The Great Tree

[Ashtar]

When Myst was first released back in 1993, there was not much in the way of 3D shooters. We had Wolfenstein 3D and Doom with very crude 3D graphics compared to what we have today. And probably not many families had a computer with a graphics card that could handle it. Then Cyan comes along with a new type of game that revolutionized the gaming industry. It was immersive, beautiful, and thoughtful. Just what Mom and Dad were looking for. It was a big hit, and the rest, as we all know, was history.

Moving forward to the present time, the state of the game industry has changed drastically. Now most basic home computers or game consoles have 3D Graphics chipsets with capabilities that surpass Silicon Graphics workstations of just a few years ago. Most kids don't want the thoughtful and immersive games like Myst or Uru, they want something to blast. Doom-3, Unreal Tournament 2004, and Half-Life II are probably on most kids wish list.

And it seems now most parents have given in to letting Johnny buy his 3D blaster games. After all, if they can take out their frustrations by blasting surreal monsters, then maybe they won't take it to school. Despite the two kids at Columbine, I don't think most people feel that 3D shooters are the cause of todays teenage social problems.

So that leaves Mom, Dad, and a few of us intellectuals to purchase the Adventure games of today. A small market, to be sure. And so far, Cyan has been targeting a segment of that market interested in the Myst storyline. But can they continue to do so and survive? Will they have to break away from the Myst genre and try a different type of Adventure game, or a different type of game altogether? Uru Live was certainly a bold attempt, but too far ahead of it's time. Hopefully it can be revived in the future, but until then, all they can depend on now is the sale of Uru prime, the expansion packs, and the royalties from Myst IV.

So these are my burning questions for today. I'm sure the folks at Cyan are having the same thoughts. Believe me, as a Spokane resident and Myst fan, I want to see Cyan continue as a healthy, innovative company far into the future. But what will it take for it to remain so? I'm sure we don't have all the answers, but it will be interesting to read your thoughts and comments. And no flames please! This is intended just for thoughtful discussion and not Cyan bashing!

Shorah
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Uru Live KI #: 69208

[NSymon]

Doom 3 is on my wish list along with Quake 4 I like what Id Software do with that genre and for me they lead the field in that and what they do is pretty cool. I started out playing online games with Quake 2 back in 97/98. Its interesting to see how far it's come from then.

Anyway to Uru, yes I agree it is very much ahead of it's time. Thank god it is. Maybe it's just me, but there's a lot of sameness, a lot of games repeating a similiar formula that have sold well. I'm all for inovation and trying something new. Even if it doesn't win out, its the attempt at trying that counts. Myst was a revolution, just like Id Software when it launched the first Doom and pioneered shareware. So I'm grateful for these companies that do take these steps and try something new.

[jahuti]

Cyan's fan base is a very different demographic than that for FPS games.
It consists of people of a wide range in age, but favors those above the lowest socioeconomic status. News of Cyan's imminent demise (hypothetic)
would certainly bring money out of the woodwork. In other words, Cyan has some fans with bucks and they wouldn't let the company die.

FPS games attract teenagers, mostly. I doubt that there are many FPS fans over the age of 25, since they drift away from such games by then.

On the other hand, Myst fans are older and have been enjoying the games longer. I think that new fans will stay because of the on-going story, something FPS games distinctly lack.

Cyan won't go away anytime soon. They'll survive.
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jahuti
In the heart of the California wine country.
And it shows...

[CuzinJohn]

I'm sure I've said this before in a handful of different forums, but I DO think Cyan will survive.

The whole MYST line of games draws on a different crowd of gamers. I'm not a HUGE fan of FPS games... tho I have been known to stay up all hours with the Jedi Knight series and the classic American McGee's Alice.

MYST is, um, a little more intellectual. I don't mean that to sound superior in any way, I'm just saying that Doom, Quake, and the like don't have trilogies of novels to fill in the blanks between games.

Frankly, that's what I loved about Uru in it's Live days. I got to meet all of you folks who are just as nuts about the MYST universe as I am. Heck, some of you are MORE nuts than I am... and THAT's saying something.

