This is the problem with MMORPG articles the journalists just can't get their craniums round the fact that for sub-based mmorpg you need a million plus subs to be a major player these days, less is just niche sucess or failure. Rift don't have 2 million subs, just web accounts, and probably have less than 250 K subs at present. Box sales don't mean much as WAR proved. Rift just isn't a next gen mmo it's a WoW clone.
This is the problem with MMORPG articles the journalists just can't get their craniums round the fact that for sub-based mmorpg you need a million plus subs to be a major player these days, less is just niche sucess or failure. Rift don't have 2 million subs, just web accounts, and probably have less than 250 K subs at present. Box sales don't mean much as WAR proved. Rift just isn't a next gen mmo it's a WoW clone.
So then by that criteria, the only "successful" MMO is World of Warcraft?
Rift is actually a decent game, but its solo-friendly focus and 'more of the same' gameplay don't take long to override the keen polish and pretty visuals. It really does feel like WoW 2 in my opinion, and it didn't take long to bore me. The unique aspects of it such as the soul trees are cool, but they do not replace exciting gameplay and community.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
This is the problem with MMORPG articles the journalists just can't get their craniums round the fact that for sub-based mmorpg you need a million plus subs to be a major player these days, less is just niche sucess or failure. Rift don't have 2 million subs, just web accounts, and probably have less than 250 K subs at present. Box sales don't mean much as WAR proved. Rift just isn't a next gen mmo it's a WoW clone.
Illyssia,
What are you basing ANY of these statements on? Are you a game developer? Are you an investment bank or even a financial analyst? Your statements have no basis in reality. How many millions in profit does a company need to make to be succesful in your book? You think that they have less than 250k accounts based on what? If you honestly believe that they would keep open servers with less than 10,000 accts for each, you are mad.
I do not have a vested interest in Rift or Trion. I do however have an interest in limiting the ammount of psuedo experts that regale the public with their poorly formed arguments. Opinions are fine, just don't state facts that you have created with no basis in reality.
This is the problem with MMORPG articles the journalists just can't get their craniums round the fact that for sub-based mmorpg you need a million plus subs to be a major player these days, less is just niche sucess or failure. Rift don't have 2 million subs, just web accounts, and probably have less than 250 K subs at present. Box sales don't mean much as WAR proved. Rift just isn't a next gen mmo it's a WoW clone.
Yeah would love to know where are you getting your info from. only Trion has the real data on sub numbers. Not that i care but since you are so sure about what you are saying maybe you know something we don't? because if you are just making guesses i am not even going to bother.
Of course it still is a huge grind. Quest grinding to max, craft grinding to you can make something useful, rep grinding, valour grinding and gear grinding for endgame. Rift as one big grind but it's no way near as grindy as something like Lineage or Everquest. Which is why I was able to max out 3 chars and deck them out in T1 or T2 gear, in 2 months. ^_^
Tell me one MMO which is not a grind? every MMO has repetitive tasks. it is matter of approach, what is grind for you could be a fun acrivity for others and vice versa. Not sure where you are going with this.
It's tough to discuss what constitutes success of Rift, when no one has access to financial figures. Getting over that, we've got buzz and hype and forum activity, number of shards/servers, how often and how many patches come out, etc. Based on those, the game looks alive and healthy, and continuing to improve. I find it unlikely that it will grow its subscription base substantially at this point, now that it's been out for 6 months.
Once gw2, prime, and swtor are out, people will probably try those if they're picking up a new game, and some will leave rift for those games. But even then, I imagine plenty will play Rift. It's fantasy genre, 2 faction, and lots of pve raiding, and it's not that old yet. For people looking for that formula, Rift fits the bill.
Flip side, sci-fi genre, or 3 faction pvp (prime) will work far better for people like me, and I don't have much longer to wait.
I am not one to talk smack, really. I still play vanguard lol. Suffice it to say, I leveled my rogue in rift to 50 in two weeks nearly 100% solo... I also have several server firsts in crafting. So....I maxed crafting and my character level in less than one sub cycle... In my opinion that is proof enough to say that Rift is not a "long haul" game.
So you intentionally soloed the whole game without attempting any of the group content and that makes you an expert on this topic how?
The end game that Trion has in place is better than any other game out there right now and the updates they are doing are happening faster than any other game out there right now.
Sometimes I get the feeling that people around here just hate the idea of a game (any game) succeeding.
