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What does MMO success look like?
Jetrpg
Member UncommonPosts: 2,347
Reading and commenting on mmorpg.com, often the issue of mmo success pops up. A lot of what i read in those posts is sold this many million copies = success
Do number of copies sold equal success for mmorpgs?
Wow sold over 800,000 copies it first 3 months. Aion sold 1 million in just over a month and a half (western market btw, impressive). WAR sold 1.2 million in just over a month and a half. DAOC 200,000 in three months.
Well that is enough.
So looking at numbers of copies sold within a three month range (often 1 month) we can see what mmos are successes right?
I say, HECK NO.
Look, this may help owners measure how much money in their pocket or not, but it shouldn't mean anything to the mmo community anymore, other than showing the hype of the game at release.
If you want to look at the success of an mmo i purpose look at its growth or trend. Games that bleed players are inferior and failures. I say this because getting players is the hard part, losing them because your game does not appeal to them, is a failure.
Now look at games i would consider successes wow, from 800k in the first 3 months to 12 million, growth is alive and as many people have noted this is a freak of timing, marketing, social influences, and not least of all A GOOD MMORPG. Eve is another game that has substantially grown from its release. And there are more out there.
The key aspect of a MMORPG success to me is a game that retains its players or shows growth of it.
Now i would like to say that i don't hold this standard of growth for all mmorpgs, niche mmorpgs should be allowed to be niche. But WAR, aion, aoc, etc. cannot claim this because they talked the talk of being massive and appealing to the population. In other-words, the devs./co/marketing themselves proposed their own massive success, and bleeding subs does not reflect success
In other-words, lets hold games to the standards they set for themselves, if a games devs/etc. say, you their game may not get over 150k and they meet that number (or close to) and keep or grow it that is a success. However, if the devs/etc. say everyone jump aboard, best game ever, everyone is gonna be playing it millions son, millions; and they sell 1 million and proceed to bleed 70% (random high number, i would say losing 30% is a failure) or more; that is a success of marketing and failure of a game.
So what do you people think, how should we measure mmo success?
Are some measurments better than others?
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
Comments
I think the majority of players that reflect on these types of matters feel the same way. I would imagine there was a time more probably focused on sales within itself, but as some recent mmorpgs have shown your intial sales do not guarantee success if the bulk of the purchasers end up leaving within a short amount of time.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
Me having fun, and not uninstalling within a week.
There are plenty of examples of games that didnt make money and failed, as well as examples of games that did and succeeded. The whole reason that a BUSINESS creates and publishes a game, is to make money. This is why they measure their sucess and failure by those goals.
There are still a LOT of muds out there, that are not based on financial goals, and as such meet your standards, and can be considered a success....
Success is highly subjective.
To us, the players, successful is a polished, fun game with high replayvalue, and great pvp/pve depending on your preference. To the developers, it's a solid game that meets all of their design goals. To the producer and their investors, it's bringing in as much income as possible with the least amount of overhead.
And this is why we the situation in the genre today. As you can see, the goals of the first two are pretty much directly opposed to the last two.
OK but to you as a game player what does success mean? I already stated that $$ makes the piggies happy. What does a game need to be for it to be a success to you Supermax?
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
I think the success of a MMO relates soley on it's ability to be properly discussed without the use of obnoxious font-fluffing.
That aside, I do think the ability to turn a profit and continually update and grow are viable signs of success.
Dark & Light, Shadowbane, APB. All innovative games with giant and mouth watering aspects! AND, they're also closed down.
UO, AC, Linage I&II, EQ2, so on and so forth. They're hanging in there. Nothing real uber going on, but they're there.
AoC, WAR, Champions, DDO, LotRO - moderate successes. Their love and hate ratio alone means they're mostly successful.
WoW: deal with it- they are the epitome of being a sucessful MMO. If you wonder what it looks like.. It looks like this. It doesn't have to be pretty to be successful.
I'll call it success if it's making money compare to it's initial investment. And that's from a business stands point.
For example minecraft could be called a success since it's made by 1 person, and he's making a hell lot of cash out of it.
If a game can make a load of cash relative to it's investment even if it die in 1 year, it's a success to me. At least it's a success to the company, because they are making money.
