SWTOR, Warhammer, 38 Studios Failures Linked To Weak MMO Buying

Written by: Jason Winter (@winterinformal) | May 23, 2012 3:35 pm

84 Comments

Nobody is buying MMOs any more. Not a single person. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

So sayeth Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter in an article on Joystiq. Referring to the recent troubles at 38 Studios and BioWare, Pachter said:

“Nobody is buying MMOs after Star Wars fizzled. I think value is low, probably $20 million or so. There is just no demand for game assets right now, as THQ proved when it tried to sell the Warhammer MMO. I think [Electronic Arts] could step in, since they are the publisher, so you might see some alternative way to get 38 some bridge financing.”

Electronic Arts denied any involvement in directly acquiring the Amalur IP.

So he’s not referring to individual sales as much as he’s referring to sales of assets, on a corporate scale. But is all this tied to SWTOR‘s problems?

Or maybe, as ArenaNet‘s Christopher Lye postulated, companies are realizing that making “safe” games — like SWTOR and Warhammer Online — are actually more of a risk than actually trying something different?

And as for 38 Studios and Copernicus? Well, the way that company looks right now, would you be backing up a truck full of millions of dollars to buy it?

Didn’t think so.

Maybe the statement needs to be amended to say nobody is buying “questionable” MMOs right now. Maybe we need better MMOs, not more or flashier ones. Just a thought.

SWTOR, Warhammer, 38 Studios Failures Linked To Weak MMO Buying

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http://twitter.com/grizzlyGummy Glajummy

I swear to god, I clicked this link fully expecting the analyst to be Pachter.

You didn’t disappoint.
http://www.facebook.com/SexyQuang Quang-Vien Hua Nilsen

MMORPG is not dead at all, its going into a new generation. 1. of all, you have TERA with aim based combat. You have Guild Wars 2 with proper WvW and dynamic events. You have ArcheAge which is also having new features to mmorpg that is looking pretty good.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Jason-Baesel/11612845 Jason Baesel
  
  I think what we will see happen is a slow saturation of the mmo market starting. Not necessarily immediately, but I do not doubt that companies (especially American companies) will stop/slow down investing in MMOs. With many games not lasting on a huge scale, they are getting afraid. But we’ll see.
- MMO_Doubter
  
  “Proper WvW”?
  
  With P2W and no population balance, Yeah, right.
  - http://www.kaiketsu.enjin.com/ Corey Jenkins
    
    lol you cant even back up your P2W accusations my friend, and its still in beta, so how are you going to say anything about population balance yet? epic fail troll…
    - http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
      
      PTW came up in the BWE WvW event. If you can really buy the mats for siege engines, that would be a huge advantage at the start of the WvW cycle. Someone provide multiple arrow carts, which was devastating on any attackers.
      
      Foreshadowing of population balance issues can up on Darkhaven. We quickly dominated the map and Anet had to reshuffle the World after 12 hours.
      
      There were issues with the adopted Australian servers, they would dominate when they were awake and the US servers would dominate when the Aussies were asleep.
      - http://www.kaiketsu.enjin.com/ Corey Jenkins
        
        I understand the concerns, but first off we have to remember that its a beta and not a demo. So everything is pretty much subject to change or at least tweaked and so far Arenanet as been very good about the way they have designed their game, and im sure if something that is obviously gamebreaking made its way into the system they would certainly change it. unfortuantely you can’t always test these in beta, and have to see how they are in a live environment. hence why MMO’s undergo tons of patches even after launch
        
        Secondly, the gems are part of the trade market and follow the same rules of supply and demand. If everyone is trying to trade gems for gold at launch then the amount of gold you get for them will drop significantly probably down to a few copper, which at that point most players will not want to spend 5-10 bucks on a few copper that would not be enough to get them a siege weapon to begin with. And who cares if 1 guy has a lot of money to buy them..1 guy cant win WvW which will take place over two week periods.
        
