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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:
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Wagner James Au / New World Notes 