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Themeparks, like Sandboxes, are actually a "Niche"....
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Only one subscription based sandbox has grown, and that is EVE. UO, who knows, but it sure isn't gaining subs. MO and DF both have steadilly lost subs sinse their release, that's a fact.
So how do you explain the free overhaul? Or the 30 new developers? If Darkfall never grew, how did they afford the new office? The relaunch?
Your story doesn't add up. Mine does.
MO has because it's a joke. Darkfall has not. It has flucuated but has overall gone up.
I only ran a succesfull small business for over a decade, and at an age when most guys are still trying to figure out how to talk to women. I'm pretty sure I know EXACTLY how business works from the ground up.
No your story doesn't add up because the guy in charge of the game has said the complete opposite of what you're saying.
All of AV's money is got through defense contracts with Greece, learn a little bit about the company your cheerleading.
@Uhwop....DavisFlight's logic is fairly straight forward.
What about your "experience" of running your own small business leads you to believe AV hasn't grown if they've hired 30 more developers etc etc?
At that rate, it will reach notability (2M subs, ~10% of the market) in 2028, when I can probably buy a real spaceship.
Afaik, Darkfall has ~10k subs tops.
Growing, maybe, significant any time soon? nope.
Even if they would manage to double their subs every 3 years, they still wouldn't reach notability by the time everyone of us is dead.
Steadily growing isn't doing them any good if there is a peak like WoW experienced in 2011.
We can now say with confidence that the market for "classic" or "traditional" MMOs (both DF and WoW fall into this category) is roughly 22 Million (source: MMODATA.net), there just isn't more fresh subscriptions to be had, and the competition for subs is on.
350k subs just isn't a large part of the cake. Even if you take all the major sandboxes together (EVE, Perpetuum, DF, MO, DS etc.) you get not more than maybe 500k.
Since the competition is already been going on for a while and the growth of sanbox is essentially glacial, I don't see this as a large market to be tapped anytime soon.
Also please don't forget that operating costs of MMOs don't scale as well as your revenue.
They convinced some investors to throw money at them?
Stranger things have happen. Alganon has an expansion coming too. How do you explain THAT?
really?
DDO is putting out a new expansion.
LOTRO is still running.
DCUO is adding content.
wait .. wow just released an expansion.
What financial failure?
AV has defense contracts with Greece, that's how they afford to do things with a game that isn't making them money. No one redevelopes a game because it steadily grows, you do it when it's failing. Their ability to do that has nothing at all to do with the game.
They do not just make games.
I dont have experience of business and shit, but I've heard about this Project Copernicus and that little company called Big Huge Games that released their game, got shitty sales then started "expanding" their business to make an MMO.
Afaik everyone knows how that ended.
Haha wow, nice fiction there bud. The deals with the Greek defense happened in 2006, 3 years before Darkfall launched. It was a one time thing. Do you honestly believe the Greek MILITARY funded the office, the game, and the new developers?
You honestly believe that, your fantastical story that has NO EVIDENCE, against what the devs have said themselves?
That's funny, because not only is that not even CLOSE to when happened with Project Copernicus, but it's not even remotely relavent to what's happening in Darkfall.
37 Studios got funding from Rhode Island to make an MMO. They worked on the MMO for about 4-5 years. Another studio was developing a singleplayer RPG on their own. 37 Studios bought the singleplayer RPG studio and had them reskin the game so that it was in the same world/IP as the MMO they were making.
The singleplayer game released and did really well.
The MMO was delayed again. Finally, they just ran out of money.
Darkfall on the other hand, was an MMO that was created on a budget of 1,000,000 dollars. They made a profit off of it so they reinvested it into their own company, to hire 30 more devs, get a bigger office, and overhaul the game. Now that they had the experience and staff to make the game how they always wanted, they could afford an overhaul. That could not have happened if Darkfall was a financial failure.
Understand now?
True and this idea was obviously shared by other developers and/or thier investors because we've gotten a handful of MMOs, similar to WoW's model, in the last year.
What happened to them?
Downsized and either swimming to F2P shores or struggling. WoW's model only works for WoW. Rift has successfully taken a small chunk or gained their own but each of the others (swtor, tera, tsw) have obviously not. Not as much as they needed to get by anyway. I'm not that they aren't good games it's just the model they follow draws a quick in and out reaction from a majority of the players.
That's why I think, or agree with others of like mind, that the next wave of successful MMOs will be social sandbox titles that offer the full combat system you get now with tools to make you feel like part of the gameworld. Does "successful" mean a gagillion subs? No but a good MMO should grow over time.
People sure do like to argue O.o
*lol do i win teh obvious statement of the day*
No matter how cynical you become, its never enough to keep up - Lily Tomlin
I would bet Darkfall currently has less than 20k uses. It's number of subscribers IMO has not grown but shrunk tremendously over the years.
It funded darkfall 2.0 by the few subscribers that are left, grants and by partnerships with InternetQ and Mgame.
edit - and 38 studios spg kingdoms of amalur: reckoning did pretty bad. Very polarized reviews. Before the release Curt himself said this about their demo, "way more buggy than anything anyone should ever release," with wide-ranging glitches affecting even the simplest gameplay"
Game sold less than 400,000 copies in U.S.
If Darkfall had shrunk over the years there wouldn't be a new server. And the "partnership" was just sealed this summer, so it offers no explanation on how the game or the new devs or new office was funded.
As for Amalur, it sold about 2 million.
Its amusing watching this argument. Try reading things properly before going off on rants. Nobody said DF was a "financial failure", they simply said the game isnt growing. Which it isnt. In fact the population shrunk dramatically from the 1st year it was out. If you ever actually played the game, that much is obvious.