        As far as darkhaven dominating the map the first twelve hours, thats pretty much expected, I mean if they could find a way to get everyone ever who is going to play GW2 on at the same time, then im sure they would. Realisticly though people are going to log on at different times, and since everyone and their mom wanted to play with gamebreaker during the beta that server filled up the fastest which is why they were able to take control over everything so quickly during the first day. We did see later though once other people started joining the beta and they reset WvW again then things become a lot more balanced. This is why WvW has that 2 week reshuffle and a ranking system to match servers accordingly. Things will always be hectic near the beginning because no one is going to know what servers will dominate in WVW and what servers wont. As the weeks go by however things will become noticeably more balanced. Same with the Australian servers who were dominating at night. Eventually they will get matched up with other servers who dominate at night so it will be more of an even game.
        
        I just think labeling a whole game P2W because of one aspect that obviously he didn’t know that much about was pretty noob. Even if WvW was pay to win(which it is not) having the most money or leveling faster would not give you an advantage in any other part of the game.
    - MMO_Doubter
      
      There is no mechanism in WvWvW to balance numbers, so complete miss-matches are both possible and likely. THAT is what I mean.
      
      Did you play WoW? Remember Wintergrasp? What a mess it was when the numbers were imbalanced? I do.
  - Lycronis
    
    Roger, you are sounding like an idiot again. Come on dude, you were starting to be reasonable for a the last few weeks. What happened?
    - MMO_Doubter
      
      Once again – tell me where I am wrong.
      
      WvWvW has no mechanism to balance numbers. Am I wrong?
      
      Money does have an impact in WvWvW. Small for now, perhaps, but the nature of cash games is a tendency for increasing gouging.
      
      TRY not to call names – if you want a reasonable exchange.
      - Lycronis
        
        Yes Roger, you are wrong. Why, because WvW matches last for TWO WEEKS! Do you honestly think that one realm is going to have a full team the entire two weeks? No, they will not. And there actually is a mechanism in place to help balance numbers, at least after the two week periods. Anet has repeatedly stated that they will try to balance out and match up similarly populated servers with each other. The only major problem with this is that it will take some time to see how each realm matches up. As to your money comment, I’m not even going to go there as it’s a VERY dead horse and merit-less.
        
        And by the way, once again I did not call you any names. I said you were “sounding” like an idiot, I did not call you one. Big difference.
  - http://www.facebook.com/people/Alex-Sanchez/100003130430158 Alex Sanchez
    
    if you have to lie about a game just so you can hate on it, why are you hating in the first place?
    - MMO_Doubter
      
      I am not lying. Do some research, rather than just trusting that ANet loves you and everything will be okay.
- http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
  
  Arenanet has the history to pull off a new MMO. What I dont think you will see is another MMO like Rift from a developer like Trion.
http://www.facebook.com/panda.jenkins.1 Panda Jenkins

this guy sounds like kermit the frog through half of this.. X)
http://twitter.com/ookamiwing Phillip Rushing

Everyone pull your stocks! MMOs are dead and SWTOR caused it! The market is crashing!
H S

I remember having this conversation with others about how if SWTOR fails, it will pull investor cash from the MMO industry because they lost the easy copy model of WOW to make a quick buck.

EA has sucked the limited resources from the gaming world and now the investors are going to shy away from the biz. You know, if EA was around during the turn of the last century, EA would have gone around buying up all those new star up automobile companies, like Ford, Benz…ect. And in EA fashion, would have pulled the motors out and stuck a horse in front of it. After all, why take a risk on something new, right?
- tehixe
  
  I don’t think EA had that much to do with the shape of SWTOR. Bioware’s never made an MMO before, so they just ganked the most popular model and worked from there. They set out to revolutionize MMOs by adding story, not by changing how combat works. The fact that they didn’t abandon WoW principles is because they didn’t want to, not because EA somehow forced them not to. Plus, when you consider that they were making the spiritual successor to KoToR, you can see that hotbar combat makes sense for the game. The only real change from KoToR was taking the tank/heal/DPS mechanics and making them more explicit (although they still existed in KoToR).
  
