Cryptic: The MMO Industry is Sick

In the same GDC roundtable we discussed earlier, Cryptic’s Jack Emmert explained that – in his view – the MMO industry is sick.

Emmert blamed the questionable health of the MMO business on the runaway success of World of Warcraft, pointing out that Lord of the Rings Online is the only MMO released after WOW to break the 100,000 subscriber mark. In a friendly dig at Blizzard’s senior vice president of game design Rob Pardo, sitting on the same panel, he said that other MMO developers had essentially “worked QA for you, Rob”.
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At the same panel, Nexon’s Min Kim agreed that developers trying to steal WOW’s users would lose. But he contended that his company had found great success and a growing market by producing simple free-to-play games supported by micro-transactions, such as Maple Story and Kart Rider. However, Emmert doesn’t like micro-transactions one bit, saying “they make me want to die”.