Hope this is sarcasm... cause the themepark model works very, very well - depending on the game and the payment model.
Haha, seriously? Didn't work for WAR, or SWTOR, or AoC, or TSW, or Rift, or LotRO, or any of the other recent flops. When a game merges servers and forces itself to go FTP after a month or so, and developers get fired, it did poorly.
How many sandbox MMOs are there that prove that model works?
One? EvE? And, by the way, their 500k peak subscribers is still... let's see.... 6 times less than what you say was the peak WoW subscriber count in the west (3 million.)
Don't be ignorant.
We're not talking about sandboxes. DAoC, EQ, AC, those games grew over time because they weren't built around linear scripted content that you burn through and then leave. They had heavy social elements, which built human ties that kept you on the game. Same for sandboxes like UO, and SWG.
How many AAA sandbox MMOs have there been? Two. UO, and SWG, and both were massive successes of their time, and didn't start failing until themepark features were added.
And Eve, which started out as a nothing MMO, is the second biggest MMO in the west, and its a sandox, and its STILL GROWING. Meanwhile, SWTOR, 300 million budget, died instantly.
They changed up the part of the game that had all my best memories. All the places I once had so much fun discovering are gone. The game i once played doesn't exist anymore and the game that replaced it is only mediocre. I don't know if Cata ruined the game or not but it did make it easy for me to move on.
No game ever stays the same, they all move forward, usually by being made easier and so you never can recapture again, what once was. You only come back to visit the old neighborhood to relive some memories. But it is always jarring and a bit sad the last time you come home to find out everything has been bulldozed and you realize there is no reason now to come back.
also, lol@the numbers when EQ Next hits the shelves
People have been saying that the last 8 years.
"lol@the numbers when Vanguard hits the shelves."
"lol@the numbers when Age of Conan hits the shelves."
"lol@the numbers when LOTRO hits the shelves."
"lol@the numbers when hits the shelves."
Great post!
If WoW releases a quality expansion that backs off on some of the simplification and gives long term players what they actually want (and lets the younger players flock back and forth to new titles like Wildstar and ESO etc.)
Those numbers (7.7 million) would actually go back up, like they do for a short while after every expansion.
If the remove the damn gimmicks and simplification and focus on quality content, lots of it, and exceptional gameplay - WoW will continue to do fine, maybe even earn some folks back.
Personally I see that as doubtful.
WoW, like EQ, UO, and so on will always have a fan base, but the biggest factor for its decline is realistically just that it's a 10 year old game. Games get old, and people move on. The older the game gets, the more people move on, and the less new people come to join in. WoW will lose subs until it tappers off to just the hardcore fan base, but it's not because it's bad, its because its passed its prime.
The quicker they go down, the quicker it'll go FTP and then they'll be back up to over 10 million active players... and most of you will be included in them.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
Might as well say it's 7.7 million +1.... I'm heading back to Azeroth and resubbing this weekend. And I'll stay subbed until my wife and I hit 90. Then my daughter and I will be heading to Eorzea for a while.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
I left and broke the cycle of returning to it last year between cata , pandas and feeding raiders at expense of rest of community it was not worth playing. However they are still making mountains of money and can just ride it out until they launch a new game.
How many sandbox MMOs are there that prove that model works?
One? EvE? And, by the way, their 500k peak subscribers is still... let's see.... 6 times less than what you say was the peak WoW subscriber count in the west (3 million.)
Don't be ignorant.
We're not talking about sandboxes. DAoC, EQ, AC, those games grew over time because they weren't built around linear scripted content that you burn through and then leave. They had heavy social elements, which built human ties that kept you on the game. Same for sandboxes like UO, and SWG.
How many AAA sandbox MMOs have there been? Two. UO, and SWG, and both were massive successes of their time, and didn't start failing until themepark features were added.
And Eve, which started out as a nothing MMO, is the second biggest MMO in the west, and its a sandox, and its STILL GROWING. Meanwhile, SWTOR, 300 million budget, died instantly.
Let's see - EQ player numbers easily dwarfed UO (and I was one of the folks who hated EQ and played UO instead) and don't get your facts wrong with SWG - the game was dying and on its last legs BEFORE the NGE and CU happened, if you remember the timeline, SWG lost more than 50% of the playerbase when WoW came out about a year after.
It was again about a year after the release of WoW that the NGE happened, and it was done to try and save the game from ridiculously low subscriber counts - but of course we all know that really backfired as those who still loved the game were furious and left and the new "WoW-crowd" players never showed up - because they were playing WOW!
