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General: Player Perspectives: Industry Layoffs
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
MMORPG.com columnist Jaime Skelton addresses the number of layoffs that we have seen in and around the MMO industry recently and talks about how this kind of news can affect players.
This week's layoffs at EA - particularly at Mythic Entertainment, who run Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, and Warhammer Online - are a sore reminder of the economic situation. In the past year, we've seen several MMOs close their doors: Shadowbane, The Matrix Online, Dungeon Runners, Tabula Rasa, and about half a dozen various free to play MMOs. Other games, named and unnamed, have been axed before they even entered a playable phase of testing.
As gamers, sure, we're concerned about the economy. But we're also very concerned about how it affects our gaming. Budget cuts, or staffing cuts, mean a lot more at an MMO. Because MMOs are staff-heavy and require constant supervision from multiple teams (customer service, server maintenance, new content development, etc.), we have good reason to be concerned. Our MMOs aren't just games that can be cranked out of a basement. They aren't Torchlight (at least, not for another two years.)
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
One important thing to note here is the different philosophies pertaining to huge corporate companies vs the independents in times of strife.
The huge company just cares about profits. They will cut and slash until they get the job done at the right profit level. They will also change the payment models to suit their needs.
The independents are just trying to make a livelihood. They will nurture and pour everything they have into their game to ensure that the customer is satisfied.
Totally agreed here, and the way alot of Asian games handle the micro transactions we lose out.
I did the math on one game(all be it not accurate) and we pay 20$ for say like 10000 points too spend in game but most of the item you can buy are #### points in price so you at the minimum you are paying 2$ for alot of the items. Where as I navigated too the native version website and saw their prices 10x lower then ours. I believe the Asian gaming market views us more so as ignorant addicts. I only fear that US and EU developed micro games might follow the same model and on average charge 1-2$ for a single ingame item.
Quote-------"This week's layoffs at EA - particularly at Mythic Entertainment, who run Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, and Warhammer Online - are a sore reminder of the economic situation. In the past year, we've seen several MMOs close their doors: Shadowbane, The Matrix Online, Dungeon Runners, Tabula Rasa, and about half a dozen various free to play MMOs. Other games, named and unnamed, have been axed before they even entered a playable phase of testing.
As gamers, sure, we're concerned about the economy. But we're also very concerned about how it affects our gaming. Budget cuts, or staffing cuts, mean a lot more at an MMO. Because MMOs are staff-heavy and require constant supervision from multiple teams (customer service, server maintenance, new content development, etc.), we have good reason to be concerned. Our MMOs aren't just games that can be cranked out of a basement. They aren't Torchlight (at least, not for another two years.)"
Remeber it also puts more people into the job market, that will take a job for less pay. Lowering the cost of making MMO's., or even lowering the pay of people that make a living writing about MMO's. What is minimum wage these days? $7.25 per hour. I love being Retired at the age of 49.
retRA-11B
Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.
- General George Patton Jr
Your only going to see more of this until the economy rebounds.
Take for instance Lotro changing the model for payments, trying one last desperate attempt to hold onto their share of the gameing industry. You go multi month and get the XPAC for free. That is depseration, it speaks of hoq many folks are not renewing on a month to month basis, while those of us who have a lifetime acocunt get to play virtually for free, while our lifetime 199 money has already been used and gone.
I too fear that they will get the axe even if they do go to FTP, wich is something I am all sure we can see headed our way. They had to go there to save DDO, and I expect the same.
The real problem is if these game and I mean all of them would give us good content, make the game fun, make it to where you wanted to spend you ever loving life there and skip work to even play, then these games would not be having these money problems
And yes layoff affect the amount of content and what happens in game, thus driving of more folks this goes for all games.
All "Industry of luxury" are Micro transaction based.
I found it funny that the article states this, then rally's agent it.
