Massively multiplayer online role-playing games that used to be known as the home of fantasy, magic and swordplay, but now it's been known as a game with different themes and story settings that make this genre deepens the meaning of role playing and interactions between players.
"I think something very big is happening in online play in general," said John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, the company behind DC Universe Online, Free Realms and EverQuest.
What makes this start looks to be changes happen when Sony launch MAG on Playstation 3. FPS game developed by those who successfully released SOCOM, reportedly supports battle up to 256 players at a time. Originally MAG looks like a standard military shooter game, but it entered with the elements of MMO, where players can track their characters when joining into one of three factions.
"It's about getting a large number of people to play" Smedley said. "It's a huge notch above current-generation shooters."
And MAG was not the only game that incorporate elements of the current popular FPS with elements of role-playing.
"I think the lines for what you call a massively multiplayer online game are being blurred," he said. "Now an MMO just needs to be a game where a large number of people can interact. It doesn't mean it needs a subscription or to have micro transactions."
While Smedley and team at Sony Online Entertainment works to develop both pay to play and free to play massively online games, they also keep an eye out on the less traditional forms of massive online games, especially those made by smaller, indie developers, like RIOT Games on their product, League of Legends.
League of Legends, which has players controlling heroes as they try to take down an enemies fortress, isn't really massive. Less than a dozen gamers can play in a single match at a time. But Smedley says that the number of people playing matches at any given time is staggering, something that reminds him that the massive in massively multiplayer doesn't necessarily have to be in a single game. It can instead by a mammoth community built around a single game.
"These guys are doing amazing numbers," he said. "Is it an MMO? It's definitely not an MMO but they are rivaling MMO concurrency numbers."
The diversity and complexity of this the ever-evolving massively multiplayer genre means that the PC, despite the decades of naysayers, remains a powerful and robust gaming platform. It's just having successes that aren't as easy to track as are the sales of boxed games in a retail store.
"People say that a lot of the PC industry has declining sales," he said. "But really it is the things we are measuring that are declining. The tools aren't there to measure the games we play."
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