I personally left SWG because I hated the Holocron grind, the themeparks (Rebel/Imp/Jabbas) and monthly arcs were always broken/borked, and I got into BETA for JTL expansion and it was garbage compared to X-Wing / Tie Fighter.
SWTOR didn't die, BTW either, by all accounts F2P saved the game. Just like RIFT and TSW and a few others.
Those were all failures AS GAMES, not the failure of the model.
And to say WoW hasn't survived this long without any social ties is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. Tons of people still play only because their friends play, and the most social aspects of the game are still some of the most popular like Raiding and Arena/other Team PvP.
Originally posted by sketocafe Does anyone know the breakdown on the $15 a month western subscribers and the Asian "subscribers" who don't pay a sub?
I can't find a breakdown of types of subs on their financial statements (probably because money is money to accountants, whereas chinese subs are "fake" subs to internet trolls).
But the Blizzard segment of Acti-Blizz brought in $1,698,000,000 in net revenues in 2012 (and to keep that in perspective, Activision brought in $3,072,000,000 which is about double).
Acti-Blizz made $1,537,000,000 from digital online channels (which I assume subs are included) and $3,013,000,000 from retail channels again in 2012 (which I would assume includes all box sales, merchandise and such)
Ah, sorry I'm doing this in real time and I just found revenues by geographic location: Just to save me the zero's, there are all in millions:
North America $2,436 in 2012
Europe $1,968 in 2012
Asia Pacific $452 in 2012
So it seems Asia is their smallest market to date. Actually looking at the previous years, 2011 and 2010, it was significantly smaller before. pocket change compared to NA and EU.
And I just found online subs: $986,000,000 in 2012. Almost a biillion dollars, but it is a drop from previous years.
$1,357,000,000 in 2011 and $1,230,000,000 in 2010. Ouch. These subscriptions are a combination of WoW and CoD memberships.
In any case, if you are ever curious about a companies financials you can just google "name of company" and "financial report" and go through it.
Figured I'd pull this out of the middle of the thread since we're getting back to people saying "most of the subs are Asian players" which insinuates that asians should not be counted as "real" people because, I don't know why; and that most of Blizzards money is coming from that region while the west is failing.
But if we look at their financials, we see that Asia is their smallest segment bringing in 1/5 of NA is bringing in, despite the population of countries like China. So think what you will, but those are numbers.
really small group dungeons and content is the best way to go now.
I couldn't disagree more. I find no fun in everything being 1 party (5-6 person) content now.
There's no longevity or community building aspects in that; there's only segregation and separation.
It's become all about "me and my 5 friends and fuck everyone else". That's not healthy.
Yeah, because grinding raids with 9 or 24 other people who only hope one thing, that you won't have enough DKP or lose the roll if something they want drop, is "healthy" and superior community building.
I have to agree with Jean-Luc here. Pve raiding is the community bane. What is the difference between saying screw everyone but my 4 or 5 friend or screw everyone but my 9-23 friends? I am not sure what the answer is but end game raiding treadmills are clearly not it. World wise and immersion wise to me UO and EQ up to Scars of velious and DAoC up to ToA were much more community oriented and less about who is the top group of hamsters on the raid treadmill. In my experience the post wow raiding community is a large part of the problem just based of my experiences with raiders being over 90% bad.
really small group dungeons and content is the best way to go now.
I couldn't disagree more. I find no fun in everything being 1 party (5-6 person) content now.
There's no longevity or community building aspects in that; there's only segregation and separation.
It's become all about "me and my 5 friends and fuck everyone else". That's not healthy.
Yeah, because grinding raids with 9 or 24 other people who only hope one thing, that you won't have enough DKP or lose the roll if something they want drop, is "healthy" and superior community building.
I have to agree with Jean-Luc here. Pve raiding is the community bane. What is the difference between saying screw everyone but my 4 or 5 friend or screw everyone but my 9-23 friends? I am not sure what the answer is but end game raiding treadmills are clearly not it. World wise and immersion wise to me UO and EQ up to Scars of velious and DAoC up to ToA were much more community oriented and less about who is the top group of hamsters on the raid treadmill. In my experience the post wow raiding community is a large part of the problem just based of my experiences with raiders being over 90% bad.
All I'm saying is, small man dungeons are the wrong way to go as far as "progression" or "endgame" goes. You don't have to go the large scale raiding route, but you sure as hell have to do something better than 5-6 man dungeons.
