Did F2P Conversion Work? Korean Investment Bank Weighs In

SBFord

Did F2P Conversion Work? Korean Investment Bank Weighs In

The largest investment bank in Korea is predicting that NCSoft's stable of games will have had a fantastic year overall, but that Carbine Studios' WildStar did and will continue to struggle for survival even after a free-to-play conversion in late 2015. Daewoo Securities has published its estimate for the results of the forthcoming 2015 investor report to be revealed later in Q1 2016.

Read the full story here

ThumbtackJ

Knowing NCSoft, I would genuinely be surprised if W* was still running by the end of 2016. The F2P conversion brought in people for a few months, then the population rapidly dropped as soon as most of them hit cap.

sipu

They hit cap and realized that the game is badly optimized. My NASA PC had problems to provide 60 PFS constant.

Reizla

ThumbtackJ said:

Knowing NCSoft, I would genuinely be surprised if W* was still running by the end of 2016. The F2P conversion brought in people for a few months, then the population rapidly dropped as soon as most of them hit cap.

Kinda what I said in the "Predictions for Wildstar" news topic 2 months back...

gervaise1

They obviously read the analysis and conclusions that mmorpg.com forum contributors came to and decided they were accurate.

At the end of the day that, or something like it, is all they can have done.

Of course mmorpg.com posters and Daewoo Securities could both be wrong and players the world over may have been swayed by the sites articles .....

Harbinger1975

I'll be entirely honest. I'm surprised NCSoft hasn't pulled out of the western markets. They shut down a game that was doing alright, still generating SOME profit (City of Heroes), and save for Guild Wars (2), nothing else stuck. The rest is all overseas games. Lineage, Aion, etc. I expect them to shut down Wildstar by the end of the year. It'll just beat out Tabula Rasa for the amount of time it was active. If just barely.

Albatroes

Highly mobile action RPGs dont do well in the long run. People 'want' these types of games but dont think about the long when you have to grind, it kills playability too fast in comparison to something cruise control like tab targetting.

Darkspire

Wildstar has several severe issues that people told devs from the start but no one listened.

Instances are ridiculously hard, sure some people like challenge but most just want to play the content.

Atunment... this is 2015... not Molten Core... people dont want to do this anymore.

PVP is a joke, telegraphs on everything... AoE madness, pvp stats that do nothing...

The payment mode help if people like aspects of the game but they dont think it deserves a sub. Payment mode is irrelevant if the game is terrible.

Warlyx

what game is supposed to be MXM? is the moba ?

Nitth

Darkspire said:
Wildstar has several severe issues that people told devs from the start but no one listened.

Instances are ridiculously hard, sure some people like challenge but most just want to play the content.

Atunment... this is 2015... not Molten Core... people dont want to do this anymore.

PVP is a joke, telegraphs on everything... AoE madness, pvp stats that do nothing...

The payment mode help if people like aspects of the game but they dont think it deserves a sub. Payment mode is irrelevant if the game is terrible.


Sounds like the "Wowification" of wildstar.

Wildstar had a very clear niche it tried to fill but unfortunately there wasnt enough interest in it, and the people that wanted wow type gameplay will, and always will play wow.

ie Why would you buy no frills cola over the real thing?

SpottyGekko

Wildstar is not a game that was thrown together by 5 people working for 2 years in their spare time. It consumed a considerable amount of money during its development.

If NCSoft get to the point where they consider the ROI of Wildstar to be to low, they will shut it down. Keeping it going ties up resources that could be deployed to more profitable projects.

Gobstopper3D

gervaise1 said:
They obviously read the analysis and conclusions that mmorpg.com forum contributors came to and decided they were accurate.At the end of the day that, or something like it, is all they can have done.Of course mmorpg.com posters and Daewoo Securities could both be wrong and players the world over may have been swayed by the sites articles .....


I could also ignore what everyone else says (typically what I do) and try it for myself and come to the conclusion that they were right in the first place.

zaberfangx

Who know what in shore for wildstar can't really trust people with there forecasts after some people said that arche age said it's going to die when it hit the fan that still going. Who know the forecasts can be right but have anyone seen ncsoft number after wildstar went free to play?

Derros

Darkspire said:

Wildstar has several severe issues that people told devs from the start but no one listened.

Instances are ridiculously hard, sure some people like challenge but most just want to play the content.

Atunment... this is 2015... not Molten Core... people dont want to do this anymore.

Was Molten Core's attunement even that hard? I just remember having to touch a thing in the Black rock depths dungeon, Black Rock Mountain raid you just needed to kill the last boss of Upper black rock spire, which wasnt that hard, most groups i was in for it seemed to have a 60-70% chance on average to finish.


Part of the problem with the dungeons was game mechanics shaping player perception and expectation. If you have a dungeon finder, the average player is going to expect a reasonable chance of success with a pug group made through it. If your dungeons need a very high level of communication then dont use a dungeon finder, do something like FF14's party finder. Both are great tools, but for different difficulties of content. A dungeon finder just didnt fit with Wildstar's difficulty and the player expectation it created didnt mesh with the reality of the dungeons.

I also think wildstar needed a Karazhan (10 man) type raid. The 40 mans were just a pipe dream.

filmoret

gervaise1 said:

They obviously read the analysis and conclusions that mmorpg.com forum contributors came to and decided they were accurate.