As long as it is not their favorite game yes, they want it to fail.
Around here...sometimes I wonder even about that !
Seriously, I do hope RIFT remains successful. Just from (infrequently) looking at their servers - the game 'appears' to be fairly well populated, so good on them!
as for pvp - subpar, and prob lower. worst matchamking engine ive ever had the "enjoyment" of using.
edit: didnt feel like writing to much,but few exrta points.
a. the writer didnt even mentioned the pvp in rift. for a good amount of people, that part matter.
b. world pvp, people has no reason to fight since there nothing comes out of it. (at least when i was around, 3 month ago)let me explain. ive played some "asian" mmorpg, in most of them when you world pvp. you can lose staff if you die (items,$$,xp etc) so u wont go leroy on every single person on the server 24/7. if you will do that you will lose very fast and get pinced by every npc (since your on the "red" bar), in rift if you kill someone or someone kills you what happnes? nothing. some minor xp/gold. hes rez and go away, you go away, after killing people for weeks and like lets say more then 60% of the pepole just ignored me until i killed them. so damm boring.
c. 4 pvpv maps, should i say more?
d. servers are clustered into "battle groups", this mean that when you go onto a pvp map you will face people from your server and 2 others. forever.
in short, trion pvp team is a fail, they have no clue about how to build a pvp game/servers/skills/tools/engine/ i can go on.
they added pvp as sad side note.
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Revenue (incoming money) - cost (outgoing money) = profit/loss. If Rift ever becomes in danger of not being profitable, you will probably know. There are numerous ways to control cost, such as closing servers, moving developers off the project, less releases, etc. The exact number of sales/subs required to remain profitable will therefore fluctuate over time as well.
My assumption is that Rift is profitable right now and not in any imminent danger of tipping into the "loss" scale. A company will typically take drastic measures leading up to that point, none of which I am aware of for Rift.
I'm on the fence still about Rift. I do love some parts of the game, but totally hate others. However reading about what's in the games future, Trion seems to be making the right decisions about things, even getting rid of some of the things I totally hate. They're working on making open world RvR more of a possibility, which I think most players want.
I took a break for about a week, then 1.4 came out and I started playing again. The biggest thing I love is that there is only about a week, sometimes less before I'm done with the last content added, then they add more. I'm one that would love to see a new zone, but I can't complain about content. Every single other MMO I've ever played, I've always found myself sitting in a city doing nothing but talking to friends because I've done everything about 2 months ago. With Rift it's no more than a week of doing this. And when I do get bored, I do always have rift invasions to take care of (mage is still OP, I can solo some rifts lol)
Revenue (incoming money) - cost (outgoing money) = profit/loss. If Rift ever becomes in danger of not being profitable, you will probably know. There are numerous ways to control cost, such as closing servers, moving developers off the project, less releases, etc. The exact number of sales/subs required to remain profitable will therefore fluctuate over time as well.
My assumption is that Rift is profitable right now and not in any imminent danger of tipping into the "loss" scale. A company will typically take drastic measures leading up to that point, none of which I am aware of for Rift.
So here is what we do know:
1. They dropped 50million bucks on Rift out of a 100million dollar budget from mystery people
2. The game started with 29 server of which could hold maybe 1-2k at a time online at the same time. This quickly shot up to 99 servers and even then the queues were still 2,000-3,000 on some servers.
3. After they raised the concurrent server levels and the initial wave left they allowed free servers x-fers and consolidated to 60 servers. Those 60 servers look pretty stable and some peak at high pop more then they used too.
Now take what we know from a game like SWToR. We can assume they spent more then 50million dollars obviously. The producer has come out and said they needed to maintain 500k for 6 months to be profittable. So assuming this Rift probably became proffittable after month number 3.
This is without a cash shop or money from transfers. I can guarantee Trion is handing out some Christmas bonuses this year because when you maybe expected 100k sold and are around 1.5 million sold you did something right.
I don't think there's any question Rift is a success. Given how few subs you need to be profitable with a P2P model, they've definitely exceeded that. That being said, I'd say it's definitely a success for its time. WoW is getting old, Cataclysm didn't do as well as expected, and people are looking for an alternative, any alternative.
