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Greedy Companies?
Daranar
Member UncommonPosts: 392
Ok, this is less of a rant and more of a, 'let's discuss this' / 'help this idiot understand'.
How are companies folding or saying their games are not making profits, or whatever press release that lets us know the game is in trouble, when they may have millions of customers? Are these marketing schemes? If so to what avail? I ask this question because if we look back to games like Everquest, Asheron's Call, and Ultima Online, we see customer numbers in the 10s of thousands and 100s of thousands. Yet these games were HUGE. They made large enough profits for SOE to invest in many more games of the like and companies like Blizzard to break into a brand new market. Hell! these games are still around and strong with far less numbers. But now we hear Blizzard is worried because they only have a few million subscribers left. We hear of subscription based games like SWTOR, with 1.7 million subscribers, struggling to find profit and switching to f2p in hopes of increased income....Why?
How is it that 1.7 million customers is not sufficient when a couple 100,000 has proven to be. If it is the fact that inflation has taken place in the last decade and a half, then was that not answered in raising subs from 8 to 15 dollars? I don't understand this. Maybe you do and can enlighten me. But I am afraid this is coming down to nothing more than greed; to enough not being enough. Is this trend recoverable? Or are we now fated to be seen as $ signs and not gamers? Or is this just my perception? When I began playing Everquest, I never felt like a dollar sign. I felt like a valued person. GMs were always available to help with limited wait time. I felt I was provided with a great experience, rather than a product.
Thoughts?
If I want a world in which people can purchase success and power with cash, I'll play Real Life. Keep Virtual Worlds Virtual!
Comments
First, expenses matter as much as revenue. SWTOR's revenue would have made the game a colossal success if the game had cost $10 million to make. At $300 million, not so much.
Second, what matters is revenue, not player numbers. If you charge a subscription fee of $15/month and have 200 thousand players, you get more revenue than if you have an item mall that brings in $2/month per player and have 1 million players. Remember that in a typical "free to play" item mall game, something like 80% of players will never pay a dime. That said, there are many wildly different business models that are marketed as "free to play", and revenue per player varies wildly from one to the next.
I sometimes make spelling and grammar errors but I don't pretend it's because I'm using a phone
I understand what you say about expenses. But seeing the #s and estimated revenue for Everquest, they clearly did not spend $300 million on development. So why with significantly less budget, was Everquest able to create a much larger, in depth world capable of sustaining players for significantly longer than SWTOR? Are developers focusing on the wrong features? Does spending millions on VOers really pay off? Are games simply mismanaged in development?
Sure there are multiple business models, all of which should theoretically be expanded on the original model UO, AC and EQ had. If this is the case, should these models not be more efficient? Should they not be capable of producing large revenues from smaller customer bases? If not, they certainly should be capable of producing more profit, or else it would be insanity to use these newer models.
If I want a world in which people can purchase success and power with cash, I'll play Real Life. Keep Virtual Worlds Virtual!
Think of it this way, when you earn more you spend more. I used to earn a great deal of money, then I moved into a different career with alot less money but more happiness, the drop in wages hit me really hard and I nearly lost my house, it took me about 2 years to change my habits and get my expenses under control.
Now times that by a thousand fold or more for a company that was at the peak of it's game, money was rolling in and it seemed it would never end, you have offices all over the world, your teams are working on projects that may never see the light of day but your scared of losing the talent to a competitor.
Expense claims are rife with fraud, workers are given everything they could dream of because you want to keep them happy.
Then you start to lose customers, the expense forms suddenly get more attention, the excess you spent on your workers is cut, the worldwide network of offices is suddenly under scrutiny, your talent pool starts to shrink.
Yet on the outside we still see a huge number of players subscribing to a game, why aren't they rolling in money, because at the end of the say the more you earn the more you spend, and undoubtedly spend unwisely.
It's the same trend as in other video games. Games are just too expensive to make nowadays. Resident Evil 6 sold more than any of its predecessors, but it still failed to reach its goals, because it was damn expensive.
It's also why EVE was very successful with its 400K subs, while TOR would've been considered a failure at that number.
Simpler graphics, little voice acting, a smaller marketing budget. TOR was also apparently mismanaged. They bought a crappy, unfinished engine, gave it to devs who were never capable of making balanced, innovative or bug-free games in the first place, threw lots of money at them and hoped it would succeed.
Estimates are that EverQuest spent $8 million before launch, while SWTOR spent $300 million, with EA buying Bioware accounting for some portion of the latter number. If you're comparing EverQuest today to SWTOR today, then it's not a fair comparison on content amounts, as EverQuest has had many years and a ton of expansions to add stuff later.