At the end of the day that, or something like it, is all they can have done.

Of course mmorpg.com posters and Daewoo Securities could both be wrong and players the world over may have been swayed by the sites articles .....

They need to read someone's analysis because theirs aren't working.

zaberfangx

Derros said:

I also think wildstar needed a Karazhan (10 man) type raid. The 40 mans were just a pipe dream.

40 man was gone long time ago if I remeber they have 20 mans now I think. But yeah 40 man was just a pipe dream didn't work in wow so well not sure why they went with it. Maybe to catch the wow player base that still miss wow vanilla and didn't work out as people want something but never end up doing it when something comes along that ends up and takes hard work to do.

GeezerGamer

Carbine created an MMOARPG to appeal to the hardcore WoW Fan.
Now why oh why did that fail?

zaberfangx

GeezerGamer said:

Carbine created an MMOARPG to appeal to the hardcore WoW Fan.
Now why oh why did that fail?

Rift did that to Aim for that wow player base and it's still going even I don't like what there doing now.

tenfootgoatman123

I liked Wildstar but when I got to level 50 on the EU pvp server it was dead . If there had been a free transfer to the pve server I would have tried that . I didn't have the patience to do it all over again so I gave up on it .

gervaise1

SpottyGekko said:

Wildstar is not a game that was thrown together by 5 people working for 2 years in their spare time. It consumed a considerable amount of money during its development.

If NCSoft get to the point where they consider the ROI of Wildstar to be to low, they will shut it down. Keeping it going ties up resources that could be deployed to more profitable projects.

Looking at the reported revenue and subtracting the reported marketing and box production costs - it fell  way short of recouping what it cost to make. Even wildly optimistic estimates are way more than what it has recouped.

So staff were cut, development costs written off presumably and now - as you say - it is a case of ROI. Not just about WS covering its costs either but of making a "decent profit" - otherwise it pulls down NCSoft's overall.

Wizardry

IF WS consumed a lot of money,they need to rethink their development ideas.I said from day 1 the cartoon graphics would not fly.Then we hear people claim it was too hard..lol,,they could make it the easiest  game on the planet and it would still fail.
Bottom line is this,your game has to at least look professional,like top notch employees worked on it with a top notch Director/Producer.WS does NOT look like that game.

I think MOST gamer's/readers seem to forget some very obvious fact >>>$$$$ marketing/advertising.There is a reason it is a billion dollar industry maybe a Trillion dollar industry,..."it works".That is why people get so easily hyped up then are disappointed a month in ,then only stick around a bit longer to get their money worth.

Where is the mad rush now?Aion "f2p",Rift "f2p",WS "f2p" MANY more and soon BnS will join the fray as will BDO.I see a HUGE crowd of  people defending these shallow games but then those same people are jumping on some new  bandwagon a few months later.

F2p will 100% absolutely NEVER make a game better,it is nothing more than a marketing ploy.

umcorian

Wildstar could have been good - it was just a terrible mixture of a little bit too much WoW Clone and a lot too much of Saturday Morning Cartoon. Being that I'm not under 10, I found Wildstar a little too corny/silly to be playing... and the fact under all the window dressing, it was the same game as World of Warcraft all over again did it no favors. So done with the go to one hub, fetch quests, go to another hub, fetch quests playstyle.

I can tell a lot of heart went into Wildstar... that alone isn't enough to make me play it.

Derros

Wizardry said:

F2p will 100% absolutely NEVER make a game better,it is nothing more than a marketing ploy.

Well, F2P could give a game more time and/or resources in order to get better, and yes, it is another bite at the release apple, which is a marketing thing.

Alders

zaberfangx said:

Derros said:

I also think wildstar needed a Karazhan (10 man) type raid. The 40 mans were just a pipe dream.

40 man was gone long time ago if I remeber they have 20 mans now I think. But yeah 40 man was just a pipe dream didn't work in wow so well not sure why they went with it. Maybe to catch the wow player base that still miss wow vanilla and didn't work out as people want something but never end up doing it when something comes along that ends up and takes hard work to do.

I don't think the people clamoring for Vanilla WoW are fans of 40-man or action combat. My opinion anyway.

Wildstar hit the perfect storm of what not to do. Action combat is niche. 40-man raids are niche. Hardcore raiding is niche. Had the game not cost as much or taken the ridiculous amount of time it did to develop, maybe it could have done well as niche. Expecting the subs it did was the first mistake.

Sovrath

Wizardry said:

IF WS consumed a lot of money,they need to rethink their development ideas.I said from day 1 the cartoon graphics would not fly.

F2p will 100% absolutely NEVER make a game better,it is nothing more than a marketing ploy.

While I agree with you that f2p doesn't make a game better, the cartooney art design was not the issue.

World of Warcraft is Cartooney art design and we know its history.

Wild Star didn't do well in part because of its same old same old very same old questing.

And if all the raids were uber hard then what happens to players when they coast into "end game" only to be stymied by hardcore raids?  I don't know how those were set up, maybe they had different difficulties. But if they didn't then that's an issue.

All I know is that I hated the tutorial section. That was the first turn off for me.

Xxerox

All i know is, that after Wildstar went f2p i imediately download it and guess what. I loved it. I honestly do not care about anything except lore and having fun exploring.

I am not like most of you who just grind and get to the last level as soon as possible. For me it may take years to actually hit the max lvl.