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"Anyone posting on this forum is not an average user, and there for any opinions about the game are going to be overly critical compared to an average users opinions." - Me
"No, your wrong.." - Random user #123
"Hello person posting on a site specifically for MMO's in a thread on a sub forum specifically for a particular game talking about meta features and making comparisons to other titles in the genre, and their meta features.
How are you?" -Me
Nice article, i like the fact that your straight up. I too was disappointed with the War letter but well i guess i understand why they did it too.
"Communication. Don't leave players hanging in the dark, wondering if a game they've supported for years may be in the trash bin within a few months.
Honesty. Stop feeding us feel good press releases, and give us the facts. Optimism is good, but not when it obscures a very real chance of bad news. "
From a player prospective of course that type of information would be good, from an industry standpoint that information would be terrible.
If a company says it is going to shut down a game in 3 months, they basically just shut it down that day instead. Players won't want to pay for the next 3 months knowing it is going away and so they'll quit instantly. Why toss money down the drain? That is money the company will lose that it could put towards it's other or future products. Also players that do stay in game will get obnoxious and ruin the fun remaining for other players since they realize it isn't in the companies interest to devote time and money to controlling the players anymore.
Giving the truth to players, if it is bad information, causes panic. Players read into every statement ever mentioned by a producer and come up with crazy stories on what it means, and that the game is closing etc etc. So players then react to this false information and it costs the companies money again. There aren't enough mature players who can take statements at face value and not explode. How many times has a game closed servers to boost population on the other servers and had players scream from the roof tops that the game is doomed and will be gone in 3 months and then quit? Happens everytime and makes the situation worse. They forget games like EQ that closed servers to boost population and then later had to reopen new servers to handle the increased population gains.
Sadly MMO players don't handle information well enough for companies to be upfront and honest.
Also in these times I think it's a good idea to support the games you like, I support the ones I want to see stay around even if I don't get to play much. But I also don't have any financial troubles and have a solid job.
Some games seem to not be effected much at all. WoW obviously would have to take a crisis to be hurt by a bad economy, in fact the top few MMOs seem to be exhibiting no change at all.
Even the game I love, AC, just released a large free update and continues to release free monthly updates. This last large update seems to have increased the population significantly and they've already announced new player races and other interesting features being added in late spring. I'm sure there's plenty of other companies still working hard and improving their games without any worry to the economy as well.
EA was a big one, but it was also an extremely bloated company with a lot of bad products both in the works and released. So it's not surprising that it had a huge layoff. But I don't think most MMO players should be concerned at all.
While I understand your position in regards to the letter from the EP of Mythic, the reality is that he couldn't really have said anything else. He had to calm some of the fears and rumors that have resulted from EA's personnel cuts, These types of games operate very much on belief. If the player base starts to buy in to some of the rumors, then subscription levels start to decline, and a nasty spiral feed back starts. Thats the LAST thing Mythic needs at this point.
I'll buy a box and pay a monthly subscription for an MMO and periodically buy major content upgrades.
I won't give in to micro-transactions...ever. If the game goes free-to-play but with paid for premium content, I'll quit. If the game tells me I have to buy premium items one at a time instead of buying major expansions once every 6 months to a year, I'll quit and go elsewhere. If premium items are available for real dollars, I'll quit and take my dollars elsewhere. If experience bumps or experience bonuses are available for real dollars, I'll take my business elsewhere.
Micro-transactions look great to a bean counter, but he's counting unhatched chickens IMHO. I refuse to be nickled and dimed, and I'm not the only one that feels this way.
i don't min MT's as long as they don't take away from the game. Some people want a little more then the norm, i don't mind paying for "extra frills"
Take CO for example.
i bought 20 extra costume slots, by defaut you get 4
How many people need 24 costumes on 1 character?
Some key points of this article, like the being bullied part or as I stated a day or so ago that these companies truly think we are stupid, have come up time and again on this forums in the recent few days. The communication part is something I touched on in Jon's thread yesterday's far as these companies, even if they say they are listening to their consumers, sure do very little action wise in showing it.