Game world size isn't a good measure of anything other than how big the developers thought a game world should be. It's fairly trivial to make an enormous game world on a shoestring budget if you're willing to have the game world not have all that much variety in it. See A Tale in the Desert, for example, where it takes about 5 hours to run from the north edge of the map to the south edge.
If you want employees to make a model, write a quest, or whatever, and then stick it in the game even if it's mediocre and move on, that's a lot cheaper per model or quest than if you want them to redo things several times to polish it. If most models and quests are copied and pasted from another model with only a handful of changes, then that's vastly cheaper than if every model and quest has to do a lot more work from scratch. To take an extreme example, I'll bet that Guild Wars 2 spent far more money on development per dynamic event than Pirates of the Burning Sea spent per land-based quest.
Also, don't forget that there is a big difference between what a privately-held company finds acceptable vs. what a publicly traded one does.
In the former, the basic traditional bottom line of the ledger that we can all relate to applies. It's just as simple as profitable enough or not. Your corner grocery store (if it's still privately owned that is) works that way.
But when you're dealing with investors who could invest in anything, and the value of your company depends on that, return on investment trumps profitability. This is what leads to all kinds of counterintuitive actions when a company that made $500 mil profit last quarter makes "only" $300 mil the next quarter and their stock prices go down and they layoff workers.
The average person will look at that and say "WTF? Greedy bastards!" and from his/her perspective that would be right. But from the company's perspective they are competing with every other investment opportunity available and if you're "only" providing your shareholders with an 8% average yearly return on their investment, they'll take their money out and invest somewhere else where they can get 10%.
You don't have to know any more than that to understand why it's all about greed these days: it's the system that drives it.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
If you're an investor and you think that one company is going to make $500 million in revenue per quarter in the foreseeable future and another is only going to make $300 million, then all else equal, you should think that the former company is worth a lot more than the latter.
I see the key in the last sentence..."unwisely". In your case, you were in a career with probably nothing really to suggest it would change until you changed your mind. Many people keep the same careers till death only ever gaining more income. But has never been the case for an MMO. Should companies, particularly MMO companies not realize that the natural flow of an MMO is a rise and a fall? Is it conceit that makes them think they can grow forever, never having their game get stale? As much as I loved Everquest and subscribe that it is the greatest of all time, after about a decade, I got tired of it. There has never been a game that would suggest you can grow and grow and never keep your expenses in check, never expecting a potential downfall.
Idk i just feel like in a career you have no reason to believe things will change(unless of course you are an entertainer, athlete, etc...in which your job is unstable at any given moment, or destined to end at a certain age) until like you said, you changed them. Then, yes, it takes time to adjust. But with games....idk...they should know better.
btw, great to hear you found something that gives you happiness. sorry to hear of your hardships in the transition though.
If I want a world in which people can purchase success and power with cash, I'll play Real Life. Keep Virtual Worlds Virtual!
While many of the people who complain that companies are greedy are themselves greedy customers who want everything for free, that's not what the original post is about. Rather, he's asking why newer games need so many more customers than some of the early MMORPGs did in order to make a profit.
Your thinking is a bit magical and suspect. EQ didn't have to compete in the same environment as games today. A couple of choices vs hundreds of choices makes a major difference. Some would say EQ wasn't deep and was just grindy, so it sounds like a false base to establish your point upon. Too many people are riding their high horses.
The economy is hurting and people don't have the extra money and time to blow on video games. It's not that they don't cost very much, it's just money is needed for more important things. IMO, it is affecting the industry.
Are developers focusing on the wrong thing? Not sure how you mean it. We have a problem in general with the player base and their thinking. IF a developer focuses on producing Y and a player thinks Y is wrong, that doesn't make the devs wrong. It does make the player odd to think so. There are such things as different tastes. It might also be wrong player thinking to expect one game to make the masses happy.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Ok, so thanks for reading my original post. Because I clearly stated I don't have the answers, in fact that was what the entire post was about. I never once suggested I think everything should cost 5 cents. I am actually against f2p games and would rather pay $60 for a box and $15 a month for a good game.... this post was uncalled for. Yes I am younger (24) and have not had a stable career yet. Excuse me for asking some questions wishing to explore why we are in this state of game development. If you don't want to comment on the OP or any other reply then don't comment, man.
Sorry, it just bugs me that you created assumptions never even hinted at in my OP, to try to attack me personally, most of which (except my age) were false.
If I want a world in which people can purchase success and power with cash, I'll play Real Life. Keep Virtual Worlds Virtual!
Ah, fair enough. I see what you are suggesting in that there are more choices now. HAHA, stupid me didn't consider that. And as far as wrong focuses....I guess I (possibly wrongly) put MMORPGers in a similar taste. I guess I have this delusional idea that people who play fantasy MMOs are all into DnD and such type games. And are looking for a world to explore rather than a rail game with great VOs. I forget sometimes that WoW opened up the MMO genre to the mainstreams. And even that before this we gamers still had different tastes.