  Anyway, you can criticize them for not being more revolutionary, but I think it was simply a decision about how to allocate their resources rather than a financial decision. Anyone who spent that much money on development wasn’t afraid of taking risks, not by a long shot.
  
  I don’t think you can blame SWToR for the current state of MMOs, regardless. With the huge volume of mediocre dead on arrival MMOs that have been coming out for years now, if the market hasn’t got the hint until now then they’re very slow. Maybe investors just aren’t that savvy about games, because MMOs have been failing ever since developers first saw the success of WoW and got dollar signs in their eyes. Studios and investors are just finally starting to understand that MMOs don’t print money like they once did when there were only a few to choose from.
  - H S
    
    You may need to read on the two articles done on thematter, the one where they BW staff called the EA meetings the “Death Star” and the other where EA told BW after all the bad feeback back in late 2010 testing, to make it “More like WOW”.
    - tehixe
      
      Omg. Disturbing.
  - MMO_Doubter
    
    EA is the publisher. Usually, the publisher decides when and how the game is released. They screwed up Warhammer Online with an early release. SWTOR shows the same signs.
http://www.facebook.com/toph1980 Christopher Fischer

Looking bad for TESO.
Deffizzle

After 7yrs of WoW, players are expecting basic tools,endgame,pvp etc. Making a game just to make money off the Ip for a sure thing deff backfired. Guild Wars built a GAME to play that didnt revolution the mmo market, but just improved on the basic mmo features. Ppl will pay monthly for a game that is good, but are canny enough to realize that their paying 15$ a month for crap.
Waypoc Jaypec

Wow. When are they going to get that it’s not the MMO genre, it’s the crap MMO’s that are being developed. The companies have lost their way due to their love of the 1/4ly earnings report. They have no real passion and any passion they do have is seriously hampered by future earnings predictions.

Companies need to make games that have crafting, harvesting, housing, professions, PvP and open worlds like SWG, just without the bugs.
Add to that,SWTOR’s story. Except instead of making it single player, encourage grouping. Allow anyone to update their story in conjunction with you.
Also companies need to Stop thinking they know what’s best and really go with what works and that doesn’t necessarily mean WoW.

Stop trying to control everything.

Let people explore, get lost, group up and be immersed.
- tehixe
  
  You’re asking for the moon on a string like you were ordering a bagel, like it’s something that obviously should be available on demand. What you’re suggesting is that a company should not only make a game with total immersion and freedom, but somehow also a great story that somehow doesn’t railroad you, and also it should be massively multiplayer with all of the balance issues that go into that. What you describe has simply never been done. I’ll agree that there are tons of passionless MMOs that they keep slapping us in the face with, but a game like you describe is technical and creative feat that has simply never been matched by anyone.
  - Waypoc Jaypec
    
    The problem today is that the companies don’t even try to achieve greatness from the player perspective. Instead they engage in a game of smoke and mirrors which is what SWTOR did from the start with story VO, story, VO, story VO, being pushed to every media outlet that would listen and repeat it.
    While I agree that at this point in the MMO evolution, what I consider to be ideal for an MMO may too lofty, I do think that with some forethought, imagination and passion, it could be achieved in the form of a piecemeal release, with periodic expansions.
    
    What a challenge for the right company.
- Old Ben
  
  MMO is not a genre, it’s an adjective.
  - Waypoc Jaypec
    
    In the world I play in, it can be both.
    - Old Ben
      
      MMO is any on-line game with a lot of players. It tells you nothing about what genre the game is.
      
      There are racing MMOs, role-playing MMOs, flight simulation MMOs, sports management MMOs, military strategy MMOs, etc..
      
      Saying that “MMO is a genre” is like saying that “single-player” is a genre.
jayremy

I think a divide is happening like in the business world everybody knows a particular brand and they all flock to it, look at CoD and WoW. Everything else nobody wants to wager on in the masses, either by company name or just the game IP. Some of the most popular titles have had great profits from them but either came as disappointments or not that much of an eye opener.

