Shift of joystick to make a point in online gaming

“I don't think there's any other field where you can find a failure rate this high and still find people willing to invest,'' said Mark Jacobs, general manager of the Fairfax, Virginia, game studio EA Mythic.

Jacobs was talking about his own section of the video game industry — the realm of online games where players pay a monthly subscription fee to participate as characters in a virtual world.

According to him, in the past 11 years, fewer than ten titles have met with some level of financial success.

Mythic's new title, Warhammer Online, went on sale recently after three years of development.

Jacobs said: “You have to spend $50 million (Dh183 million) these days if you want to compete with the big guys.''

Most game titles bring in a one-time purchase price of $50 million (Dh183 million) but games such as Warhammer Online also bring in a $15 (Dh55) monthly fee for web access to their virtual worlds.

World of Warcraft (WoW), the popular title in this genre, is a money-minting machine with 10 million subscribers.

New horizons

Frank Gibeau, president of EA Games, the division of the publisher that owns Mythic, said the popularity of WoW has shown this market's potential.

“The game industry is only just starting to scratch the surface for the opportunity out there,'' he said.

Gibeau said this segment of the industry has had some expensive failures but if no other “massively multiplayer online (MMO)'' games have been hits in WoW's wake, it was because they haven't been good enough.

Underdog scores

“We're the first quality MMO to release since WoW's release,'' he said.

Mythic has been the successful underdog before. Years ago, when the local studio was a small start-up, Mythic's title Dark Age of Camelot competed against a Sony title EverQuest for gamers' attention and dollars.

Camelot had a peak subscriber base of 250,000, compared with a half-million subscribers for EverQuest, the dominant title at the time.

“They came out of nowhere and built a big and successful business,'' said Gibeau of Jacobs and his team.

Gibeau was a WoW player himself; in this industry, a hands-on familiarity with WoW is nearly a given.

Gibeau said he gave up the habit recently and plays Warhammer instead.

In Warhammer Online, players starting the game choose to side with one of two factions — they can fight on the side of the “Empire'', or they can pick a role as one of the sinister-looking members of “Chaos''.

Mythic's game designers figure they have put in enough quests and adventures to provide around 200 hours of content for the average player.

Fantasy tale

Much of Warhammer Online's action is the same as fantasy-oriented games: Players take on the game's assigned missions to win loot and buy better weapons, armour or spells, so that they can, say, take on a more powerful class of monster.

But Mythic's new game has a few innovations, as well. In many online titles, the worlds' virtual cities remain controlled by one side or another.

In Warhammer, by contrast, players banding together in online battles can grab control of parts of the game's virtual world and claim them for one side or the other — for the Empire or for Chaos.