You know, this traditional end-of-the-year roundtable shouldn’t be a thing. We’ve been doing this such a long time and getting so much coverage on the very dumb things that MMO and MMO-adjacent execs say that you’d think they’d have learned to stop saying such things, or maybe even to stop talking out loud where journalists and cameras can hear them. Alas for them, they just keep talking, and so here we are once again.
For this week’s Massively Overthinking, I’m asking our writers and readers to remind us of something an MMO or MMO-adjacent developer said in 2024, whether it’s praiseworthy or provocative, and tell us why it matters to the genre. Who really stepped right in it this year?
Chris Neal (@wolfyseyes.bsky.social, blog): One of my favorite quotes from the year isn’t going to be another bit of executive brainworms (even if there are no shortage of examples to choose from). What I’ll be repeating is one of the single finest clapbacks this year against Ubisoft and its feckless annihilation of The Crew 1 and stated goal of eliminating the idea of games ownership:
“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing.”
I. Love. This. Especially against one of gaming’s most gormless monsters. It’s so direct and effective and while maybe not the right call to action, it is definitely the righteous one, especially given the target. Hell yea, Steam reviewer. Hell yeah.
Eliot Lefebvre (@Eliot_Lefebvre, blog): Phil Spencer’s “I have to run a sustainable business” nonsense… hoo boy.
“In the end, I’ve said over and over, I have to run a sustainable business inside the company and grow, and that means sometimes I have to make hard decisions that frankly are not decisions I love, but decisions that somebody needs to go make. We will continue to go forward. We will continue to invest in what we’re trying to go do in Xbox and build the best business we can, which ensures we can continue to do shows like the one we just did.”
See, the thing that gets me – the part that bothers me the most – isn’t that Phil Spencer did something that was undeniably meant to cut costs and didn’t really care about anything beyond cutting costs. That’s not good. I don’t like that. But it is what it is.
The thing about the quote that gets me is twofold. The first is that it’s Phil Spencer trying to earn sympathy. He’s trying to make people still like him despite what he did. I accept that given the business that he is working in, sometimes his job is (by his definition) to make bad decisions that result in bad things for people for dumb, short-sighted business reasons. But you don’t get to do that and still try to pain yourself as the victim. The other people, the people you laid off, they’re the victims. You are going to be fine. People are not going to like you, and right now, that’s fair.
And the second part? Xbox has never been a sustainable business; it’s consistently lost money, which means that it’s a lie anyway. PC Game Pass is basically cannibalizing game sales to make part of the console division look better. This is not building a sustainable business, it’s spreadsheet manipulation. So… yeah.
Justin Olivetti (@Sypster, blog): The English language was tortured to the breaking point this past fall when New World tried to convince us that playing dungeons, grouping up, and engaging in PvP was actually still soloing:
“For those that want to dabble in group content, they can use the easy queuing system in the activities menu to play modes like Outpost Rush, 3v3s, and Expeditions, where they can continue their solo experience ‘alone in a crowd.’”
At this point, does all meaning simply fall apart when you can describe one thing as a completely different thing? What does Amazon even consider social or group play to be? How desperate is the studio to add nerf to all of its social aspects so that the apparently incredibly fragile soloer will not hurt him or herself? We were left hurting and with so, so many questions.
MJ Guthrie (@MJ_Guthrie, blog): I have had my answer for this question ready since August. Go me! (If you knew how much I agonize over EOTY stuff, you’d realize how much of an accomplishment this is for me.) The most impactful and favorite quote for me this year was one uttered by Conan Exiles’ Director Dennis Douthett during our interview on the game’s living settlements. He said,
“The deeper we go with it, the more it feels like a real world. And that’s really the goal at the end of the day.”
This! Can other games please adopt this mantra? This statement mirrors my decades-long sentiments as I search for a game that can finally fill the void for a virtual world that SWG’s absence left. I like my fluff games, and I like those that I can snack on as I have the time and inclination. But man, oh man, I do still want a one I can settle in, that has a vibrant world happening beyond me that I can watch or pop into to participate at my leisure — just as I do the real world. I may not have the time or energy to devote to a full life in there (heck, I don’t even in the real world!), but that doesn’t mean I don’t want it to be there for when I can and do. If more developers can just lean this way, it would do so much for making games more sticky and enticing for me. A home-away-from-home I can go live in when the mood/opportunity strikes. And when I need to bail on this one for a time!
Sam Kash (@samkash@mastodon.social): This one is something that I’ve been thinking about long before it was ever even said. Early access tempts developers with some cash early, but the long-term cost might be impossible to recover. It comes from the devs of Shadow’s Kiss, which was apparently a vampire MMO and not the moment of totality during an eclipse.
