MMORPG wrapup

[Don]

Been playing a few MMORPGs recently lightly waiting for something else better to come along.

LOTRO - Haven't seen anything really different from this from any other WoW clones but at least the game looks pretty nice. I usually assume if a game goes F2P that means they can't cut it on the subscription model and must not be too good but since it didn't start out as a F2P it's not as bad as you'd expect from a F2P.

EQ2 - EQ2 went F2P too but the price it charges seem to be way too much. I heard the free servers has a lot of people but a free to play account can't equip legendary (blue) or higher item, so what's the point of running a dungeon when you cannot possibly use anything in it? The standard 8 classes they let you start with is also pretty lacking in variety. This is a game that either doesn't lend itself to F2P or at least everything is too expensive.

Champions Online - Went back during the free week for the anniversary event. The game still looks pretty but is devoid of people. This game might have made more sense as a Diablo clone than a monthly subscription.

FF14 - For some reason all the guys I know are still going to play it when it's live. While no MMORPG launch is ever smooth, there are problems you can stall for many months (WoW). There are problems can stall for a few months (most failed MMORPG launch goes in here), but FF14's problems are not deferrable at all. It's not like something where you can throw money at it (hardware issues usually). The game's design is simply bad. There are only two MMORPGs in the history of MMORPGs that achieved higher than it should have based on quality alone: EverQuest and World of Warcraft, and both games lucked out for being at the right place at the right time (if you invert EQ or WoW with its closest competitor on their release timeline, right now we'd be talking about how DAoC or LOTRO is the best MMORPG ever). FF14 is definitely not in the right place considering Cataclysm is coming out like a month after it, and there's actually some promising MMORPG coming next year (SWTOR and Guild Wars 2). Yes people might be a bit tired of WoW at this point, but FF14 isn't going to be the game that can capitalize on that.

[SineSwiper]

LOTRO - Haven't seen anything really different from this from any other WoW clones but at least the game looks pretty nice. I usually assume if a game goes F2P that means they can't cut it on the subscription model and must not be too good but since it didn't start out as a F2P it's not as bad as you'd expect from a F2P.

It's F2P because it's a three year old game, not because it isn't good. A lot of us had a lot of fun with LOTRO. We're just not playing it because we're not the type to stick with a game for years and years.

[Eric]

http://spoonyexperiment.com/2010/09/13/ ... ld-wars-2/

Hilarity.

Looking forward to Guild Wars 2.

[Don]

LOTRO - Haven't seen anything really different from this from any other WoW clones but at least the game looks pretty nice. I usually assume if a game goes F2P that means they can't cut it on the subscription model and must not be too good but since it didn't start out as a F2P it's not as bad as you'd expect from a F2P.

It's F2P because it's a three year old game, not because it isn't good. A lot of us had a lot of fun with LOTRO. We're just not playing it because we're not the type to stick with a game for years and years.

WoW isn't F2P and it's older than LOTRO. Most games I've seen that went from pay to play to F2P did so out of financial duress. If you look at some quoted figures for F2P it's something like 5% of the people spend $30/month average on F2P, which is a lot less than 100% of the people spending $10-14 a month. Now of course by going F2P you generally increase your customer base, but it doesn't exactly go to infinity. Using $10/month, you'd need 6.66 times the active playerbase by going F2P to make up the difference. Now obviously both active playerbase, the % of people that spends money, and the average money spent at heavily guarded secrets so estimates can be very far off, but successful F2P games like FreeRealms or RuneScape have something like ~10 million registered users (keeping track of active population is not as meaningful in F2P games) and they're also designed as a F2P from the ground up, which means they're more likely to have stuff worth buying. If you look at what sells well in F2P games, the game really has to be built from the ground up to support it for a good money-making engine.

Of course given how many MMORPGs flopped just staying alive can be considered an achievement, and if you don't have to pay for customer service (virtually no F2P games have customer service for the people who aren't paying, which is understandable) the server maintenance cost is actually pretty negligible.

[Don]

http://spoonyexperiment.com/2010/09/13/ ... ld-wars-2/

Hilarity.

Looking forward to Guild Wars 2.

For reasons I cannot understand Guild Wars 2 appears to have no monthly fee whatsoever. It's like SWTOR, GW2, and Diablo 3 made an unholy alliance to dethrone WoW and rid the world of monthly fee based model. If GW2 can deliver what it says it can do, you're going to have a lot of shakeout in the paid MMORPG scene since it'd simply be a much better product and costs way less. It makes me wonder maybe ArenaNet just doesn't care about making a ton of money (WoW makes comparable money to rest of ActivisionBlizzard put together), but whatever works for them. It sure works well for the gamers.

