Well considering no big budget MMOs have managed to survive more than a few months, it's safe to say they're dying out.
Really? Shall I list all those which survived and still exist nowadays, or will you admit you didn't think enough before pressing the "post message" button?
You're right, I should have been more specific.
Considering no big budget MMO has managed to GROW their subscriber base post launch since 2004...
Laying off staff, closing partner studios, merging servers, and going FTP because people won't pay to play your game... yeah that's not a sign of a huge success.
Yet games like SW:TOR still make more money than your beloved "EvE". And other games like GW2 are actually recruiting staff despite what the "experts" here think of them.
Seems like your own reality is very far from the real reality
Eve has almost 600k subscribers and growing, retaining and playing each month. It also has a much MUCH smaller budget than SWTOR ever had.
Meanwhile, SWTOR spent about 300-400 million in development, and several dozen more millions in marketing.
It crashed so hard it had to lay off most of its staff, merge servers, fire its partner companies and founders, rush to be FTP, and sell gimmicks to stay afloat.
If I was investing in a business, I would invest in the one that is steadily growing, not the one that still hasn't made back its development budget.
Considering no big budget MMO has managed to GROW their subscriber base post launch since 2004...
Laying off staff, closing partner studios, merging servers, and going FTP because people won't pay to play your game... yeah that's not a sign of a huge success.
The importance of growth is relative to where you started. The size of the MMO playerbase seems to have stabilized, it doesn't appear to be growing the way it was for most of WoW's life to date. Reports suggest that the number of actual subscriptions in the U.S., to all games combined, is 5.3 million. When a game is extremely hyped, it tends to sell a couple million copies in it's launch window; that means somewhere between a third and half of all the people in the U.S. who are willing to subscribe to a MMO try a new launch. Considering how much of that 5.3 million is the people who either never leave or always go back to WoW, that doesn't leave a lot of room for growth. It's far more reasonable to assume that, when a game launches that big, the numbers are only going to go down. It's not an indication of failure, it's an indication that there is a hell of a lot more competition for your MMO dollar than there used to be. Failure is when your revenue drops so far that you no longer turn a profit, and not many big budget games have reached that point.
Well, I'm not sure what reports you've been looking at, but let's look at a single set of numbers to compare.
Blizzard 2013 9-month financial report shows the following:
9 months ending Sept 30 had $714million in revenues from online subscriptions.
Now, I'm about to compare apples to oranges here, but it works: Net revenues by geographic region shows Asia Pacific as $242million 9-months ending Sept 30 (that's NET revenues, not just online subscriptions like my first number). And just to put it in persepctive, net revenues for North America was $1.6 billion. Asia makes up only 15% of Blizzard revenues despite many claims by forum posters that all the subs comes from gold farmers. Blatantly false.
So basically I'm building a worst case scenario for Western online subscriptions.
$472million is what we're left with. Now, divide that by $15/monthly and you get 31.5 million subscriptions. WAIT! WoW doesn't have 31 million subs! Yes, you are correct! Now relax.
They also count Warcraft boxes in those sales, licensing, cash shop revenues, and Call of Duty Elite memberships (Cause Activision Blizzard is one compnay).
But you're claiming that a report said the western market only has 5.3 million subs combined. Well what's 5.3 million subs in money? $79.5 million That's a difference of $392.5million (just from Blizzard alone!) Blizz states that WoW has something like 7 million subs. Their numbers bear that out quite nicely.
AND AND AND, these are not complete numbers for 2013, they're just 9 months of revenues. you can expect an additional $200-$300 million in the last quarter (assuming historical data represents any type of trend - which it does).
I'm very curious how the entire western market can have only 5.3 million subs when WoW alone likely surpasses that. Remember, Asia Pacific only makes up 15% of Blizzard revenues (and that's NET revenues - they likely make up an even smaller percentage of online subscriptions). Using the worst case scenario for Western Subs (based on Blizzard alone), We can be fairly close to the mark if we say that WoW has approximately 6 million Western Subs and 1 million Asia Pacific Subs.
That's one game. This assumes EVE has zero subs. SWTOR has zero subs, etc.
Eve has almost 600k subscribers and growing, retaining and playing each month. It also has a much MUCH smaller budget than SWTOR ever had.
Meanwhile, SWTOR spent about 300-400 million in development, and several dozen more millions in marketing.
It crashed so hard it had to lay off most of its staff, merge servers, fire its partner companies and founders, rush to be FTP, and sell gimmicks to stay afloat.
