Funcom Interview

The guys at CVG had the chance to sit down with Funcom product manager Erling Ellingsen and fire off a handful of questions about the MMORPG industry.

Q: Do you think the genre is expanding too rapidly at the moment?

A: Look at the genre four years ago, when the biggest western massively multiplayer online game was EverQuest. It peaked at about 500,000 players and people were saying that there couldn’t possibly be more room for another game of this type. Then World of Warcraft launched and it has soared to over eight million subscribers, several millions of them in the western market, shattering some of the darkest prophecies the critics delivered.

But while I do not think it’s expanding too rapidly, I am worried about some developers releasing half-hearted games that can’t live up to the high expectations the marketplace now have for these sorts of games.

Not necessarily because they’re not talented enough, but because they’re going into the genre with limited means. Creating these games takes a tremendous amount of resources, both people-wise and money-wise, but especially in terms of using the right technology. These games are hard to make.