TWIMMO 127: Goodbye 2012, Hello 2013

Just wanted to say THANK YOU SO MUCH for using Youtube as your hosting service.  Makes life so much simpler.

I find guild wars 2 lacks what world of warcraft has hoping next year they add more types of game play like wow got

We saw nothing major from Planetside 2 until a few months before beta started. It was also originally called Planetside Next about 6 months or so before beta started. I expect similar things with Everquest Next. So I wouldn’t be surprised if it was revealed early this year with a beta starting a few months later and release at the end of the year. Smedley said it would be playable by the next SOE Live.

Guild Wars 2 may or may have not failed based on the definition of failure. The P2P market just isn’t there anymore. F2P is where the majority of the money is.

TESO is going to be a failure because it won’t be TES. It’ll be a WoW-GW2 hybrid with TES lore. I disagree with Pokket that MMOs are about grouping. MMOs are about a massive amount of people in the world, regardless whether someone wants to group or not. What isn’t MMO are instances because it takes you out of that world. That is a CORPG feature stuffed into an MMO.

On the SWTOR vs GW2 hyped, failed, would have failed diversion that happened while talking about TESO. Both of these games drew in larger audiences at launch. Hype and timing played a big part in both cases. There is understandably going to be some section of this over inflated population that realizes that the game they bought is not the game they imagined, or expected. These things happen. I think the difference between the games is how they delt with this. You could argue that the press was harder on SWTOR. Maybe having subscription numbers that could be measured was the difference. I feel like the marketing for GW2 continues to be on point after release, where as the SWTOR marketing was all over the place making odd promises.

Agree with Jason that being overhyped is more a problem with the player than the game or game maker. Many people plays these MMOs in beta and know what they’re getting into. The game doesn’t change into something different when it launches. Often, it’s in a better shape at launch than in beta. The only thing that changes is the player’s behavior from a habit of needing to hype themselves pre-launch to no longer needing to live off of hype with the game actually in their hands.

If you feel a game was overhyped then it’s mostly you or your fellow player’s fault. I played some SWTOR beta and I saw that the game would not satisfy me in beta. Yes, it was being hyped, but the game is what the game was. I played the GW2 beta and liked what I played. 

Hype is this nebulous quality or thing that can’t be related to any actual answer to questions of why. MMOs have betas and informative feedback from those betas. Base your interest on playing the game and on the information present. Don’t try to mine emotions from others experiences and turn it into hype for yourself. 

Ok, GW2 was over-hyped? It’s made over $150,000,000 in two quarters, $118m of that in Q4. Yeah, its totally over-hyped.

I read this somewhere else, and if just feels right.  TESO will be released in 2013 and on 11/12/13 (Tuesday).  

There is zero reason for TESO to rush their game unlike GW2 and SWTOR.  They don’t have NCSoft or EA or public investors pressuring them every quarter.  They are a private company with private investors and after seeing the recent failures like GW2 and SWTOR they know they must release a game when it is finished and not rush the game.

With that said they seem confident in 2013 and I don’t see any reason why it won’t be a Holiday 2013 release.  This isn’t the early 2000s anymore, with technology the way it is you don’t need 2-3 year hype cycles to sell millions of copies.

I do agree with Pokket about GW2 but I would take it even further.  If GW2 had a subscription it would have been the biggest failure in MMO history.  I would like to see one stat that shows how GW2 is a success currently.  I can provide about a dozen that shows GW2 was a massive failure.

Here do a test yourself, go to the Mists in sPvP.  Look at the active servers, then look at the amount of players per server.  You will notice less than 200 players playing during primetime in sPvP.  SWTOR has more than that in their Warfronts and WoW has more players than that in their 10-14 bracket.