Who exactly makes a MMORPG?

Stormgaard wonders "Who Do You Give the Oscar To?", wondering who exactly is responsible for the success of a MMORPG. Why are there so few "stars" in the MMORPG world, even if Brad McQuaid and the Garriotts are trying so hard? But a MMORPG is a team effort of hundreds of people over many years, often coming and going, and in the end it is hard to say who made for example World of Warcraft.

I remember a discussion on this blog about Raph Koster, where I said he was (partly) responsible for Star Wars Galaxies not being a good game, and other people disagreeing and saying it wasn't his fault. Both sides just basing their arguments on hearsay and job-titles, because the people who actually know what exactly who did on SWG are those most likely to want to shift the blame elsewhere. :)

I recently talked about design, cohesion, and execution, and in most often the people responsible for the design aren't those responsible for the execution, and the cohesion is where their efforts overlap. I don't think there is a single person who can say he is responsible for World of Warcraft. Stormgaard mentions Red 5 Studios, who advertise with the fact that they have lots of ex-Blizzard employees. Industry rumor has it that Blizzard cut the salaries of their programmers just when World of Warcraft was finished, to cut cost, because WoW came out much later than expected. If that is true, that was obviously a bad move, and explains why it took them over 2 years to get an expansion out. And of course that could "seed" a lot of other MMORPG developer studios with ex-Blizzard employees. But whether that is enough to make the new games from those studios as good as World of Warcraft is doubtful.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:07 PM Permanent Link