Former Elder Scrolls Online boss was told in 2001 that 'There's already enough MMOs out there, no one is ever gonna play a new one'

In a recent interview with MinnMax, ZeniMax Online Studios founder Matt Firor discussed the death of its new MMO, Project Blackbird, as well as his thoughts on the games industry's current economic crisis. The takeaway? While things are bad, he thinks we're still in a boom and bust cycle that will come back around, and he's heard some of this routine before.

MinnMax host Ben Hanson asked if Firor had come into any recent epiphanies about working in games, leading the developer to express his disagreement with analyst Matthew Ball's bombshell report on the state of the industry.

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Essentially, Ball argues that gaming has hit a saturation point, with fewer new people entering the hobby, and companies competing over the remaining audience share with not just each other, but also social media. Gaming is "losing the War for Attention," according to Ball, with short form video in particular representing a major threat to the industry's continued growth and health.

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"That was very, eerily similar to E3 2001, when we went to E3 with Dark Age of Camelot, with no publisher," said Firor. "We met with⁠⁠—I'm gonna say 18, but it was probably five⁠—publishers. And four of them were like, 'There's already enough MMOs out there, no one is ever gonna play a new one. There's Everquest, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call. I mean, really, what are you doing that they can't?"

"Forunately, the fifth one was Vivendi, and they ended up publishing Camelot. It's just cyclical. It's always cyclical. There's always a boom and a bust, and we're riding a pretty weird bubble right now, tech-wise, but I've seen it before."

This prompted Hanson to ask if a new MMO could potentially succeed no matter the market conditions, so long as it was good enough. Firor had a more reserved, perhaps less optimistic answer on that front. "I would like to think that's true," he said, "But there are a lot of really good games out there that nobody knows about.

"Discoverability is a big issue. But in general, if you have the right game with the right features and the right crew that's helping you get the word out to the world, that's the recipe for success. No guarantee, but every game that has been successful has pretty much followed that model."

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I'd like to share Firor's optimism about the cyclical nature of such layoffs, particularly since he lived through them himself, and he draws a compelling parallel between the "saturation point" idea expressed by both Ball and those publishers at E3 2001, but the sustained nature of gaming's current layoff crisis gives me pause. It's been three years of this, with no signs of slowing down.

I don't think gaming is too big to fail, but it's too diffuse for there to stop being cool new games to play: Too many developers working at varied levels of complexity on every continent. What seems to be an open question is whether you can reliably live a good, dignified life making games, something one gaming CEO recently described as a "romantic idea."