AUSTIN, Texas – Big players in the massively multiplayer online games space say they don't need a World of Warcraft killer, as long as they can keep expanding the audience for MMOs.
On Monday at South By Southwest, a panel composed of top executives from Zynga, BioWare, Nexon and Funcom tackled several questions about the MMO genre, which now encompasses games from the free-to-play Facebook timewaster Mafia Wars all the way to BioWare's lavish Star Wars: The Old Republic. Much of the discussion centered around incorporating the features of social games like FarmVille into the rest of the genre.
SXSW has posted high-quality audio of the panel.
"I don't think the market necessarily requires someone to fail in order for another group to succeed," said BioWare cofounder Ray Muzyka in response to Wired.com's question toward the end. "When you bring in a new license, like we did with Star Wars... we know there's millions and millions of potential players that we can bring into the fold just because of that," he said.
"I don't mean to be perhaps out of line, but I think I know what Ray's team needs to do to be successful," offered Zynga's Erik Bethke. "I think mastering the viral channels and the social graphs... I think they need to get to the point that 250,000 or 500,000 people a day are downloading (Old Republic) on their own, just coming in from friends, and get there through science-based metrics... you have all the data in the world about why you are currently failing, and you can correct it in real-time."
SXSW: The Great MMO Hope [direct .mp3 link, right-click and save]
Photo credit: Min Kim, Ray Muzyka, Nicolai Nickelsen and Erik Bethke share a joke during their SXSW panel (James Merithew/Wired.com)
