EVE Shows Niche MMO Markets Can Work – Again

A few days ago it was EVE Online’s 6th anniversary. It was also the day they announced that they gained over 300,000 users, broke yet another record with well over 53,000 people sharing a single virtual world at one time, and that they were the second largest Western subscription based MMO. Talk about a busy day.

I bring up EVE every so often here. This is largely because I play it every so often – although I’m not currently – but also because I find the game genuinely fascinating. Six years after launch, few games can say that they haven’t just had solid retention rates, but that they’ve actually added to their subscription numbers. Significantly. Most games do exactly what Warhammer Online did; get a big launch (750k subs) and drop off after that point (slightly less than EVE now). Some also pull an “Age of Conan” and build up an awful lot of subs… then drop hugely significantly.

High profile MMOs like that tend to build up a lot of hype that can’t be met. Once people see that the game can’t possibly live up to their hopes and dreams, they’ll drop it and move on. Building hype isn’t a bad thing, though. Getting a huge user base right off the bat is going to help an MMO, but it is basically expected that you’ll lose a huge amount of your subscribers post-launch. It makes sense, given that not everyone is going to be pleased with their purchase. The sad part is that they never build up a strong enough marketing machine to reel in more people to get their subscriptions up.

Then, most models are built from the same mold. An awful lot of them are more than just a little bit similar, which presents a major issue. MMOs are more costly than most types of games, and tend to suck up more time. Only a limited amount of people are willing to play more than one at any given time. So, we have all these games competing over a very finite resource of players, but they’re doing little to differentiate from each other. So, when you have a Juggernaut like World of WarCraft, with MMOs trying to compete with it… You’re going to see a lot of fail. Yet, development studios are sticking with the strategy and adding more titles to the Fail Brigade (which isn’t to say that they’re turning out bad games).

Throw in yet another problem that many of these games are designed as very, very linear theme parks, and people will feel the sense of accomplishment for beating the game. That isn’t necessarily bad, but it also isn’t good for strong retention rates. If you get too high in something, there’s a greater chance of dropping out as you find yourself running out of things to do. I don’t see a lot of MMOs providing all that terribly much to keep people around these days either.

Then you have a game like EVE. It is an extremely niche game. It didn’t have any prior-existing IP behind it. It came out of a totally no-name developer from Iceland. It is also often enough jokingly referred to as “Spreadsheet Online” due to the general gameplay style. It has very, very little in the way of quest content and the like and other theme-park like features. By all means, it has a recipe that is built for anything but success. Which is why it succeeds.

It is extremely niche. To steak a metaphor from Raph Koster, it isn’t a sapling trying to grow in the shade under the tree of the largest traditional MMO (ie: currently WoW). Rather, it is off somewhere else, getting enough sun to grow much larger than everything else below that giant tree.

Not every niche game is going to be an instant-success either, though. Jumpgate, which came out before EVE, is a very, very tiny game. A Tale in the Desert isn’t exactly supporting giant numbers either. They do still exist though – and the former is even getting a much higher profile sequel. Still, it is definitely a risk, one way or the other. As I’m sure Tabula Rasa and AutoAssault will verify.

So, a niche game can work, provided it is, you know, good enough.