Why is this surprising? Black Desert has seen virtually no advertising. Unless you followed MMORPGs religiously, you would have no idea the game existed.
every server crowded in the evening since launch...seems enough and moreover most seem to stay. good start for growing further. i guess it will but you never know...odd enouh so many ppl just love wow and the sort *shrug*
for me best game since eve with a lot of depth besides combat and more stuff you "can" do than all the western mmo's of the last 10 years combined :surprised: spent the last 2 weeks just with crafting and didn't hit a mob and had a blast. this weeks combat time again...choices *yay*
just don't look for a dungeon grinder with group finder style of game. besides that even the gear progression is a bummer compared to wow & clones...it mostly adds on the items you have without having you throw away the gear with every patch.
hard to describe but very well done core system with tons of choices for a lot of playstyles.
Empty considering they dont kick AFK and encourage it actually. Now some people might spin that as a way of making their game look better than it is, I wont. Its just a mechanic they allow. I think the main reason they do it is so that what few people are playing will feel like theyre getting over and hopefully not realize that every other person is also doing the same exact thing so they arent any better off than anyone else.
But it does help against the rabid no lifers who do nothing but stay logged in for the first few weeks of a game. While being AFK wont keep up with them it surely helps guys who cant stay online 24/7 not lose ground as quickly as they would.
As for numbers after 6 months. I would say more than 100K would be a miracle for them and they woud be very happy with that. Although since its B2P they probably couldnt care less about retention anyway. Other than the people willing to spend money in the cash shop. They already got all the money theyre going to get from most people already.
Until they start adding cash shop or 'premium' (or whatever sub system they have if they even have one) only content then income for the game going forward is going to be pretty limited.
Daum only has licensing for NA/EU, so it's just those regions.
Then it's great, the game was made for korea. We were ported to as an afterthought.
Oh that's not true. They've been thinking about the NA/EU audience for a long time, since the game was just in closed beta testing in KR. It's actually done better in NA/EU than it did in Korea.
LacedOpium said: "This (forced pvp) is unacceptable and it needs to stop. PvEers need to start speaking up and quit being so passive.
This will only happen when they become as toxic and out-spoken as these PvPers"
laserit said: Something that I would like to see tried as a deterrence is say when a person is ganked the murderer has to survive for a certain period of time without being killed and if they fail they lose everything they own in game.
You need the kind of penalty would not be for the faint of heart.
BDO has a ridiculously penalizing OW PVP karma system. Honestly I think a problem they have is they tried too hard to make the game both PVE and PVP friendly. From my understanding there is little to no OW PVP in the game because "ganking" 1 player takes hours of grinding to repair your karma - angering the pvp community. At the same time rarely people gank anyway angering the pve community. They took the worst road they could and made both sides unhappy.
There is a lot of OwPvP actually, it's mostly guild vs guild battles in the open world. And that's exactly how the game was designed, so it's working as intended. Random ganking was never intended to be a main feature, just something there when you need it.
The game is awesome. And I've seen some recent moves by Daum that are actually pretty encouraging. I'm interested to see what they do next. The fact that they now have a dedicated technical GM is great. Looking at that and the content updates coming so quickly, things are looking pretty good right now. We'll have to wait and see.
Without a demo or some sort of free trial I'm not going to dump money on the box sale.
The game would not do well with a demo. The game is just too complicated for someone to try out for a few levels. 7 day passes have already done a lot of harm to the game I think in some respects. People expect to know everything about the game the moment they step into it and then freak out when they are lost. They realize it's too hard and then go off on social media with their ill-informed opinions.
Much better to make people 'dump money' into it so they will hopefully be invested in it enough to form an opinion after taking some time to actually learn the game and all its intricacies.
I'd very much like to play it and give it a try, but I've been burned by so many MMOs that I can't justify spending $30 just to try it out. If they had a free trial or something, I would gladly try it out and potentially spend money on it.
