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The recent announced end of Dual Universe, a science fiction-themed MMO with incredible potential and ambition, dredged up a question I’ve been pondering since, well, roughly since Star Wars Galaxies was shut down in 2011. Specifically:
Why is it impossible for a sci-fi themed MMO to gain a truly massive player base?
Yes: Impossible. Eve Online and Star Citizen are successful niche MMOs, with a player base below 500,000 each. But no science fiction-themed MMO has ever reached and sustained the popularity of all the many popular fantasy-themed MMOs — nothing close to the millions of Elder Scrolls Online, or the tens of millions of World of Warcraft and RuneScape.
To make the question more vexing, there’s dozens of massively popular single-player sci-fi games. Make a similar game/IP massively multiplayer, however, and it fails. The single-player Cyberpunk 2077, featuring Keanu Reeves, sold 30 million copies; The Matrix Online, an MMO based on the hit cyberpunk movies starring Keanu Reeves, never really took off.
I have a new theory (or rather, old research which I’m newly applying), but before I get into that, I ran the question by two experts who’ve been closely involved with the MMO game genre for years.
Scott “Lum the Mad” Jennings, who’s been developing and analyzing MMOs on his blog forever, believes it has to do with underlying player aspiration:
“Hard science MMOs are tough because it's harder to find the aspirational fantasy — space is brutal and hard by definition — just surviving in outer space makes you a hero,” as he put it to me. “So the more 'realistic' the space MMO, the more it diverges from the heroic fantasy of ‘user is rescuing the world’ that most theme park MMOs guide you through.
“The most successful hard-SF MMO is Eve Online and it's a success because it provides an experience you don't get anywhere else (hardcore player vs. player where players own their own sectors of space and conquer it from each other).” (And again, Eve is successful only with a small but hardcore fanbase.)
If Everyone Gets to Be a Jedi / Han Solo / Boba Fett, No One Wants to be a Jedi / Han Solo / Boba Fett
As noted, I first started noticing the problem of sci fi-themed MMOs when Star Wars Galaxies launched the very same month and year that Second Life did, in June 2003. It grew to 400,000 players, but soon sputtered in growth. (It started shutting servers down in 2009.) The fact that a non-genre virtual world comprised completely of user-generated content has succeeded for far longer than a virtual world based on the most famous sci-fi franchise in history still remains mind-boggling.
More from Scott:
“MMOs like Star Wars Galaxies that are more traditional ‘theme park MMOs’ struggle because they have to justify ‘the player is the one hero that is saving the universe’ versus a player base of people doing the exact same thing. High fantasy MMOs like WoW get away with it because ‘you are the special hero saving the world’ is a key part of high fantasy to begin with so it's easy to write those stories.”
Or to put it another way: How do you make a Star Wars-themed MMO when every player wants to be a Jedi? (Or Han Solo? Or Boba Fett?)
The Generic Draw of Elves & Orcs
Damion Schubert was a designer of Star Wars: Old Republic, an MMO that did cross the 1 million player mark, but then quickly shed active users. (It’s still running, but with a MAU rate in the low six figures.) So as you’d imagine, Damion has an extended opinion on my question:
It's always been a harder push to make sci-fi games a thing than fantasy games, and as a result it's also much harder to pitch them and get them funding. It's almost always easier to push forward a fantasy pitch than a sci-fi pitch.
My theory is that the most emotionally resonant stuff in sci-fi — lightsabers, death stars, the enterprise, the force, the holodeck — are really derived from two major IPs and leaning on those elements makes you feel kind of like a copycat. But not having those ends up usually feeling very generic.
By contrast, the most emotionally resonant stuff in fantasy — dungeons, dragons, wizards, elves, dwarves, orcs and trolls – are effectively 'open source' and often lean upon shared and known concepts of history and mythology. Yes, popularized by Tolkien and D&D, but these are all concepts that existed beside those works and, anyway, a lot fewer people read The Hobbit and played D&D than watched Star Wars. Put another way, the 'generic' stuff is just much more approachable.
That's not to say it's impossible. I'm a huge fan of Fifth Element, the Expanse and Dune and there are some great sci-fi gaming licenses that were audacious bits of worldbuilding in their own right, such as Mass Effect, The Outer Worlds and even games like Master of Orion. But it always feels like these games have to work a little harder to create a world that somehow manages to straddle the line between familiar and accessible enough to be approachable while still being unique and alien enough to really capture the imagination.
That final paragraph brings up another piece of paradox: There are many single player sci-fi themed games like Mass Effect with many millions of players. But then when similar themes/gameplay are put into an MMO, mass interest wanes.
Damion again:
I could wax philosophically about 'non-fantasy' MMOs for quite a bit. As one example, at one point we were investigating a Western MMO. One of the problems that we had was the Escalation of Content. In a fantasy game, you have a smooth path of enemies that resonate with you cleanly: rats, giant spiders, goblins, orcs, trolls, dragons, etc. Fantasy games also can pull easily from other cultures — jamming in an area of Norse mythology or Egyptian themes can often work and not feel completely out of left field, and yet still are familiar to players.
By contrast, a standard (non-fantastical) Western world has… mostly humans. Guys in black hats, Native Americans, etc. Yeah, you can make a complete game or world out of it (see Red Dead Redemption), but the amount of enemy variety you get is going to get stretched, especially when you try to provide heroic-scaled challenges and satisfy players for hundreds of hours.
The other thing to talk about with sci-fi is the alien problem:
One thing I've written about frequently is how Asheron's Call lost out to EverQuest for a whole bunch of reasons, but one big one is that Asheron decided that they were NOT going to rehash the same tired D&D bestiary and invent their own weird stuff that can be completely theirs. This just inherently is harder for players to relate to — we have emotional resonance with dragons and trolls and all of that has to be built from scratch if you try to build it on your own.
Well, most sci-fi universes have to invent all that, because your weird alien worlds probably shouldn't be infested with cave trolls. It's a tricky line to walk, though — people need those mental touchstones to be able to find purchase on a new world. It's no wonder that the best fictional sci-fi worlds (Dune, Mass Effect) were built by undisputed masters of big 'w' Worldbuilding.
Doing a single-player game is a lot easier because coming up with enough content that threads this needle is a lot easier for a 30 hour game than for a game that is meant to be played for thousands of hours. The amount of new shit you'd have to come up with to create enough content for a Mass Effect MMO would be huge.
And at the end of the day, on SWTOR, the monsters people were excited about were… the ones they knew from the movies. Sand people, jawas, twi'leks, Sith lords, etc. The new stuff we made up was, by and large, filler. It's just so hard to compete with the stuff people know already, especially in an existing IP.
Read more on Damion's blog, Zen of Design.
I think both he and Scott have accurately pinpointed part of the problem, but I’m not fully satisfied. Again, there are a number of Star Wars-themed single-player games that have been hits.
I suspect there’s another, deeper reason why so few people want to spend dozens of hours in a sci fi-themed virtual world. But I’ll save that for another post.
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Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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