Rift is a solid, polished game, but it's not a great one. It's pretty obvious to me that it never even set out to be a great game. There's only one leveling path per faction. There's a ton of repetitive kill X, collect Y quests in very linear hubs. The cities to me just show a rushed development, Sanctum in particular. It's like one team designed a tiny city and then passed it off to another team that had to cram NPCs into whatever rooms fit them. No iteration back and forth.
Yes, Rift is generating a lot of content very fast, but they have to in order to keep player interest. They have to generate the content because the content just wasn't there on launch. Look at the Gamescom footage of last year and compare Rift to GW2. It's obvious that GW2 was further along in development, yet they're still going to take probably an entire extra year to make sure their game is complete. Five enormous cities, five leveling paths, a branching personal storyline that has no comparable content in Rift. Not to mention dynamic events that are clearly superior to quests and rifts, the dozens of other innovations it's bringing to the genre, and being B2P as well.
Rift will undoubtedly stay online forever due to diehard fans and a P2P model, but I really can't see people not immediately leaving once SWTOR and GW2 hit, not to mention other games like TSW, TERA or ArcheAge that would provide their own unique experiences (setting, targeting, sandbox, etc).
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it."-Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
All I need to know is that Rift has had a free trial going for a long time now.. They obviously didnt do as well as they thought they would. It also inflates the accounts created number which the article pointed out.
My problem with Rift? The character classes are boring to play and the multi class system works against it IMO.
Originally posted by SlyLoK All I need to know is that Rift has had a free trial going for a long time now.. They obviously didnt do as well as they thought they would. It also inflates the accounts created number which the article pointed out.My problem with Rift? The character classes are boring to play and the multi class system works against it IMO.
WoW had millions of subs and gave out free trials left and right. They were obviously doing just fine so the free trial thing isn't an indicator of anything except the company wants to give out free trials.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Fantastic article and very brave, knowing the trolls/haters that come to this website!
I could of sworn that Scott Hartsman or Hal Hanlin said about a month after release in one of the RiftPodcasts (one of the last ones done) that they are in the black. To me a video game company that says they are in the black = the game was a financial success.
This means they have a profit on return of investment. They said this profit is what has led them to hire more people and produce more content. I know for a fact that Hal Hanlin attributes the success of the game for the most recent and continued changes and content updates.
That was in the last Riftjunkies podcast. So going by their word, they are doing well financially - exceptionally so. The only thing they are not releasing is hard numbers. Honestly business wise, it makes sense not to do it. The competition as noted in the article is fierce and why would you give your competitors more information than they already have to quell a few nay-sayers that are just going to find something else negatitive to say about the game. Honestly with some of these folks you would of thought Trion burnt their house down. I am VERY interested in GW2, but I also like Trion a lot. I don't see why people can't see these two games as an improvement in our genre, as opposed to an US vs THEM mentality.
Comments
This is the problem with MMORPG articles the journalists just can't get their craniums round the fact that for sub-based mmorpg you need a million plus subs to be a major player these days, less is just niche sucess or failure. Rift don't have 2 million subs, just web accounts, and probably have less than 250 K subs at present. Box sales don't mean much as WAR proved. Rift just isn't a next gen mmo it's a WoW clone.
Bottom line. If you feel the need to hide your subscription numbers. Your game is not doing as well as expected.
If this game was doing well or beyond expectations. Trion would be all over it and use it as a marketing ploy. Since they don't...
well
So then by that criteria, the only "successful" MMO is World of Warcraft?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Rift is actually a decent game, but its solo-friendly focus and 'more of the same' gameplay don't take long to override the keen polish and pretty visuals. It really does feel like WoW 2 in my opinion, and it didn't take long to bore me. The unique aspects of it such as the soul trees are cool, but they do not replace exciting gameplay and community.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Illyssia,
What are you basing ANY of these statements on? Are you a game developer? Are you an investment bank or even a financial analyst? Your statements have no basis in reality. How many millions in profit does a company need to make to be succesful in your book? You think that they have less than 250k accounts based on what? If you honestly believe that they would keep open servers with less than 10,000 accts for each, you are mad.
I do not have a vested interest in Rift or Trion. I do however have an interest in limiting the ammount of psuedo experts that regale the public with their poorly formed arguments. Opinions are fine, just don't state facts that you have created with no basis in reality.
Yeah would love to know where are you getting your info from. only Trion has the real data on sub numbers. Not that i care but since you are so sure about what you are saying maybe you know something we don't? because if you are just making guesses i am not even going to bother.
