There are probably many ways in which an MMO can try to stick out of the crowd. Having tens of millions of subscribers, being based upon a major franchise or coming with some revolutionizing in-game mechanics. Becoming an MMO-TV hybrid though isn’t one of the things you’d probably be thinking about.
Nonetheless the SciFi channel did come up with the concept in corporation with Trion World Network. The details are still sketchy at best, heck at first it was so unclear that a single miss report on G4 TV stating it would involve stargate for half the web suddenly in shock. Wasn’t a stargate mmo already in development after all?
With the days the calm came back a bit as the error was rectified and just recently some more details on the TV-MMO hybrid have been given.
The question which stands with something like this is of course how realistic will it be, and then I’m not talking in terms of the game or the shows genre but whether it’ll work out as succesfull or not.
As with any show one of the major issues always is the fact that content simply isn’t available in Europe, will European players have to wait years before seeing the actual episodes or will the episodes become available online for the members to see as well? If so, does it come with an additional price tag to view these episodes? In all honesty the SciFi channel doesn’t sound to me like an orginization which would be airing episodes for free after all.
Are the demographics of MMO gaming in favor or against something like this, with an average age of 26.6 years old for the MMO gamer will there be enough potential amongst the players for watching the series or is the average gamer simply “too young”. The terribly low count of women in MMO games being just 15% versus the 43% of female SciFi viewers and rising doesn’t really stand in line with on each other either. How they plan to tackle these difference hasn’t been mentioned yet.
Overall I find it hard to imagine how they’d incorporate the game settings within the show though, simply airing gameplay footage within the live-action material would occur to me as rather bizzare. Games look good, but just not that good. Also the average player events, well it’s not really prime time material now is it? More details on how SciFi expects to see this all happening will to be awaited, it’s definitely an interesting concept though.
