meems wrote:The potential for a Factorio derivative to break into the $billion MMO market is real, and should be a goal for the ambitious game industry pros here.
No, no it isn't real. When working outside of large publishers, like EA or such, a successful game is 10% quality and 90% luck. When dealing with MMOs, its 5% quality and 95% luck. Factorio is great. A Factorio MMO isn't impossible by any means, it could work. But there will never. Ever. EVER. Be a Factorio MMO. I'm so certain of it I would swear on my mother's grave, I would bet everything i'm worth, every possession i have, anything. There will never be a billion-dollar Factorio MMO, its less likely than winning the lottery.
Similarly, no mod is going to turn Factorio into a billion dollar game. Its not a case of "can't", its a case of "will not". We don't need to debate over what would happen in that scenario because its so
astoundingly unlikely that it makes much more sense to come up with a plan on how we should keep the mod portal servers running during a
alien zombie apocalypse.
Finally,
no, making a Factorio MMO is not the next logical step after F1. First of all
ENOUGH with fucking "F1". For comparison, look at Minecraft. LOOK. AT. MINECRAFT. Yknow what people asked about Minecraft a few years ago? "Oh what is notch gonna do for Minecraft 2?" Lo and behold, 8 years after development began, 5 years after the official release, there are not even the
slightest indications that M2 is in development.
"But Factorio isn't Miencraft!!!!1!11!1one"
Okay, fine. Would you like me to drudge up any of a number of other indie games in similar situations? Or maybe make a laundry list of similarities that indicate that Factorio is going down a similar road?
Secondly, "F2" won't exist any time soon at best, but lets pretend it will. HOW. IS. A. MMO. AT. ALL. LOGICAL. Okay, lemme rephrase that. How is making a FACTORIO MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE GAME not a
UTTERLY IDIOTIC idea? Trick question, it is! Have you ever looked at a MMO, ever
played one and considered for a
second how MMOs actually work? How all of the game mechanics have to be built in a certain way for it? Clearly not, so lets review how a MMO works.
MMOs and You, a guide by a irritated forum-goer
So, you want to make a MMO? First, you gotta address the big question? How are you gonna pay for it? Sure, if you're a billionaire you could pay out-of-pocket, but otherwise you're gonna need to get your players to fork over cold, hard cash. Generally, there's three main ways to do this: upfront payment, subscription payment, or a microtransaction system.
Upfront payment: Players pay upfront for initial access to the game and then can play indefinitely. This payment method is tricky, if players play for long enough you start to lose money. Requires a constant influx of players to remain stable, or constant release of DLC/expansion packs which cost more money, mandating extensive advertisements or significant developer manpower. If you opt for the expansions route (which most people do), you have to keep players playing so that they will buy the next expansion, effectively making it a ghetto subscription system.
Subscription payment: Player pay a periodic fee to keep playing. Extremely sustainable, you just have to make sure enough players want to keep playing the game and you're golden.
Microtransation system: Players can play for free, but can indirectly buy items, currency, or cosmetics with real money. Similar to, but trickier than subscription payment. It can work just as well if done right, but will drive players away if done badly.
For all of these systems, you usually need to keep players playing for a long time. This has resulted in a sort of 'convergent game design', wherein almost all MMOs use similar game mechanics to encourage players to stay. These will be elaborated on in chapter 2.
Chapter 2: time-consuming game design and you!
As discussed earlier, MMOs need to keep players playing. This has lead MMOs to employ gratification-delaying game mechanics of all varieties, in order to create a engaging game experience that nonetheless lasts as long as possible. Almost all game mechanics revolve around encouraging a player to keep playing, usually by employing incentives locked behind repetitive, easy-to-develop gameplay.
Levels, equipment, skills, quests, and more. All of these are designed to keep players engaged while undergoing repetitive tasks. By rewarding players only at the end of the task, players are kept working for the 'next thing', always engaging in some repetitive gameplay (often referred to as 'grinding') that they may only moderately like, or even dislike, for the sake of the end reward. With a careful balance of reward v.s. grinding, and a sufficient variety of adequately disguised methods of grinding, players can be kept occupied for hundreds or even
thousands of hours before they become bored and stop playing, all the while requiring a minimum investment of development time.
In order to be successful, a MMO has to apply this strategy to more-or-less
every facet of gameplay. Any less, and players don't stay hooked long enough to keep the game afloat. Every mechanic, every tiny feature, every detail, all of has to be focused on keeping players
playing.
Chapter 3: examples
Lets take a brief look at some MMOs, and use what we've learned to come to a greater understanding of them.
Example 1: EVE Online
Payment system: EVE Online can be played for free, however, most equipment, skills, and missions are locked unless you pay a monthly subscription. Additionally, cosmetic items are available through a microtransaction system, and ingame currency can be indirectly bought using microtransaction currency. Therefore, it uses a hybrid subscription-microtransaction system to make money.