As a bit of irony, the guy who came up with the hardware mouse hack for FF14 was supposed to be a programmer from ArenaNet.

[Don]

I think the party system in GW2 has potential to change the MMORPG landscape the same way WoW's quest driven system changed MMORPG. Let's face it, aside from possibly EQ and DAoC in its infant stage (because it'd be utterly impossible to solo anything so you got to take risks), you really do NOT want to group with random strangers, and yet it's the fact that you group with random strangers that allowed EQ (and to a lesser extent DAoC) manage to entrench itself so well that it pretty much stifled the MMORPG market until WoW came along, because you have to have some kind of social bonds to make the game lasting and it can't be just your friends from real life unless you have a ton of friends. Now forced grouping is generaly frowned upon, but GW2 with the way everyone just gets full reward if they participated at all means people won't act like antisocial jerks the moment anyone else tags along. Yes it might end up looking like '7 on 1 computer stomp' in Starcraft but 7 on 1 computer stomp is probably one of the major reasons why SC has longlasting appeal because people really like 7 on 1 computer stomps.

And FF14 actually encourages you to be an antisocial jerk since spells are all AE, which means if you see someone who can cast heal you want to just stand next to the guy so his heals hit you and you can leech from him. It's gotten so bad that Sqix implemented the ability to make your spells not AE for NO GAIN WHATSOEVER. That is, you can just change your buffs/heals to single target instead of their normal version at exactly the same cost so you'll still have a bunch of leeches waiting for you to heal yourself!

[Don]

Here's a video explaining how the FF14 fatigue system works. It's pretty much just PR stuff repeated verbatim, but it actually does so ion a more convincing way than Sqix managed to sell their system. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abE09-tqhoM

I think it's kind of funny most people after playing the beta realized that the fatigue system doesn't matter because nobody will play the game long enough to hit it anyway.

[Eric]

SWTOR is monthly fee, I think.

[Shrinweck]

I've been reading everything I can get my hands on with TOR and I haven't seen anything about them not doing monthly fees. I think it's still too far off for them to have released a monthly subscription pricing model, though.

[Don]

SWTOR is monthly fee, I think.

Yeah but I mean like 3 promising games are coming out within a short time (well, never can be sure with Diablo 3) and two of them are free so if something is going to change WoW's dominance might as well be that.

[Shrinweck]

A lot of what keeps people in WoW is the community feel of it and the friends they'd miss if they left. There'd have to be some kind of mass exodus from WoW to "try out" SWTOR (which there probably will be) but it'll be up to Bioware to keep them in TOR so much that they just stay and potentially don't go back. The all action all the time feeling that I got out of the latest PC Gamer preview makes it seem like this could actually siphon off a lot of WoW players. The tunnel shooter that they're building into space flight is probably going to pull a lot of twitch gamers that wouldn't give WoW the time of day, too.

I haven't been keeping up much with GW2 but I loved the original and played through the campaigns of all but one (if I recall correctly... maybe I finished that last one too) multiple times. Still, if it's just an updated version of the last one it'll definitely get a ton of attention. The focus on PVP at the end when your level is capped is probably a mistake. The level cap of 20 to make very specialized classes was a damn fine idea, though. Tooling around with builds definitely kept me in the original for much, much longer than it would have been otherwise. You would also get some pretty sweet bonuses if your account was old, too. If I logged in now I would probably have the means to be insanely rich. The reliance on instances in the original kept it from feeling much like a community, though. Running quests was limited to a handful of people at once and the zones in between the campaign missions would only house something like a few to several dozen at once.

Diablo 3 probably won't act as anyone's replacement to WoW - I imagine it'll just siphon off a ton of people from playing WoW constantly and after a time they'll just go back and expansions will act as a way for them to just bounce back and forth.

[Don]

Those 1 million boxes for failures like Age of Conan didn't come out of thin air. They're almost certainly all ex-WoW players. Now people eventually went back to WoW since most of the recent games aren't great or at least not a viable alternative to WoW but there's no loyalty involved in MMORPG community at the global level.