For the unpopular titles they usually don’t ever get a following until gameplay becomes known well throughout the community and goes a step and being the norm. A great example of this was 38 studios, KoA was great but it didn’t really go beyond the norm or exceed many expectations, especially when player-bases are trying to compare it to Witcher 2 (a second title) or Skyrim which is many titles prior to its making. They tried to introduce the IP of KoA: Reckoning to prime publicity for “project Copernicus”, just say a game like Warcraft did for WoW.

I don’t think people put enough faith or support into new IPs until they get to “bet on a winner”. I think SWTOR’s failing wasn’t as much and IP issue as it being too similar to “another popular” IP in gameplay, which it didn’t quite match up to at launch. The only uniqueness of SWTOR was cutscenes/cinematic experience and Star Wars IP, huttball isn’t enough alone to to make a game a hit.

Maybe SWTOR needs a Day Rakghoul mod, to revive it.
A N

The analyst is kinda right. Mmo’s are risky and a bad long term investment, but they aren’t dying per se, its that they were never that big. They have been overvalued, oversold and the market over-saturated the past several years. What he’s talking about is the mmo market coming back down to the reality that its potential customer base is a niche one, and a fickle one to boot.

Everyone knows WoW came to prominence at a time when that niche market had few options so most mmo players were funneled to a few places. This lead to a huge customer base for a few companies. Developers seem to think they can replicate this today, but its nigh impossible. There are too many options, many of them decent, and many free. Plus one of the things that made mmo’s a unique draw, i.e., online play with your friends, is available in pretty much every genre of game these days.
- tehixe
  
  How about the fact that MMOs came to prominence when Generation Y was mostly in high school, and now that Generation Y is mostly past grad school age and working we can’t pour our lives into questing for digital candy like we once could? WoW still has a lot of players, but I suspect that for every 10 subscribers they shed, 8 of them are quitting MMOs forever after realizing that WoW has sucked away hundreds and hundreds of hours that they’ll never get back, and most of it was grinding and wasn’t even fun.
http://www.facebook.com/Jstricklolwut Jeremy Strickland

look at all the crap coming out and there’s your answer. obviously companys aren’t going to want to invest when all they see is this garbage coming out that’s popular for a few weeks and dies out. i mean come on, does anyone actually think this new elder scrolls mmo is going to be anything but complete garbage. they hit the nail on the head when they said companies need to take more risks. mmo’s aren’t dead, they need to rethink the whole mmo experience.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-Johnson/1353890372 Michael Johnson

Ah Micheal Pachter. The EA poster boy himself.
Spends months defending SWTOR, and then when it crashes, he claims it’s because all MMOs are doomed.

This guy needs to get bent
http://profile.yahoo.com/3JO75BNS43WDETCNCO7F7XS6Q4 jo

SWTOR is toxic. it seriously gutted lots of people. the amount of people professing MMO’s dead because bioware crapped out a turd is staggering. if only those people could look past the Bioware label(which means jack shit now anyway), and see a shaky and arrogant company employing shitloads of first time game devs straight from community college….
tehixe

What’s dead is companies getting away with charging $60 for a game that then costs an additional $15 a month for life, without providing any direct return in value. Seriously, what do you get for your money? They keep the servers running? Like that costs them $15 per player. They fix bugs? Why am I even paying for a product with bugs, let alone paying monthly for the bugs to be fixed?

I think the model is dead because people are fed up with “renting” WoW clones. If all they’re gonna give us are WoW clones, they could at least make them free to play. If they want to add content, they can sell the content as DLC and let us choose whether it’s worth the asking price, rather than locking us into a pricing model where we have to pay and we get what we get, if we get anything. It’s an anti-consumer business model that has only worked at all because of the addictive powers of Skinnerian reinforcement–MMOs actively remove fun and add barriers to success in order to make success more rewarding. In other words, they make their games less fun to make them more addictive, and pretty soon they’ve got people locked into playing a game they don’t even enjoy. It’s like slot machines or video poker, entirely boring but you can’t stop. Of course, with slots sometimes you win. With MMOs, the house takes 100% of your bet every single time.
DoctorOverlord

Excellent analysis GBTV!