As long as people are having fun, that's all that matters. I personally didn t like it, and it seems not as many people are interested in this hybrid style as some thought.
Those numbers are quite low IMO.
I had friends that were really hyped for this game and are now changing their tune about it. They say the game has alot to do but its all just grind. To much grind can kill any mmo. All mmo's have grind but this one is the king of it i guess. It sounds good when you just start playing but the more you play it really starts to show how it really is.
Honestly I am surprised they sold that much considering the niche nature of the game.
That isn't to say it isn't a success(or "is" for that matter as it's too early to tell).
The key to success is not necessarily volume. If they are making a decent profit margin, and keeping players happy, that is success.
Problems arise when the scope of the game becomes larger than the income. As long as they keep the scope and costs in check, focus on what the players enjoy most about the game, they can do fine with less players.
400k isn't that bad. The real question is: how many will still be there after 3 and after 6 months? This game is combining pvp and lots of grinding as did original DAoC (its PvE = grinding mobs) lacking the coolness of the RvR and adding lots of stuff most people don't even know about. With a little more advertising it might get more attention. Most "let's play"s on youtube have been showing a "kids" slashing game. If it could be more, they have to tell their audience.
That sounds like a success to me. It's a VERY niche game that, as I understand it, was already out in Korea. It's absolutely not my cup of tea, but 400k box sales plus a F2P style cash shop sounds sustainable to me.
" Why then, are we quick to suggest WildStar is a flop and Black Desert Online a success? (I suspect that’s a topic for a lengthy discussion some other time)."
How about:
1) Budget
2) Expectations
3) BDO wasn't designed for the western market - we had to wait for it's localization. Wildstar was designed to capture a supposedly ripe for the picking western audience that grew tired of WOW.
That sounds like a success to me. It's a VERY niche game that, as I understand it, was already out in Korea. It's absolutely not my cup of tea, but 400k box sales plus a F2P style cash shop sounds sustainable to me.
That article is 1 month old.
As of today, Stardew Valley is already over 900k copies sold. Very impressive for an indie game.
That sounds like a success to me. It's a VERY niche game that, as I understand it, was already out in Korea. It's absolutely not my cup of tea, but 400k box sales plus a F2P style cash shop sounds sustainable to me.
That article is 1 month old.
As of today, Stardew Valley is already over 900k copies sold. Very impressive for an indie game.
While still impressive, $15 single player game vs. MMORPG isn't an appropriate comparison to me. Plus being on Steam is always a good thing for boosting sales.
That sounds like a success to me. It's a VERY niche game that, as I understand it, was already out in Korea. It's absolutely not my cup of tea, but 400k box sales plus a F2P style cash shop sounds sustainable to me.
That article is 1 month old.
As of today, Stardew Valley is already over 900k copies sold. Very impressive for an indie game.
While still impressive, $15 single player game vs. MMORPG isn't an appropriate comparison to me. Plus being on Steam is always a good thing for boosting sales.
We're talking about an indie game, that was made by only 1 guy, compared to an MMO which was likely made by over a hundred developers. Of course it's not a fair comparison.
Besides I'm confident most people that bought BDO, bought it for 30$, so the difference in price isn't that big. However there is also a huge difference that most of BDO's copies were sold based on the marketing, while Stardew Valley is selling only based on the word of mouth.
MMOs are hard to manage, they require constant updates, marketing and there are also server costs to consider. BDO's sales will dry fast now that the launch hype is gone. I wouldn't be surprised if an indie SP game like Stardew Valley has actually a bigger profit than BDO. Lets face it, 400k for a supposedly AAA B2P MMO is very low. We've seen MMOs with millions of copies sold in the first month go F2P relatively fast.
BDO is not about exploration and intelligent game design, its only about fighting, and that gets old. Its a game for the people that dont want to think, the kids.