It's difficult to unseat WoW because of the first-mover advantage. If your new game is only as good as WoW you might as well stick with WoW since more people plays it (because it's the first one, compared to a later game anyway) so the only way to beat WoW is to have a game that is a lot better than WoW, which is something nobody has done yet.

I don't see how WoW's bosses are any different from repeating Baal runs. On a strict difficulty level Diablo 2 might be a lot harder than WoW (but then you can keep on come back after you die). The Ancients are extremely difficult if you're fighting them with only yourself because you can only die once in that scenario (they reset when you die). Even a non-regenerating boss like say, Diablo, is still very difficult to beat 1 on 1 if you're an overpowered build, even when you know exactly what he does since you've like half a second to react to the lightning hose before it kills you even when you know it's coming.

[SineSwiper]

WoW isn't F2P and it's older than LOTRO.

I knew you would say that. WoW is the exception, not the rule. No other MMO has had the longevity as WoW. You just can't follow a model and audience like WoW, because you would be compete with WoW and lose. It's the AOL of MMOs.

LOTRO has probably waned in popularity since its start and they are trying to get software sales now. After all, they still need to tell the whole LOTRO story.

[Don]

There are plenty of MMORPGs with longer longevity than WoW. I suppose you can say no other MMORPG has the same combination of longevity and numbers, but then it's really hard to say this when subscription numbers are practically impossible to get. If WoW declined 40% in the last couple of years in NA/Europe that's still a significant loss even if 60% of its prime population is still about 10 times bigger than the closest competitor in the same geographic area. 2% of its peak population would put WoW at 100K which is a pretty respectable number, but I don't know if you can say a game that lost 98% of its population has good longevity.

[SineSwiper]

Okay, what MMO has lasted longer than six years and is still worth a damn? Certainly not Ultima Online, or Everquest, or Dark Age of Camelot, or Star Wars Galaxies, or FF11, or Anarchy Online, or anything else.

[Don]

Okay, what MMO has lasted longer than six years and is still worth a damn? Certainly not Ultima Online, or Everquest, or Dark Age of Camelot, or Star Wars Galaxies, or FF11, or Anarchy Online, or anything else.

How can you say that when you absolutely have no idea what the subscription number of ANY of these games are?

Using the same old unreliable charts from MMORPG subscription data (since I got nothing better), DAoC hit half of its peak about 6 years after launch. EQ took 7 years. SWG took about 3 years. FF11, as of 2010 (8 years), hasn't dropped below 50% of its peak. Now yes I realize all these numbers can be completely bogus but even bogus numbers tend to suggest most games do not decline significantly relative to its peak. Of course WoW's peak is much higher but a lot of that can be attributed to existing base/timing. If Pokemon Online peaked at 10 million and then dropped to 1 million the 5 years later is that a with long longevity or not? I'd say it's not.

Of course if you go to the same charts it also says WoW is still currently at its peak so the decline is 0%, but then I don't really put much credit into charts that are based on questionable metrics (the Asian numbers are grossly overcounted). WoW census efforts as well as ActiviBlizzard's quarterly earning extrapolates an equivalent paying base of about ~3 million subscribers. It is believed WoW topped 6 million in NA/Europe at some point and in those countries everyone pays the full subscription price, so is WoW in decline? It'd be impossible to tell without going into earning statements and even then it might not be telling you much.

[Shrinweck]

Okay, what MMO has lasted longer than six years and is still worth a damn? Certainly not Ultima Online, or Everquest, or Dark Age of Camelot, or Star Wars Galaxies, or FF11, or Anarchy Online, or anything else.

EVE Online still has a massive following and still gets regular free expansions. And that was released in 2003.

[Don]

I did some research on Blizzard's numbers, here's what the MMORPG section for revenue says from Activision Blizzard's financial reports:

2007 - $1024M
2008 - $1152M
2009 - $1248M
2010 - $306M for the first 3 months, so extrapolate to $1224M

Now $10 a month * 12 month * 1 million = $120 million, so at a guess it'd look like WoW grow by around a million subs per year. However, the MMORPG sub charts keeps track of press releases (which is their primary source of numbers):

Links for 11,5m subs on Jan 10 2010 :
http://seekingalpha.com/article/203610- ... ource=bnet
and
http://kotaku.com/5469063/world-of-warc ... since-2008
and
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/vi ... t-Level-10

Link for 11,6m subs on may 2009 :
http://www.blizzplanet.com/blog/comment ... rd_awards/