I like to hope that eventually, kids will grow up and move away from the "frag everything that moves" mentality of games. What's out there for them? Well, I bet the good people from Cyan will have something to play...

Right then, enough prattling...
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KI 182798

Science is how you talk about the universe with words that bind it to a common reality.
Magic is how you talk to the universe with words that it cannot ignore.

[Professor Askew]

Welcome to the Great Tree, jahuti!! Another branch! Glad to have you.
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Professor Daniel Askew - Securing our reality from the machinations of the Station Masters.

[NSymon]

[Ashtar]

[Kehrin]

Hi Jahuti!

Personally, I don't think that Uru was too far ahead of its time. I believe that if Cyan had had the backing to run the game for two years, it would have become able to sustain itself. It had so much potential, and so many of the people who played it are trying to recapture their community activities in games like There, Second Life, and Ryzom.

Right now, according to Grey Dragon, Cyan is living game to game, as do most developers. They get a contract to make a game, the publisher fronts the cost, the developer makes it, and then the developer gets a small percentage of the sales of the game and looks for another contract. If the games sell really well, the developer can build up enough capital to develop whatever game they want. I'm hoping for great sales and a great backer so we can have Uru Reborn!

But in the mean time, Ubisoft offered them a contract to make "Something Else." Rand seemed happy to make it, and said he thought we'd like it. That was quite enough to get me excited about it. I have been asking myself... what would Ubisoft want Cyan to make? I have an idea, but I'm a little hesitant to say it out loud. It's total speculation and I don't want to supercharge the rumor mill with what might be a bad guess, but I'm wondering if all you guys are thinking the same thing I am.

(whispers) We're all longing to see Releeshahn, right?

[Durin Mephit]

With several months behind us since this thread was last touched, and with Until Uru unleashed upon us, and it being late at night and myself feeling a bit of insomnia, I thought I would drop a little speculation about past events and what future Uru may have.

When Uru Live was shut down, Ubi and Cyan both indicated that it wasn't the technological problems that led to its closure. Time and again, they informed everyone that the number of signups was the critical measure of Uru's success, and that the numbers needed simply weren't there. And now, I think I understand that explanation better. It certainly seemed like a poor excuse at the time... but maybe now in hindsight we can consider what it really meant.

Uru, I believe, was a huge, huge gamble. I believe now that Cyan overshot their budget on the game. As the end of their cash neared, Ubi pressured Cyan to put out the game as a standalone box so that it wouldn't be an entire wash if the venture failed. Perhaps some of the money that would otherwise have gone to advertising went into reworking the game for single player. I'm not sure. But, it seems pretty obvious at the end that Cyan was out of money, and had no way to further push the game on the market aside from what Ubi had committed and through word of mouth. In the USA, the advertising for Uru appeared primarily on the SciFi channel, and while a significant part of Uru's audience may overlap SciFi's, it seemed like Ubi ignored Myst's and Riven's prior broad appeal to people who traditionally disliked "computer games."

With money already tight at the ship date for Uru, the technical troubles and Cyan's need for more signups probably went hand in hand in a more vicious cycle than we'd considered before. Consider this scenario: Cyan couldn't afford to pay to fix server problems unless they knew Live was going to eventually pay for it, so they needed the signups, but the technical problems also caused many people to avoid signing up as discussion spread over the internet about how people should "wait for the bugs to be ironed out." Cyan's reliance on word of mouth had backfired.

Even with significantly more cash reserves, I don't believe Cyan could have kept Uru going without a whole lot more signups. The cost of development of new ages, performed rapidly enough to maintain players' interest in the game, could only be justified if there were many people shelling out their hard earned cash from the very beginning. I think Cyan would have needed to have grown just to reach this "fission reaction" type situation, wherein the business model would have become self-sustaining. Anything less would have drained the cash pool until it was empty.

I don't believe this speculation is unjustified when you look at how it took Cyan 5 years to produce Uru, and how little content there really was. The expansion packs contained only material which was mostly complete in November when Uru launched, but needed some rework to be viable as a single-player game. A lot of content in progress was simply tabled because it was nowhere near complete enough to publish.