Stardew got lucky when a bunch of Twitch streamers with +20k followers each decided to play it for a few days. That's what happens when League of Legends players show their followers a game. It honestly didn't have much to do with stardew itself, a few streamers were bored. That's hype train at it's best in my opinion, the game went from having no one who knew about it, to 70k people watching 3 dudes play it in less than an hour. The current twitch viewers are only 187 people, that's much more normal.
Similar to PianoImProMan, an elderly piano improv player, he had 80 views a day till Sodapoppin, Reckful, and a few others all decided to host him for 90k views, after the first 90k, it shot up to 200k viewers. He made over $20k in donations that day, and got 180k followers out of it for only about 12 hours of streaming.
Comments
I think 400k is a good number considering all the game has going against it for mass sales in the west.
But it does help against the rabid no lifers who do nothing but stay logged in for the first few weeks of a game. While being AFK wont keep up with them it surely helps guys who cant stay online 24/7 not lose ground as quickly as they would.
As for numbers after 6 months. I would say more than 100K would be a miracle for them and they woud be very happy with that. Although since its B2P they probably couldnt care less about retention anyway. Other than the people willing to spend money in the cash shop. They already got all the money theyre going to get from most people already.
Until they start adding cash shop or 'premium' (or whatever sub system they have if they even have one) only content then income for the game going forward is going to be pretty limited.
There is a lot of OwPvP actually, it's mostly guild vs guild battles in the open world. And that's exactly how the game was designed, so it's working as intended. Random ganking was never intended to be a main feature, just something there when you need it.
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Ethion
The game would not do well with a demo. The game is just too complicated for someone to try out for a few levels. 7 day passes have already done a lot of harm to the game I think in some respects. People expect to know everything about the game the moment they step into it and then freak out when they are lost. They realize it's too hard and then go off on social media with their ill-informed opinions.
Much better to make people 'dump money' into it so they will hopefully be invested in it enough to form an opinion after taking some time to actually learn the game and all its intricacies.
That isn't to say it isn't a success(or "is" for that matter as it's too early to tell).
The key to success is not necessarily volume. If they are making a decent profit margin, and keeping players happy, that is success.
Problems arise when the scope of the game becomes larger than the income. As long as they keep the scope and costs in check, focus on what the players enjoy most about the game, they can do fine with less players.
It just seems to me that they're milking western players as suckers (because they knew they could get away with it).
So once box sales dry up, I have no doubts that the game will go F2P (as was always intended from the start).
"in a mere 12 days, Barone has sold over 400,000 copies of his game."
http://www.pcgamer.com/stardew-valley-interview/?ns_campaign=article-feed&ns_mchannel=ref&ns_source=steam&ns_linkname=0&ns_fee=0
http://store.steampowered.com/app/413150/
How about:
1) Budget
2) Expectations
3) BDO wasn't designed for the western market - we had to wait for it's localization. Wildstar was designed to capture a supposedly ripe for the picking western audience that grew tired of WOW.
That article is 1 month old.
As of today, Stardew Valley is already over 900k copies sold. Very impressive for an indie game.
Besides I'm confident most people that bought BDO, bought it for 30$, so the difference in price isn't that big. However there is also a huge difference that most of BDO's copies were sold based on the marketing, while Stardew Valley is selling only based on the word of mouth.
MMOs are hard to manage, they require constant updates, marketing and there are also server costs to consider. BDO's sales will dry fast now that the launch hype is gone. I wouldn't be surprised if an indie SP game like Stardew Valley has actually a bigger profit than BDO. Lets face it, 400k for a supposedly AAA B2P MMO is very low. We've seen MMOs with millions of copies sold in the first month go F2P relatively fast.
Similar to PianoImProMan, an elderly piano improv player, he had 80 views a day till Sodapoppin, Reckful, and a few others all decided to host him for 90k views, after the first 90k, it shot up to 200k viewers. He made over $20k in donations that day, and got 180k followers out of it for only about 12 hours of streaming.