Virtual Worlds #18: Underachieving and Under Assault

Last week brought worrying news for players of Auto Assault, NCSoft and Net Devil's three month old vehicular-combat MMO. In order to "allow more community-oriented play" the often sparsely populated US and European servers are being merged into a single US-located server. While it might be a great step for international relations, it could also bode ill for the game's long-term survival prospects -- although it scored well with the critics it hasn't caught the gaming public's imagination, and already pundits are foretelling its doom.

First things first: the server merge is likely to be good news for existing players, at least in the short term. Fewer servers increase the concentration of players, which improves the economy, encourages community, and makes PvP a more fulfilling prospect. But it also indicates Auto Assault is performing below the pre-launch expectations of its creators.

"We are still assessing Auto Assault's performance and can't comment on its current status," was all that NCSoft said last month, in the wake of a round of layoffs at its Austin-based division. It's hardly a ringing endorsement, and probably with good reason. Best available data? The usually reliable web site MMOGchart.com puts Auto Assault's current subscriber base at about 11,000.

Let's be honest: 11,000 isn't many subscribers. At all. Although each one of those players is paying their way, you can't run an MMOG on $165,000 a month for long. It'll be especially galling that Auto Assault is starting at 11,000 -- Horizons, while generally considered a dismal failure, peaked at around 35,000 in 2004. The bean-counters at NCSoft must be looking hard at its future.

All of this is a great shame, because there's nothing particularly wrong with Auto Assault -- at least, there's nothing particularly wrong with it that isn't also true of the entire massively multiplayer genre. Sure, it's derivative, has rather dull quests, and PvP is not as relevant as it could be, but you could probably say that about six-million-and-counting World of Warcraft, too. People like derivative, within reason, and Blizzard's critical and commercial success is evidence of that.

But the odds were stacked against the game from the beginning. People who played the notoriously prolonged beta in its early stages, when it was a bit of a mess, didn't touch the released game based on that experience. Then there's the contingent of gamers who played the beta in its later, smoother stages, and liked it...but sated their vehicular-combat appetites in the process, and didn't feel the need to stump up the green for more of the same. If the beta is as much a marketing opportunity as a testing one -- as is increasingly the case these days -- Auto Assault reversed over its own toes.