Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
How WoW negatively impacts the industry
Meltdown
Member UncommonPosts: 1,183
TL;DR Inflated subscription market numbers create unrealistic subscription number expectations and hurt new companies trying to get into the market.
So yea, it's no mystery that the people on these forums love to hate World of Warcraft. But this is not one of those threads. But more recently I've been really thinking about what was considered "WoW-clones" and more recently, the failure of any AAA developer/publisher to reach their desired subscription numbers and end up going to F2P, reinvent their game, or just shut down operations altogether.
And WoW is to blame for all of this. NO not because of gameplay mechanics, the grind, throwing away gear... no actually the game itself has nothing to do with it. What happened is marketing teams around the world saw a market expand exponentially. What does that mean? Well if you think about it prior to WoW the market for MMOs was just a handful of a million players. Successful MMOs had subscriptions in the thousands, not millions.
Post WoW success is now marked in the millions of subscriptions. But wait a second. How do these new MMOs "fail" with 1million+ subscriptions which used to be the hallmark of a very successful MMO? Well it's obvious right, the market expanded and the companies are targetting a percentage of market share for their MMO.
So lets toss some numbers around shall we. Let's say the NA MMO market is somewhere around 15 million active subscriptions (its probably more, but im just making this up). Company X says, we can address 10% of that market easily, makes a game with 1.5 million subs in mind and releases. The game starts strong, maybe 2 million initial sales, then falls quickly to under 1million subs and quickly has to perform "cost-cutting measures".
So what happened to this game released by Company X? Did the game suck? I don't know, 800k subscriptions seems pretty solid even if its under expected market share. SO WAIT... is the game bad? Or did marketing pull one over on you? I'm starting to lean more towards "marketing pulled one over on you". Those 15 million subscriptions is hugely inflated for three reasons.
#1. People with multiple accounts in a single game
#2. People with single accounts in multiple games
#3. And probably the biggest reason here, the 15 million market includes those not traditionally interested in MMOs at all.
And here we come back full circle to why I blame WoW. WoW brought MMOs to the masses, which inflated the market's expectations. I'm sure someone will point out that the 15 million number IS the correct number for the market regardless of their "traditional" gaming experiences. And that's how new people get introduced to different markets. But WoW was such an anomoly in this field, how long until companies realize this.
Now this creates all sorts of problems for marketing/investors who aren't familiar with these things. When a company makes a pitch for 10% of a 5 million player market, any investor will laugh them out of the room since 500,000 subs is only 3% of the 15 million player market and hardly seems worth an investment...
The industry will take time to recover and come back to reality. As WoW's subscription numbers drop and the top dog is only hitting 30% or less of the market then perhaps we will start seeing more focused and smaller sub geared games. Then again... the market makes no promises, and everyone wants to lightning to strike twice.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
Comments
WoW sub numbers are also inflated in their own right since they include pay-per-hour "subscriptions" that could be generating a lot less than the $15 per month (more like 7 cents per hour played). Why would you cancel a "subscription" when it doesn't cost you a thing to keep it going? When over half your subs aren't real ($15/month) subs, you'll always be able to boast 6M+ "subs" even if everyone in the Western market cancels their subscription.
WoW numbers minus the "Chinese subs" are a lot less impressive than 12M, below 10M now.
Artificial numbers, artificial expectations...
Why is $15 considered a real sub? Different games in different countries pay different amounts.
Anyone who payed anything in the last 30 days excepting new accounts in their first 30 days are considered subs, regardless of how much they payed. So paying by the hours is entirely legit, if they paid something in the last 30 days. There is nothing inflated about that.
WoW cannot control what other developers decide to do. Blaming Wow for another completely seperate companies decisions is completely moronic. Those other developers decided on their own what they would put in the game, what the game would cost and what they consider success, not WoW.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
Take away the "Chinese subs" and they still blow away every other MMO in terms of subs. And it's not even close.
Sometimes you have to break something before you can fix it. That's what I think will happen in the MMO industry. The bigplayers will lose their expensive bets on a game, divest themselves of the MMO development division and the now unshackled MMO development studios can make the games they want with realistic expectations not governed by the publicly traded companies.
None of this has anything about being greedy or evil btw...it's just business.
My feeling is that this discussion is already history. There was a wave of investment (that started a few years ago) dreaming of being the next WoW. That's already come to an end, but as customers, we only see a delayed reaction to what the money is thinking. Investors will have already done this analysis, moved beyond that bubble of expectations around WoW several years ago and are looking at the next wave in the industry *after* the one that's currently still in development.
Maybe blame or fault is too strong of a word, but to suggest they are unrelated topics would be awfully niave. When it comes to what projects get the green light and which projects get shelved a lot of it has to do with potential profits, and there is a lot of pressure on people to make the best case possible for their project... which means they are using the highest possible subscription and profit metrics they can get their hands on. Also who said anything about "devs", this is purely a marketing/investor point of view. Developers have nothing to do with expected subscriber numbers. Devlopers certainly have an impact on final subscription numbers, but not as much on market expectations.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
This doom and gloom thread was brought to you by Chin Up the new ultra high caffeine soft drink for gamers who just need that boost of happiness after a long forum session.
I completely agree. It is delayed because of a long development cycle. And we might be seeing the last of those investments coming out now (SWTOR, GW2, Studio 38s flopfest). This has just been more of a recent realization personally and I thought I would share it. Maybe finally we can all be excited for smaller games with more focused target audiences.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath