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If i make ForeverQuest....
oilthu
Member UncommonPosts: 42
Myself and a few collegaues got around to debating whether a rebooted EQ-like game could actually make a profit in todays market.
If i made a new indie MMO that at its heart was a reboot of the original eq and the first few expansions how many subs do you think i would be able to get per month.
When i say reboot, i dont mean reskinning the dungeons and zones and models as this would be copyright infringment, but if we made something new but very familiar.
Lets say hypothetically that at launch i have:-
* Good grahpics (not AAA but on par with other recent kickstarter projects)
* 40 zones with non instanced world dungeons, bosses
* No "!" questing, Having to 'H'ail NPC's and ask questions etc
* Corpse runs / XP loss when you die
* Placeholder mobs / A mix of long and short spawn timers
* Epic quests (and i mean EPIC - read months and months of work, 2-4 hours a day etc...)
* A dozen playable classes and over twenty races
* Factions / Religions where your KOS to a decent % of the world
* Very very long levelling treadmill - 50 levels at launch (8+ hours a day will still take 6 months+ to reach max level)
* Very limited automated fast travel - player to player travel would be the main way
* Classic Trinity, Crowd control, healing, taunt/aggro / pulling mechanics
* Real darkness, lack of infra / nightvision on most
* a /pizza command that auto alt tabs from the game and loads up Dominos.com ;-)
How many subs do you think it would get a month, on average for say the first two years and how much do you think they would be willing to pay for that month.
I summise the player base would max out at 10k people (if the game achieved the maximum success possible) and more likely would be sub 1k but on the flip side these players would be willing to spend a little more than your average sub fee for a modern eq-like experience (say $25-$35 per month)
Comments
Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
Thomas Jefferson
The answer is No.
Just look at Vanguard. Can you pull off the quality and scope of Vanguard? Most probably not. And even with that scope and that quality(which wasn't of course the best.. but by far not the worst either) is not capable of making any decent profit, you will most probably even less have a chance of being successful. Furthermore Vanguard got Brad McQuaid, one of the designers of EQ.. and he got actually a good reputation before of the release of Vanguard.
A very good point, we had considered this and one of the people involved in the original debate suggested the launch limited its success and appeal however i would argue that so many years later the launch is not the overriding factor for why Vanguard does not have at least a self sustaining population (in terms of revenue for expansions and upgrades)
Thanks for the considered reply.
It really depends on the quality of the game. Vanguard's biggest failing was that it just flat out didn't work. Very poorly optimized and lacked polish.
If sub based, you'd likely get 100k-250k and if the game was really well done, you could eek your way up past 300k.
If F2P you would probably make a lot more and people would definitely give it a shot.
For all the huffing and puffing you see on the forums, it's a really small community of players who actually would go back to that.
If you tossed on OWPvP, I bet you could attract some of that crowd too (but at the cost of alienating some of the first group - so kind of a wash).
I guess it boils down to how much you anticipate it costing to produce and maintain.
@ ;BichMittens
Whilst i didnt find it irritating i firmly believe that its a pointless mechanic as the majority of EQ players simply used Allakhazam and a few other sites to find out what needed to be asked. That being said, there was 11 of us discussing this and only two of us were against it.
I believe a similar system would promote roleplaying and help build solidify the lore but i would prefer a system similar to one that was found in an old SNES game called shadowrun - simply by conversing with NPCS you build up a dictionary of words, phrases and lore that you can then use in future conversations to initiate / pursue quests.
I loved EQ, but no this would fail quickly. That kind of gameplay was only fun because we didn't know, we didn't have choices, the genre was new, and the community was limited.
* We talked more because it wasn't all second nature.
* We explored more because we hadn't seen it all before.
* Most people couldn't even afford a computer that could play EQ at the time, let alone the cost of internet back then (when most charged per data usage).
* Most of us that recall it now were in very different positions in our lives at that time (mostly adolescent) where sitting there camping something for 8 hours was possible. I would wager most of us now that recall that with such great memories couldn't do that any longer.
* The limited community, due to the lack of saturation of MMOs AND the lack of the ability to really play (see above), meant that you had to get to know people, to group up and to make friends. You had to help teach that monk how to pull or the tank how to tank because you might not be able to get another tank for a couple hours which meant wasted time.
