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My 5 predictions of 2014
sportsfan
Member Posts: 431
1. MMO's will still be free to play for the most of them and will not recover from the shake out in the loss of their subscriptions.
2. THE game of 2014 on line will be Hearthstone. Establishing a new wave of massively played casual games on line.
3. iPads and other tablets will even more erode the MMORPG worlds on PC.
4. The newly launched MMO's will just fade after the initial 3 months launching period, just like in previous years, despite the hype.
5. WOW will still be top dog with 6 million subs of which 3 M reside in the west. Actually Hearthstone could have a positive impact on it by the end of 2014.
tldr: nothing will change.
CU in 2015.
Comments
Not so sure about your faith in Heartstone, there are too many MMOs out there and the players are nearly all content locusts. They will all suffer the fate you described in 3. In the last four or five years the only MMO to retain traction population wise is GW2, it is not even the best MMO released in that time period but there you go. That fact should show you just how tough MMO land has become.
You mentioned iPads etc, this is the snowballing danger for the easymode MMOs we have today. They are going to change as much in the next five years as they have over the last five. I speak out against easymode MMOs all the time, but my advice if you like them, is to play them now. I don't think they will exist in their current form in 2018.
Hopefully we will see you before 2015.
No way are the current trends in MMOs going to reverse. You may see one or two MMOs showing how it can be done but even then it would be three years more to become widespread in the genre. As you mention its a long haul.
Like many of us you are seeing things in the payment schemes that you don't like, trouble is they don't care. MMO companies are now pursuing a social media market that is far more into microtransactions than even your average F2P player. Any reduction in the old player base due to people leaving will be made up by the new people they are appealing to.
So I don't see a big drop in profit coming and that's what you would need to make them take there head out of the sand.
Heathstone is a gateway game to online Poker.
2014 will be the year of the teenage gambling addict!
"When people don't know much about something, they tend to fill in the blanks the way they want them to be filled in. They are almost always disappointed." - Will Wright
WoW will still be going strong. They are updating their dated models, citing that they are going back to the roots of the game, open world PvP zone, player housing that actually impacts the player unlike most player housing where it is entirely fluff.
There is enough going on for WoW that it will be a force to be reckoned with and likely still be the dominate MMO. Wildstar will need to stand the test but so far it is following the path of all past "WoW killer" mmos, that is people will rant n rave about how it will be the greatest thing since sliced bread and on launch day will have a good reception but a few months later subs will dwindle to below 250k mark.
Only two things will challenge WoW, WoW's own internal demise or a truely revolutionary MMO which WS is copying the WoW formula and modifying it to their own taste.
Also people bashing on the cash shop need to realize that the cash shop has ALWAYS been there either through the battle.net or through the TCG. They just incorperated it into the game for easier access and even then it is truly entirely fluff items unlike Neverwinter where they said fluff only which the could not be further from the truth.
1. Everquest Next: Landmark will do very well and will cause more developers to start putting serious effort into world building elements of their game as well as show developers that the F2P model IS viable for AAA MMOs. It will also get people excited for EQ:Next, which won't release till 2015 most likely but we'll probably see an alpha/beta sometime in 2014.
2. Consoles will start becoming a viable market for MMO developers with the release of console MMOs such as The Crew and Destiny (and more later down the road like The Division) and more and more games being developed for both the PC and consoles.
3. Wildstar will have a slight impact on WoW's numbers - expect to see a small drop when it releases, but won't even approach the juggernaut in terms of subscription numbers. Yes, WoW is still going to be king.
4. Although neither will be "failures" (and I have high hopes for Wildstar in particular), Wildstar and TESO will be the last AAA MMOs to use the subscription model and may even be the last MMOs with a "themepark" focus.
5. Korean games will still take over 2 years to port to port to the Western audience and will fade into obscurity in the West due to taking too long to port. The first concurrent release of a high quality Korean game may have impact on the West, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen in 2014.
How is Wildstar copying the WoW formula? Almost every aspect is different aside from maybe some similarities in art style and overall lighthearted feel of the game
Also the cash shop has not always been in WoW. I think it was released late at Burning Crusade (or was it WotLK?) through their site selling minipets and mounts. It wasn't present at all during vanilla.
"2. Consoles will start becoming a viable market for MMO developers with the release of console MMOs such as The Crew and Destiny (and more later down the road like The Division) and more and more games being developed for both the PC and consoles."
Remember what happened to PC gaming when consoles became solo player king? First people were saying they would compliment the PC, more games for everyone. Then consoles took over and far fewer games made it to the PC. That's exactly what is going to happen to MMOs if they go console first. Bye, bye PC.
"4. Although neither will be "failures" (and I have high hopes for Wildstar in particular), Wildstar and TESO will be the last AAA MMOs to use the subscription model and may even be the last MMOs with a "themepark" focus."
Definitely not the last AAA with a thempark focus, quite possible the last AAA to use a subscription. I think there have been only two MMOs out in 2013 which used a subscription or B2P. Poorly funded F2P MMOs are now king.
1) I will keep gaining weight
2) December will come and the barn will still need to be thatched
3) I will flop french classes after going to 4-5 of them
4) The static Bycicle will keep gathering dust in the corner for one more year
5) I will be balder.