“We learned, too late, that putting a game on early access without it being in a commercially polished state is pretty much suicide. The bad reviews pretty much killed our revenue and any chance we had of closing a deal. In talking to other Kickstarters that have done the same, we learned just how dangerous Early Access is.”
The devs here are pointing out how they were bombarded with negative reviews because their game was an actual pre-alpha or beta type of build and not really developed to the point of a real release. And I do not doubt that at all.
I think Bree and Justin have discussed the curse of early access dozens of times on the podcast, and this was a developer basically saying it’s true. They were buried under bad reviews, and there was no way to get out of it.
Brianna Royce (@nbrianna.bsky.social, blog): I always collect quotes all through the year, so let me add a few more to the end here – some good, some bad.
First, there was the absolutely out-of-touch “let them eat cake” moment from former Sony Europe exec who suggested developers affected by the mass layoffs propelled by the executives’ bad decision-making should just go
“drive an Uber, or go off to find a cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year.”
Please, people, I bet you to see what horrible people these executives are, how little they understand the actual world most of us live in, and how little regard they have for the human capital who make them their monopoly bux. Incidentally, he also blamed the layoffs on gamers not spending money on games, which is 1) literally a lie as game revenue continues to climb and 2) a totally whitewash of executive greed and overborrowing during the early pandemic years. You know, the actual shit decisions that got them into this when the debts came due, and instead of taking responsibility, they just lit thousands of talented devs on fire to satisfy the investor gods. That asshole’s comments might actually be the peak worst take of the year for our industry. Just full-on Gilded Age II trash.
A second one. Palworld took a lot of heat this year, but I wanted to pull out this quote from the game’s community manager.
“Some of you may have had your fun over the last 3 weeks and found yourself putting the game down. That is fine. […] [I]t’s probably also a good time to step in and reassure those of you capable of reading past a headline that it is fine to take breaks from games. You don’t need to feel bad about that. Palworld, like many games before it, isn’t in a position to pump out massive amounts of new content on a weekly basis. New content will come, and it’s going to be awesome, but these things take a little bit of time. There are so many amazing games out there to play; you don’t need to feel guilty about hopping from game to game. If you are still playing Palworld, we love you. If you’re no longer playing Palworld, we still love you, and we hope you’ll come back for round 2 when you’re ready.”
You’d think this would go without saying, but some folks carrying around immense guilt when they take breaks from MMOs. And it’s a fantastic attitude for a game studio to have, instead of monetizing and designing the game to make it impossible to leave. Make it worth coming back!
A third – how about one that seems reasonable but aged poorly? At the end of April, not all that long before New World announced Aeternum, Amazon’s Scot Lane answered a player question about how Amazon meant to regain the trust of the game’s community.
“The only way we’re going to do it is by putting out quality releases that you all like. […] I can tell you that we failed differently on this last one than the one before. We won’t fail this way again. But anything I say is not going to make you trust us. It’s going to be when we put interesting software in your hand that is on time and works.”
Now, I like Scot Lane a lot, but I do have to wonder why he thought it’d be a good idea to answer it this way, knowing as he did that Aeternum was already in the oven and knowing as he did what Amazon was planning to do to MMORPG players. I mean, everything he said in there was technically true. They didn’t fail exactly the same way twice, right? And only solid content will convince players to hand over their trust again, right?
OK, let’s end on a good quote from Ship of Heroes this past summer, when Heroic Games was talking up the MMORPG raid.
“Joining raids should be fun. Different raids should be accessible throughout the game, not just as end-game content, and they should reward gameplay skills and organizational leadership skills. But raiding is also a social activity, and many of us don’t want to be stressed when we socialize. How do we balance these ideas? We let players decide whether they want to lead a raid and earn extra rewards for accepting the challenges of leadership. If not, you can join a raid and just follow your team leader, blast enemies, heal friends, and chat at times while you do it. Because sometimes you feel like leading, and sometimes you don’t. […] The era of the big raid has returned – and we did not have to sacrifice graphics to get it.”
I have no idea whether Ship of Heroes will ever have the update to make this kind of raiding happen, but the philosophy being espoused here is just everything I want from MMORPGs. Raiding -i.e., very large groups of players PvEing together – is not and has never been the problem. Ultima Online had raiding before anyone every breathed the word “endgame.” EverQuest had raiding that didn’t even expect you to be at the level cap. The “raiding is for endgame / endgame is only raiding” is a major problem with MMORPGs (thanks WoW), and I love that more games are trying to restore sanity to the genre.
Every week, join the Massively OP staff for Massively Overthinking column, a multi-writer roundtable in which we discuss the MMO industry topics du jour – and then invite you to join the fray in the comments. Overthinking it is literally the whole point. Your turn!
