We are still in the silly transition time where as campaign and war hero is the only armor which has the set bonus on its armor mod. I hope they don't change that with Dread Master gear, which means that you can choose whatever outfit you like and just switch mods to look as individual as you like. Would have been much better if they had changed the previous sets as well instead of just leaving them as they are.
Yep, here is the link, we hear about hundreds of thousands or millions creating accounts but not a whole lot afterward. As an example, Turbine opened, what, two more servers to deal with the supposed rush of going F2P but have they opened any since? Where is the growth that many like to assume F2P brings? Its an illusion and opens the product to even more potential trouble when you can actually have no revenue at all instead.
Sir Robin, the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot.
Who had nearly fought the Dragon of Angnor.
Who had almost stood up to the vicious Chicken of Bristol.
And who had personally wet himself, at the Battle of Badon Hill.
Except plenty of other companies have the same data and yet continue to operate with a profit. We know they profit, because they continue to stay open and make new content. They aren't a bank, they aren't going to get bailed out. If they cease to make more money than they spend, their doors will close.
That's not to say that the only reason a game would shut down is due to non profitability. Several terrible management/business events could cause something like this. Not to mention that some companies might see an opportunity elsewhere and abandon ship to jump on it. This is the first 'failure' from a 'big' F2P game that we've seen. A lot of people claim they were still making money, so who knows what was really going on.
We have one game out of the (counting... I can count 10 off the top of my head?) that made the transition and closed down afterwards. The remaining games are all still open and running fine, releasing content and patching the game ect.
It's not some OMGEXPLOSIONOFMONEYEVERYWHERE! change, but it brings a huge initial influx of revenue followed by a generally higher steady revenue stream than before. If it didn't work, games wouldn't consider the transition and we wouldn't see SWTOR doing it and TSW considering it.
It was the only one that came up in discussions around here as being successful after the transition that later closed down, an assumption would be the other 9 wasn't successful enough to be remembered or valid enough to use in an argument.
Yet it closed down, if it did make enough money to justify having the studio open there would be no reason to close it down. Another way of looking at it is that they aim for that quick boom in players and revenue as a last resort to squeeze money out of the game before writing it off.
There's no doubt that if EA allows it, TOR can and will settle down to be a modestly profitable back catalog game, with modest staff, modest content schedule, and modest playerbase, and run for years.
The danger is that EA surveys its shark tank of competing titles and says "We're EA, we don't do modest little games," and continues to mess with it until they've killed it completely. Let's hope that prudence (and a little force choke from LEC) prevent them.
Still experimenting...
Going on past experience with EA, they are pissy because they didnt get 10 million subs in the first 3 months, and are now yanking all the talent they can from the game and leaving a skeleton crew of interns to run day to day. EA doesnt give a crap about making a good game, or what fans what, they just want as much money as possible, if they dont get it despite putting in little effort, they ditch the game and move on.
You're right, it did close down. So based off the 10 games that made the transition recently that I can think of, that's a 90% success rate given that most have been running for well over a year with this model. I'm not even counting the model that L2/Aion uses, but it seemed successful enough in L2 to justify making Aion F2P as well.
So you have one example of a studio closing shop after a transition, and I've provided 9 others for studios that haven't closed shop after a transition. I fail to see how your argument holds much more weight, especially when you look at games like LOTRO/DDO/Champion Online ect. which have been going strong for years since their transition.
It's a legitimate model that has been proven to work the overwhelming majority of the time. And for CoH it's not as if they made the transition and stopped reinvesting in it, only seeking to "squeeze money out of the game before writing it off". They've had a number of patches (I think they actually patched faster after the transition) since then so active development was still going on. Nobody actually knows why the studio is closing down. It's assumed that they aren't profitable enough, and that's a good assumption, but there is the possibility that there are some sort of internal conflicts.
There is plenty of possible reasons why to close down a studio. Glass half empty kind of guy can speculate like you do, but it's all just speculation. It's clear that BW and EA are not happy with how TOR is doing, so they are trying something else. Either it will work out or it won't ... current situation is not something that is sustainable in the long run anyway and it's better that they are trying to do something rather than have the game slowly die with no bang at the end.
I just hope future MMO developers realize that making b2p MMO is much more reasonable business plan than hoping for p2p miracle. I also hope that b2p MMOs will be good business in the future
My part in this story has been decided. And I will play it well.
So how long did CoH run the model before shutting down, that there is an initial boom is no question about but the validity over time is in question and matters much in the discussion as content deliver is tied in to that, especially if the developer doesn't fix the original problem that made them bleed subscribers.
Never said it hold more weight, originally I only said that it was interesting turn of events as it was one of a handful games proclaimed as successful in our discussions about it on this forum.
Yet it's not proven to work better, especially not over an extended timespan.
That comment was made regarding EA and SWTOR as an alternative motive to make the transition, if it's shown that the initial boom will tie the game over for 6-12 months with increased revenue before it dies down then it can very well be a valid business decision.
And patching faster means little without quantifying content of said patches and knowing how much they had lined up to make them selfs look better after the transition.
Really, so what other games have shut down shortly after a transition? As far as I can see, all the evidence points to it actually saving and improving the quality of the games that have made the transition, even over the longterm (calling 2+ years longterm at this point given that that's a pretty good run for many MMO's). That and the fact that games continue to transition to it and view it as a more viable option than a subscription model speaks volumes, there's a ton of market data to support these kinds of decisions.
To my knowledge, patch size remained almost identical to pre-transition patches, but someone who played more pre-transition could provide a more accurate answer. And as for having patches stored up, knowing a few guys that work at Paragon and speaking with them, they definitely did not store a bunch of content in their back pocket.
I could argue that they should have spent the time and effort fixing the issue why people didn't want to play the game instead, without fixing that no amount of changes to payment methods will save the game, sure the free to play boom will surely work as a band aid but only for so long before they are back to same position with the downside of giving players an easy out to play free.
If you look at it from that view they are yet again wasting months of development on features that should have been developed with the game and not after it's launch at the expense of actual content.
---------- Post added 2012-09-24 at 05:15 PM ----------
Did I say shortly?
Only game I have come to understand actually improved and supposedly retained a bigger player base after the transition is LotRO, others are alive as free to play but if they actually improved or retained any players after the initial boom is debatable at best. CoH was held up there with LotRO by some which is why I find it interesting that it closed down, if such a successful game after transition does that what does it say about the once not achieving the same success with the transition.
There are so many factors that plays in to that was more my point, but hey if you know people working there you should be able to find out why they closed down and if it was profitable when they did...
Last edited by Redblade; 2012-09-24 at 05:18 PM.
Idk... I actually think (just from my observations talking to people and reading the internet) that model type of an MMO doesn't matter all that much in general. What people seem to care about most is content. I mean of course other things go into it as well, but content is the one thing that seems to come up in every discussion.