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Official when will they pull the plug on STO speculation thread
TheHellfire
Member Posts: 67
I say in about 3-4 months they will have run out of the operating capital they received from lifetimers. Anyone in the know has seen the subs drop off like rats fleeing a sinking ship, so they dont have any money coming in off of subs. Discuss.
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Depends... i haven't seen the sub numbers of it but i know the power of the IP.
The IP alone gives them a steady number of devoted players that can and probably will sustain this garbage. Its not unheard of in the industry and it doesn't take allot of subs to make a game profitable... It just takes time.
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Cryptic appear more and more desperate for new subscribers with every passing day. This whole sham council idea is meant to appeal to non-subscribers and get them to buy the game. Im sure Cryptic is more than aware that they have lost the bulk of their initial customers, now they are trying to grab the last bit of cash they can prior to switching to Free-to-play.
Your friendly neighbourhood Spider-pope.
If cryptic makes enough off initial sales to cover their development cost and overhead, STO could linger on for quite a while just on subs. I think one of the cryptic guys said they could "get by" on 50k subs but it would make a decent profit at 100k. I'd be interested in seeing what their retention rate is beyond 1-2 months as Im betting it's pretty low. I remember there were people who where pretty prolific posters over on the main forums that are all gone. Although it's possible a lot of them got banned when cryptic tried to clamp down on a lot of the bad press on the forums. It didn't really work as a monthh later new people are pretty much posting the same things all over again.
Instancing is what will kill the game though. I just logged on to see if anyone I knew was on and there were supposedly 35+ full instances on sol station. I went to a couple different instances and don't think I ever actually saw more than 1/2 that. Of couse they could all be hanging out in the admirals office. Even though there were supposed to be 40+ players there it didn't feel like it.
Not soon enough IMO.
CBS needs to pull the game liscense from Atari/Cryptic and give it to a company that will actually do the IP justice
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It is just the LIFERS and a few monthlys left and when the lifer money runs out then either F2P or bye bye STO I could be mistaken and be off by a few months but i doubt it. Atari has been hemmoriging money for years and they are going to go belly up one of these days so it will be Bye Bye either way.
Weird. Whenever I hear "Livers", I think of "Lifetime sentence". Is it only me?
Since Champions Online does not financially do well they will milk STO for all its worth until their new project is done. I think STO will be around for quite awhile.
Weird. Whenever I hear "Livers", I think of "liver and onions". Is it only me?
I highly doubt they will pull the plug anytime soon. Does anybody here remember Champions Online and how hard that fell? They won't pull the plug on STO before they pull the plug on Champions, so don't get ahead of yourselves.
Please OP, name me 5 mmos that have died in the first year after release. These threads are just retarded.
When the chickens finally come home to roost for Cryptic, both games will just go F2P with even more item mall junk and premium memberships for the LTS.
Neither will be shut down as they deserve. They will look at if there is any profit and go F2P if cost benefit analysis is positive.
If not, they will likely do an all out marketing propaganda blitz to sell as much CStore crap and LTS as possible, then shut down.
I dont know of any MMO that has tanked in the first year, but theres a first time for everything. STO is just crappy enough to pull this off.... in my opinion.
Lets see, OP.
DDO has a decent f2p model that Cryptic can follow, and not surprisingly, the WAR client is free now, so as STO subscribers continue to bail and the client purchase continues to erode, perhaps offering the client for free would be something we see first.
That would preserve the life-timers position, and since the life-time was somewhere around $280? Well, dividing that by $15/month subscription might mean, the game would need to remain aliive for 19 months. So my prediction is STO will continue to be available for 2-years.
Striving for Silver Stars since Gold is so effeminate.
Well there was Hellgate, it lasted about 9 months before it went under. It got bought by a korean company so I don't know if it's actively being played there or not but for all intents and purposes in the US it is dead.
Ah... I remember reading a little blip in a magazine once about Hellgate. After that, I never really heard anything else about it.
How long did Auto Assault last? Tabula Rasa? Dark n Light? They were pretty fast flash in the pans.
Cryptic for some reason seems to be pushing box sales and lts to generate extra income so I don't think we'll see the client be free anytime soon. If it doesn't do well as a sub based game, there's always the f2p arena and it may do fairly well they already have a mt store and seem to be planning a lot of development for that. It would also sit better with the more casual/ first time mmo players than paying a monthly sub. The 20 month mark is just were the lts has paid itself off in monthly subs but cryptic is not bound to that should things go south. The lts is for the lifetime of the game whether that's 6 months or six years.
tabula rasa and auto assault lasted about 15 months each. Looking up dark and light, I came across this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_and_light
You'd think cryptic would use this as what not to do with your playerbase, but I guess not.
Learn from it? I think they are using it as a script to follow. Blame everything on the player base while avoiding actually doing anything for the game.
Monthly subscribers will find out there is no justification for paying once they've bought the box and paid for a couple of months. Heck, monthly subscribers might not even pay any subscription fees at all if they picked up a box that includes an extra 60 days of playtime -- the box price covers 90 days in total before a subscription needs to be paid.
In 90 days, STO is pretty much game over.
STO is almost F2P at the moment considering what you can get for just the box price.
I think STO will eventually turn completely to F2P and a model similair to DDO.
F2P would be the smart choice for STO.
I don't think the game will go under any time soon. Looks at the crap SOE pulled with SWG and it's still running. How long did Hellgate London last? Didn't they shut it down as soon as the numbers of months money wise equaled what lifers paid?
I was just going to mention SWG, but thank you for putting that up there. I find it pretty amusing how everyone here bashes STO and Cryptic, like they have EVERY other game. I guess AoC must have gotten too boring since they announced the expansion and proved all of you wrong lol. They did the same thing to SWG and got shot down when that game decided it wasn't ready to die yet. Might as well give up....STO won't be going anywhere for a long time now, no matter how many bad words you throw at it.
Yep, just haters, STO doesn't deserve any of the panning it's received on every major game site, magazine, official boards and 3rd party boards like this one. It's all just a huge conspiracy by haters and Blizzard right?
All these people from around the world are just throwing bad words at it because the game is so good.
Let's wait to see what the council tells us is truth.
This thread is silly, Champions will be shutdown long before STO, and CO is being supported more strongly than ever right now.
Cryptic is trying a Customer Development approach to MMO creation.
That might not be true Champion. CBS owns the IP and if subs drop enough CBS might step in to reclaim their reputation.