Tell me one MMO which is not a grind? every MMO has repetitive tasks. it is matter of approach, what is grind for you could be a fun acrivity for others and vice versa. Not sure where you are going with this.
It's tough to discuss what constitutes success of Rift, when no one has access to financial figures. Getting over that, we've got buzz and hype and forum activity, number of shards/servers, how often and how many patches come out, etc. Based on those, the game looks alive and healthy, and continuing to improve. I find it unlikely that it will grow its subscription base substantially at this point, now that it's been out for 6 months.
Once gw2, prime, and swtor are out, people will probably try those if they're picking up a new game, and some will leave rift for those games. But even then, I imagine plenty will play Rift. It's fantasy genre, 2 faction, and lots of pve raiding, and it's not that old yet. For people looking for that formula, Rift fits the bill.
Flip side, sci-fi genre, or 3 faction pvp (prime) will work far better for people like me, and I don't have much longer to wait.
Sometimes I get the feeling that people around here just hate the idea of a game (any game) succeeding.
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www.prophecymma.com
So you intentionally soloed the whole game without attempting any of the group content and that makes you an expert on this topic how?
The end game that Trion has in place is better than any other game out there right now and the updates they are doing are happening faster than any other game out there right now.
As long as it is not their favorite game yes, they want it to fail.
Offcourse man. Some people's objective in life is to cry that WoW is the cause this genre sucks, and how WoW is the antichrist, and crap like that.
But when a game launches and has some success there they go and try to bash it with all their strenghts. Helping WoW to maintain its top position.
Gladly, or else how could they cry everyday against WoW it it lost its top position?
Around here...sometimes I wonder even about that
!
Seriously, I do hope RIFT remains successful. Just from (infrequently) looking at their servers - the game 'appears' to be fairly well populated, so good on them!
rift is a nice pve game.
as for pvp - subpar, and prob lower. worst matchamking engine ive ever had the "enjoyment" of using.
edit: didnt feel like writing to much,but few exrta points.
a. the writer didnt even mentioned the pvp in rift. for a good amount of people, that part matter.
b. world pvp, people has no reason to fight since there nothing comes out of it. (at least when i was around, 3 month ago)let me explain. ive played some "asian" mmorpg, in most of them when you world pvp. you can lose staff if you die (items,$$,xp etc) so u wont go leroy on every single person on the server 24/7. if you will do that you will lose very fast and get pinced by every npc (since your on the "red" bar), in rift if you kill someone or someone kills you what happnes? nothing. some minor xp/gold. hes rez and go away, you go away, after killing people for weeks and like lets say more then 60% of the pepole just ignored me until i killed them. so damm boring.
c. 4 pvpv maps, should i say more?
d. servers are clustered into "battle groups", this mean that when you go onto a pvp map you will face people from your server and 2 others. forever.
in short, trion pvp team is a fail, they have no clue about how to build a pvp game/servers/skills/tools/engine/ i can go on.
they added pvp as sad side note.
I 3930k -- Rampage IV Extreme -- G.skill RipjawsZ 32 GB -- Corsair Force Series 3 120gb -- G.skill Phoenix Pro 60gb -- WD 1 TB Black -- Corsair H 100 -- Thermaltake Level 10 Gt Snow Edition -- Corsair AX1200 -- Asus 560 Ti Sli -- Microsoft Sidewinder X4 -- Logitech G5 -- DELL UltraSharp 2007FP -- Samsung Syncmaster Sa700 -- Logitech Z2300 -- Logitech G35 -- Logitech G600 White -- coming soon : Dell U2711.
Let's make this very simple, folks.
Revenue (incoming money) - cost (outgoing money) = profit/loss. If Rift ever becomes in danger of not being profitable, you will probably know. There are numerous ways to control cost, such as closing servers, moving developers off the project, less releases, etc. The exact number of sales/subs required to remain profitable will therefore fluctuate over time as well.
My assumption is that Rift is profitable right now and not in any imminent danger of tipping into the "loss" scale. A company will typically take drastic measures leading up to that point, none of which I am aware of for Rift.
No game is a " long haul" game if you play 24/7 .
I'm on the fence still about Rift. I do love some parts of the game, but totally hate others. However reading about what's in the games future, Trion seems to be making the right decisions about things, even getting rid of some of the things I totally hate. They're working on making open world RvR more of a possibility, which I think most players want.