One can imagine investors will be hesitant after the many recent failures and I think you can connect part of those failures to a failure to adapt, as was pointed out. SWTOR had SWG devs and people who worked on previous MMOs and they simply may not see how those past MMOs were fundamentally flawed in so many ways in the first place. I think it will take people willing to throw away the past MMO traditions and finally bring real evolution to the genre.

I also agree that the subscription model is dead, not MMOs. MMOs are continuing to evolve in interesting and unexpected ways with things like like DayZ. The massive multiplayer space is here to stay, it will simply be unrecognizable from the tedious, bug-filled junk that passed for games in the past and that’s a good thing.

The death of the subscription model could be the single best thing to happen to the MMO genre. Without subs there is no longer a business incentive for developers to make timesink mechanics that stretch out subs as previous MMOs have done.

I really believe that the sub model was the single biggest flaw of MMOs and it’s past time players finally start to refuse to fall for it anymore. Subs were never necessary to keep up servers, they were never necessary to run an MMO. Subs were nothing more than a massive profit grab and for years players went along with it. Now we’re seeing it’s not necessary or needed and players can refuse to pay subs. If only people had done the same back when UO had first come out, the MMO genre would have been in a much better place today.
http://twitter.com/SeedEve AppleSeed2148

Those MMOs failed because of the lack of vision from the people developing them period.
tommythepower

lol at that picture
http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr

The question is will investor be interested in investing a 50m dollars, wait through a three year development cycle and recoup their investment through initial box sales. The publisher would need to sell over 800k boxes at $60 a pop to recoup the initial investment. That doesn’t include a reasonable profit for a 3+ year investment.

No wonder there is so much pressure to release theses MMOs before they are ready.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Ronny-Sunrock/100002737688676 Ronny Sunrock
  
  Well the movie industry is as risky as the game industry and we see investors do it there.
  - MMO_Doubter
    
    I disagree.
    
    How many big-budget movies fail to make a profit? It’s just a matter of HOW MUCH profit they make.
    - http://www.facebook.com/people/Ronny-Sunrock/100002737688676 Ronny Sunrock
      
      Same thing with most MMORPGs too. You don’t need to have 10 million subscribers to make a MMORPG profitable. When the facts are that you don’t need more then around 500k to make a profit. However a MMORPG is called failed if they don’t get more subscribers then WoW.
      
      So the question is how much profit they make on producing a MMORPG and so far the answer is have been: very little.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Willi-Enderle/1668850948 Willi Enderle

Down with the cashcows!
pc11

Actually I think TotalBiscuit nailed it on the head when he said that its MMO RPGs that are dead. We are getting more and more online shooters, RTS, strategy and other genres that are doing great.

What people and the market is burned out on is the RPG MMO. After WOW people simply dont want to grind quests and gear for months since it is not fun anymore. All MMO RPG are just reskinned variations of the same game style.

Look at games like LOL. Low development budget, simple gameplay premisse, GIANT SUCCESS. The MMO market is still growing and it will be profitable but the RPG segment is saturated, companies need to look to other segments.
- snikendelarveføtter
  
  Still think gw2 is bringing enough freshness to the mmorpg scene to show that it is still possible if you think outside of the “WoW-box”. If gw2 turns out to be a success, which i think it will, that hopefully takes mmorpg’s in the right direction.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Ronny-Sunrock/100002737688676 Ronny Sunrock
  
  Well all MMORPGs that have been more “casual friendly” then WoW have failed….
- Old Ben
  
  The problem is that “RPG” (which used to mean something like “consistent and believable world simulator with complex NPC interaction and intertwining stories”) has been reduced to “repetitive grind to make some numbers increase”.
  
  The problem isn’t so much with the MMORPG concept in itself, it’s with the dumbed-down interpretation of what an RPG is. It didn’t even start with MMOs, it started with games like Diablo, which have nothing to do with classical RPGs (it’s really a hack’n'slash game with gear upgrades, which is a completely different concept from “role-playing” – and yet it was marketed as an RPG, because RPGs like Ultima were popular at the time).
  