As someone who was completely over raiding when GW2 was released, i now see the importance of it.
We need something to get players out of their comfort zone and expanding their field of view. We need a system that puts a greater reliance on other players not in their circle.
What we don't need is content being built for smaller and smaller groups.
Every product does eventually, so it is not some rare phenomenon. The length of the lifecycle is what I find extraordinary in case of WoW. It has been out for a decade and it is likely to keep going for many more years. Of course the playerbase will be SIGNIFICANTLY lower than it was at its peak or even than it is now.
I believe it can remain a profitable product for a long time. However, the revenues will likely lose some zeros. It is nothing Blizzard would not expect. The question is, do they have anything that will help them maintain as much of their market share as possible? I always thought TITAN was supposed to serve this purpose. At this point, it seems rather unlikely.
From business / economic perspective, it will be interesting to watch Blizz in following decade. I am quite curious how much of their market share will they manage to hold without their only "Titan" which is currently WoW.
well it's not on the uptick, but far from dead and I speak as someone who has only dabbled a bit in WoW, EvE is my main game.
It's still interesting that no other game can pull in 7 million paid subs a month, get paid for expansions and run a vanity cash shop as well.
With Titan getting scrubbed to be rewritten from scratch we won't be seeing a sucessor for a good few years so if the current trend continues ... if ... we will see more people trying other games, which is good for the competition.
But yeh, it will be an interesting ride over the next few years.
I sometimes make spelling and grammar errors but I don't pretend it's because I'm using a phone
But like I always say, go look at how much a million is.
This game will end just like every other game out there, we should really use all this cyberspace for something more important, like pictures of food or videos of cats...
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
really small group dungeons and content is the best way to go now.
I couldn't disagree more. I find no fun in everything being 1 party (5-6 person) content now.
There's no longevity or community building aspects in that; there's only segregation and separation.
It's become all about "me and my 5 friends and fuck everyone else". That's not healthy.
Yeah, because grinding raids with 9 or 24 other people who only hope one thing, that you won't have enough DKP or lose the roll if something they want drop, is "healthy" and superior community building.
I have to agree with Jean-Luc here. Pve raiding is the community bane. What is the difference between saying screw everyone but my 4 or 5 friend or screw everyone but my 9-23 friends? I am not sure what the answer is but end game raiding treadmills are clearly not it. World wise and immersion wise to me UO and EQ up to Scars of velious and DAoC up to ToA were much more community oriented and less about who is the top group of hamsters on the raid treadmill. In my experience the post wow raiding community is a large part of the problem just based of my experiences with raiders being over 90% bad.
With DAoC and UO in my opinion a lot of that community came about because of crafters and/or the need for them. In UO you also had to have friends to survive much early on... or you were really good at pvp quick.
Raiding kills crafting.. trying to solve that by making crafting components drop in raids doesn't fix it. So regardless of raidsize you need a different reason to raid than gear .. so that crafters can have a purpose. Maybe you raid for skins for your armor/weapons.. or who knows what... but that goes right back to the "progression" word...
In UO I was almost a full time merchant. If I wasn't stocking my vendor I was harvesting so I could craft and stock my vendor. So I will admit I am very biased against the standard raid progression.
As to raid size I guess that really depends on your guild or friends list. You certainly don't want to end up with an EQ2 type of design that mandates you bring this many of these classes and nothing else.. that doesn't build community either. That was probably part of why UO did have a great community even with open pvp.. nobody was spamming "looking for healer" (or tank) because there was no concept of those things at the time in that game at least.
really small group dungeons and content is the best way to go now.
I couldn't disagree more. I find no fun in everything being 1 party (5-6 person) content now.
There's no longevity or community building aspects in that; there's only segregation and separation.
It's become all about "me and my 5 friends and fuck everyone else". That's not healthy.
Yeah, because grinding raids with 9 or 24 other people who only hope one thing, that you won't have enough DKP or lose the roll if something they want drop, is "healthy" and superior community building.
All I can say is that you have never been in a quality raiding guild.......
James T. Kirk: All she's got isn't good enough! What else ya got?
Originally posted by Shadowguy64 The interesting thing is, other MMO's populations aren't going up. So people aren't switching games...they are leaving the genre.
The entire concept of the mmo was bastardized to bring in maximum number of players. This means players who should never have ever played a mmorpg as they were originally intended and created have been drawn into the player base expectations of developers.