If I was investing in a business, I would invest in the one that is steadily growing, not the one that still hasn't made back its development budget.
Damn, now TOR cost 300-400 million plus several dozen more millions? It won't be too long before people start saying: "TOR SPENT 1 BILLION IN DEVELOPMENT!!1
The game genre that players should fear for is the single player offline game. Companies are looking to online play as a way to both make a game harder to pirate and a way to generate continual revenue post sales with DLC and micro transactions. Not to mention in game advertising opportunities. That doesn't mean they will all fill the traditional definition of a MMO but you can bet they will try and call it that if they think it will help sales.
Why?
I don't see "harder to pirate" is a bad thing. Always online is also not a bad thing, if the technology is ironed out and there is no bugs. Surely we don't want the server issues as in the D3 launch, but having online cloud saves, cross game chat with friends, auto-upates are all good things (at least for me).
And what is wrong with DLC? They are no different than smaller, cheaper sequels. I play the Brigmore Witches DLC of Dishonored and it is great.
Lastly, why would they call it a MMO? It is not like people are coming out in masses to buy MMOs.
I don't see 600k there, do you? May I lend you my glasses?
The most recent press releases stated about 550k. Given the rather steady rise in subs, and that the 550k number was reached about 3-4 months ago, kind of safe to extrapolate, no?
Eve has almost 600k subscribers and growing, retaining and playing each month. It also has a much MUCH smaller budget than SWTOR ever had.
Meanwhile, SWTOR spent about 300-400 million in development, and several dozen more millions in marketing.
It crashed so hard it had to lay off most of its staff, merge servers, fire its partner companies and founders, rush to be FTP, and sell gimmicks to stay afloat.
If I was investing in a business, I would invest in the one that is steadily growing, not the one that still hasn't made back its development budget.
Damn, now TOR cost 300-400 million plus several dozen more millions? It won't be too long before people start saying: "TOR SPENT 1 BILLION IN DEVELOPMENT!!1
I believe he is citing EALouse who said 300 million well before release. Considering everything else EALouse said was spot on I think it's the most believable number out there.
Hey look the oblitory "*Titles here*: Last of the Big Budget MMo" threads! How they like to pop up yet are wrong every time!
Its silly to think that. MMos make a lot of profit. Yes,. they will decline in population (so many games, why bother dedicating to one like in the past?) but MMos still make big profits. SWTOR, a game I think many feel wasn't very good has made amazing profits last year with its F2P model cashing in on the "Take advantage of people's gambling addiction" gambit that many Korean F2P Mmos have used in the past to great success. F2P even if a game loses a lot of its population still will tend to get enough suckers to waste hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make up for having less people. Big budget costs more of course but is far more likely to grab people and get people dedicated to spending all that extra money if it goes F2P which can make a killing for money well over the price to create and maintain.
Big Budget MMos are here to stay. The only time I can see them "Vanishing" will be if a big MMO "Crash" occurs, which would likely hurt all MMos, not just big budget ones.
The problem with all these kinds of threads is WoW. WoW was a huge finacial success and judging all games to be a failure if they don't match that would lead to no new games ever.
What you need to look at is invest/rate of return ratios. It doesn't really matter if the game craters after initial release (though obviously you don't want this) or if it goes free to play. (Again you may not want this). You are just looking at the numbers.
WoW of course is killer - with 50 million investment (initially) and a return of now up to 1 Billion dollars a year. That's an incredible rate of return. But an established publisher doesn't need to see that rate of return to fund future MMOs. Take GW2. It only cost 100 million or so to create. They will say 4 million boxes at 30 dollars (at least) a box - and - thats already 120 million. They make 25 million or so each quarter - for an additional 100 million a year - but 50 million of that is lost to ongoing costs. So in short they likely created a 70% or so rate of return..
Would you fund an investment with a 70% rate of return? I would. In the PC world MMOs are more profitable - not only do you get the box sales - you get lower levels of piracy - and you get some ongoing revenue. The initial costs are higher - but so is the profit. Until the big companies start really taking a bath expect more big time AAA mmos to be funded.
Sorry if that doesnt mesh with the all MMOS that I don't like are failing vibe you get from this site. Like another poster said I expect on the PC side most of the big investment is going to MMOs in the future. Its single player games that are on the endangered list. Zenimax could have funded a offline single player game using the Skyrim engine - made by another group (other then Bethesda) but the went the MMO route for more profits.
Well, I'm not sure what reports you've been looking at, but let's look at a single set of numbers to compare.