We know this stuff. I'm not trying to take away from Ms. Skelton's article, but the plain truth is we know this. The questions that remains as far as I see it is:
What do we do about it?
What can we do about it?
As I said in Jon's thread trying to organize people to vote with their dollars just isn't really feasible as there is no central "authority" to marshal such courses of action. Is the course to start such organizations that essentially equate to the NFL's Player's Union? If so, how and who should start it? Does congress get involved seeing as they already have set a precedent by interjecting their will in regulatory fashion in other forms of entertainment?
Something has to be done, that's for certain.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Chavez y Chavez
Magazine subscriptions, Readers Digest condensed books, and cigar clubs are three luxury industry business models I can name off the top of my head that are subscription based rather than micro transaction. So no not all luxury industries are micro transaction based. The premise fails. The article doesn't state that either.
Just with your examples, you are leaving off the fringe purchases.
----------
"Anyone posting on this forum is not an average user, and there for any opinions about the game are going to be overly critical compared to an average users opinions." - Me
"No, your wrong.." - Random user #123
"Hello person posting on a site specifically for MMO's in a thread on a sub forum specifically for a particular game talking about meta features and making comparisons to other titles in the genre, and their meta features.
How are you?" -Me
Very objective in that report, thankyou.
I think MMOs have just about seen the golden age are about to pop into some of the crappest things around (if not already). Wizard of the Coast might be getting another go at vaccuming up my account.
I've seen great MMOs come and then die as the next latest and greatest company that promises so much then disappoints in failure after failure to correct issues that were in the last great MMO.... Seriously, Wizard isn't nearly as back about screawing up in MTG as Blizzard, Mythic, and Sony have been to the MMO world... Laying off the backbone of the MMO creation is a sign of the death of MMOs....
As for why MTG is messed up , not as bad as MMOs: damage is no longer on the stack wracks many a extended, legecy, and vintage red deck...
I am not willing to pay for micro-trans in full priced and/or full priced games. Period. LOTRO, dragon-age, not a chance. Other people are, and they'll give you a laundry list of excuses as to why it's okay for companies to do that. As long as you have those people with money to burn, the industry is just going to keep doing it.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.
"Some key points of this article, like the being bullied part or as I stated a day or so ago that these companies truly think we are stupid, have come up time and again on this forums in the recent few days. The communication part is something I touched on in Jon's thread yesterday's far as these companies, even if they say they are listening to their consumers, sure do very little action wise in showing it."
Totally agree to that point.
As far as Mythic's lay offs and other MMO closing I see no problem with that. The market is brutally honest. Warhammer was not doing well ( no shit) and they laid people off. Having crap games die is good. I loved shadowbane but I know games need to be profitable.
As far as us getting gaming companys to be more truthful and direct with their customers I have no idea how we can do that.
Although in time stuff gets out.
Trimming the fat is good. WoW has shown the genre can be very profitable so it will not abandoned. It might just be slow for awhile. This can be good. I would rather have 3 well funded games instead of dispersing the cash over 20 games that blow.
Oh lord... Don't get the morons in congress assembled involved... Unless you want things REALLY screwed up. That "something" that "has to be done" is to not play games that you don't like/enjoy. Beyond that you are simply asking for serious trouble.
Sorry, this is exactly the brainwashed mentality I ve heard from too many people, primarily americans: "Trimming the fat is good." Its like the trickle-down theory, the concept of passing savings on to the customer and other myths that they have taught us in business school as well.... and then added they mostly do not work.
"Trimming the fat" does what? It removes a lot of games and companies, pooling the playerbase around a few of them. These may be well supported... or they may not, as less games means less competition means less need to actually put some of that revenue back in.
Also, "trimming the fat" is making it much harder for a good, original idea to break into a stagnant market. How is that good? Do you want to play the same games and concepts for years, because there is no need to further innovate, as the barrier of entry is so high that "fat" that is smaller companies and experimental game concepts gets "trimmed" ?