Developers shot themselves in their own feet by losing sight of what the mmo market is. It has always been a niche market of players who like rpg style games and came from heavy social and/or rpg backgrounds. Developers like Blizzard hit a home run and then continued trying to cater to the larger crowd which alienated their core audience. Other developers either stuck with their niche audience (and therefore were called failures because they didn't attract millions or tried to copy the themepark concept to bring in players from everywhere instead of striving to creating community).
What I am saying is the you can't expect a constantly growing player base when it is an inflated bubble ready to pop already.
I for one don't fear this issue. The bubble should indeed pop and only then will we see properly build games which target a specific audience. We will start seeing lower population yet very healthy games once developers and the big distributors realize the limitations of the genre.
Originally posted by Prenho The thing I want to see the most is WoW going to oblivion. i will make party if it happens.It will help the MMO genre.
How?
Don't even listen to people like him. They think the world has to implode before change occurs. Perhaps this is because they can't imagine enough control over their own lives without catastrophic occurrences forcing them to change.
Comments
We're not talking about sandboxes. DAoC, EQ, AC, those games grew over time because they weren't built around linear scripted content that you burn through and then leave. They had heavy social elements, which built human ties that kept you on the game. Same for sandboxes like UO, and SWG.
How many AAA sandbox MMOs have there been? Two. UO, and SWG, and both were massive successes of their time, and didn't start failing until themepark features were added.
And Eve, which started out as a nothing MMO, is the second biggest MMO in the west, and its a sandox, and its STILL GROWING. Meanwhile, SWTOR, 300 million budget, died instantly.
They changed up the part of the game that had all my best memories. All the places I once had so much fun discovering are gone. The game i once played doesn't exist anymore and the game that replaced it is only mediocre. I don't know if Cata ruined the game or not but it did make it easy for me to move on.
No game ever stays the same, they all move forward, usually by being made easier and so you never can recapture again, what once was. You only come back to visit the old neighborhood to relive some memories. But it is always jarring and a bit sad the last time you come home to find out everything has been bulldozed and you realize there is no reason now to come back.
All die, so die well.
Personally I see that as doubtful.
WoW, like EQ, UO, and so on will always have a fan base, but the biggest factor for its decline is realistically just that it's a 10 year old game. Games get old, and people move on. The older the game gets, the more people move on, and the less new people come to join in. WoW will lose subs until it tappers off to just the hardcore fan base, but it's not because it's bad, its because its passed its prime.
I dunno why people gloat.
The quicker they go down, the quicker it'll go FTP and then they'll be back up to over 10 million active players... and most of you will be included in them.
And of those 7.7 million 5 million are asian.
Free to play comming at you this winter.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
If WoW loses subs at million a year, it will have 700,000 subs in 2020 :P
Almost all currently out mmos are sitting at near that value and are profitable enough with cash shop.
:P
Let's see - EQ player numbers easily dwarfed UO (and I was one of the folks who hated EQ and played UO instead) and don't get your facts wrong with SWG - the game was dying and on its last legs BEFORE the NGE and CU happened, if you remember the timeline, SWG lost more than 50% of the playerbase when WoW came out about a year after.
It was again about a year after the release of WoW that the NGE happened, and it was done to try and save the game from ridiculously low subscriber counts - but of course we all know that really backfired as those who still loved the game were furious and left and the new "WoW-crowd" players never showed up - because they were playing WOW!
I personally left SWG because I hated the Holocron grind, the themeparks (Rebel/Imp/Jabbas) and monthly arcs were always broken/borked, and I got into BETA for JTL expansion and it was garbage compared to X-Wing / Tie Fighter.
SWTOR didn't die, BTW either, by all accounts F2P saved the game. Just like RIFT and TSW and a few others.
Those were all failures AS GAMES, not the failure of the model.
And to say WoW hasn't survived this long without any social ties is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. Tons of people still play only because their friends play, and the most social aspects of the game are still some of the most popular like Raiding and Arena/other Team PvP.
Figured I'd pull this out of the middle of the thread since we're getting back to people saying "most of the subs are Asian players" which insinuates that asians should not be counted as "real" people because, I don't know why; and that most of Blizzards money is coming from that region while the west is failing.
But if we look at their financials, we see that Asia is their smallest segment bringing in 1/5 of NA is bringing in, despite the population of countries like China. So think what you will, but those are numbers.