I took a break for about a week, then 1.4 came out and I started playing again. The biggest thing I love is that there is only about a week, sometimes less before I'm done with the last content added, then they add more. I'm one that would love to see a new zone, but I can't complain about content. Every single other MMO I've ever played, I've always found myself sitting in a city doing nothing but talking to friends because I've done everything about 2 months ago. With Rift it's no more than a week of doing this. And when I do get bored, I do always have rift invasions to take care of (mage is still OP, I can solo some rifts lol)
So here is what we do know:
1. They dropped 50million bucks on Rift out of a 100million dollar budget from mystery people
2. The game started with 29 server of which could hold maybe 1-2k at a time online at the same time. This quickly shot up to 99 servers and even then the queues were still 2,000-3,000 on some servers.
3. After they raised the concurrent server levels and the initial wave left they allowed free servers x-fers and consolidated to 60 servers. Those 60 servers look pretty stable and some peak at high pop more then they used too.
Now take what we know from a game like SWToR. We can assume they spent more then 50million dollars obviously. The producer has come out and said they needed to maintain 500k for 6 months to be profittable. So assuming this Rift probably became proffittable after month number 3.
This is without a cash shop or money from transfers. I can guarantee Trion is handing out some Christmas bonuses this year because when you maybe expected 100k sold and are around 1.5 million sold you did something right.
Sorry for derailing the thread, but any idea, why they do search programmers for xbox 360? Is one of their games not PC only?
I don't think there's any question Rift is a success. Given how few subs you need to be profitable with a P2P model, they've definitely exceeded that. That being said, I'd say it's definitely a success for its time. WoW is getting old, Cataclysm didn't do as well as expected, and people are looking for an alternative, any alternative.
Rift is a solid, polished game, but it's not a great one. It's pretty obvious to me that it never even set out to be a great game. There's only one leveling path per faction. There's a ton of repetitive kill X, collect Y quests in very linear hubs. The cities to me just show a rushed development, Sanctum in particular. It's like one team designed a tiny city and then passed it off to another team that had to cram NPCs into whatever rooms fit them. No iteration back and forth.
Yes, Rift is generating a lot of content very fast, but they have to in order to keep player interest. They have to generate the content because the content just wasn't there on launch. Look at the Gamescom footage of last year and compare Rift to GW2. It's obvious that GW2 was further along in development, yet they're still going to take probably an entire extra year to make sure their game is complete. Five enormous cities, five leveling paths, a branching personal storyline that has no comparable content in Rift. Not to mention dynamic events that are clearly superior to quests and rifts, the dozens of other innovations it's bringing to the genre, and being B2P as well.
Rift will undoubtedly stay online forever due to diehard fans and a P2P model, but I really can't see people not immediately leaving once SWTOR and GW2 hit, not to mention other games like TSW, TERA or ArcheAge that would provide their own unique experiences (setting, targeting, sandbox, etc).
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
All I need to know is that Rift has had a free trial going for a long time now.. They obviously didnt do as well as they thought they would. It also inflates the accounts created number which the article pointed out.
My problem with Rift? The character classes are boring to play and the multi class system works against it IMO.
I also forgot to mention that I also think Rifts world design is utterly pathetic for such a large budget. ( and small )
WoW had millions of subs and gave out free trials left and right. They were obviously doing just fine so the free trial thing isn't an indicator of anything except the company wants to give out free trials.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Fantastic article and very brave, knowing the trolls/haters that come to this website!
I could of sworn that Scott Hartsman or Hal Hanlin said about a month after release in one of the RiftPodcasts (one of the last ones done) that they are in the black. To me a video game company that says they are in the black = the game was a financial success.
This means they have a profit on return of investment. They said this profit is what has led them to hire more people and produce more content. I know for a fact that Hal Hanlin attributes the success of the game for the most recent and continued changes and content updates.
That was in the last Riftjunkies podcast. So going by their word, they are doing well financially - exceptionally so. The only thing they are not releasing is hard numbers. Honestly business wise, it makes sense not to do it. The competition as noted in the article is fierce and why would you give your competitors more information than they already have to quell a few nay-sayers that are just going to find something else negatitive to say about the game. Honestly with some of these folks you would of thought Trion burnt their house down. I am VERY interested in GW2, but I also like Trion a lot. I don't see why people can't see these two games as an improvement in our genre, as opposed to an US vs THEM mentality.
It's lame.