Interesting addition to CCP Games' own.

I'm sure you remember the recent interview with Matt Woodward, where he described how MMORPGs can thrive by not competing with World of Warcraft? Well Craig Morrison, creative director for The Secret World at Funcom, has come out with a similar spin at Gamasutra recently. 

You know, you look at the results for The Old Republic and you see a game massively invested in. I don't know their budgets, but I'm guessing something five or tenfold what we've spent on Secret World, at a conservative guess -- where they can retain a million subscriptions and that's a failure. That's a very harsh situation to be in for a genre.

We need to find ways where we can build these worlds. People tend to forget that EVE Online started with 10,000 customers and held that for the first few years, and then it grew organically to where it's now up to 400,000 accounts. And we have to have the space to allow those games to develop like that, because they build better games.

An MMO at the three-year point is a far better game than the MMO that released. And I think we have to find a way as an industry -- and specifically as people working in this genre -- to let that flourish, because that's how we'll build better virtual world games in the next five, 10, 15 years.

It's taking that approach to it, rather than this huge bet that we're going to spend 300 million dollars in the hope of making 2 billion from having a huge mass market, instant hit. When I think the true potential of the genre is in that more slow-boiling, building game that might build up and up and organically build a community.

He also talks about World of Warcraft's influence on the market, system-based games, and free to play. But I wanted to point out that quote, because it's very reflective of a lot of the MMORPG market right now. Investing into the future and the world in which you're building is what makes the MMORPG so enticing - that's why FireFall still has my eye hooked for the future.

Julian "Mirai" Williams