Blizzard 2013 9-month financial report shows the following:
9 months ending Sept 30 had $714million in revenues from online subscriptions.
Now, I'm about to compare apples to oranges here, but it works: Net revenues by geographic region shows Asia Pacific as $242million 9-months ending Sept 30 (that's NET revenues, not just online subscriptions like my first number). And just to put it in persepctive, net revenues for North America was $1.6 billion. Asia makes up only 15% of Blizzard revenues despite many claims by forum posters that all the subs comes from gold farmers. Blatantly false.
So basically I'm building a worst case scenario for Western online subscriptions.
$472million is what we're left with. Now, divide that by $15/monthly and you get 31.5 million subscriptions. WAIT! WoW doesn't have 31 million subs! Yes, you are correct! Now relax.
They also count Warcraft boxes in those sales, licensing, cash shop revenues, and Call of Duty Elite memberships (Cause Activision Blizzard is one compnay).
But you're claiming that a report said the western market only has 5.3 million subs combined. Well what's 5.3 million subs in money? $79.5 million That's a difference of $392.5million (just from Blizzard alone!) Blizz states that WoW has something like 7 million subs. Their numbers bear that out quite nicely.
AND AND AND, these are not complete numbers for 2013, they're just 9 months of revenues. you can expect an additional $200-$300 million in the last quarter (assuming historical data represents any type of trend - which it does).
I'm very curious how the entire western market can have only 5.3 million subs when WoW alone likely surpasses that. Remember, Asia Pacific only makes up 15% of Blizzard revenues (and that's NET revenues - they likely make up an even smaller percentage of online subscriptions). Using the worst case scenario for Western Subs (based on Blizzard alone), We can be fairly close to the mark if we say that WoW has approximately 6 million Western Subs and 1 million Asia Pacific Subs.
That's one game. This assumes EVE has zero subs. SWTOR has zero subs, etc.
I thought WoW's U.S. (to the best of my knowledge, the 5.3 million number was supposed to be just the US, not everything "western") subs had been estimated as being in the 3.5 million range? If that number is accurate, even if we assume the 500k a piece for EvE and TOR were all from the US, that leaves around 800k to spread around between the other games. Which, as empty as most of them usually seem, would be entirely plausible.
I'm not saying the 5.3 million number is necessarily correct. All I am saying is that it is the only estimate of total U.S. subscribers that I am aware of that is available to the public and comes from a source that is supposedly taken seriously within the industry. (The superdataresearch report)
Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me.
Neither eve not swtor have 500k just in the west. Last I saw eve was about 1-200k in the west, rest spread out over a couple dozen counties including China. Swtor I've never seen a regional breakdown but you can bet it's still global.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
Originally posted by VengeSunsoar Neither eve not swtor have 500k just in the west. Last I saw eve was about 1-200k in the west, rest spread out over a couple dozen counties including China. Swtor I've never seen a regional breakdown but you can bet it's still global.
Yeah, I was trying to say that even if those two games' subs did come all from the US, a total of 5.3 million subscribers for the country across all games seemed plausible, not that I thought they actually did all come from here.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me.
Originally posted by VengeSunsoar Neither eve not swtor have 500k just in the west. Last I saw eve was about 1-200k in the west, rest spread out over a couple dozen counties including China. Swtor I've never seen a regional breakdown but you can bet it's still global.
The Chinese do not even play on the same server. They are not included in the 500K subs that EVE currently retains. Where do get your information, jeez.
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
It's starting to seem like a reasonable possibility at this point. My guess is that both TESO and Wildstar will achieve moderate success when they release but just like almost every other MMO, they will lose most of their playerbase within a couple of months.
SOE appears to at least be trying to implement some outside the box ideas which may give EQN some longevity.
Only way SOE's flagship game will die is when Sony dies. EQN will continue on even if only 10k play it (and they can even fund it...rich people play that game -- $75k+/yr income types).
So newbies to MMORPGs worried about establishing themselves in a MMO, that's the MMO to start in. WoW will die before Everquest (i.e., Activision-Blizzard gets bought out and trashes the catalogue of games, as Square has done with the older EIDOS IP).
And 300,000 of them are due to this: until June, 2013 in order to skill another character, you had to open another account.
In EvE you can only have one toon leveling on one account at a time (until now, where those wishing to pay another sub/PLEX/Time-code fee for a second or third toon to level at the same time -- one EvE account can cost a player $45/mon on leveling fees).
