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NCSoft Mobile Revenue Soars, PC Games Tumble - MMORPG.com News
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
NCSoft Mobile Revenue Soars, PC Games Tumble - MMORPG.com News
NCSoft has published its Q2 2017 earnings report that shows a huge increase in mobile games revenue and a fairly significant across-the-board drop in revenue generation for PC games. Lineage M is the juggernaut that drove profits up by approximately 8%, an increase both year over year and quarter over quarter.
Comments
Mobile market users are going to kill everything good about gaming and turn it into even more box-rng casinos. Want it to stop? Stop fucking dropping 50+ dollars on loot boxes and "summons" to try and get your favorite character ( looking at you, bravius and summer's war ).
The whales are taking us down.
Sad thing is it's something even technology probably won't fix because there's only so much you can feasibly do with a control scheme on a small mobile device.
What it means for us in the long run is less casuals, PC MMOs will lose even more players and the people left will probably be more hardcore gamers.
Basically we might be moving back to the MMO situation in the late 90s with smaller games. I assume that also means that the difficulty and complexety of those games will go up since the main target of the games will change.
That is assuming that the PC technology wont get something you can't do on a mobile platform. If VR or AR for instance becomes popular you have a good reason to use a more powerful PC then an IPAD. If the average consumer want and can afford something like that they will get back to PC but in that case VR or AR need to have more then just games.
If you get VR/AR social media, shopping sites where you can see how clothes look on you, checking out possibly travel options in VR first and so on average people will get it instead of just hardcore gamers and that would reflect the PC games including MMOs. Oh, and of course the thing that often sells new technology: porn.
People did more or less have to get a PC in the early 2000s but now a mobile platform can handle the regular need of people so many don't get PCs anymore. If that changes the PC will make a comeback, at least until the mobile platforms can catch up.
Before the early 2000s personal computers were mainly owned by hardcore gamers and people with other special needs like musicians, certain artists, authors and similar. Unless something happens it will go back to that again.
It's not a club and we are not "all in it together".
Heck, someone else could very well say "you are ruining mmorpg's start playing more full loot games/start playing more pve games/start playing more pvp games" etc.
You're going to play what you want to play no matter what others are doing.
The Whales are bringing us down? Well then spend more money in games you care about I suppose because it seems the whales are the people willing to pony up and support the games they are interested in.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
It's nowhere near as well made and it offers only a fraction of the content.
I just hope PoF won't mess up the open world content and make it harder than it should be,because that will seriously turn off a lot of players.
When Anet got butt hurt,because all the cool forum goers and youtubers that don't even play the game told them the game wasn't hard enough,they made HoT and we all know how well that went.
This,and PvP/WvW balance will make or break the expansion.
Currently class balance outside of PvE is a clusterf@ck,and listening to the devs talking about the new Elites made me wonder if they've played their game once in the past 2 years.
Understandably it's advertising material and devs tend to speak out of their asses sometimes,but still...
The NA/EU release in 2016 basically doubled B&S revenues, while GW2 doesn't seems that popular in Asia and I heard the cash shop was kinda p2w in B&S, while it's not in GW2.
Also, the older GW2 gets, the more gold players have to convert into gems instead of spending real money on it.
If Mobile MMO's are the money-making machines of the future, how does that bode for the interest on developing large-scale MMO's for PC, that are known to be expensive and long to make?
I think is already a lack of titles on the genre capable to respond to how tired the genre feels, with one growing unlikeness that we may see big publishers taking interest in developing MMO's; this raises me the following question: Are we doomed to become a "niche" in the shadow of mainstream gaming in the future?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But yeah it's rather unfortunate this is happening, I don't think there's lack of demand or even audience interested, but there is a lack of games to back up what people wish from one "next-gen" MMO presently.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
Why?
Every niche oldschool MMO launched terribly. But MMOers played them anyway. If AAA companies fully leave the PC MMO scene, there will NEVER be a 100% stable/high polish launch for an MMO, at least until AAA companies return.
Vanguard released terribly, got fixed, no one ever tried it again. Everyone just complained how bad the launch was and never bothered to go back (even though it got fixed)
People saying they want MMOs to go back the way they used to be, a niche indie experience, will be the same ones who leave and STILL NEVER find an MMO because they'll never get past launch issues. Vanguard is a 100% perfect example of that.
And no, an indie company won't have a stable launch like Blizzard did with WoW and even that launched kinda buggy (but way better than other MMOs, ignoring the HUGE amount of people trying to play at launch, the game was pretty bug free and polished compared to earlier generation MMOs)
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/skyrim-anime-overhaul
Today people use their phones and Pads for that so far fewer people bother to get a good PC unless they are more like the gamers of the 90s.
VR (or AR) can change that if it becomes popular, until the mobile hardware can catch up at least but with fewer PC owners and more mobile owners it is pretty simple.
Things like SWTOR, Bioware/EA seem to have moved away from MMO's after it. I don't think we'll see Square Enix touching MMO's again after Final Fantasy, not sure if ArenaNet will ever do "Guild Wars 3", who knows if Blizzard will give continuity and undertake a new MMO or if their direction now is just stuff like OverWatch, I also don't see Bethesda developing a new one again after ESO...
What else? hm
I think I read some place where it was an extremely small percentage of people supporting these free to play games, spending money. The majority were hardly spending anything or spending nothing.
It's a very difficult sell to a company when the majority of their playerbase is spending "little to nothing" and yet players demand and demand and demand. Who are they going to listen to? The people who are actually paying the bills.
edit: so yeah, the whales are not taking us down. They are keeping the lights on. Until they move on and then what?
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
In PC I think the biggest potential in terms of what we could call "AAA" is Star Citizen that might just benefit from the decrease in interest to develop big MMO titles for PC; it's always one opportunity because the big players move on to "greener pastures" (pun intended).
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Doesn't seem so bad to me.
Developers evolving towards a focus on whales is not a result of a refusal of the rest of the players to pay for anything. It's that developers have realized how large the pot of money that exists behind those whales, and, because that makes the opportunity cost for those whales relatively low, they're as easily parted with those large sums as the rest of us gamers are with our more modest sums.
We're going to find out, and sooner rather than later, because catering to your whales is not a viable long-term business model. What most of these companies seem to not understand is how to entice people to give them money. Almost all of them do it by trying to frustrate you. By making progress so difficult or time-consuming, or by locking the best characters and/or gear behind paywalls that people feel compelled to pay in order to compete. But this ultimately leads to resentment on both sides. Those that have the discretionary income to spend feel suckered and those that don't are made to feel second class. And resentment almost always leads to a breaking point where one says "enough". And in this situation once you've lost your whales, you're done. Because you've alienated everyone else with your BS that now no one is going to give you any money.
The best long-term solution is to entice people, not frustrate them. It's better if you can convince 500,000 to give you $10/month than it is 50,000 $100/month. And you do that by being generous, by not making progress unbearable if you do not pay, and to keep your prices fair. Very few mobile developers seem to understand this, which is why most of them are doomed to fail. This also seems to be the case for a number of PC MMOs too, that have shifted to catering to whales at the expense of everyone else. It's simply not going to end well. It's only a short-term fix. And if companies can't get things back on track to getting people to contribute small regular amounts then it's literally game over.
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Crazkanuk
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