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Economy and new system specs. for games
Wow4Lifer
Member Posts: 255
Background info:
I am a graduating student who lives in chicago and these are observations from this geographic location.
Observation:
99% of people who I know who play wow, out of about a few hundred that I have met in the last five to six years, cannot play a game that requires more system resources than wow.
Analysis:
Statistically using Z chart, this would mean that in the midwest 95% of players cannot afford better gaming rigs.
Question?
How is a company going to turn a profit in this market if it needs 200,000 subscribers to break even, as I've heard mnetioned before.....witht hese figures...it is impossible unless they are aiming at other global markets like the asian market or in greece, where kids who don't even own computers play at cafe's. It's impossible.
Prognosis: Any game comming out in the near future in the U.s. with higher specs than wow, will not succeed, and no people do not buy new computers every year...the average is every seven to ten years, unless they are getting some sort of money from work or school or scholarships. My dad is a Doctor, and he cannot afford to buy a computer right now because of rising gas prices college tuition and a slumping economy. I have been working for a year now and make about 30 grand a year. I cannot afford to pay for a new computer because of my rent and college debt. So how are people, who are not in the top 5 percent of the wealthy, going to play these games? They can't, and blizzard has researched the demographics and that is the answer to why they do so well...simply because they have common sense.
Comments
I think your stats are a bit off. There are a lot more people than that who have the means to play games with specs greater than WoW's.
How can you say 95% of the midwest when you are getting your data from a very small pool of people? And I would say people can "afford" better rigs, they really arent that expensive. Although they can afford them, not all people have them. But if they needed to get them to play a certain game that they wanted, many people could easily do that.
There is a thread on this in a KOTOR MMO thread i made that has a link to the developer on the new MMO talking about this. But i tend to disagree with no being able to afford a new PC. you just by part by part. Most games today just need a better graphics card and thats only for the few who want there systems on the highest graphics.
edit: linky
http://mmocodex.com/blog/?p=14924
Some contentions to the responses above.
Statistically, I used a Z chart to calculate this figure so it is statistically accurate based on my sample of 100 people from different places all around illinois, from Greenville illinois to downtown chicago to benton...all random players who played wow from different places, but most are concentrated in the northshore suburbs, which is accoridng to newsweek, a place where only "Those with money" live. And no, people cannot afford to pay 2g's 1g for a game when they can buy a console for 300, and even if they needed to would not be able to without taking out a loan, which they would not do, since they do this for cars, etc. or things more important and necessary to them.
Second, not everyone knows alot about computers. The average gamer can barely put his graphics card in right, so what makes you think that they are going to risk no warranty on their own machine? That simply does not happen, or else there owuld be no best buy's or comp usa's selling premade machines with warranties, or no dell....you see my point?
People will not pay to play new games especially when there are old ones. There are still more people who play diablo II than who have played oblivion on the pc....so my point is pretty much right....and that is this....no people will not buy new computers to play your game, so making it without the average specs in mind is already a financial failure. That's it, proven over and over by sales and facts and established cases.....this is the argument though, why continue to make games, and lose sales, and fail...look at all the mergers recently....merging is a sign of a highly competitive market turning into a not competitive market, or oligopoly...so my point is confirmed by happenings in the industry...game companies are failing at capitalism and resorting on mergers to aquire value...this is accounting 350 studies of industry...and it has happened in other industries as well.
My point is this too....as the american economy continues to slump, gaming companies will have to focus on foreign consumers rather than native american consumers, and we will actually see alot less games catering to us....i.e. fallout anyone? And more along the lines of final fantasy...
Hmmm judging by your forum name I detect a little bias maybe in these figures..........
That's great but my name really has nothing to do with anything considering I have played every mmorpg for at least a year besides eve and the ones with heroes...here's a list, by all means not exclusive or inclusive of all the games I've played that are mmorpgs...
Magestorm
Meridian
UO
EQ
EQII
Lineage I
Lineage II
WOW
VANGUARD
AOC
LOTR
Anarchy online
The one I played the longest was DAOC and UO...but my brother helped me level to 70 in wow and the bg's I must say are a blast, which is strange for someone who is a die hard ganker....let me tell you why I enjoy it even though I am a pvp-sandbox type player...
A) It turns nicely. when I hit attack, I attack, no pause to drive me insane....which is good because UO would have been perfect if it weren't for the lag and outdated graphics.
C) Easy to get into pvp- no need to travel for fifty to sixty minutes to fight in pvp battles....don't get me wrong i love exploring but optional exploring not mandatory exploring when you what to be fighting....