All this caused CCP to inflate the actual number of players playing. Since also last year CCP approved of IsBox multi-gamer software to be used, even more gates will be camped by Mitt's legion of multiboxers.
Comments
Eve has almost 600k subscribers and growing, retaining and playing each month. It also has a much MUCH smaller budget than SWTOR ever had.
Meanwhile, SWTOR spent about 300-400 million in development, and several dozen more millions in marketing.
It crashed so hard it had to lay off most of its staff, merge servers, fire its partner companies and founders, rush to be FTP, and sell gimmicks to stay afloat.
If I was investing in a business, I would invest in the one that is steadily growing, not the one that still hasn't made back its development budget.
Well, I'm not sure what reports you've been looking at, but let's look at a single set of numbers to compare.
Blizzard 2013 9-month financial report shows the following:
9 months ending Sept 30 had $714million in revenues from online subscriptions.
Now, I'm about to compare apples to oranges here, but it works: Net revenues by geographic region shows Asia Pacific as $242million 9-months ending Sept 30 (that's NET revenues, not just online subscriptions like my first number). And just to put it in persepctive, net revenues for North America was $1.6 billion. Asia makes up only 15% of Blizzard revenues despite many claims by forum posters that all the subs comes from gold farmers. Blatantly false.
So basically I'm building a worst case scenario for Western online subscriptions.
$472million is what we're left with. Now, divide that by $15/monthly and you get 31.5 million subscriptions. WAIT! WoW doesn't have 31 million subs! Yes, you are correct! Now relax.
They also count Warcraft boxes in those sales, licensing, cash shop revenues, and Call of Duty Elite memberships (Cause Activision Blizzard is one compnay).
But you're claiming that a report said the western market only has 5.3 million subs combined. Well what's 5.3 million subs in money? $79.5 million That's a difference of $392.5million (just from Blizzard alone!) Blizz states that WoW has something like 7 million subs. Their numbers bear that out quite nicely.
AND AND AND, these are not complete numbers for 2013, they're just 9 months of revenues. you can expect an additional $200-$300 million in the last quarter (assuming historical data represents any type of trend - which it does).
I'm very curious how the entire western market can have only 5.3 million subs when WoW alone likely surpasses that. Remember, Asia Pacific only makes up 15% of Blizzard revenues (and that's NET revenues - they likely make up an even smaller percentage of online subscriptions). Using the worst case scenario for Western Subs (based on Blizzard alone), We can be fairly close to the mark if we say that WoW has approximately 6 million Western Subs and 1 million Asia Pacific Subs.
That's one game. This assumes EVE has zero subs. SWTOR has zero subs, etc.
Time to learn something new!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Online#Subscribers
Damn, now TOR cost 300-400 million plus several dozen more millions? It won't be too long before people start saying: "TOR SPENT 1 BILLION IN DEVELOPMENT!!1
Why?
I don't see "harder to pirate" is a bad thing. Always online is also not a bad thing, if the technology is ironed out and there is no bugs. Surely we don't want the server issues as in the D3 launch, but having online cloud saves, cross game chat with friends, auto-upates are all good things (at least for me).
And what is wrong with DLC? They are no different than smaller, cheaper sequels. I play the Brigmore Witches DLC of Dishonored and it is great.
Lastly, why would they call it a MMO? It is not like people are coming out in masses to buy MMOs.
The most recent press releases stated about 550k. Given the rather steady rise in subs, and that the 550k number was reached about 3-4 months ago, kind of safe to extrapolate, no?
Link to recent press release saying 550k please.
Dunno about 550k, but here's the "over 500k" release: http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/02/28/eve-online-hits-500-000-subscribers-heads-into-second-decade/
Although no one ever says anything about the jump in numbers being attributed to the reopening of the Chinese server.
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
I believe he is citing EALouse who said 300 million well before release. Considering everything else EALouse said was spot on I think it's the most believable number out there.
http://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility
Look at this and even on their own forums they say the 500k included trial accounts and that the number was inflated see this thread
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=3790066
Usually it is a multiple of 5 so taking their highest number at 66k it is nowhere near 500k.
Somebody is bad at reading information...
Concurrent users != everyone who is subscribed to the game.
Concurrent users includes trial numbers.
Subscribers, which is what the press release was about, includes subscribers, not trials or free plex users.
Hey look the oblitory "*Titles here*: Last of the Big Budget MMo" threads! How they like to pop up yet are wrong every time!
