MMOs on consoles face many problems

The MMO is one of the few genres that really and truly struggles on consoles. It and the RTS are the bane of the console industry, and while both genres have their bright spots on consoles and are constantly being tackled by developers, there are some reasons they don’t work. Rob Pardo, Blizzard’s executive vp of game design, believes he knows why MMOs aren’t making the leap so well. Speaking with Industry Gamers he laid the cold hard truth out.

“…there’s a lot of challenges. I’d say challenge #1 is the input device. So if you’re going to port a game like WoW how does that work? Do you ship a keyboard and a mouse? Do you try to make a game that [adapts] to all the different controls and buttons? That’s a porting issue. The bigger issue would be things like hard drives. I think WoW now is about 10 gigs and we’re always pushing out more content. That’s something cloud computing could eventually solve, but in the current generation of consoles that’s a lot to deal with. You’d have to eat almost the entire hard drive, and there are Xbox consoles [sold to consumers] that don’t have hard drives. So that’s a big issue,” Pardo explained.

He continued, “Another big issue is how to actually do patches because the certification process is pretty arduous to do that. I know that’s something Microsoft is trying to work out so you can do more updates and the certification process is faster, but it’s not going to be nearly as fast as we can do it. We just put it through our QA department and upload to our servers. … Then, the other big issue is the business model. Right now, Microsoft and Sony charge platform fees for retail, but if you do an MMO there and it’s subscription-based, they’re going to want a cut of the subscription revenue too, and so that becomes a hurdle. So there’s definitely a lot of hurdles right now for doing MMOs on a console, but it all can be overcome and I think in the next generation of consoles it’ll be much easier.”

So the issues are the controls, the platforms and the money – that’s pretty much everything, isn’t it?