D) the possibility of world pvp with destructible buildings...wow will be the first and only game to get this right, at first, becuase of their engine, and expertise in polished game engines...imagine a game like aoc with graphics like farcry - i.e. warhammer, with exploding buildings...its going to have to be 10 v 10 at most because any more than that and even the best gaming rigs will not be able to handle that with low ping and low fps...just not possible....when your getting like 80 fps and 200 ping in wow, how can another game come and get better performance than that, and anything less than 50fps is just not exceptable for a game that requires reaction to play...it just isn't....its like playing basketball by announcing your going to shoot, then waiting, and then shooting, no fun...
so please tell me where you see the bias in this post....separate it from hard facts which i have stated in quantitative and relative terms...I have given you fps, and i have given you ping times, and my specs relative to the industry of gaming....1.9 year old gaming system...pentium d: 3.6ghz, 512 mb ati graphcis card, and 4 gigs of blazing fast ram which only 2 of is used cause windows xp sucks.
BTW that's just a short list of games, i've played more, including some muds....my system runs all of them, however, I run wow at about 80 fps, and vanguard at about 40 fps at default, and my system is about one year old....but I got ripped off when i bought it, so more about 1.9 years old....
that being said, Out of all the 100 players who I sampled, actually adding a few more now from the internet....I have the best system...which is sad considering I can't even run FARCRY 2...
The purpose of this post is to make developers aware that they will not be rewared for graphics, but rather gameplay....this is evident in wow and daoc...both did not have the best graphics when they were released but both outperformed any other mmorpg...and this is also true with other games...look at oblivion - welll that's a bad example.....look at games like farcry...awsome graphics, mediocre gameplay, gets shelved and forgotten about in a week...half life 2 on the other hand, even though i think they used similar engines....well you get the idea....longevity is not shine, longevity is logic.
Here's something for you to consider. You only sampled wow players. What of the others who don't play wow? You're assuming that everybody plays WoW and that's painting some broad strokes. Of the supposed 10 million players that WoW boasts, if I recall corectly the projected numbers only put about 2.5 million of them on the North American continent. Now realize that Canada has about 30 million people living in it, and the USA has 300 million. Now that 100 people is nothing more then a drop in nothing but a small bucket when you consider that all the games (including wow) make up an ocean.
No required quests! And if I decide I want to be an assassin-cartographer-dancer-pastry chef who lives only to stalk and kill interior decorators, then that's who I want to be, even if it takes me four years to max all the skills and everyone else thinks I'm freaking nuts. -Madimorga-
I can kind of see what the OP is getting at ,about the low end of WoW and people's Computers being able to run it on them. Kind of like having pong running on the Comp and asteroids and checking frame rates and ping for each.
as to the affordability of computers and parts needed to play a said game is all relitive, some will be able to and others will not but that runs into being able to afford to pay for the game aswell and expansions aswell.
I think that WoW has , in the fact that it is a large and well known MMO, set a standard of a sort. People compair games to it all the time and it wouldn't be such a large step to use it to compair Comp. Specs. aswell. I do think your sample is not large enough to be accurate, I think that connection type might be a large reason for playing WoW. It does have low specs in order to play it and both connection speed and the Comp should have been taken into accout when making this poll.
This is wrong. Why?
Let's begin with Age of Conan:
It had great sales. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and if the game was actually good, more people would be playing it. The fact that they can sell that much at release is MORE than 250,00 people. If the game was better, they would have plenty of subs. Even though the system reqs were high, they still did well at release.
The people you did this "research" on:
Have you considered that they don't have a new computer because they don't actually NEED one. I remember playing RuneScape awhile back, and then I never needed a high requirement computer..I could have gotten one, but I didn't necessarily need one. And, the same probably goes for your friends. They all are enjoying WoW and it's running perfectly, so they don't see the need to buy a new computer.
WoW is four years old:
WoW is an older game....a lot of people are usiing a computer purchased within the last six-seven years, and they can run WoW. If WoW wasn't so old, people would be bashing it for its graphics.
Also, a game attempting to defeat WoW usually doesn't just release in the U.S. Remember that half (if not more) of WoW's subs are in Asia and that is where they get a lot of their money.
Do system reqs help WoW? Of course. Does this mean that a game with higher system reqs is at a disadvantage? Not at all. People will follow what's big, and if the reqs are a little higher, poeple will find a way through it.
__________________________________________________
In memory of Laura "Taera" Genender. Passed away on Aug/13/08 - Rest In Peace; you will not be forgotten
life moves on despite economic realities. Game manufacturers don't need to put their games on hold because of this.
Also, you really think WoW's simplicity has nothing to do with this? The fact that young kids can play the game has nothing to do with its popularity? Not at all, that is one of the reasons WoW is a success---its simplicity and its popularity.
__________________________________________________
In memory of Laura "Taera" Genender. Passed away on Aug/13/08 - Rest In Peace; you will not be forgotten
A bachelor making $30,000 a year and can't afford to get a new PC is not handling their money very well. You might not be able to buy one off of a single paycheck, but give it three months of solid saving, and you shouldn't have a problem.