"Trimming the fat" is an ingeniously chosen phrase for its purpose, and as anyone with a degree, hell, with experience in marketing can tell you, it is almost the perfect catchphrase to shove anything down your customers throat. It combines a lot of subtext.... but in the end, its just a phrase with no actual content, that hides a pretty bad consequence:
Fewer companies get larger market shares, and are less threatened by new competitors, while the general number of products offered to us, games in this case, goes down, and the market becomes extremely hard to enter.
I wonder what games would fit the category "and watched bad games continue to thrive."?
Obviously, any game that is thriving isn't a 'bad' game from the companies perspective. If the game really is bad, why would players continue to pay for it? I know there are always a few die-hards that believe that their favorite game, which has a poor implimentation of what they hope for, will soon be fixed and the world will then see its hidden beauty. But the majority of players will see the poor game and drop it, maybe revisiting it in 6 months to see if it has been turned around.
History has shown that games that are in bad shape on release have a huge uphill struggle to survive. AO is one of a few that were a mess on release and after a few years of fixes have managed to survive (I play on a free account occasionally when I'm bored with what I've currently been playing). So does anyone have an example of "a bad game that continues to thrive"?
Something that surprises me in the discussions here are how some people talk like micro-transactions are some kind of game poison (i.e., they would quit immediately if added to a game they play). Personally, I love the current DDO model. It gives the players a choice:
1) Play it as a subscription based game will full access to most content.
2) Play it as a F2P game, buying the content they want access to.
3) Play is as a F2P game, and earn points in-game to get enough content to continue playing.
I don't see how having a choice can be a bad thing as long as there is no deception involved (and DDO is very up front about it).
I would MUCH rather just buy the content that I'm interested in, rather than pay a monthly fee to get everything, half of which I may not be making use of. Games with micro-transactions get immediate truthful feedback about what players are willing to pay for instead of biased feedback in the forums where vocal players typically dominate and may push the game in a directing that the majority isn't interested in (i.e., "give us unrestricted PvP").
Sorry, this is exactly the brainwashed mentality I ve heard from too many people, primarily americans: "Trimming the fat is good." Its like the trickle-down theory, the concept of passing savings on to the customer and other myths that they have taught us in business school as well.... and then added they mostly do not work.
"Trimming the fat" does what? It removes a lot of games and companies, pooling the playerbase around a few of them. These may be well supported... or they may not, as less games means less competition means less need to actually put some of that revenue back in.
Also, "trimming the fat" is making it much harder for a good, original idea to break into a stagnant market. How is that good? Do you want to play the same games and concepts for years, because there is no need to further innovate, as the barrier of entry is so high that "fat" that is smaller companies and experimental game concepts gets "trimmed" ?
"Trimming the fat" is an ingeniously chosen phrase for its purpose, and as anyone with a degree, hell, with experience in marketing can tell you, it is almost the perfect catchphrase to shove anything down your customers throat. It combines a lot of subtext.... but in the end, its just a phrase with no actual content, that hides a pretty bad consequence:
Fewer companies get larger market shares, and are less threatened by new competitors, while the general number of products offered to us, games in this case, goes down, and the market becomes extremely hard to enter.
So proppoing up failures is both wise and anti-American? Free market forces decide. No government interference, industry welfare, or demand economy foolishness changes that. The strong games profit the weak ones are consigned to the trash bin. Mythic is laying off people because their games and business model cannot support their workforce. End of story.
Its not about propping up failures, its that there is no value at all in reducing the number of products in a segment to us, the customers. If a game is bad enough that you dont want to play it, dont play it. Its existence does not hurt you. You gain nothing from having it removed, but you lose something, and that is diversity and competition. A game that fails to attract enough gamers isnt going to stay around for long, yes. But for the customer, at best that doesnt matter, at worst it reduces the quality of other games over time.