Link for 12m subs on January 2009 :
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL246 ... dChannel=0
and
http://kotaku.com/5469063/world-of-warc ... since-2008

Link for 11,5m subs on December 2008 :
http://eu.blizzard.com/en-gb/company/pr ... tml?081223

Now look at the numbers, if WoW had 11.5 M in Dec 2008 and grew by 1 million, it should have something like 12.5M by the end of 2009, yet they accepted an award for 11.6M. If you assume no company will make a press release giving less numbers than what they actually do, something doesn't add up here. WoW's population seems relatively stagant (they stopped releasing new higher numbers) for a few years now, even though revenue would indicate something like +2-3 million subs. Of course, we really don't know what the "MMORPG" section in earning really means. I think Activision Blizzard only has one MMORPG entity but I'm sure you can cram in all kinds of interesting stuff in there. My best guess is that revenue went up because of microtransactions while the population certainly didn't grow (using press release numbers, assuming no company ever understate their number of subs).

And remember, WoW is actually doing pretty well (the revenue is growing) and you can still account for about a discrepency of 2 million subs from expected numbers. So if WoW is ever on the decline you can expect Blizzard to be able to spin far more than 2 million subs as 'no loss', which means it could have already happened and you wouldn't know about it.

[Don]

Okay, what MMO has lasted longer than six years and is still worth a damn? Certainly not Ultima Online, or Everquest, or Dark Age of Camelot, or Star Wars Galaxies, or FF11, or Anarchy Online, or anything else.

EVE Online still has a massive following and still gets regular free expansions. And that was released in 2003.

EVE is even more of an outlier compared to WoW. There's really no logical reason why it should be so successful (assuming the numbers are legit) but it is. Looking at the way money converts game money readily, I suspect it's one of those games like Planet Calypso or Second Life where the economic aspect of the game makes it a viable form of income which is why you have so many people playing. Most of the news I heard of is like people in EVE Online steals $10K or whatever via a pyramid scheme, and to me if Madoff can run a Ponzi scheme for millions there's no reason why a MMORPG can't be run as a Ponzi scheme as well.

[Shrinweck]

EVE has a lot more going on than most games in the genre. The combat becomes very challenging and there are enough different types of missions that WoW would shit its pants. Most of them are still killing and delivering shit, but the variety is what brings me back. That, and it's very easy to do other things while playing it which is something I typically like in a game I'm going to drop 100 hours into. The schemes and backstabbing that goes on in the background is what keeps a lot more of the people in for longer than the 1-2 months at a time I've played it (I've resubscribed for about that long probably 4 or 5 times now). There's a lot more personality to the politics of the game than meets the eye, as well.

One server shard where you can be playing with tens of thousands at once is pretty damned amazing, too.

[Eric]

Server death is a pretty good out liner for a game's health no? Most games can start with like 50 servers and die with 2. Warhammer Online certainly springs to mind, I think they started with like 100 or something ridiculous and are down to 4.

Aion started with 12 I think and is down to 4 or 5?

I think we'd have a better idea about WoW's decline if Blizzard started merging some servers.

Unless they think it's a better idea to keep dying servers alive to keep the perception that all is well in the world. (Sneaky marketing tactics!)

[Don]

Server merger is generally a good sign of problem, but lack of server merger doesn't mean much. Plenty of games delayed server merger to give the appearance that the game is fine. In the case of WoW you really only need a very small number of people per server to be viable due to the way the game works (only PvP needs a lot but that's what battlegroups are for). Even if there are only 100 active guys on your server during prime time it doesn't really limit your options so even if population declined significantly there is no real reason to merge servers. I'm pretty sure the cost of hardware for servers is negligible. That is it doesn't really hurt anybody to be running 100 servers even if there are only 10 guys on each server. I mean they already bought the computers, and it's not like there is a large market for second hand computers of that type. Server mergers are usually done because people need to see at least X people around them or they perceive the game as unplayable/dead. For example in a game like EQ it is pretty much impossible to get a functional server under 1000 active players due to the tremendous interclass dependecies and raid sizes. WoW can probably have a functional server with 100 people since the really people-intensive stuff is already cross-server anyway (PvP, random dungeons).

By census metrics the activity of WoW has declined significantly, but it's not completely clear how this turns into subscription numbers (people might still have account active despite not playing) much less revenue. It is entirely possible declining population still yields higher revenue if you're able to get more out of each person through service fees (see airline fees), and if revenue is going up obviously the company isn't too worried about the state of the game.

