The next session I attended was a panel discussion on the future of MMOs.  Question 1 solicited general agreement: "can you be successful without outside IP?".  Basically "it depends" with most agreement the larger the project the more important established IP becomes to draw in the crowds you'll need to break even.

The next question had the same "it depends" response: are MMOs going cross-platform, launched on PC and consoles at the same time?  But a pattern started to emerge: Jack Emmert from Cryptic taking more, uhm, shall we say "evangelical" viewpoints with the others, especially Ray Muzyka (BioWare) defaulting to: "start with the game, then go where the audience is, and that will determine which platforms to use.

The next question set off the fireworks: "Micropayments: a viable North American business model?".  Jack was adamantly opposed to micropayments giving plenty of personal examples of how subscriptions are valuable to him (cable, phone, etc.) and that micropayments would never be a viable model.  When Min Kim (Nexon) dryly retorted "well, it's 85% of our business model and we seem to be doing fine" the audience erupted in applause.  The remaining dynamic for that exchange were pros and cons of different models, and ultimately a panel agreeing that many bizdev types are too quick to jump onto the "micropayments is THE model!" bandwagon and it goes back to first things first: what is the game, who is the audience, THEN decide the right business models that best work with that specific environment. 

The next question looked at the growing cost of MMO development, with the panel seeing a bifurcation of the market into blockbusters and low-budget.  Each studio discussed how they deal with that, but one thing I think they missed was that this is the model Hollywood has been operating under for decades, especially since the rise of the Independent Film movement.  There's definitely something they could learn from that experience, but there wasn't one mention of how Hollywood's been dealing (and NOT dealing) with this issue.

THe panel was then opened up to audience questions.  The first was whether SciFi as a genre could be successful as Fantasy, with Bioware speaking for the entire panel when they said: "go back to the game.  Have a great idea and it won't matter the genre.  Before StarWars, scifi was viewed as a niche film genre, afterwards EVERYONE wanted to produce a scifi film".

The next question was a rambling thing about UGC and rights and value; the panel didn't understand it and neither did I…and with 5 minutes left in the session took that as my exit cue.