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MMORPG History 101: Biggest MMO Failure
sempiternal
Member UncommonPosts: 1,082
"EA is often criticized for buying smaller development studios primarily for their intellectual property assets, and then making the developers produce run-of-the-mill games on these same franchises." - Ten Ton Hammer Wiki
Electronic Arts' The Sims Online
Biggest Failure in MMORPG History
“Our Revenues Have Been Heavily Dependent on a Single Product and Would Be Adversely Affected if That Product's Popularity Were to Decline; Our Future Success Depends on the Success of The Sims Online”
- Electronic Arts Inc Form 10-Q, Feb 11, 2003, p. 57
"Despite a $300 million investment, "The Sims Online" from Electronic Arts Inc. only has about 80,000 subscribers more than a year after its release, far short of the company's stated goal of 1 million."
- CBS NEWS (AP), AUSTIN, Texas, April 1, 2004
"EA even tried its own version earlier this year with The Sims Online. It invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build the EA Online division and rolled out a virtual area for players to form Sims communities and socialize. The company prepared for as many as a million people to sign up. It didn't come close. Just under 10,000 are now subscribed, paying $9.99 a month."
- The Biggest Game in Town, FORTUNE, Tuesday, September 2, 2003 By Peter Lewis
"Despite a $US300 million ($A393 million) investment, The Sims Online from Electronic Arts only has about 80,000 subscribers more than a year after its release, far short of the company's stated goal of one million."
- PCs stumble in video game world, The Age, Austin, Texas, April 12, 2004
"The Sims Online was released in December of last year amid lofty expectations. With earlier versions of The Sims having sold better than any game in PC history -- and now doing a booming business on consoles -- EA executives openly discussed reaping as many as 1 million active monthly subscribers globally for the online version. EA backed up its bet by spending as much as $20 million on the project, while committing a large team of A-list talent from its Maxis development studio. Nearly six months later, The Sims Online has sold 125,000 copies retail, has been discounted from $50 to as low as $20 on Amazon and has 97,000 active subscribers. Over the past year, EA has faced other disappointments with slow sales and sign-ups for its multiplayer online space opera, Earth and Beyond. An online subscription-based homage to muscle car culture, Motor City Online, will be shut down this summer. The string of misses led EA to fold the tracking stock of its former online division, EA.com, in March, back into the parent company. Over it's three-year life span, losses for the division were reported to be close to $300 million."
- Sims Flop Dogs Game Developers, Wired, 5/12/03, Suneel Ratan
Designing for the Internet Gamer
Powerpoint presentation by John Riccitiello, Chief Operating Officer, EA Inc, 3/08/2001. (Modified on 3/30/2001 by Bing Gordon)
Free, open source, MS Office & Powerpoint alternative www.openoffice.org
Comments from EA suits before releasing The Sims Online:
"All we can do on this project is fail, because everyone is expecting success. They've told us from the beginning this [The Sims Online] is the most important project at EA." - Will Wright, creater of Sims
"Executives at Electronic Arts, parent company of Wright's Maxis studio, have touted the game [The Sims Online] as vindication of the company's substantial investment in online gaming."
"The multiplayer version of "The Sims," set to debut Tuesday, has been hailed as the first major test of whether subscription-based onling gaming can appeal to a mass audience."
"The most optimistic "Sims" boosters say the online game has the potential to draw an audience in the millions. EA executives have said they expect to have at least 400,000 subscribers paying $15 a month for "The Sims Online" by the end of the company's fiscal year, next March 30."
"...EA insiders and analysts still see a clear road for "The Sims Online" to become the biggest thing in the developing world of online gaming."
"Chief Operating Officer John Riccitiello said in a conference call with financial analysts that the company expects "The Sims Online," the upcoming online version of the smash PC game, to play a major role in helping push EA.com toward profitability in the 2003 fiscal year. The game is slated to go live during the third quarter, and EA expects to have 400,000 subscribers paying around $15 a month by the end of the year. We think it's going to be a very successful product that proves the online subscription model," Riccitiello said.
EA executives were speculating on The Sims Online with hundreds of millions of dollars, while fans of their only successful MMO, Ultima Online (UO), were practically begging the developers and producer, namely Anthony Castoro (aka Sunsword), to consider the disaster that the technology and marketing neglected, "carebear" expansion riddled, UO game was becoming. While the suits were pipe-dreaming about The Sims Online, moderators of Stratics were banning customers of the official Ultima Online www.uo.stratics.com forums for merely posting any discussion of the original "pre-Renaissance" Ultima Online game design responsible for EA's only MMO success. Some of the reasons given were; that UO was only moving forward, that it was too difficult to re-create or define classic servers, or that there was no demand. This resulted in hundreds, if not thousands, of locked and deleted threads from existing UO customers expressing their displeasure with the direction the game was going.
Apparently all EA ever cared about is attracting mass audiences; with little regard to good game design. While The Sims Online was being developed, Ultima Online, which was originally an outstanding game design, professionally recognized throughout the industry, was being dumbed-down with yearly expansions, aimed at also appealing to a "mass audience," rather than the market the game had become successful in. Was The Sims Online a foolish waste of money when Ultima Online had such a successful, unique and compelling MMO design to begin with? And, what about "Ultima Online 2," a project started and then canceled three separate times by EA?
Comments
The problem is the concept and the game really doesn't have anything to do after the first 30 hour.
I was one of those 80000 subscriber.... I played the game for a week or two. Then i gave up because the game's concept is really boring, you simply build a house, go to another player house earn some money and go back to build your own house and invite others to check it. After few hour, you will find yourself going to other residence and doing nothing then idle.
none
I don't care what that article says, there is NO WAY $300 million was spent on any single game title at any given point in history, ever.