But is minecraft a success becuase of the money he is making from it or because it was accepted beyond his initial projections?
If mmo success is simply determined by $$ then could one make a fake mmo and trick someone / people into paying for it, make a profit and then in turn be success as a mmo?
Lets say ff14 has made its production costs now, so its successful?
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
Success is money.
Just when you think you have all the answers, I change the questions.
I'll start by listing a couple of things i DON'T think MMO success should be measured by:
Preorders/Box Sales
Revenue from Subscriptions
Review Scores
Reasoning:
1 - The number of copies sold at launch is usually entirely independent of the quality of the game. Even if you were fortunate to play the beta, even if you've seen gameplay demos at festivals/conventions the studio still has the right to entirely change content upon, or shortly after release. So even if you see a huge splurge of consumers buying a game upon release after a few months of balancing and patches the number of retained customers is likely to fall.
2 - From what i gather, a large amount of the production cost of an MMO is recounted by box sales at launch, this being one of the reasons there is so much hype when it comes to MMOs as a genre. It may be more beneficial to the company to over hype the game and shift as many boxes at launch as they can, to mitigate the development cost and then have subscriptions come in as profit. Realistically i don't think the cost of maintaining servers for a successful MMO is a great expense when they have a million or two subscribers. However i don't think this is the best measure of a game's success, this being because if you've invested in buying the game itself, then paid for a couple of months of sub time and put in many hours of work into the game it's going to be hard for you to just up and leave the game for whatever reason. So this value is slightly misleading.
3 - Reviews are usually entirely biased towards the opinion of the writer, now this can be a good thing if you share their opinion but as a baseline for determining a game's success i doubt this is a good measure, due to the range of genres within the mmo supergenre. You'll play what you like regardless of what other people think, or at least you should :P
So, what do i think you SHOULD measure a game's success by? New user retention, if you will. Basically the ability of an MMO to attract and keep new players. And by keep i mean for them to become subscribers for at least a few months, or until they have enough invested in the game that they don't want to quit. By providing new revenue to the game these players should hopefully ensure the development of new content and give an indication to the owner of the MMOs that it is profitable to keep maintaining the game, and to keep developing new content for it.
The hardest thing although is to find a developer who wants to pump in a large majority of their profits back into the game to ensure customer satisfaction, rather than to reinvest the bare minimum so that their profits are maximised.
Capitalism is a harsh mistress for us mmo gamer folk :[
I totally agree with you new user retention. Nox (and anyone else) would you agree that sub growth is an approperate measure of this? (It does have some issues, game might be getting 100k new subs a month but losign 100k a month from the hype. So maybe sub grow from 3-5 months out?)
Side note-
CApitalism seems harsh but she our friend, thats why our computers exist and and play more than pong right now. Why games have to continue to preform better. But look at wow i don't know much much they reinvest but its a bit, ccp does the same also. And games that don't have enough players to make it worth investment are not invested in , daoc, etc.
However for as much wow is making they could pump more into the game instead it makes them sc2 and the new mmo, d2 , etc.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
Mr T is the epitome of success in numerous industries, including acting , boxing, preaching and professional wrestling
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
The term is Churn. It's a measure of new subscribers compared to the number of subscibers that have left.
And Czzarre, you can not use the epitome to measure whether or not a game is successful. A game could fall well short of WoW and still be a major success. Inertia is a biatch
One thing to factor in is that new games might not hold attention of gamers as long as the old.
We have a lot more games coming out in shorter intervals. I personally do not really want to get stuck in a single game. Sometimes I feel like playing WoW and sometimes I can spend months straight on EVE.
Developers have already noticed the very thing. Customer loyalty does not necessarily mean that they continue subscriptiosn all the time. They might take long breaks to try out something else. That is why F2P combined with sales of additional content might be more profitable in a long run.
"The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in."
For me as a game player, sucess is having fun (achieving the goal). So, that means that my success is not dependant on the developer, it is dependant on my ability to pick a game I will like. This also means that my success has no effect on the games success.
The question was 'What does an MMO success look like?" The answer is still the same. It has to make money, because that is the reason it was made. If it does good, then others will seek to replicate this success. If it does not succeed, others will not try to replicate it.