Its silly to think that. MMos make a lot of profit. Yes,. they will decline in population (so many games, why bother dedicating to one like in the past?) but MMos still make big profits. SWTOR, a game I think many feel wasn't very good has made amazing profits last year with its F2P model cashing in on the "Take advantage of people's gambling addiction" gambit that many Korean F2P Mmos have used in the past to great success. F2P even if a game loses a lot of its population still will tend to get enough suckers to waste hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make up for having less people. Big budget costs more of course but is far more likely to grab people and get people dedicated to spending all that extra money if it goes F2P which can make a killing for money well over the price to create and maintain.
Big Budget MMos are here to stay. The only time I can see them "Vanishing" will be if a big MMO "Crash" occurs, which would likely hurt all MMos, not just big budget ones.
No.
The problem with all these kinds of threads is WoW. WoW was a huge finacial success and judging all games to be a failure if they don't match that would lead to no new games ever.
What you need to look at is invest/rate of return ratios. It doesn't really matter if the game craters after initial release (though obviously you don't want this) or if it goes free to play. (Again you may not want this). You are just looking at the numbers.
WoW of course is killer - with 50 million investment (initially) and a return of now up to 1 Billion dollars a year. That's an incredible rate of return. But an established publisher doesn't need to see that rate of return to fund future MMOs. Take GW2. It only cost 100 million or so to create. They will say 4 million boxes at 30 dollars (at least) a box - and - thats already 120 million. They make 25 million or so each quarter - for an additional 100 million a year - but 50 million of that is lost to ongoing costs. So in short they likely created a 70% or so rate of return..
Would you fund an investment with a 70% rate of return? I would. In the PC world MMOs are more profitable - not only do you get the box sales - you get lower levels of piracy - and you get some ongoing revenue. The initial costs are higher - but so is the profit. Until the big companies start really taking a bath expect more big time AAA mmos to be funded.
Sorry if that doesnt mesh with the all MMOS that I don't like are failing vibe you get from this site. Like another poster said I expect on the PC side most of the big investment is going to MMOs in the future. Its single player games that are on the endangered list. Zenimax could have funded a offline single player game using the Skyrim engine - made by another group (other then Bethesda) but the went the MMO route for more profits.
Ubisoft is already looking like they are heading that direction with The Division. And dont forget Bungie with Destiny.
I thought WoW's U.S. (to the best of my knowledge, the 5.3 million number was supposed to be just the US, not everything "western") subs had been estimated as being in the 3.5 million range? If that number is accurate, even if we assume the 500k a piece for EvE and TOR were all from the US, that leaves around 800k to spread around between the other games. Which, as empty as most of them usually seem, would be entirely plausible.
I'm not saying the 5.3 million number is necessarily correct. All I am saying is that it is the only estimate of total U.S. subscribers that I am aware of that is available to the public and comes from a source that is supposedly taken seriously within the industry. (The superdataresearch report)
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
I think they have the smarts of not making those games traditional MMOs.
Its the reason im interested in them more than anything else, because they are not traditional mmos.
Yeah, I was trying to say that even if those two games' subs did come all from the US, a total of 5.3 million subscribers for the country across all games seemed plausible, not that I thought they actually did all come from here.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
The Chinese do not even play on the same server. They are not included in the 500K subs that EVE currently retains. Where do get your information, jeez.
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
Main Game: Eldevin (Plat0nic)
2nd Game: Path of Exile (Platonic Hate)
Only way SOE's flagship game will die is when Sony dies. EQN will continue on even if only 10k play it (and they can even fund it...rich people play that game -- $75k+/yr income types).
So newbies to MMORPGs worried about establishing themselves in a MMO, that's the MMO to start in. WoW will die before Everquest (i.e., Activision-Blizzard gets bought out and trashes the catalogue of games, as Square has done with the older EIDOS IP).
.:| Kevyne@Shandris - Armory |:. - When WoW was #1 - .:| I AM A HOLY PALADIN - Guild Theme |:.
And 300,000 of them are due to this: until June, 2013 in order to skill another character, you had to open another account.
In EvE you can only have one toon leveling on one account at a time (until now, where those wishing to pay another sub/PLEX/Time-code fee for a second or third toon to level at the same time -- one EvE account can cost a player $45/mon on leveling fees).
All this caused CCP to inflate the actual number of players playing. Since also last year CCP approved of IsBox multi-gamer software to be used, even more gates will be camped by Mitt's legion of multiboxers.
So please do know the truth in the numbers game.
.:| Kevyne@Shandris - Armory |:. - When WoW was #1 - .:| I AM A HOLY PALADIN - Guild Theme |:.