Turbine: MMOs to Consoles Panel Coverage

Joystiq has kicked up some coverage of Turbine’s “MMOs to Consoles” panel discussion at this year’s GDC Austin, during which VP of product development Craig Alexander had some interesting points to make. After claiming that the Xbox 360 is easier to develop for than the PlayStation 3, Craig goes on to say that the future of the MMO is on consoles:

After a brief history of the MMO from the 1980s to the present, Alexander claimed that the fifth generation of MMOs will be MMOs on consoles. He pointed out that the MMO took ten years to mature on the PCs, and using history as a guide, he thinks that MMOs will revolutionize the console in the same way they helped grow the PC. It’s been a long time since the graphical MUD Shadow of Yserbius came out in 1992, up to 12 million subscribers in WoW today.

He mentioned that Fable 2, Fallout 3, and Oblivion have all sold more than three million copies each, and that PC titles rarely ever hit that level. So why not develop MMOs for consoles? Alexander calls them a superior MMO platform. “It’s the 360 and the PS3 where we really finally have the hardware and the storage capacity to develop what we consider more traditional MMOs with lots of content …” Sorry Wii owners, “The hardware in the Wii more closely resembles the previous generation than the current one. It’s just not there yet.”

Turbine’s goal is to create MMOs for the consoles that look as good as Fable 2 and Fallout 3, but are also as good as the best MMOs. Can they pull it off? He presents a strong argument, as did Valve in 2008 who presented a similar panel. If you want to see the slides from that presentation you can download them right here. But as with any project, we’ll never know until we play it. We noticed Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart in the audience, so it’s possible we’ll see a minor MMO boom on the consoles in the next couple of years.