  In a strange way, an “RPG” these days seems to be “a game about what you wear”.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1354220951 Dave Burns

Please stop telling me to sign up to netflix, its not available in australia
- http://twitter.com/cyanerd Prostyle
  
  just a little bit more and they’ll get tired but yeah, waaay annoying after the first few times and its funny how american folk think everything they got is available all over the world :/
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Ronny-Sunrock/100002737688676 Ronny Sunrock
  
  How is this Gamebrakers problem? Beside do you think Netflix will continue sposer Gamebraker if they stopped? Think first next time mm-kay?
  - Old Ben
    
    It’s not that hard to create a 5-second Netflix ad that plays at the start / end of each video after detecting if the client IP is from a country where Netflix exists.
    
    Serving 30 seconds of useless advertising to everyone is just a waste of bandwidth and more likely to make visitors lose interest and go somewhere else.
    
    Anyway, the main waste of bandwidth (and user interface problem) in GBTV is that videos auto-start as soon as a page loads. Half the time I open 5 or 6 articles from the main page (in different tabs) and they all start shouting in the background (and using up Gamebreaker’s bandwidth), when I simply want to read the text articles or reply to some comment.
    
    With long videos like Legendary or Guildcast, this means the GBTV server (and every router between them and my system) is transferring over 1GB of useless data.
    
    Can’t be that hard to make the videos load only after people click them.
    - http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
      
      It’s very clear GamebreakerTV is looking for more views on the commericals.
      
      The comments on the articles must be a gold mine on views. All the posts, and replying to post must make Gary a very happen man.
      - Omie11
        
        Lore had it right. Maybe people need to stop trying to develop these “ground breaking” games and focus on making games that are simply fun. SWTOR was about as fun as the local AIDS clinic.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Ronny-Sunrock/100002737688676 Ronny Sunrock

Well he is some what right. MMORPGS are not games for the average casual players. Thinking MMOs are a main stream cash cow is stupid. MMORPGs are a nich for hardcore gamers. And as soon as the producers start to realize that and make the games with that in mind they will start to succeed again. Because you are not suppose to play a MMORPG for months an month. But todays MMORPGs last you two months at best and by then you probably have two if not 3 characters with the best gear for both PvP and PvE before you grow bored because you already been there and got the t-shirt for the 101st time.

We need to see slower progression and/or longer progression curves. And if the industry fail to realize that MMORPGS are truly dead.
Sharuko

People need to stop thinking like it is the WoW era, that has past. Now there will be multiple MMOs with decent size populations instead of one or two big dogs dominating the market. Developers need to stop with the massive hundreds of million dollar projects and 5-6 year development cycles and make “cheaper” games with quicker turnaround time.

It is not about the payment models or the fact that people want something new. Games that are F2P will fail and games that are different will fail. People just expect to think that to be a success you need WoW numbers which won’t happen. If SWTOR built their team around the fact they expected 500k to 1 million subs it wouldn’t have been an issue, but their expectations were set too high.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Ronny-Sunrock/100002737688676 Ronny Sunrock
  
  BioWares expectations with SWTOR was 1.5-2 million. That was not a unrealistic expectation.
  - MMO_Doubter
    
    It wouldn’t have been unrealistic for a quality MMO. For an unfinished, buggy, 2005 era MMO, it was.
    - http://www.facebook.com/people/Ronny-Sunrock/100002737688676 Ronny Sunrock
      
      SWTOR was not an unfinished buggy game. Did you even play it?! My god what idiots there are out there. BioWare did release a quality MMO
      - MMO_Doubter
        
        Yes, I did, and yes, it was.
      - http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
        
        SWTOR had a serious lack of testing for level 50 content.
      - William Moore
        
        Agreed, The game was good… For a non-MMO game.
        Simply put it did not have the Replay value to keep 1.5-2 million players.
      - http://twitter.com/ryeryespapa Shawn Searles
        
        Did you even play not buggy are you kidding me alderaan was a complete nightmare at launch and for months after
- http://twitter.com/Jayeluu Jason Winter
  
  My god, I actually (sort of) agree with Sharuko.
  