Do you think that game companies are trying to please all tastes and possibly that is causing larger expenses in development? And if they do not please enough of these varying tastes that this is resulting in less than pleasing profits?
Also, great point whoever said that its different for private companies vs companies trying to please investors. I guess at the end of the day, some (if not many) of the investors might not even play these games they are investing in, so i suppose they don't even care how good of a "game" it is. Maybe I am on my high horse, and miss games like Everquest. But for me, that was good and I just wish we could have another like that. I feel in the past 6 or 7 years, only 1 has tried; Vanguard. And that failed for far too many bugs and poor optimization.
P.S. To the guy I was comparing SWTOR to EQ, in terms of size, I was just talking about original release state. EQ was larger than SWTOR is. Not to mention SWG, that game was MASSIVE!
Thank you to those of you who are respectfully answering my questions and allowing us (particularly me) to think and discover different reasons MMOs have evolved the way they have, particularly from the business side.
If I want a world in which people can purchase success and power with cash, I'll play Real Life. Keep Virtual Worlds Virtual!
Sorry. I took a short cut and read the title and final sentence and skipped the important part in between. My bad.
Plus I never attacked you personally. My statement was a general statement because, on this site, I see a lot of people throwing around the term "greed" and it's annoying as hell. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Everquest almost certainly did make millions on a small budget.
It represented a company taking a risk on an unknown thing and ending up with something great that exceeds expectations many times over.
That set the expectations for other companies, who committed larger sums of money to similar projects. Some worked. Some didn't.
Over time the market became dramatically more saturated, which reduces the expectations companies can set.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
That is exactly right. The investors typically don't play the games.
And even if gamers here often have a hard time expressing what they really mean, this is the single reason why Kickstarter indies are so appealing: they are attempts to design games for the love of the game... EA and Activision's shareholders have no influence on the game.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
That 1.7 million dropped to just under 500k in three months.
Required number of players depends on what was put into the game and the business model. Puzzle Pirates needed about 5k, got over 34k, made bank. Who knows what SWTOR's expenses or targets were/are.
Subs went to 15 dollars about ten years ago. There was no gradual increase from 8 (were there many at that price?) to 15 over the past 15 years.
Without seeing the books, very few here can answer your question as to whether it's greed or not.
Question for you, though. Consider the field you are studying for. Imagine you offered a product or service in that field and people were willing to pay a certain amount for it. Not forced to pay, but willingly paying for your product or service because they enjoy it.
Are you being greedy by accepting that amount if the materials and labor to create/provide it cost far less than what you were selling it for?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
You've made that claim several times about both investors and CEOs, and I really would like to know which investors and CEOs you are talking about. Could you name the ones you are referring to?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
The only game in the last 8 years to even come close to EQ's sub numbers is SWTOR. In fact, thats the only game to be able to sustain even DAoC's numbers.
But there are two big factors: Games are tougher to develop with the better capabilities of computers so bigger staffs are needed
Subscription rates have stayed the same, but developer average salaries have increased significantly.
So more devs, making much more money.
Government restrictions and taxes. Wish the government, esp the US one, would leave games alone. Zoning restrictions omg I'm so sick of hearing about it. Cyber space belongs to everyone and it should be free for all. There is someone somewhere always trying to charge you money for pissing on their soil.
How much does it take to make and run a game? Might find out it's a lot more than we thought.
Hmm. I think I've said that once...about investors.
These are the top shareholders for EA: http://investors.morningstar.com/ownership/shareholders-major.html?t=EA and Activision: http://investors.morningstar.com/ownership/shareholders-major.html?t=ATVI
How about you tell me how many gamers you see there...go ahead guess.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Yeah, I could have googled that, too, but that doesn't answer the question. Look, if you made up that fact, that's fine. No need to feel ashamed, Iselin.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Greedy companies and cheap players. Players cry about subs, get their f2p model, finally understand this becomes more expensive than p2p, and whine about it.
For the record no one is going to make a game without a profit motive see, that is how the world works, it is why people do anything. No profit, no game, period, end of story. They don't owe you a game. They're providing a service you can compensate them for it and the service will continue, or you can not and the service will be cancelled.
Reading these boards and people whining about greedy devs drives me freaking mad. Subs are the way to go. If you can't afford a sub you shouldn't be playing, you should be working a second job.
Yes. You could have googled it. But you didn't. Because as usual, you just want to spout nonsense and bait.
Are you saying that wall street investment companies and mutual funds are made up of gamers that care about the games and pressure EA and Activision to provide a qulaity gaming experience? That's quite an assumption. I would think the onus would be on you to prove such an outlandish idea.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED