The Business: The Reality of a Normie-Required Gaming Business

Today, we return to the reality of game design and the needs of commercial viability. Specifially, we're again talking about MMORPGs.

MMORPGs are very expensive and tedious to produce, and about as much to maintain. Because of these factors, you cannot get investment for a MMORPG aimed at a narrow target audience; the investors will demand a much wider audience in order to guarantee an acceptable return on investment, and "acceptable" means far more than you may expect if you have no familiarity with how they think.

In practical terms, this means that you have to attract and retain Normiebux to succeed with MMORPGs. That means that you have to cater to Normies as your core audience, and to succeed in catering to Normies you must remember the following: Normies will not put in work for their entertainment.

I have gone over this previously, so I shall summarize here. Normies, regarding entertainment:

• Consider entertainment and work to be polar opposites.
• Entertainment is effortless farming of dopamine hits, simple to do and intuitive in comprehension that thrills and excites but isn't at all difficult, and not at all reliant on others to succeed and has no regular or long-duration commitment.
• Work is deliberate effort towards a practical reward, routinely tedious and often non-intuitive or counter-intuitive as well as frustratingly complicated or difficult and often requires others to get it done and often has long-term or regular commitments.
• Entertainment, therefore, is nothing more than a thrill ride in a theme park that makes no demands upon them and has immediate payoff.

You can manage these expectations to a limited extent, but there are hard limits to how far you can do that without requiring external interventions from beyond the medium.

For the would-be MMORPG creator, this is what you have to accept:

• Your core player is a Normie.
• Normies won't go out of their way for anything for any reason. They log in, play, and log off. No guides, no videos, no Discord servers- NOTHING. If you do not tell them what they do and how they do it, in the manner one instructs a child, they will get frustrated fast.
• Normies will not work for their entertainment. If it feels anything other than effortless thrill riding, they bail and take their Normiebux with them- and then they tell all their Normie friends that your game is shit. Normies do not DO "Git Gud".
• Normies interpret sudden violations of their expectations as bad game design. This means that suddden difficulty jumps, usually brought about by sudden violations of expectations, are regarded as damage and they react with one of three responses every single time.
  • Skip: Done if they don't have to do it, but what is beyond it is either necessary or desirable.
  • Quit: Done if they don't need to do it and what is beyond is neither necessary nor desirable.
  • Force: Done if they need to do it and what is beyond is either necessary or desirable.

The last option in particular needs to be specified more. The Normie doesn't refine his skill when faced with difficulty; he brute-forces the solution with raw power, and in a MMORPG context that means one thing: grinding levels and gear. He goes out of his way to grind up whatever is necessary to gain the character levels required to brute-force his way through, and he grinds his way to acquire the overpowered gear required to do the same, and he resents the game for making him do this all along the way.

Difficulty, to a Normies, means putting in work. That is interpreted as damage and handled accordingly.

Do you now see why so many MMORPGs, and other console/PC RPGs with similar budgets, are so often like this? It's because the investors demand Normiebux to get that return.

The winning design paradigm is a core experience that is the effortless thrill ride. The quests are not difficult or tedious. The group content is likewise straightforward and short in duration--about 10 minutes is the limit for smaller groups, and tolerable out to 20 for larger ones--and has no expectation of regular attendance over a long period of time.

From that core comes a very firm gate. The wise developer explicitly tells the Normie "This is a very difficult gameplay mode, and it is often tedious content. It is entirely optional; you do not need to do this at all, and you will be expected to put in work to succeed, so you will not be penalized for refusing to participate. Go do something else if this does not appeal to you. You have been warned."

That is where the hardcore gamer stuff gets put--the Savage/Ultimate/Mythic raiding, the Extreme Trials, the top-end PVP, etc.--and it is best handled to have no material impact on the overall game, both in terms of rewards or in terms of prestige. Normies should feel--not just think or know, but feel (since that's how Normies go about their lives)--like skipping that is just fine and they can go play something else or go on a vacation because there is no Fear Of Missing Out. No FOMO? No problem.

Sadly, the MMO world hasn't quite figured that out yet, but the better ones are getting there.

As for how you can fuck this up, I'll give specific examples tomorrow.