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Wildstar business model failed predictably
The reason Wildstar has been a failure and will not last for much longer is an obvious lack of understanding of how business works.
You either create something to appeal to the masses and hit volume sales e.g. a game with a broad appeal to all types of players (but you must still do it well for you are competing with others for the same customers, so you need quality and USP), or, you appeal to a small niche with something that is so good, the majority of that niche will come to you to purchase.
Wildstar went for the niche and by having an endgame focussing on hardcore raiding, that's their small target of players to aim for. But it's not enough to sustain a business model for a game that obviously had a lot of time and effort put into it and will have huge ongoing dev costs. They also put in a major flaw to cheese off their niche market by making the questing grind so bad. The quests are just in your face, full on tedium, over and over with no meaning to them - the worst kind you could get. Probably the worst kind of quests to give hardcore raiders as the stick before the carrot.
Wildstar has made it difficult to get those niche players and keep them - and of course, there are other games vying for those same gamers.
At least EVE has a niche with no real competition - Wildstar does not.
The success of WoW is partly down to first-mover advantage and an IP that everyone recognised i.e. Warcraft, but they also cater for all playing styles. You can be casual and you can be a hardcore raider - and what they do, they do it well. So Blizzard have a huge potential audience whereas Wildstar has to be damn appealing for it's much smaller target.
Wildstar cannot now be recovered unless they change their strategy, accept losses and re-market a more casual game. And, tidy up the awful questing.
Otherwise, there is no hope.
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Does an mmorpg that starts out sub then converts to f2p make more money than a game that goes f2p on day one?
The answer is yes.
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The business model they used obviously directed how the game would be designed i.e. they chose the niche and then went for it - they are intertwined but they made mistakes.
Now you are confusing business model and target audience. They are not the same thing.
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They decided how they would capture value i.e. by going for the hardcore niche, and got it all wrong because they didn't deliver to entice enough of that niche to stick with it.
[mod edit]
Business model is erroneously used by many on this forum to decide that, but if you look up the term on wikipedia or something, you'll see it's actually more about how you design and build your offering to appeal to your target market i.e. how you capture value to appeal to them.
How you get your revenues in is such a small part of a business model [mod edit]
Their model only failed if it fell short of their predictions and aren't generating enough revenue to sustain their game/studio. I have to believe that they fully understood that they were going after one of the tiniest MMO market segments, because if they didn't know that, then they have reached unimaginable levels of incompetence.
Large-scale, hardcore raiding was not, is not, and never will be popular. The only reason people slogged through in the old days is because there were no options. The moment options showed up, people bailed on it left and right and games stopped catering to an almost non-existent group of players. I have no problem with people who want this type of game-play, but any developer that chooses to pursue this group has to know how small a niche it is and offer something else for the non-hardcore large-scale raider to do.
I would have said that a game with broad appeal should be able to offer a return on high development/ running costs, but a game designed for a niche audience should not. Part of Carbine's mistake was making a game for a very small niche with (estimated) relatively high development costs.
But I would say that this is only a part of Wildstar's problems. There are many other design choices that would turn players away regardless of the audience they were aiming for.
Not interested, don't reply. Simples.
I have to agree.
Now don't get me wrong, I find a lot of armchair sports punditry quite irritating because people simply are not party to a lot of the information that inform those decisions.
But as a customer of a product people know what they like and what they don't, and if a company ignores the feedback from potential customers during beta's, or ignore the lessons learnt by their competitors, or hugely over-estimated the size of their market; then that is just stupidity.
Well, I don't see any kind of hard statistics or data backing up anything you're saying there, so I can only take that as conjecture.
However, if by your statement about WoW having a "first-mover advantage", you're speaking in terms of them being the first MMO to have a sub-based business model, then you're flat out wrong. They were not the first to have subs, nor the first to do it successfully. Not even close.
Also, you make the very common mistake of trying to use WoW as a standard measure of "success". WoW is an anomaly in how well it's done. And you do not have to have WoW-like numbers to be successful. FFXI is a sub-based MMO that peaked, then settled at around 500,000 players for its first 7-8 years. It's since gone down, but FFXI has been, by any measure, a very successful venture for SE. And XI was and, to some degree, still is, very much a MMO that appeals to a limited audience.
In my opinion, one problem with post-WoW MMOs, and why - in part - they aren't doing as well, is that they keep making the same mistake. They keep... trying... to... emulate... WoW... and keep missing the mark. They're just following the same basic formula, and aren't doing nearly enough to differentiate themselves.
Asking someone which post-WoW MMO they enjoy most is like asking someone which brand of Cola they like better. They all have the same flavor, there's just little differences between them that makes them not exactly the same. However, they're all still Cola. Wildstar seems to have gone that same route. They adhered to the post-WoW, themepark model, and made a few adjustments to set it apart "just a little". At the end of the day... it's "yet another post-WoW themepark MMO"... just like XIV, just like Rift, just like WAR, just like almost all the others. The little differences work at first, but before long, players see through that and realize they're basically playing the same game all over again.
MMO devs or, rather, the people making the decisions, have to stop with the "me too" game design and try doing something to actually stand out as something different.
Because you're clearly a member of their target market, what with all the "they must target the mass market" talk?
The game didn't appeal to you so it's going to fail. That's all you said.
Pre-LFR, Blizzard released numbers about it's player base and active raiding. The numbers were 1.3% of the player base had cleared normal mode raids and 0.9% had completed herioc mode raids.
It's fairly safe to say, that only about 1% of total MMO population is interested in hardcore raiding.
Wildstar never stood a chance in the mass market. It was always going to be a small niche game.
Same here. Raiding being hardcore or not was not the reason i gave up my subscription.
The only game out there that targets a specific group and it has been successful is EVE, any other game trying to copy that style will fail because there are not enough hardcore gamers out there to make a company profitable, you need casual, semi-hardcore, semi-casual, dedicated players etc etc.
They went for the hardcore without a real hardcore game and they failed.
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