Yeah, it's been losing around two mill though. 600k over 3 months is around 6500 people per day. 275 people per hour.
i previously posted the breakdown
it was last known to be 55 Asian vs 45 Western split
http://wow.joystiq.com/2008/01/22/world-of-warcraft-hits-10-million-subscribers/
EQ2 fan sites
I couldn't disagree more. I find no fun in everything being 1 party (5-6 person) content now.
There's no longevity or community building aspects in that; there's only segregation and separation.
It's become all about "me and my 5 friends and fuck everyone else". That's not healthy.
I have to agree with Jean-Luc here. Pve raiding is the community bane. What is the difference between saying screw everyone but my 4 or 5 friend or screw everyone but my 9-23 friends? I am not sure what the answer is but end game raiding treadmills are clearly not it. World wise and immersion wise to me UO and EQ up to Scars of velious and DAoC up to ToA were much more community oriented and less about who is the top group of hamsters on the raid treadmill. In my experience the post wow raiding community is a large part of the problem just based of my experiences with raiders being over 90% bad.
All I'm saying is, small man dungeons are the wrong way to go as far as "progression" or "endgame" goes. You don't have to go the large scale raiding route, but you sure as hell have to do something better than 5-6 man dungeons.
As someone who was completely over raiding when GW2 was released, i now see the importance of it.
We need something to get players out of their comfort zone and expanding their field of view. We need a system that puts a greater reliance on other players not in their circle.
What we don't need is content being built for smaller and smaller groups.
well it's not on the uptick, but far from dead and I speak as someone who has only dabbled a bit in WoW, EvE is my main game.
It's still interesting that no other game can pull in 7 million paid subs a month, get paid for expansions and run a vanity cash shop as well.
With Titan getting scrubbed to be rewritten from scratch we won't be seeing a sucessor for a good few years so if the current trend continues ... if ... we will see more people trying other games, which is good for the competition.
But yeh, it will be an interesting ride over the next few years.
I sometimes make spelling and grammar errors but I don't pretend it's because I'm using a phone
Ugh...
Even the Roman Empire came to an end.
But like I always say, go look at how much a million is.
This game will end just like every other game out there, we should really use all this cyberspace for something more important, like pictures of food or videos of cats...
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
With DAoC and UO in my opinion a lot of that community came about because of crafters and/or the need for them. In UO you also had to have friends to survive much early on... or you were really good at pvp quick.
Raiding kills crafting.. trying to solve that by making crafting components drop in raids doesn't fix it. So regardless of raidsize you need a different reason to raid than gear .. so that crafters can have a purpose. Maybe you raid for skins for your armor/weapons.. or who knows what... but that goes right back to the "progression" word...
In UO I was almost a full time merchant. If I wasn't stocking my vendor I was harvesting so I could craft and stock my vendor. So I will admit I am very biased against the standard raid progression.
As to raid size I guess that really depends on your guild or friends list. You certainly don't want to end up with an EQ2 type of design that mandates you bring this many of these classes and nothing else.. that doesn't build community either. That was probably part of why UO did have a great community even with open pvp.. nobody was spamming "looking for healer" (or tank) because there was no concept of those things at the time in that game at least.
How?
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
All I can say is that you have never been in a quality raiding guild.......
James T. Kirk: All she's got isn't good enough! What else ya got?
The entire concept of the mmo was bastardized to bring in maximum number of players. This means players who should never have ever played a mmorpg as they were originally intended and created have been drawn into the player base expectations of developers.
Developers shot themselves in their own feet by losing sight of what the mmo market is. It has always been a niche market of players who like rpg style games and came from heavy social and/or rpg backgrounds. Developers like Blizzard hit a home run and then continued trying to cater to the larger crowd which alienated their core audience. Other developers either stuck with their niche audience (and therefore were called failures because they didn't attract millions or tried to copy the themepark concept to bring in players from everywhere instead of striving to creating community).
What I am saying is the you can't expect a constantly growing player base when it is an inflated bubble ready to pop already.
I for one don't fear this issue. The bubble should indeed pop and only then will we see properly build games which target a specific audience. We will start seeing lower population yet very healthy games once developers and the big distributors realize the limitations of the genre.
You stay sassy!
But who needs facts? Facts are useless in the face of a random internet forum poster.
Don't even listen to people like him. They think the world has to implode before change occurs. Perhaps this is because they can't imagine enough control over their own lives without catastrophic occurrences forcing them to change.
You stay sassy!