  I agree, there will be fewer “big” MMOs and more “smaller” MMOs — with “small meaning pops of about 500k or less.
  
  To say that F2P doesn’t matter, though, is a bit of an oversimplification. True, nobody’s stating that they’re quitting SWTOR “because it costs $15/month.” But can you really think more people wouldn’t be playing — thereby increasing those numbers on the fleets — if it didn’t have a monthly fee? I’m going to let my sub run out this month because I can’t justify $15/month for the limited amount of time I play it, but if I didn’t have to worry about a monthly fee, I’d stick with it. Yes, time is an issue, but if I only have 10 hours (or whatever) a month to play an MMO, I’m less likely to want to pay $15 for that privilege.
  
  And look at other games that go F2P and the surge they get in players — LOTRO, AOC, DCUO, etc. all reported huge upswings in players after going F2P. And I was playing LOTRO when it switched, I can confirm that personally.
  
  True, F2P doesn’t overcome bad game design, and the effect on overall income might be debatable, but it sure as hell helps boost population numbers. And that, in and of itself, can help keep paying customers around.
  - MMO_Doubter
    
    “My god, I actually (sort of) agree with Sharuko.”
    
    You work here, Sir. Act like a professional.
    
    At least three of us here at the Fringe (not me) played LOTRO for some time – including when it went F2P. They are not playing anymore. Due in large part to what Turbine turned it into.
    
    “F2P doesn’t overcome bad game design,”? It could hardly OVERCOME it, when it IS bad design. If you were thinking of players, rather than the companies, you might be able to see that.
    - http://profile.yahoo.com/3JO75BNS43WDETCNCO7F7XS6Q4 jo
      
      sharuko is a militant fanboy on this an many other websites, so that’s an appropriate comment.
    - http://www.facebook.com/people/Evan-Iwerks/712235 Evan Iwerks
      
      I’m not sure why you think F2P is a bad monetary design. Letting players choose when and where to spend their money on content, rather than requiring a standard-fare for all players, is a player-oriented design.
      
      The lack-of-quality argument in F2P games just doesn’t make sense to me anymore, if that’s what you’re getting at. If the company doesn’t properly use its income to support the game, they either committed heinous over-spending in the early development stage (and are thus paying off loans), or otherwise want to treat their game as a static entity. Just avoid those types of F2P games – there are many others that do great work on the F2P model.
      
      In any event, Jason was simply stating that the monetary design – be it F2P, subscription, or box-price-only – will not overcome bad game design. Monetary design =/= game design. No matter how good or bad you think a given monetary design is, the point is that it won’t be enough to make a player pick up a game they think is a bad game. You could rewrite the statement as “A subscription model doesn’t overcome bad game design,” and get the same meaning.
      
      Also, it’s incredibly important to think about the companies. If there are no companies, there are no games, and by extension, no players. You can’t examine one without thinking about the repercussions on the other. It’s not about thinking of one or the other – it’s about thinking of both at the same time.
  - Sharuko
    
    I shouldn’t say it doesn’t matter, but it doesn’t matter as much as people say it does. When I go back to WoW or any other MMO, I am never telling myself “Oh I have to pay another $13 dollars. I go back because I already planned to go back and some new interesting content was released.
    
    But you are right it removes a barrier to entry and makes it easier to go back.
- William Moore
  
  Ya agreed. A few years ago there wear maybe 14 million players in the market, and Wow had 10+ Simply put you will never see that Level of Market cornering again. Wow may still have 10 million players 10 years from now. (They may have 20 million) but there will be 40-60 million people in the market.
squidgod

Too many games, not enough players.
http://profile.yahoo.com/MSNHEFEXOE2KWJXGLOQADRQOGY Erik C

uh, who said star wars fizzled?
- William Moore
  
  Sorry it did, Less then a Million Players at this point. And 300 million dollar price tag. At the rate they are “Making” money it will take 20 years to pay off the game.
  - http://profile.yahoo.com/XNQFSPBOFDG2IDERT4QR2UJ4SA Falcon
    
    20 years? Interesting accounting. On subscriptions only they will gross that amount within 3 years. Counting the sale of the initial software and future sale of new content they will be in profit by then. MMOs as a revenue stream are and will continue to be a cash cow.
    
