Reuniting! But Does It Feel So Good?

We are not seeing just the MMO Industry change, if it’s really even changing at all. What we are seeing is the convergence of Gaming with MMO Gaming, or more to the point, a shift from the development of Games as a Product into Games as a Service, especially using the Free 2 Play model. See Crytek’s announcement at E3 a few days ago for further evidence of this, but any given day browsing Massively (and other /cough “MMO News” sites) will show that increasingly we (the collective “we” as in not only the gaming industry and media but also the players and communities) are diluting “MMO” to mean any online game with more than one player and — here’s the important part — treats said game as a service not a product. Hence, under the Games as a Service umbrella, Diablo 3 is absolutely an “MMO” as we are allowing the acronym to be degraded to mean, despite not qualifying in any sense under the true, original meaning.

Within today’s paradigm what we’ve been seeing is Joystiq blogging about Games as a Product while Massively reports on Games as a Service. I suppose very generally, I’m okay with that except my opinion on the matter is that I think if that is going to be the rule from here on out, that Massively should be renamed to reflect what it has become and is becoming, and hopefully allow “Massively Multiplayer” to retain some meaning and dignity to differentiate it from all the other multitudes of games increasing being designed under the Games as a Service banner.

Otherwise, at this rate, soon an online game of checkers or any other two-player game will be considered “MMO” if it has a monetized service business behind it.

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