Now we've seen it all, done it all, and know how to generally function in any game without communication. Teamwork is automatic, the need for communication isn't there because of this and most people only look back thinking they would want this because they don't realize all of the above led to these factors.
Like someone else said, go play Vanguard, it has much of this but when you join a group no one says a word, you go about doing what you need to do in the group till you're done then you move on.
Just because every car has similar features doesn't mean that Ferraris are copies of Model Ts. Progress requires failure and refining.
I firmly agree with this and we all argued vehemently about just how small this community would be. figures ranged from 1k to 10k.
We have roughly costed the project figuring in the eleven of us working for free and using a pledge system whereby artists could contribute to the project instead of donating money, plus limiting the amount of art required by buying certain common assets such as landscape features/textures etc, whilst i do not want to mention the exact figures as they really were just guesstimates i will say that the breakeven point was somewhere around the 5k - 10k subs depending on how many artists collaborate for a pledge and how much would be needed for advertising and promotion etc (this was based on a $20 sub)
Thanks for your well thought out reply, i have a hard time disagreeing with any part of it.
Those points In essence are the very thing that would make this a very niche product with a very limited player base, i guess i am trying to gauge just how small is small heh.
I, personally, would like something like this but with some of the more main-stream features.
* UI Modding
* Maybe have a way of long distance communication through Inns, almost like group queue through a job-board or something like that, so there's still interaction and everything but more in an RP way. You walk into an Inn, "choose a table to sit at" and you have a list of tables with half-formed groups that you could choose between.
I'd be more curious how you would intend to make it challenging at all. I mean, with traditional gameplay you're going to have to go the route of WoW/EQ where the only real challenge is who in your group isn't able to perform their menial task.
It's hard for me to see the genre staying with the trinity formula due to the simplicity of the encounters because of it. Tank taunts.....heal tank......cc adds......dps avoids aoe.....heal dps.....
Just because every car has similar features doesn't mean that Ferraris are copies of Model Ts. Progress requires failure and refining.
The problem with your suggestion is that you do not offer a more complete package as a rewarding experience. You mention epic quests, but thats a blank statement. Normally quests in mmos are not epic.
So if you want to convince anyone this is going to work, you have to specify how its going to be epic. And voice over for quests is not worth the trouble of an epic quest.
for example. You enter an area and there are good or bad guys in town. You have to get by and survive day by day with chores, pay rent, fix your saddle/ship/mount/etc. You meet two characters in the town. They are at odds with each other and are hiring help to increase their power. You basically choose who to help and that unlockd missions. However, the thing that makes this quest better than an average mmo quest is that its a chain quest but you already know your characters and story of the area. It plays like a single player story, and running into the good or bas guys several times. Something as simple as that.
And how questing is about finding rare loot. Not just a cash shop, or a random drop from an epic boss. Something that makes the loot special as well. There is an old dig site of an old kingdom, he was rumoured as the best warrior of his time wielding a sword forged by a forgotten art. It is rumoured that his descendants still lurk the area. If you succeed you get to challenge this descendant trained in a different martial arts with different culture, but also take this mysterious weapon.
This may seem insignificant or maybe even obvious, but the quests in swtor for example did not reward people with epic quest chains nor was the loot epic. Never could we get revans loot for example. You can buy it from the cash shop though.
thats just for questing.
Then the actual problem is how are you going to make it fun and rewarding to play for 6 months? The quests have to be fun and challenging from the beginning.
however, is the path going to be a paved one, or is there exploring to different areas.
if there is exploring then there us a bolster system. Which makes the game more accessible.
and what about pvp and other end game features. Will people have access to that early on or only at end game?
Also when an expansion comes, how are you going to reward people to continue playing?
I think you are playing with fire and people's patience to put a game that exploits the appeal of online but makes a mediocre single player game with a terrible gear grind.
Creating a lot of content that is time consuming will make any vet developer realise that to have quality there should be something dynamic and intelligent that makes people want to come back but its different when doing the same/similar content. ( hence pvp having less areas than pve). Thats why something like eqn makes sense: trying to add a gear grind to eqn means you have to add good single player elements to it, which most mmos have terrible single player story.
i cant help but feel frustration from your suggestion tbh, and wanting a long 6 month grind. Since its just exploiting peoples addiction and people with ocd, or who are completionists and devs add so much mediocore and lame content. To me a mmo like thst is the new ponzi scheme or scam.
