The White Wolf thread spawned an interesting discussion, once you cut through the mindless flamewar, about Grey Shards. A Grey Shard is a server emulator for an MMO, with those for Ultima Online being the most common. The debate is, put simply, between “Grey shards are the spawn of Satan” and “Information wants to be free, yo.” As usual, the ‘yo’ crowd are the ones not trying to make money off the product.
Jaycen points out (quite correctly in my mind) that there is a clear parallel between White Wolf’s recent antics and how Ultima Online’s actions and direction nudges players who disagree with those directions to play on Grey Shards. What other choice do you have if you think Elves in UO are an abomination?
The problem is that building content for MMOs is enormously expensive – they require an order of magnitude more content than standalone titles – and as such, the business model of them depends on not having a significant number of people syphoned off by free shards. Saying that the exiled have to buy the client is actually contrary to reality – many of these shards run older versions of the game they are emulating, as such, buying the most recent client for the game frequently won’t work at all. In these cases, you have to download an older version of the client – which allows you to bypass paying anything.
So while we’re building projections depending on getting $120 bucks per customer to pay for the massive amount of content that we’re creating, some people are getting the game experience (albeit usually a lesser one) for the total price of the time it takes to download it. This, understandably, makes the people trying to pay their rent building these things mad.
What is unknown is how many people are lost – i.e. how many of these people would be playing on Origin’s servers if UO didn’t exist. Many of them likely would be playing something else entirely. In the case of UO, you could even make the argument that the Grey Shards have actually extended the reach and the popularity of the game — but that’s really, in my opinion, up to the guys who own that license. In the case of smaller games like Meridian and the Realm (yes, both have had grey shards), there’s little question that an emulated server is stealing directly from the population of the primary game, and as such, it’s not a huge surprise when the people running those react very viscerally about the topic.
Personally, I wish one of these companies WOULD release their source code. I think that if UO or EQ were to officially do so, they’d get quite a bump in publicity and get an explosion of interest on their primary game if they were to do so. Of course, it’s pretty unlikely that will ever happen, if for no other reason than most code bases are too embarrassing to be shown to the public once they hit the 5 year mark of patchwork code and emergency hotfixes.
Some things to think about.
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