"One of the things I take pride in: every MMO I've ever made is still live today," says Jack Emmert, who rejoined Cryptic Studios as CEO back in January.
That's an impressive claim in a famously punishing genre, especially when you consider Emmert has been in the business for more than 25 years. His previous releases include City of Heroes, Star Trek Online, Neverwinter, Champions Online, and DC Universe Online, all of which are still alive and kicking. (City of Heroes was shut down by NCSoft in 2012, but has since been revived by fans on private servers.)
In the US and Europe, we've seen a few high-profile MMO cancellations recently, like Amazon shutting down New World: Aeternum and reportedly cancelling a Lord of the Rings MMO, as well as Microsoft stopping work on ZeniMax Online's long-in-development Project Blackbird. But Emmert maintains the demand is still there. "People want MMOs, and the sales of New World proved it. But I don't believe that the infrastructure and the strategy was there to sustain it, and so ultimately they shut it down."
Video Game Insights estimates that New World has sold around 10 million units across Steam, PlayStation and Xbox. Emmert says it's clear that the market is out there.
"I think that the idea that the MMO crowd doesn't exist is belied by the number of players who are still in World of Warcraft, or in my games, or in the Daybreak games, or whatever. They want something new." He points to the MMO Ashes of Creation, which shut down earlier this year after a difficult launch, but that had gathered an army of backers on Kickstarter, raising $3.2 million through the platform. "There were a lot of people following that game for a reason."
He was pleased to see Daybreak announce earlier this year that it was bringing back the original 1999 version of EverQuest as EverQuest Legends. "I hope it does really well," he says. "I think it's a great idea. Nostalgia works. There's no new MMOs out there in the West, and so there's a whole class of people that would love to jump in that maybe are intimidated by EverQuest today, but if you could get on the ground fresh, maybe you'd give it another look."
Keep it simple
Emmert thinks the secret to a long-lasting MMO is to efficiently target a niche rather than trying to please everyone.
He says that large publishers tend to come in with the idea of competing with World of Warcraft. "So in their minds, they needed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and they also needed to appeal to the widest possible audience."
But what this tends to result in is somewhat vanilla titles, he says. "These new MMOs or MMO-adjacent games become so watered down by the expectations that it's got to be everything. And so you see games that are basically features, but without any soul... And so they fail, and you've seen it over and over again."
Instead, he thinks, publishers and studios need to "establish a reasonable budget with a reasonable projection, stick to it, and have a very distinct vision of what you're trying to do."
It doesn't need to be overly complicated, he adds, pointing out that the initial concept for Neverwinter was: "Kill shit and take their loot. That was it, over and over again. And make it fun." The fact that this Dungeons & Dragons title is still going some 13 years later is testament to the success of the formula.
"A major publisher would have said to this game, 'Oh well, you're going to need to build your own house, and you're going to need to cut down forests: What's going to differentiate you from World of Warcraft?' And when I made Neverwinter, I never even thought like that. I was just trying to make the experience of what I had work. I didn't worry about competitors. I didn't worry about the X factor that's going to make me stand out. Just didn't even think about it."
Emmert thinks the main thing is to target a specific audience. "I'm a niche developer in the grand scheme of things, because I identify – like [with] Warhammer – something with a passionate fan base, and then I try my best to create an authentic experience." Emmert was working on a Warhammer title at the NetEase-owned studio Jackalyptic Games, before it was shut down by the Chinese company in 2025.
With a tightly focused scope and a laser focus on the audience, he thinks that it's possible to create an MMO on a relatively limited budget. "The thing is, players don't mind, it's the publishers who thought you needed a bajillion number of things," he says.
"For example, I will run the same goddamn dungeon a hundred times as long as the loot is worth it. So it's not that I need a gajillion number of dungeons. What I need is to make sure the progression is worth it. In fact, I enjoy doing things a gajillion number of times, because each time I get a little bit better, and then all of a sudden I'm an expert and I'm telling other people what to do. But other people will say, 'Well, that's impossible, people get bored or whatever'. That misunderstands the point."
He gives the example of Fellowship, a title from Cryptic Studios' parent company, Arc Games, which is based around raids. "And that's it. That's the game. Great concept." All something like that needs, he argues, is to be continually fed with new content and to have a vision for growth beyond the initial launch.
The key thing is to keep the scope under control. "Don't go nuts," he says. "You just start with something, and if you have a committed live team, you can grow it into whatever the players want. In fact, it's even bad to launch a game with one million features and a ton of content, because you don't know yet what the players really want, not really. So you're wasting a whole bunch of time and energy on stuff which they might not ever touch. In which case, what was the point?"