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
You can't simply add new textures and think you are avoiding copyright.
If you just want a game to play,then don't go for any money,you might be able to setup some sort of donation system just to pay for server.The UDK is free,you can design the maps in another program,convert the file and export to the UDK.
As for items ,that would be a nightmare,i would not even attempt that road even on a game just released.In saying that there are very ambitious people,i saw someone recreated i think most of all original vanilla wow in Minecraft lol.Still the items would take a massive amount of work.
Imo see if you can use the UDK,see if you can grab some free models,animated models,tons of free textures out there,especially to use in Unreal engine.
Personally making any game,i am too old for that now,way too much work involved,need a large team,i don't know how these small guys do it with teams of 2/3/4,they must never sleep or go through a ton of free workers that never get mentioned.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I'm in the UK, its 8pm, i started work today at 6am and we have a software release thats gone live today and unfortunately for me and the other devs its all gone pear shaped so i'll have to bow out of this for today despite wanting to reply to some of the comments.
Wish me luck - i think i know what the Square Enix guys feel like now, we tested everything for weeks, had people using the new database, new desktop app and the new web based interface - its ran without hickup for weeks, no new bugs etc... then within four hours of release the preverbial **** has hit the fan :-/
I can speak for other players, and i don't know any statistics that can answer your question of if this will be profitable.
But i will pass.
"non-instanced world dungeon & boss" .... no ... i don't camp with other groups.
"corpse run" ... no .. i don't regrind part of the game i have already played.
"Very very long levelling treadmill" ... no ... i have other games to play. I don't play games that i have to play weeks before seeing a little more content.
Anything can make a profit if the budget is handled correctly.
The real question is: Is it worth it to spend a couple of years of effort to get a game out that takes a lot of time to maintain which only brings in $10,000 of profit that is then split across a team?
To most people the answer would be no because the amount of work necessary to get that small amount of money wouldn't be worth it considering you could put in a fraction of that effort on a mobile game and make more money in return.
He said an old school reboot of EQ. Instantly every single person on this site knew you wouldn't be interested in it.
Great .. so we are on the same page and he would know that my statements are accurate.
Lost me at /pizza. Domino's? Really?
You statements are accurate... to your point of view.
If he had said he wanted to make a super casual, no difficulty, everyone gets everything they want whenever they want it, then we would have all known you would like it. Instead he said an Old EQ1 reboot so we of course all knew you'd point out how it wasn't the super casual, no difficulty, everyone gets what they want game so therefore you wouldn't like it.
That's all I'm saying.
Of course. I am very clear that i am only speaking for myself. I don't think there is any confusing that i am speaking from anything BUT my point of view. But thank you for make it even more apparent.
Although apparently you do miss some of my post which talk about i prefer a difficult slider and an appropriate level of challenge (hence i prefer D3 over most MMOs). And also why i don't play games like Eve which has easy-mode pve mission (at least up to level 2 or 3).
While Vanguard may have resembled EQ during development, SOE required it be transformed into a WoW clone as part of the takeover deal. So please stop suggesting Vanguard bears any resemblance at all to EQ.
O.P. I'd play the game you describe. Another option, however, is to pay SOE to license a special ruleset Vanguard server, and take out all the WoW elements and some conveniences; then launch that. Heck of a lot cheaper than creating a new game from the ground up. And since no one played Vanguard, it could be considered a new game.
A persistent marketing campaign would be necessary to grow subs for the first couple years.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
You best advice is to repackage an old game and sell it as new?
Wow .. and i thought people here want innovation and new ideas. I guess i was wrong.
I wonder i can repackage DOOM for those who haven't played it.
Vanguard only failed because Brad McQuaid didn't know how to run a company. Then Vanguard had the worst launch in the history of MMORPG. In spite of these failings the game still pulled 200k box sales and initial subs. That is more initial sales than EQ1 had in 1999.
This proves there is pretty sizable interest in an new EQ1 type game. There is an under served market out there waiting for such a game to be made. Vanguard failed in part due to poor execution of the product and quality issues. The lesson to be learned here is it can't be some indie game just thrown together like OP is proposing. It has to have real quality and polish that would be expected in a AAA title.