Thats all I am saying. Not sure how you put "anti-american" in there, because frankly I am neither american nor do I care. I just have seen the phrase "trimming the fat" used a lot in discussions on other forums, mainly business-related, and it seems to be a popular catchphrase for a big delusion.
For us, the gamers, the best outcome is a lot of MMOs catering to different playerbases, each competing with the other so they do their best to deliver a great game.
The worst outcome is close to what we have now: One or two juggernauts who raise the barrier of entry to insane heights, so competitors can no longer outperform them, they do what WAR, AoC and maybe Aion have done and out-market them. We get a lot of hollow short-term games that try to grab a quick buck, and nobody cares about creating quality, because quality alone does not sell as well as no quality, but lots of noise.
As a gamer, thats a lose-lose, even if for the companies, it may come out even in financial terms, because rather than spend our cash for good games for long stretches of time, we dump our money into overhyped crapgames which blow out after a short while and make us buy the next one. Overall, the same cash goes into the industry, but we just get crappy games.
In the case of Mythic, I think this was a classic case of mismanagment from the day EA and Mythic merged, and possibly before. Mythic needed cash, and they struck a deal with the devil. Maybe at the time it looked different, but EA has a very singular reputation on their business side, and its not a lenient one.
EA pushed Mythic, Mythic pushed WAR, and we got a bad game. When subs went bleeding, Mythic went into damage control mode, and swerved left and right with their attempts to please all kinds of playertypes, probably already having EA breath down their necks. Instead of trying to go down the road they originally planned and intended, too much was compromised to try and hold onto the big numbers and the somewhat different audience than they expected.
Now, the gamble did not pay off, so EA is cutting cost and basically dropping Mythic and WAR to a degree, in favor of the next big thing. EA desperately needs income, and I wouldnt be surprised if BioWare is already feeling an accelerated timetable to release ToR, because WAR as the big money-maker didnt happen.
If they hadnt gone delusional and aimed for the stars, and then refused to give up when the game impoded, they could well have a nice tidy MMO there for a niche audience, and not a shipwreck and a half-dead and cannibalized company a year later.
Its the whole "make game, rush game for early money, get rich NOW" scheme that doesnt work, but the developers are those who have to pay the price.
Oh lord... Don't get the morons in congress assembled involved... Unless you want things REALLY screwed up. That "something" that "has to be done" is to not play games that you don't like/enjoy. Beyond that you are simply asking for serious trouble.
Why not have the "loonies" police the "loonies"?
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Chavez y Chavez
Such a shame that BioWare will end up chewed up, swallowed and spit out again, an unrecognizable mess of its former glory, thanks to their spectacular sell-out to EA.
Their latest game, Dragon Age, is already suffering criticism for incorporating in-game advertising for DLC. No other bioware game ever did this - but as soon as they hit the EA greed fest it's there in your face.
Things will only get worse
Oh, independent game developers, please provide where the greedy cannot. Give us games that are fun and complete.
As for the MMOs, such a pity. Just another reason not to sign up for something under a greed-banner like EA, regardless of how appealing the IP is. EA *will* find a way of perverting it.
Oh lord... Don't get the morons in congress assembled involved... Unless you want things REALLY screwed up. That "something" that "has to be done" is to not play games that you don't like/enjoy. Beyond that you are simply asking for serious trouble.
Why not have the "loonies" police the "loonies"?
We already have that... Which is why things are going down hill fast.
Finally, someone at MMORPG that doesn't try to push MT on everyone. Bless your heart.
P.S. The feel good press releases are bad because pretty much anyone over 12 has been exposed to enough BS that flags go up when they see something like that. Companies believe their own garbage so much now days they will refuse to say anything "bad" right up until the TARP funds arrive. Then it's a matter of shifting blame and deploying golden chutes...
AMEN! I've got a favorite columnist here, and thy name is Jaime. This one seems to have some credibility.