I agree, it's not going to die anytime soon. There's too many people loyal to the game and enjoying it. Yes, it will dwindle subscriptions over the next 5-10 years. If it ever gets to the point they're not making a lot from subscriptions, they'll just go B2P or F2P and get their money from cash shops. It's not going anywhere anytime soon, I don't understand the hate for WoW, I guess because it's so successful and so many other games try to clone it. I don't think there will be another big hit for an Mmorpg (in terms of millions of subscribers) until Titan comes out honestly.
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
My predictions are...
Alien invasion, slavery of humankind, video games turns real. Oh yes and Venezuelans will still believe everything is great in socialism...
http://www.webestools.com/page/images/uploads/signature_seoeblWtso6141.png
every thing souds ok but heart stone?
whats wrong with you
I'll throw mine into the lot:
1) ESO does moderately well. A lot of buzz and hype initially dies off to a small but sustainable crowd by year's end. It's no Skyrim, but it does ok enough on it's own.
2) Hearthstone gets a cult-like following, but nothing near SC2 or LoL. Blizzard uses tie-ins to attempt to keep WoW subscriptions up, while it's no where near becoming insignificant, they continue to dwindle at a steady pace.
3) EQL hits beta, and releases "officially" Fall 2014 with SoE's typical
"Free to Play your way" style fees. EQN remains nowhere to be seen, with beta invitations slated to go out in early 2015. EQL is Minecraft with fantasy graphics and EQ lore, and a few people who love playing with Legos really take to it, but everyone else is left waiting for EQN. In late 2014, someone redoes one of the original EQ1 zones in EQL and that creates a lot of buzz about a possible EQ1 reboot (again).
4) SteamOS and SteamBox come, and go. It does fairly well for Steam stuff, but lack of support for anything outside of a limited number of Steam titles, high price for console-like hardware, and no unique functionality that can't be performed by other, less expensive devices (i.e. streaming ala Shield) really tamper down on the excitement of Valve's latest project. The handheld controller is great, but it's not so great that it replaces any of the other great controllers. Everyone complains that it can't play Windows games (duh).
5) A dozen or so MMO's appear for the latest gen consoles. None of them gain a lot of traction - 2014 isn't the year of the console MMO, but it starts to pick up steam.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
+1
Don't forget the part about them making up reasons why games they don't like " failed"
1) WoW will see a resurgence in sub numbers. For whatever reason a lot of people are excited by WoD, and, in some cases, the departure of GC. I've seen ever single one of my MMO-playing friends return to WoW in preparation, many after extended absences and some I frankly never thought I'd see going back to that game. While I doubt Blizz will see Late-BC/Early-Wrath numbers again, depending on how WoD really turns out it wouldn't completely shock me.
2) Hearthstone will be game changingly huge. Personally I don't get the CCG-style games, they just don't appeal to me at all. But those I know who are into them, as well as some pretty big names out on the net, are obsessed with it. Utterly, completely, even annoyingly, obsessed.
3) TESO will continue to be the new ToR around here, and for many of the same reasons -- most having much, much more to do with what the game isn't than what the game is and always has claimed to be. As with ToR, the hate train won't matter much despite the belief of many a basement dweller that if they just froth at the mouth loudly enough the world will realize how right they are. TESO will sell a ton of boxes (don't need to be Nostradamus to see that one) and do more than well enough long-term to get a continuous stream of updates as well as provide endless clickbait for sites like this one and Massively for years to come. It is fortunate for ToR that there's more than enough hate to go around, or TESO might steal all its heating fuel.
4) GW2 will see some sort of major shake-up. Frankly it can't continue to go as-is, the revenue decline is too consistent and predictable, not to mention that it will likely be facing increased competition -- between next-gen consoles, an increasing number of cross-platform "MMO-Lite" style games, and new full scale MMOs -- after a year of very little in the way of competing new releases. Ideally, at least for those who enjoy the game, Anet will announce a major expac (Cantha, anyone?), even if it is a long ways off. I suspect that what is more likely to happen will be less than ideal, however. Time will tell.
5) FFXIV ARR will join FFXI as a "forgotten" MMO in the West -- one everyone speaks well of, when they even remember it's there, but not very many play. Longevity issues aren't really solvable at this point. The game will likely see more than enough support from Japanese players alone to continue along happily, and it certainly will keep enough Western subs to justify the servers, but that's about it.
Bonus predictions:
6) Without a buyer or merger, Trion Worlds will be lucky to make it to the end of the year.
7) There will be major disappointment when people finally get a good look at EQL/EQN
8) Various abuses will see a severe increase in crowdfunding regulation, to the point where crowdfunding as we know it today won't really exist.
9) F2P will continue to never be 'F' enough, but games will increasingly be designed around the cash shop "random box" model.
10) Year-end predictions will continue to be either so blindingly obvious as to not be worth mentioning, or right only by sheer random chance.
No, not really it hasn't. It suffered the same fate of every other MMO in the market. Massive decline a couple of months after launch. Every single source we have on the subject states massive decline.
As for the OP and the prediction that future MMOs take the same fate, I would have to agree. Even if they are good I see them take the same fate of massive hype and population at launch to massive decline a couple of months later. I hope that weren't the case, but I can't see it not happening.