My Aunt just bought a new computer for her son tonight for $750 from Best Buy. It came with a HD 19" monitor and an All-in-One printer... and the machine is a beast. Now look... I realise for all of you guys who like to "DIY" would scoff at this, and I'm in agreement with you. But for him, it was a good buy, and it will probably play any game he wants to play - Even something like AoC or Crysis even. On MAX settings? Maybe, maybe not. But it will at least handle med-high settings.
Think about it man... $750 - that's only $215 a month - $107 a paycheck. I make $15,000 a year, and even I could do that. And yes, I do work full time, and go to college, and pay for student loans, and buy my own shit, and pay for my own gas, and play online games. It's all in how you manage your money.
Back when i used to play PS2 talented developers would do wonders with minimal specs to work with.
This day and age Devs are lazy they just pump out these sick graphics using no smoke and mirrors.
They keep increasing minimal specs when they can clearly work with older specs and make there game run and look similar.
Look at War the damn Minimum specs are what a crappy 6800 gt? hell probably lower than that.
That shows me that Wars Devs know what the hell there doing similar to WoW's devs.
Look at games like guild wars it looks really good and requires specs like Wow.
Devs like the ones Working on AoC and Crysis clearly dont give a rats ass what system specs you need to run a game.
i have a computer that can run AoC at medium/high settings and i wont be buying another puter for a year and change atleast.
If these devs keep pumping out the graphics and not caring about minimal specs ill have to bow out of the PC market.
PLaying: EvE, Ryzom
Waiting For: Earthrise, Perpetuum
I agree, but what's even better is, if you get someone good with PCs, they can build one for you for half that. You just aahve to look for the deals. I built a rig that would easily play any game ont he market now for $370 on Newegg the other day, thats the price of a 360/PS3. This of course was without a monitor, but if invest in a good monitor form the start for ~200 it lasts you a good long while, at LEAST 4-5 years. Also, if you get a custom rig, that same person that built it can teach you how to install new parts and upgrade stuff like ram/cpu/gpu and you just take it bit-by-bit and you get what you need. On a yearly upgrade basis, after the intial ~$400 for a rig, you wouldn't need to replace more then $100 worth of parts if you want to stay UP-TO-DATE, meaning you want to play current games.
currently playing: FFXI
Waiting for FFXIV to be updated more.
This is exactly what i'm trying to get at here.....and for everyone else who disagreed with me...think about this, I bought a computer just over a year ago, and I need a new one to run games at medium specs....think about this for a sec....those kids playing wow are important, they are the new mmorpg market, they are the future of this industry...
And I would bet a fair penny that 50 percent of people who bought aoc had to return it because they were wow players who realized after installing the game it was un-runnable.
Also, why sacrifice gameplay for graphics....look at the games mentioned by the poster above me...guild wars, wow, warhammer, all those names are big and successful...no offense but I hear so much bad press about aoc that I would have to say it failed against the hype and will only be saved by the xbox version.
i bought a comp a year ago and i can run everything fine. Although i did buy 2 9600's (about 300$) later. I believe people really need to build their own computer if they are serious about online games. Because odds are, if you build your own, and you dont fuck it up, you can upgrade it little by little to keep up with amazing graphics.
Playing: EVE Online
Favorite MMOs: WoW, SWG Pre-cu, Lineage 2, UO, EQ, EVE online
Looking forward to: Archeage, Kingdom Under Fire 2
KUF2's Official Website - http://www.kufii.com/ENG/ -
200k subs = 36 million a year if the game lasts 10 years thats 360 million....
(this does not include the box sales or expansions)
200k maybe the optimal net profit % per customer , but surely most games can profit with less subs.
You can also sell your engine, but consider this 1.5 million copies of crysis were sold.
( and it was a flop blamed on so many more pirated copies )
Own, Mine, Defend, Attack, 24/7
All the people I know IRL who play mmo's had a really nice computer or bought one around the time of AoC's release.
Neither my nor the OP's data mean anything because of how small the group we're talking about and how the groups are remarkably unvaried and don't bring many types of people to the table.
Well everyone my point was proven.....40 precent of people returned to wow who left for aoc, and considering that aoc only has 200,000.....that means only 10 percent of those players actually stayed...the other 50 percent are probably not playing anything and waiting for war or lich king...point proven games iwth higher specs fail....evidence
VG
AOC....
and if war doesn't learn...it will never hit 500k like some are saying it will...but if it does and follows the successful and proven business model of wow, then it may reach 200k the first day its out...
so anyways....my point was proven.....and i just want to finally post here incase any dev's are reading so that they can take notes and learn what some college kid figured out on his own.
no offense but you are biased...you've bought an expensive computer so its in your best interest for you to go against the proposed argument.
Or the fact that aoc wasnt what people wanted........or many other problems aoc had.
I have a 3 year old pc and aoc ran fine 1.8 single core amd and 7800gt.
Own, Mine, Defend, Attack, 24/7
Someone above said wow was successful because it was simplistic...well I would first like to counter that argument respectfully....
Simplicity must be defined first...I will simply describe it becuase like Plato, I do not believe abstract concepts can be defined to encompass all which they mean...for example define Good...you cannot, because one single defiinition of good will not encompass all good acts...likewise simplicity is not definatble logically speaking, pragmatically it is in the dictionary...and so is good.
Anyways...to begin.
Wow is not simplistic...it is actually more complicated because of its simple design which allows for the use of strategy, rather than tactics...let me explain.
STrategy is long term decision making in battle like how and when to use skills, tactics are short term decisions made in battle, like what skill to use. Because we are humans Strategy is much harder, and therefore less simple than tactics, which are integrated through practice...strategy may be bad no matter how much one practices...strategy is auqired by wisdom and knowledge, tactics are aquired through practice, like basketball...chess is strategic, tennis is tactical...
anyways....because we are human, there is a tradeoff between tactics and strategy...the more tactics available, the less strategy involved, becuase the more one move or two move wins there are, and also there is a threshhold...the more tactics at first, the more strategy, but there comes a point where too much tactics serves to dull down strategy and simply turn wining into luck.
Wow is well balanced relative to say EQ....it has fewer tactics, and therefore allows for the use of greater strategy by placing an important role in strategy...EQ pvp was simply a matter of luck....or simply tactics...for example a rogue could never kill a mage in EQ pvp, or even EQ II pvp.....take Ultima online as the greatest example of simplistic tactics leading to greatest strategies...with only five skills, one had to play uo like chess, not a first person shooter.
I argue that WOW...long term BG winning, is a form of strategy, not tactics, even though there are some tactics involved....now raiding is a different story...but people please realize that raiding was never a mandatory part of mmorpgs. Raiding was something that very few peopl ewant, and still want to do. The bread and butter of mmorpgs, what they offer that other games do not, is pvp....anyone can raid...in oblivion, fallout, anyone can take out bosses in x-men alliance, but pvp my friends...is something only mmorpgs offer in the strict sense of the word.
So that is my argument for why wow is actually nto simple, but more complicated than any other mmorpg currently out there, including eve.
I agree, but what's even better is, if you get someone good with PCs, they can build one for you for half that. You just aahve to look for the deals. I built a rig that would easily play any game ont he market now for $370 on Newegg the other day, thats the price of a 360/PS3. This of course was without a monitor, but if invest in a good monitor form the start for ~200 it lasts you a good long while, at LEAST 4-5 years. Also, if you get a custom rig, that same person that built it can teach you how to install new parts and upgrade stuff like ram/cpu/gpu and you just take it bit-by-bit and you get what you need. On a yearly upgrade basis, after the intial ~$400 for a rig, you wouldn't need to replace more then $100 worth of parts if you want to stay UP-TO-DATE, meaning you want to play current games.
I agree with you completely on building your own rig. It's something I personally prefer as well. But I was only showing how easy it would be to get a PC. Building your own is easy... if you know what you're doing (most of the time). But buying one from a store is even easier lol. And in reality... buying one from Best Buy or Dell or some place isn't like it used to be. Back in the day, to get a quality gaming rig... you HAD to build your own. Not only was it MUCH MUCH cheaper, but you just got more bang for your buck. In other words, building your own rig for $2,000... the same exact thing (as close a replica as possible, and still wouldn't be as good) in a retail store would cost you twice that amount, probably more.
The only complaint I have with the modern retail PC market is they skimp severely on the graphics end, usually implementing some sort of crappy on-board graphics. Intel uses the Ge-Force architecture, and AMD uses the ATI. Now, these on-board things aren't nearly as bad as they used to be, but they'll do some really crazy things to make that price so low.
For instance, they'll build the PC with some pretty modern components, and then slap an on-board GPU on there that is equivilent to a 2 year old gen card. What makes it even worse, is they don't allow for a manual upgrade. The GPU (or lack thereof) is really the only thing that jacks the price up on a retail PC anymore.
Other than that... aside from the ad-ware free software packages already installed on the HD... the PC's themselves are awesome!
I agree with most of what you mentioned, but I think that game service providers are mostly interested in an audience who will become a monthly subscriber. Most people who can become monthly subscribers can afford to purchase a computer by monthly payments. I don't think that the gaming industry loses out on too great a number of subscribers due to computer system requirements.
That said, a game provider who didn't want to provide the number 1 game might target the audience with a slightly lower budget and market toward them. Games like Guildwars caters to such an audience by their cost effectiveness in not requiring a monthly fee to play online.