So, it seems to me that with too few signups, while development -could- theoretically continue on new Ages, players wouldn't want to spend money months-on-end with no new content going online. A "buffer" of some new content - that which we saw in XP1 and XP2 - had been prepared in advance, but Cyan would have had to have published it about on the schedule that they did, if not faster, AND been ready with yet more content to rapidly follow. Look how fast people finished PotS! A lot of folks wouldn't have waited around 2-3 months between puzzle releases, and a staged release of ages like Ahnonay or Er'cana would have driven some people batty.

To do things right, I think Cyan would have needed several semi-independent development teams, each working on new ages, to produce a continual stream of new content and keep players involved. Bottom Line: They needed to grow to reach a critical mass where the influx of money would sustain more development, and the new development would sustain the influx of money.

Cyan burned $12 million on Uru in 5 years. $2,400,000 per year. We all figured that at $15 a pop, they'd have needed 160,000 players to break even... surely they could find that many, yes? But 160,000 probably wasn't enough because Cyan couldn't afford to sustain Uru at "only" $2.4 million a year. Content wouldn't have flowed out fast enough to keep people playing. If we assume Cyan could produce content at twice the speed for twice the cost, then the yearly expenditure rises to 4.8 million, and the number of players needed to break even rises to 320,000.

And that, I believe, explains why Uru Live was shut down.

And where are we today?

The participants now roaming the cavern in Until Uru can be divided easily enough into two groups.

One group is comprised of those who didn't experience Uru Live at all, and were curious enough to drop $6 and investigate. My impression is that there is a high turnover among this group (people spend their $6, get online for a bit, get bored and leave), and with Until Uru's premiere having been a month ago, Cyan has probably seen new registrations drop off considerably. Of course this isn't helped by the defects in Until Uru that are left over from Live, vault imports being disabled on nearly every shard notwithstanding, but there was little Cyan could do about that. They are not going to expend money where it won't pay off, and they shouldn't.

The second group is those few die-hards like myself, and probably you who are reading this... people from Uru Obsession, people from the 'hoods on Uru that took up causes and believed in them, ICly or otherwise. I don't believe there's many of us. Maybe a couple of hundred people at best.

Some of the more popular shards may claim to have seen a thousand registrations, but if those people don't keep coming back... if their involvement with Until Uru was but a fleeting romance... they can't really be counted.

Cyan's handling of Uru this past month, and messages from Chip (especially on Cobbs.ca), have indicated clearly Cyan's intention to focus 100% of their effort on Something Else. Every passing day, Uru's technology is a little more out of date. I believe that if Uru were to ever live again with dedicated support from Cyan, it wouldn't likely happen with the game engine in our hands today, or under the same name. If my speculations above are all correct, Cyan will likely never try it again, so I hope some of my guesses are wrong.

What this all spells out is: Uru, as we know it, is pretty much dead to Cyan. If we want it to grow, it's going to take the hard work of smart hackers and design artists, making new content for free. I'm grateful to Cyan, to Chip, to all of the shard admins for working to make Until Uru what it is today... but it truly is "just a heartbeat" and it doesn't represent what Uru was meant to be. Short of a half-million people marching on Washington to demand the DRC open the cavern properly once again, I don't think Uru ever will be what Cyan had dreamed it would be.
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Durin Mephit * Member of Guild of Messengers - Unless otherwise stated, opinions are mine only and not Guild endorsed.
rel.to | Marten KI: 59474 | Durin M KI: 11883768

[Zander]

[Professor Askew]

Well, Mr. Adrenaline-Can't-Sleep....that was quite a theory. Quite a theory, indeed. LOL I should never have left you alone with your thoughts Marten. Shame on you, too, Mystlander and Ashtar. This man wasn't ready to be by himself.

1)

[Mystlander]

Shorah and welcome, Jahuti, and Zander!

[Zander]

And lo, if I had just looked down the forum a bit, I would have seen the message about somebody called Grey Dragon and new Ages being created with Cyan's blessing at COBBS. So much for me.

Is this true and actually happening? Nothing else in the thread...
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[Professor Askew]

[Mystlander]