If the game was doing well and growing, they wouldnt be completely overhauling the game while admitting they fell short on a lot of things with DF and have learned from those mistakes. They know DF isnt growing, and it wont grow without the overhaul theyre doing on it. If they were happy with it, and the game was growing, it wouldnt make much sense to redo the whole thing would it?
For once Davies and I do agree, but facts will do that
. Amalur sold more like 2 million copies. Problem was they hoped for more and they also were planning on getting by with a second round of investment from Rhode Island. When RI delayed the extra funding and they didn't pull in enough from Amalur, they ran empty and shut down.
It does highlight how much money you can get in investments (there were private investors and Curt put millions of his own in as well) by making something sound good and sound like it will pay back large dividends but in reality you can't make it come true.
As far as a new server, you can't base growth on that. Many MMOs in the past have tried the new server to get an influx of players, a strategy that almost never works out well even though on forums you always hear the "If they did a new server I'd come back" lines. So a new server is not definitive proof of a growing population.
You also can't use an expansion pack or new funding to show that a game is growing. There have been plenty of companies that got new funding a couple times and still shut down. That's the risk in venture capital, you have to guess if you think the company can really pull off what they're saying they can. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. There is also the infamous AC2 expansion where they announced the shut down very soon after.
All of that is fairly moot anyway. Let's just go with that Darkfall is growing. It still has less than 50k subs which puts it as a tiny drop in the bucket of MMOs and does nothing to show that there is a great demand for FFA PvP or sandbox. It also still leaves sandbox game in the small minority of the MMO market.
Well I think it's fair to say what most of us would consider the traditional MMO (as opposed to something like Farmville) is pretty niche when compared to the number of people who go online for some form of entertainment. If that's not true now, it's only very recently that it has changed.
I'd also say that it's somewhat evident that no matter how large the particular segment of that niche the traditional themepark occupies...it's having a very difficult time supporting the large number of products that are currently vying for that market.
I also think that if new games want a decent chance to do well today, they are going to have to branch out and try to reach new markets or markets that are currently underserved by the existing offerings. For my book, one of those segments would include "sandboxes" which currently have very few quality offerings available. YMMV.
Well, yeah. The fact his example of a failed themepark MMO has more subscribers than his example of a successful Sandbox is why company's are making themeparks. Even a failed themepark is more successfull than a Successful Sandbox.
Um no. Sorry. The partnership with InternetQ basically gives Aventurine money for Darkfall. Aventurine then provides/improves InternetQ software and somehow helps with their mobile phone gaming. That is how they are funding, that and the partnership for Mgame and the few subscribers that are left.
I've never seen a source that said Amalur sold anywhere close to 2 million. If you have please post it.
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/03/09/kingdoms-of-amalur-reckoning-sold-330-000-in-the-us-last-month/
Darkfall has 2 servers Europe and NA. They opened up the 2nd because they needed it. They had 150K subsribers and did have 500,000 people trying. Thats why they had a 2nd server, they needed it.
Today there is signficantly less people playing. They really don't need two servers today.
edit - I did find a link that said Amalur sold 1.22 million. But needed 3 million to break even.
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/05/24/kingdoms-of-amalur-reckoning-had-to-sell-3m-just-to-break-even/
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2012/05/28/kingdoms-of-alumar-dev-closed/1
"Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game."-Guybrush Threepwood
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."-Hunter S. Thompson
That's just absolute lunacy. So you're telling me... that a game where 80% of the players drop off within a month, a game where half the development staff is fired, a game where two of the publishing partners go bankrupt, and game that HAS to stay open for the barest chance that the dev company might break even eventually....
is a more successful, financially beneficial business goal/design, than a game that starts small with a realistic budget, and grows steadily over time?
Yeah, I'm sure tons of devs choose to be bankrupt and unemployed over having a small group of dedicated fans.
(and if you didn't get the hint, I was referencing AoC and SWTOR)
If DF really cost 1 Million USD to create, there is no way in hell they got their money back AND made a profit from it in 3 years and with ~10k subs (the current extremely generous estimate that is going around at the DF forum)
Just none.
It would barely cover the innitial investment + server and infrastructure upkeep, as well as paying developers, and support staff for 3 years.
Staffing 10 people for 3 years at 2000$/month (a very low estimate) is 720,000$ alone (and according to LinkedIn there are ~60 people employed).
Unless they are paying their staff in bannanas or ramen there is no way in hell this game is profitable in any sense of the word. The company is obviously getting funding from other sources than DF, stop imagining otherwise.
It never fails to amaze me how some people turn into total conspiracy kooks whenever Darkfall is mentioned. First they couldn't accept the fact that the game existed. Then they couldn't accept the fact that any game could manage 10k people on one server with no instances AND real time FPS cmobat. Now they can't accept that the game was profitable.
First off, the game sold incredibly well, at 50 dollars a pop + monthly fee, on TWO servers, that at one point were full and had queues (which means that at least 30k people had to be on each server.
Second, when Darkfall launched, they had 20 devs. They now have 50+. They got more developers from the PROFIT they made from Darkfall.
People keep really close tabs on Aventurine, almost all their financial partnerships have been documented by the community. I've been involved with Darkfall for 5 years and I can tell you right now, they hired 30 new developers, moved into a bigger office, set up a second server, released 70 patches and 3 free expansions, and are about to release a total overhaul of the game. And now you're saying they not only did this without making any profit at all, but they managed to convince other publishers and partners to throw money at them?
You're delusional. Simple fact, Darkfall AND Aventurine expanded, because they were successful to some degree.