Game mechanics: Virtually everything in the game can be bought using ingame currency. Ingame currency can be made slowly and at a constant rate via numerous sources, such as mining, mission-running, pirating, exploration, and much more. Additionally, microtransaction currency can be traded for ingame currency, roughly 2-10 hours worth of grinding in exchange for 20$. Skills are learned passively, take a very long time to train, and are required for almost all avenues of gameplay, but this process can be accelerated for a significant amount of ingame currency. The cost of improvement in the game increases exponentially, and as such requires greater and greater investment of time (which costs money in the form of a subscription), and ingame currency (obtainable with time or more directly with money). For example, the initial skills for most types of gameplay may require only a few hours, but the best skills in the game take months or hundreds of dollars to learn.
Example 2: Warframe
Payment system: Warframe does not cost money to play. However, there is a extremely large variety of cosmetic items and equipment which can be purchased with microtransaction currency. Therefore, Warframe uses a microtransaction payment system.
Gameplay: Every aspect of gameplay is designed to encourage the usage of microtransactions to avoid time-consuming tasks. Every weapon or character (AKA 'Warframes') can be obtained in 1 of 2 ways. First, a player can invest significant amounts of time to obtain the resources to 'craft' the desired weapon or Warframe, or players can instantly buy them with microtransaction currency. Obtaining resources and blueprints, and completing quests to obtain equipment takes a extremely long time. Many weapons cannot be built without a high "mastery rank", which can only be achieved by playing with many other weapons and characters for a long time (unless you buy them, of course.)
I could go into much more detail on these MMOs, or show more examples, but rest assured that much like a fractal, MMOs are designed to be time consuming at
every level, all to encourage players to play longer or to use microtransactions. This results in a very distinct style of gameplay that is extremely different from non-MMOs. So, lets take a look at Factorio, and see how it differs.
Chapter 4: Is Factorio similar to a MMO? (spoiler: no)
In order for a MMO to be successful, It has to follow the strategies we've layed out. And does Factorio use any of these delayed-gratification techniques? Short answer: no. Factorio does exhibit a form of progressive gameplay, wherein players work to achieve goal after goal, however the process is much, much too quick to be a MMO. The entire game can be finished reasonably within 50 hours, and a experienced player can complete the game in a
fifth of that. Every advancement and goal in the game, both game-set and player-set, can usually be achieved in a matter of minutes.
If we wanted to turn Factorio into a MMO, we would have to change many, many things:
Gameplay would have to be slowed down massively. In a MMO, with players all playing in the same world, most players would quit as soon as they 'beat' the game, meaning most players would stick around for only a few dozen hours. A MMO cannot be sustained in that scenario. One solution would be to reset the game world periodically. However, resetting a game world is bad for a MMO, as it usually causes players to feel as if they lost all of their hard work, and thus can reduce player counts. It can even reduce the number of
new players, since they are less likely to invest time if they know a reset could destroy their investment.
In order to slow down gameplay, we can borrow some strategies from other building-centric MMOs. For example, building structures could take time. Instead of assemblers, belts, etc being built instantly, they could take several minutes to 'construct'. Removing deconstruction would also work, meaning that they are not returned when you remove them, forcing you to craft another. Finally, the speed of everything could be decreased. Instead of ~1 ore per second, mining drills could make 1 per minute. Crafting machines could take several minutes to produce items, belts could transport items at a snail's pace, etc. And finally, we can make everything much more expensive (e.g. 10x or more). Combining these strategies could potentially slow down gameplay enough for either subscription payment or a microtransaction payment to work.
Conclusion
Now that we've established what is necessary for a Factorio MMO to 'work'. let's ask ourselves if any significant portion of the current playerbase would
want to play such a game. Short answer: no. No one would want to play a Factorio where changing layouts, moving things around, etc, has massive resource costs and takes 10x as long. No one would want to play a Factorio where building a single assembly machine requires half a hour worth of resource mining, where a rocket takes months to build. No one wants to play a Factorio where mistakes are extremely costly. No one wants to play a Factorio where building new things takes gratuitous amounts of time.
You could make Factorio into a MMO, but to do so would be to
BUTCHER it. MMOs have to be very carefully designed so
from the ground up so that they can
function as a MMO without being a
complete piece of
crap. Factorio is
not. Factorio CANNOT be turned into a MMO without
destroying everything that makes it fun. The gameplay of Factorio is INHERENTLY incompatible with a MMO, because it was not built from the ground up to BE a MMO. Any successful 'Factorio' MMO would be in name only, it would be completely changed and bear no resemblance to Factorio aside from reusing the sprites. In all likelyhood,
it would take the form of one of those crappy app-store MMOs which blatantly rip off something else while using cookie-cutter gameplay. And I know the devs wouldn't want to make something like that, when they've poured so much time and love into Factorio. And I know they wouldn't
let anyone make anything like that, either.
So no, there will never be a Factorio MMO.