    The idea that the game cost $300M is unfounded. EA is a public company and their sheets aren’t showing those costs.
    
    There will be various business models including pure subscription in the MMO landscape. If you find that hard to believe I would ask you to give up faith and instead examine what is. Companies are turning a profit on MMOs. Even ancient ones with few subscribers. That’s why they keep them online.
- http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
  
  Bioware and SWTOR players.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_IL7J7A3V2ZNIXCQ7LSOJGTH5RY Rizen

players just know the difference between a game worth buying and a junk pop-corn game. No one is going to pay for a pop-corn game that leaves the player regretting the purchase. And since nothing has been released since then that is even worth looking at, no one is buying them. You also have to look at the gaming population.. People are still stuck on wow or other games and dont want to buy into anything else.
http://twitter.com/Nathiest Nathiest

All we ask for is a next gen WoW clone. Really you wouldn’t think that’ll be such a hard request to full fill.
- http://www.facebook.com/jesseOWebster Jesse Ø Webster
  
  Rift was a WoW clone, look at where that went. SWOTR is a WoW clone too.
  - http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
    
    It really is too bad about Rift, it was a good MMO, but the end game Raiding was just too buggy. The tool box may have given them tons of development tools, but it look like it led to bugs that couldn’t be fixed quickly.
    - http://twitter.com/Luke_Malcolm Luke Malcolm
      
      Nah alot of pple went back to Rift but didn’t stay to long, its just those MMOs are fillers until WoW or GW2 come out with new stuff. Trion promised pple it wasn’t WoW and it was a exact clone of WoW and pple rather play WoW than have to start fresh, for pple who didn’t play WoW long it not hard to leave, but the ones who put so much effort into there accounts and characters aren’t just gunna walk off and leave its almost like pple from Everquest.
http://www.facebook.com/jesseOWebster Jesse Ø Webster

the thing that makes WoW awesome is that it started a long time ago with Warcraft. It slowly built up and up and up into what it is today. From a community and lore and gameplay stand point. They didn’t start huge, it just naturally progressed as the community and the devs bounced back and forth and ultimately created something awesome.

The bottom line is that WoW is king because it breathes. What I mean is that it is alive, it gives you the sense of life, from the fluidity of the menus to the in-depth personal feel of your characters to the way the economy has real fluctuations, WoW is truly ALIVE and that is why people still play it.
http://profile.yahoo.com/ID77ZEQTZQN52Y4E7TONBVIMZA cheeseflygon…

Stop producing crap and maybe people will start buying your games.
Elusive Fox

MMOs can still be a success, but i think that companies have finally figured out that cloning wow isn’t a successful business model. the players that are leaving wow are looking for something different and good. I dont know if f2p is the best model, but I also dont think we will see any more successful hotbar/sub based mmos after swotr and rift.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000267765226 Vegas Steve

Weak games will produce weak sales results, no matter the genre. Duh…
frankelee

Nope, for pay MMOs were dead and remain dead. The problem was everybody wanted to compete for the same limited audience, asking them to drop $40-60 for the game and then $20-30 a month to have the right to play it. That’s $280 a year on the low side, want to turn around and buy a new MMO the year after that and start over again building up a character? There’s only enough space for one WoW, it was inevitable that the smart developers would start making free games that ask users to pay for premium upgrades as they become more committed and feel comfortable doing so.

When you don’t respect the cost to your customer and your business plan is basically to scream “Me too!” and dive into an already saturated market while offering nothing new, then of course you’re going to lose your shirt like almost every pay-up-front MMO of the last several years have. The free to join and play model works great, and here’s the thing, if you make a quality product that people enjoy, they’ll be happy to pay you back for the product you’re offering.

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