"The launch does not need to be everything with an MMO. It does not need to be 200 hours of unique content. It just flat out doesn't." Running the same dungeon multiple times is perfectly fine at the start, he thinks, when there should be a focus on economical use of assets and environments. "But the key is that the game launches, and then three months later there's something new, and three months later there's something new… And once you do that, the players are sold."
The aim should be to create a meaningful sense of progression, even if the game itself relies on repetition. "Usually it's, 'Do I feel that I'm earning something that's going to tackle something new in my way [like a new enemy type]', or, alternatively, 'Is it something that will help me master something that's already hard?'"
Cryptic history
Emmert was a part of Cryptic Studios at its very beginning in 2000. He rose to become CEO in 2011, but left a few years later to join DC Universe Online maker Daybreak. In 2022, he established the NetEase-owned studio Jackalope Games, whose name was later changed to Jackalyptic Games. "We couldn't trademark Jackalope Games," he explains. "There were too many entities called Jackalope."
When NetEase pulled out of Jackalyptic in 2025 – one of a number of North American NetEase studios to be affected that year – Emmert spent a while "running around trying desperately to find a home for my studio," he says. "Ultimately, that wasn't successful." He then spent "about a month pondering what the future was going to be" before landing back at Cryptic Studios.
Cryptic had been on a roller-coaster ride of owners, first being bought by Atari in 2008, then Perfect World, and then Embracer, before a management buyout saw the studio being spun out in 2025 under the ownership of Arc Games, itself an Embracer refugee.
"After I saw the announcement of them pulling away from Embracer, I reached out to them just to say, 'Hey, what's going on?'," recalls Emmert. "And I think the conversation just naturally led to us discussing me coming back."
"Is Cryptic going to make single-player RPGs? Is Cryptic going to make a new MMO?"
Now he has returned to the fold, he says his number one focus is to grow and reinvigorate Cryptic's existing MMOs: Neverwinter, Champions Online, and Star Trek Online. "It's been a challenging few years for Cryptic," he acknowledges, so he wants to make sure players know that "we're supporting these games, are 100% committed to them," and are doing "the best that we can" to fix issues and add new features.
After that, he wants to ask questions about the future. "What is our strategy over the next several years? What is it we're going to do? Is Cryptic going to make single-player RPGs? Is Cryptic going to make a new MMO? If so, what MMO would it be? And also, what technology do you use? Do we use our own engine? Do we use Unreal? Do we use Unity? I don't know.
"So these are questions that we really need to explore. Then once we've identified them, it's much easier to say, 'Okay, well this is what our next game should be.' We want to have a plan. We don't want to just go with the whims of what we think the market really needs at the moment. I think that would be a mistake."
Emmert has enjoyed being back in charge of the games he worked on all those years ago. "They've changed so much in the ten years I've been gone. So it's been fun getting to see some of the new stuff that's been added and learning about the new game systems."
The games have a solidly stable number of players, even if they're nowhere near World of Warcraft numbers. "This is my experience, that MMOs reach a status point of, 'Hey, here are your hardcore fans, they're never going to leave you'," says Emmert. The aim now is to encourage lapsed players to dive back in. "After 15-plus years, these games have accumulated millions of players that have come through, because it's free to play. Getting them to come back to try [what is] hopefully an improved product – well, that's an easy sell."
But if – or when – Cryptic does turn its hand to making a new game, Emmert is adamant that success will depend on the speed of prototyping and preproduction, an aspect that he thinks is gaming's Achilles heel.
"The cost to figure out whether a game sucks or not is really high," he says, comparing it to the movie industry, where a script can be rapidly produced and then accepted or rejected. With a new game concept, by contrast, "you have to prototype it, you have to get it up and running – so a lot more gets spent in gaming than in films just to figure out whether something is worth it or not. And that's really what's killing profit margins."
"The cost to figure out whether a game sucks or not is really high"
He thinks there are ways to make prototypes more quickly, but he's not sure whether the industry can reorient to embrace them. We point out that some studios have started making rough and ready proof-of-concept prototypes in Roblox.
"It's hard for me to imagine that EA is going to embrace that strategy," he responds. "What happened is that EA, Microsoft, all these guys, they modelled their business off of the software industry. But in the software industry, you know that at the end of the day, you're going to get Microsoft Word – it's just a matter of time before you get a product that works. In gaming, you have no clue. And so that's the problem, that's the biggest problem."
But when it comes time to work on Cryptic's next game, Emmert thinks he has an advantage over the big players. "I think I'm going to eat their lunch, because I know how to prototype quickly. I know how to make stuff inexpensively. I'm not trying to be everything in a box of rocks. I know who I am: I make niche games."
He says his definition of "niche" could still mean millions of players, but he suspects that his contentment to focus on titles with limited appeal might be why the "big companies" have never come knocking. "There's probably a reason why EA never wanted to hire me."