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discussion about MMOGs in europe.
RobUey
Member Posts: 34
this topic is mainly for europeans, but thats trivial...
has any one else noticed that with Asia and the US being the top mmo countries that europe has been completely ignored, and if an MMO company was to make european games they'd make a million (well... not literaly) why do u think that is?
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Comments
Hi,the european market is there but its certainly not at the same scale as Asia or even NA.
Europeans have been playing mmorpg for ages just that as least in the UK its viewed as an adult kind of game .
Back in the 90s we did have 2 euro UO servers europa and drachefenels(spelling) already.
Also ,EQ has loads european guilds spread out and now even has european servers.
DAoC was a big success for europe too boasting at one point nearly as many players as NA DAoC.
DaoC success in europe had a lot to do with giving it a very european theme.Nordic myth ans camelot myth.Heck most places in DAoC albion had english names.
However,the problem lies in europeans been very loyal to their games.Funny enough most people i still keep in contact in EQ from europe still play EQ while most i know who were NA have left it.
Same in DAoC when i returned after a year to try out the atlantis expansion i was shocked to see virtually all i know there still playing it.
And there lies the problem i think.While brand like warcraft and star wars know they can draw in new fans into the mmorpg circuit since they are well known in europe ,lesser known games are taking a huge risk.
They know its hard to tear people away from their old games here.
And its not like games have not tried.Anarchy online is a european made game which is kept alive mainly by NA market not europe.
Other eurpean made mmorpg are neocron and saga of ryzom which have not been very successful.
We even have some cancelled like warhammer online and dragons empire both UK based mmorpg.
So while we do have success stories like DAoC,EQ and UO and soon to come WoW,the market seems to need to get hold of the NA market before it has any good chance in europe.
So we have had a few mmorpg made by european companies but none have been really successful.
eve-online has done pretty well, considering it's had to start from scratch and it's CCP's first product. An estimated 50K current playerbase is perfectly respectable, if not WoW-esque. It does have a slightly older playerbase, and a far greater percentage of europeans than most other MMORPG's.
But yeah, there arent too many around. One of the main problems I see is the language barrier, though that could make for an interesting element in the MMO....
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currently training 'hoping for more sci-fi mmorpgs' to level 5
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PvE in general is pretty lame, if you think long and hard about it. You are spending your time beating a severely gimped AI that would lose to a well trained monkey. Best not to think too long and hard why you are wasting time playing games in general actually...
Yep forgot to add eve online to the list.
But,you can see we have had a few euro made mmorpg .
The biggest success story might be AO which in 2001 sold over 100k copies in its first week making it the fastest selling mmorpg of all time back in 2001.
It had about 80k paying subs at its height in numbers .But a very buggy and laggy launch killed it from going into the legends book of mmorpg .It was very original but had a horrible start.Add to fact they actually kept insisting this game runs smoothly on 128mb RAM when it could not.It was the most intensive demanding game of 2001 pretty much like EQ2 is today.
And they actually thought 100k people could play on one server with 2001 technology .
Even then they did first launch the game in norway and NA before rest of the europe a few weeks later.So even then they recognised that european market is small compared to NA market.
So if you look at NA made mmorpg
EQ1- over 500k accounts
WoW- no numbers on accounts but after EU/Asia launch would most likely pass 1million
EQ2-310k
SWG-275k
DAoC-250k
CoH-200k
Asian made
FFXI- 1m
L2-1.5m
L1-2.5m
Countless others at 200k mark LOL.
Then we got euro made
AO-80k
Eve-55k
Not seen numbers on neocron and ryzom but its generally seems to be under 50k or near that.
So Euro mmorpg have not done so well honestly.
I had hoped for warhammer and dragons empire to come out but they got scraped.
I've got no figures so I may be wrong but I would imagine that the percentage of households in Europe with PC and internet connection is a lot less than in the main population centres of the US and Asia. Certainy in the UK there doesn't seem to be any sort of promotion of MMOG's in the main gaming stores (Game, Gamestation, HMV and Virgin), neither do many of the magazines have that much about them. Maybe we have more of a console culture?
Just wanted to say warhammer is not dead they re opened the project after they canned it.
i only know about 2 or 3 people from my school who actually no what the term MMORPG means, where as all my other friends are playing things like GTA:san andreas. and when i try to descrie to them what sort of game im playing they say 'oh is it abit like Final fantasy?'
i was reading through one of those computer magazines a while a go, and every other page would have a big review with screenies etc about upcoming FPS'. then near the back, i found a small parapgrah or two about the everquest series... and even that didnt say much about it.
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