Star Trek MMO

I had a question on what it would take to make a Star Trek MMO given the latest events in the industry.

Earlier in my career I was the lead designer and producer on the Starfleet Command series of games. (I, II, II, Orion Pirates and the Neutral Zone).

I have actually given this a lot of thought. In Starfleet Command II, we created the online dynaverse system where we did all of the combat in a peer to peer fashion, AND at the same time we did a persistent client-server world map for conquering territory and purchasing ships and parts.

It was incredibly difficult to create BOTH P2P and C/S in the same product, and we did it for $1.4 million dollars in 1 year. I am actually very proud of the team and that product. In the end we had a great fan base that was able to serve their own SFC worlds off of simple machines and a cable modem. I do not know of any other team that was able to create something similar for that time or cash.

My understanding of what happened at Perpetual, is that they really took on way too much. When you think of Star Trek there are really TWO core experiences: naval battles in space, and squad-based combat and exploration on planetary surfaces and interior sets. Perpetual took on both.

The space-based naval combat was by far the simpler of the two experiences to deliver on. First of all you have the Starfleet Command series right there. If Perpetual simply clones the the SFC gameplay and pulled a Blizzard on it and made it as cool as possible I am confident that they would have only spent $5m to $10m (although they were based in SF with all of the associated crazy expenses). We sold though in retail nearly about a million copies of all of the various flavors of SFC, and so lets say that you had a business model of free to D/L & try, and a Club-Penguin style premium to spend prestige points. Then I think you could comfortably mode 75,000 active subs at $14.95 a month. being Trek fans they will be relatively price insensitive and you probably could go to $19.95 as long as you had new content.

With the low side of 75,000 subs, you would not need to do much in the way of marketing, again because of the super hardcore Trek audience all you would need is a great clean game. Servers up all of the time, and new ships & weapons to explore. New quests, and so on. Transaction costs of say 20% gives you a net of $12. Keeping customer service costs tight through wikis and strong fansite tools. Being space-based overall bandwidth and physics is not nearly as demanding as other forms of MMOs.

So 75,000 x say $10 after server hosting & bandwidth costs... so $750k a month for live team and investment recoup. For $5m this would be a great investment. Would take about a year to recoup and years 2 though 10 would all be profit with say just a 20-30 person live team eating about half of the $750k.

The real thorny problem is on the squad-based planet exploration business. What makes it hard is the mythology of Star Trek tries to embrace out of the box problem solving that despite how much we cheer when Kirk delivers a solid right cross, the goal is non violent conflict resolution. Non-violent repeatable action dynamics are extremely difficult to deliver on. It sounds great on the VC pitch that you are getting away from smashing a goblin and taking his shit. But throwing dozens of mad-lib style weird ass new-age socialist-libertarian arguments over and over again is probably beyond the powers of mortal game writers to create.

On top of that what are the combat mechanics for the planet-side of the game? Do you create an all-new set of player classes and skills ala Star Wars Galaxies? Where do you go? How long to level up? Where is the healer-tank-dps setup? In the end I think you end up creating either an unsatisfying standard mmorpg or a weird counterstrike like game where violence is super emphasized.

So that side of the game I would not take on at first at all.

Instead, for the planet stuff, I would in phase 2 of the project 18 months into live offer a virtual world expansion that is essentially the housing system. Then somehow toss on some planetary defenses and say if you blow up the mines and space stations and defending craft you auto-win the surface and just not try to deliver a FPS for Trek. However, running around on the planet on a bunch of user decorated spaces is probably the way to go.

Anyways, so those are my thoughts on a Star Trek MMO. If anyone wants me to make the space-based naval battle one I described, I will do it out here in Seoul Korea, and I know we could get it up into beta in 18 months and less than $5m.

-Erik <div

Originally posted on LiveJournal