[Oracle]

Okay, what MMO has lasted longer than six years and is still worth a damn? Certainly not Ultima Online, or Everquest, or Dark Age of Camelot, or Star Wars Galaxies, or FF11, or Anarchy Online, or anything else.

Well, I don't know much about the rest, but DAOC is 9 years old in October, and its one remaining North American server (well, cluster of servers) is close to full (3000+) pretty much every night. Don't look at camelotherald.com for the server numbers, since it has been displaying 1334 for the past few weeks for whatever reason.

This isn't including the European servers that Mythic just took over from GOA Europe. I have no idea how to get numbers on those servers, though, and I assume they are fairly low as they allowed the Euros to transfer to the NA server if they so chose (and they also allowed transfers from the NA server to the Euro servers to cator to the Europeans who had moved to the NA server due to population).

Don't have to have numbers like WoW to be 'successful'. Just have to keep turning a profit and show that development/maintenance is still occurring. Of course, having the good game helps too, which DAOC definitely has for the PvP niche in the MMO world.

[Don]

Sub numbers are pretty much impossible to get outside of census efforts by players, which is either manual or automated efforts to count every player on the server. It's easier if the game has advanced reporting tools (like WoW) but can be done to some extent on every game, depending on how determined your game base is. Yes it won't count people who are inactive but still paying, but you can assume it is fairly unlikely for anyone to be paying a subscription without playing for an extended time especially when talking about a timescale measured in years.

From a random look across MMORPGs minus WoW, most of them seem to have 10-20 servers, and obviously servers can vary tremendously in capacity, so just because a game only has 5 servers doesn't necessarily mean it's 1/4th as popular as one with 20. Hardware is easy to come by and even back in EQ days you could have a server run 5000 people. Sure that server is pretty much unplayable but you're also talking about ancient technology here. WoW's non Asia prime time population appears to be around ~300K based on a census chart I've seen (again these things are actually very reliable), so if you got 5 servers running 10K people each during peak time that's 1/6th the population of WoW, which is almost certainly bigger than any game that is not WoW.

[SineSwiper]

Don't have to have numbers like WoW to be 'successful'. Just have to keep turning a profit and show that development/maintenance is still occurring. Of course, having the good game helps too, which DAOC definitely has for the PvP niche in the MMO world.

Well, going back to my original point, DAOC is not WoW. DAOC can't have both the monthly fee and the population, so you have to sacrifice one or the other. DAOC chose to axe the population. LOTRO chose to axe the monthly fee. (WoW can keep both because, well, it's WoW.)

Both models can work. Just because a model goes to F2P doesn't mean an MMO is fucked or that it sucks. LOTRO is augmenting their profits by other means: premium classes, more slots, etc. Hell, this is the company that has been offering lifetime subscriptions. I think they know what the fuck they are doing.

[Don]

The fact that WoW is not F2P suggests going F2P is not likely to cause an increase in revenue compared to the standard monthly model, because otherwise WoW would have done this already.

Assuming it is not possible to generate perfect market segregation (i.e. every one of your paying customers magically stays on the subscription plan when you go to F2P), you cannot view the revenue from the F2P side as pure profit. While presumably the gain outweighs the loss you can't just say doing this results in no loss whatsoever. If WoW adapted a similar model as LOTRO (say, everything before WotLK is F2P, everything after requires subscription) it is almost certainly going to cause them a significant loss. For one, that'd mean losing all the revenue from China since they do not have WotLK anyway for a very long time. Obviously it is not possible to get statistics on this but I am positive when a game goes from subscription model to F2P, a very significant portion of your paying customers will stop paying as well. It is simply unreasonable to expect anything else. Now you can say it is entirely possible those guys would've stopped playing anyway, so it is difficult to say whether you're better or worse off, but clearly it is a risk you've to take.

With that said, F2P tends to lead to a decrease in upkeep cost (nobody expects customer service if they're not paying) and CR is a very significant cost, so it is possible even if revenue declined, profit still goes up if you don't need to keep the same level of staffing.

[SineSwiper]

The fact that WoW is not F2P suggests going F2P is not likely to cause an increase in revenue compared to the standard monthly model, because otherwise WoW would have done this already.

Like I said earlier, quit comparing WoW to other MMOs.

God, for somebody that has a lot to write about, you certainly don't like to read more than a sentence of my replies.