter” came about well after people got used to the formula and soured on it. And if your MMORPG has been out for some amount of time, even if you don’t call it that any more, no one is going to be tricked.
For example, ArenaNet could start insisting that Guild Wars 2 is a Shared Action RPG, and it will succeed only at inducing people (including us) to make fun of it and still call it an MMORPG. So there has to be something else behind it, and it can’t just be that people secretly don’t like MMORPGs, especially when we have MMORPGs that make good money and do quite well for themselves. I hear good things about Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft these days, for example! Someone said Throne and Liberty kind of got over?
But I think there is an explanation that doesn’t require that we assume marketing professionals are just jingling their keys to trick people who are too stupid to master object permanence. (As a general rule, assuming everyone else is dumber than you is a bad look… but again. Getting off-topic.) It’s not about trying to pretend that the game isn’t what it already is and setting different expectations for the present; it’s about trying to set different expectations for the future.
Let’s talk about Concord.
I know that no one really has been thinking about Concord much since it faceplanted directly into a brick wall as one of the most egregious flops in video game history, but let’s not forget that a big part of Concord’s launch motive was that it was offering not just a game but a bill of sale. There was going to be ongoing story, new maps, new characters, etc. What you got in the base game was the start, not the game moving forward.
This did not help the game in the slightest. But part of why it didn’t help the game in the slightest was that it meant the people who were on the fence were willing to wait to see how this played out, and people are generally not stupid and had a pretty good idea this wasn’t going to materialize. It then quickly became clear that they were right to stay away. Nothing the game planned to do actually materialized.
Sometimes we use words to define not what we are but what we expect to be.
If you’re not sure about how much you have left in the tank, it’s a lot easier to put your game forth as something other than an MMORPG, something other than a game that is going to have constant updates moving forward. If you call your game a one-time purchase ARPG, everyone’s going to theoretically be thrilled if you put out one small update every four months because that’s more than they expected.
I say “theoretically” because, again, object permanence is a thing, and people who actually care can do the tiniest bit of research and see that it’s kind of a lie. But sometimes you’re stuck in a place where your options are “little white lies” and “promises you don’t expect to keep,” and you take another shot of vodka and do the one you think is going to cause fewer problems down the road. Sometimes you have nothing but bad options, and you’re trying to pick the least bad option.
Do I think this is smart? No. But I don’t think it’s as simple as marketing just being dumb and assuming everyone else is dumb. (Having worked in marketing, I can assure you that the number of people in marketing who are actually dumb is pretty low.) I think it’s more likely that people are trying to make the best of an awkward situation with some creative marketing and hoping that with the love people have over debating genre anyway, they can slip something in there.
In other words, when Amazon says New World is something other than an MMORPG, it doesn’t really mean the game as it exists has changed. It’s simply signaling that it doesn’t plan to support the game with MMORPG-tier content the way MMORPG fans expect an MMORPG to be supported. And if you consider the last year, you can see that’s exactly what’s already happened.
“Wait, are you saying MMORPGs are actually popular?” Yes! Also no. Yeah, there’s a column there. Not a whole month’s worth, though. I’m not doing that a third time in a row.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