Period.
In fact, go spend half a minute to google "Sims Online Budget" and you'll see countless references to an estimated budget at or morthan $25 million.
None of this takes away from The Sims Online being a dismal failure (I played it as well, even reupped a couple of years ago). But it's nice to have valid facts, not not grossly hyped information.
Game development cost is certainly high, but that figure is outrageously, and obviously, bogus.
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They marketed it from here to high heaven when it was released.
Don't be so naive; the game development costs themselves are not the only costs, the sky is the limit for marketing. In fact, you yourself just got done stating they marketed the game "to high heaven."
And, in the case of The Sims Online, EA setup a whole separate EA.com company and online community. I found other articles that corroborate, stating that EA spent hundreds of millions on The Sims Online, but I felt that the CBS article would be the most recognized by most readers. So yes, the actual game production may have had a budget of $25 million, but the total investment was $300 million.
Further, for a company making nearly $3,000 million in revenue in 2004, $300 million is an acceptable investment for, "...the most important project at EA."
No way? Think again.
Sadly, it's just a blip on EA's radar as their sports franchises will continue to rake in the dough, despite being mediocre products to the Nth degree.
So what you're trying to say is that $25 million inflated to $300 million after marketing and infrastructure costs. And you're calling me naive?
Please share your other sources with us, so we can corroborate your statement. Considering how I get next to no relevant hits on Google with "EA 'sims online' 300 million" I can't find any validity to the completely absurd assertion made by yourself through CBS News.
No, I'm not trying to say that at all, you are. The budget for developing the game was $25 million, all other associated costs were an additional $275. It's simple math and a basic understanding that there are many more factors to selling a product than development costs alone.
What, did you think they could just develop the game, and people would telepathically know when they were finished and drive by with a blank CDR and burn off their own copy?
And you have no data to back that up. Just a single link making a preposterous claim.
Get a clue, here, bud. $300 million to develop a single gaming title? No.
This was not just any gaming title for EA, this was, "...the most important project at EA," a multi-billion dollar corporation, that was predicting that it would eventually have millions of subscribers.
It was not an unreasonable prediction or investment for an MMO either; as Blizzard has proven with the billion dollar per year World of Warcraft, the only problem was that EA attempted it with another of their terrible MMOG designs.
tylerwick beat me to the draw
A $25 million dollar budget for a title.
Spend $275 million in advertising and infrastructure?
No.
I love how you guys rationalize this. Please go on and make your baseless claims.
Do I have to ask more than once? Please provide some links that substantiate a $300 million investment.
How about Fortune magazine? You know, of the famous Fortune 500 list? Is that good enough for you?
"EA even tried its own version earlier this year with The Sims Online. It invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build the EA Online division and rolled out a virtual area for players to form Sims communities and socialize. The company prepared for as many as a million people to sign up. It didn't come close. Just under 10,000 are now subscribed, paying $9.99 a month."
- VIDEOGAMES: The Biggest Game in Town FORTUNE, Tuesday, September 2, 2003 By Peter Lewis
Do I have to ask more than once? Please provide some links that substantiate a $300 million investment.
Ok, think logically.. the 25million was spent on Developement. are you able to see stats on what they spent on advertising and production?
Think about it - at $300 mil to develop they would have to sell 5 million copies at retail to recoup development costs leaving subs to cover servers, continued development, etc not to mention profit. No company would start a project in this industry if it took over 6 million games sold to break even on development costs alone. Don't be so quick to believe things some idiot media outlet prints or otherwise claims.
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Do you even comprehend the statement above? "Hundreds of millions of dollars to build the EA Online division". That includes more than The Sims Online. That includes Ultima Online, the abortive UO2 (which was years in development), Motor City Online, Pogo, and numerous other titles.
Nowhere in this article does it provide validation for the claims you're making. There is no operating costs + development costs + marketing costs provided for The Sims Online. The "hundreds of millions" is a vague value applied to an entire area of their effort, which also includes the online efforts of their console games, etc...
Obviously you don't have the facts you're looking for. But hey, if you want to believe in the idea, go right ahead. There isn't much point in trying to convince you otherwise, you've completely drunk the koolaid here.
The whole TSO fiasco just goes to show how little EA knew about P2P online services.
The reasoning was sound enough from a managerial perspective. Get your most popular single player game, make an online version of it, and all of the sudden millions of people who bought The Sims will now start sending you monthly fees...
...yeah...right...
See, The Sims isn't about interacting with other people and playing a role. The appeal of The Sims is about being the owner of your own "digital fishbowl," or ant farm. Its about being able to control every aspect of the environment, from all the Sims you dress and create in the neigborhood, to interior design, to archetecture.
However, online games by their very nature cannot place all variables under the control of the user, because there are thousands of users who each have a different conception of what should happen. So instead of having complete control over your fishbowl, like the original The Sims, what The Sims Online did was subject all these Sims users to paying more money to have everyone else dictate what their fishbowl should look like.
Which goes to show the big lesson MMORPG producers can get from TSO:
Its not the recurring subscription that justifies the game. Its the game that justifies the monthly subscription. You marketeers and producers may want your single player customers to start sending you monthly checks. You may think you can get them to send you monthly checks by putting the single player title on a common server. But the very things that make single player games appealing undermine the feasibility of putting them on a common server in a "massive" format so you can charge.
__________________________
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"Idiot media outlets," like CBS News and Fortune magazine?
AgtSmith, don't put yourself in the same boat as ianubisi.