"Why did Rift Fail?"

[Osmeric]

Interesting blog entry I found:

So yesterday I said I would release a nutcracker, and on this Boxing Day I am. I’ve been building up this article for six months and have been following the progress of one of my favorite games, Rift. And so today I cover, Why did Rift Fail?

Within six months before launch Rift when from being one of the most unknown games on the planet to one of the most highly anticipated releases of the year. However after it released it suddenly transformed into one of the biggest trainwrecks of the year. People perceived it as doing insanely well because the developers were always making new content and working on the game. In truth it was doing terribly. After six months they broke 300,000 active subscribers. That is less than Lineage 2. Rift fell off the face of the Earth and was largely ignored. So how did this happen?

See the rest at http://thegameguru.me/2011/12/26/why-did-rift-fail/

[Bloatedhouse]

Rift tried to be WoW. Rift ain't WoW. Therefore it failed.

[Deleted]

I wouldn't say it failed entirely. However, the frequent jabs from their development team at Blizzard about "taking" their subscribers made them look like immature idiots.
I don't know about anyone else, but they totally put me off buying the game. It's just very unprofessional.

[Deleted]

i find rifts characters uninteressting. =/
and the gear sets aswell. don't know much about rift. i was going to buy it but im glad i didn't
why it failed? maybe too much of WoW and little of its own. what was good was probably what wasnt their own.
so whats there to stop people from going back

[Osmeric]

The game still has tons of subscribers

I'm not sure it does, to be honest.

[Deleted]

They had really great ideas and it was fresh. Then after a few times the "freshness" was gone and it became really boring. The same things over and over and over and over again. Rifts are cool, until they start ruining your quest zones all the time. Mobs slaughtering the quest NPC's. You only have got one specific zone to level in. If it's overrun by mobs you need to kill them first before you can continue. It kinda ruins the game for me after a while.

Ontop of that, I liked the freedom you had in creating your own "class". But for leveling you are forced to take certain specs or you'd just die trying to kill two mobs at a time.

It had potential and it look amazing, but that's quite it.

[lopk]

Rift's claim to fame was, well, in-game rifts. Mind you, I only ever played the 7 day free trial, but from what I experienced of low level rifts was just boring. They all seemed to be the same. Sure, they'd pop up in unexpected places, but you'd run to shut them down, experiencing the same 3 waves of enemies, then you moved on.

[Azuri]

Closing this thread:

Blogs are fact. Until the developer closes or shuts down the game and/or no longer turns a profit then it's not considered a failure. Trolling threads never end well.