Flops

Amathe

When I was a kid we used to have belly flop contests at the pool. Usually some ruddy faced fat kid won by landing like a beluga.

So among games that flopped, which one flopped the hardest? 

I vote Everquest Next. "Sorry guys we're done. It's not fun."

Wow. Like a bug hitting a windshield. Instant death with no meaningful discussion of what really happened.

Honorable (or dishonerable) mention to CoE.

Who gets your vote? 

Ridelynn

Tough question to ask in the MMO genre with so much promise and so much flop.

EQN is a good candidate.

I would say Tabula Rasa deserves an honorable mention. I mean, RG had to go into space to escape the fallout from that one.

Hard to not have FFXIV 1.0 on the list.

Firefall. Another classic flop. I actually liked that game a lot too...

SWG NGE?

Vangard is another good one.

cheyane

Ridelynn said:

Tough question to ask in the MMO genre with so much promise and so much flop.

EQN is a good candidate.

I would say Tabula Rasa deserves an honorable mention. I mean, RG had to go into space to escape the fallout from that one.

Hard to not have FFXIV 1.0 on the list.

Firefall. Another classic flop. I actually liked that game a lot too...

SWG NGE?

Vangard is another good one.

You're going to get some flak for some of those.

AlBQuirky

Agree with EQ Next.

Can we predict? If so, Star Citizen will be the biggest (monetarily-wise) flop if it does not release.

PS: Isn't "flop" a computing speed term, ie: teraflops? And does that term mean Terra is a "flop?"

borghive49

Shroud of the Avatar

Vrika

AlBQuirky said:

Agree with EQ Next.

Can we predict? If so, Star Citizen will be the biggest (monetarily-wise) flop if it does not release.

PS: Isn't "flop" a computing speed term, ie: teraflops? And does that term mean Terra is a "flop?"

In computing it stands for floating point operation.

Teraflops means trillion floating point operations per second.

Ungood

SWG - NGE. Top pick, because it was a cautionary tale. As I see it, for something to be a fantastic flop, like a perfect fail video, you need to be able see how and why it went as bad as it did, like a solid line drive to the nuts, and I really think SWG - NGE, owned that.

Next on the list:

WoW:
Ok.. I know.. it's hard to say that WoW is a flop, and as an overall game, it's not. In fact Wow could be seen as the juggernauth of the gaming world, the crowning achievement of what an MMO could accomplish and how successful one could be. WoW is what other games stive to get to. No argument.

However, a few months after Cataclysm, they started to bleed numbers, they just started to hemorrhage subs in amounts that other games could not dream of having that many subs to start with, they lost 2 million subs in the first year after Cataclysm, and it just kept going down.

That was the kind of flop that you look at, and it's was like watching a great white shark jump out of the water, and then screwing up the dive so bad, they hit the pier, knocked themselves out and flopping hard back into the water, it was the kind of screw up that was so impressive that you know, no matter how hard you flopped.. even if it killed you.. it would never be that impressive.

Which is really, the truth, many games have came and went, and never flopped to the tune of 10 million lost subs, which is what WoW did.

I have no idea what they did wrong with Cataclysm, but.. dayum... 

cheyane

Some games are good and can succeed if they got rid of the monetization, reduce the hoops you have to jump through to access content or control the ganking that drove players away. Not all games  fail because of their inherent poor quality but rather dubious decisions that drove players that would have played but for that reason that made them stop playing.

It isn't easy to simply call a game a flop because it may have its fans and even rabid ones at that. However there are games that just start out so bad that it had no chance at all.

Quizzical

AlBQuirky said:

Agree with EQ Next.

Can we predict? If so, Star Citizen will be the biggest (monetarily-wise) flop if it does not release.

PS: Isn't "flop" a computing speed term, ie: teraflops? And does that term mean Terra is a "flop?"

Tera is just a metric prefix.  You can have teraflops or terabytes, for example.  You could also have terameters (a little more than the distance from Jupiter to the sun) or teraseconds (about thirty thousand years) or teraliters (better known as cubic kilometers), but those aren't commonly used units.

bcbully

Amathe said:

When I was a kid we used to have belly flop contests at the pool. Usually some ruddy faced fat kid won by landing like a beluga.

So among games that flopped, which one flopped the hardest? 

I vote Everquest Next. "Sorry guys we're done. It's not fun."

Wow. Like a bug hitting a windshield. Instant death with no meaningful discussion of what really happened.

Honorable (or dishonerable) mention to CoE.

Who gets your vote? 

Landmark, Dave Georgeson and Ahmeed happened it.

Palebane

Warhammer Online followed closely by Age of Conan. Nearly every major release after WoW has been an embarrassment, with the games only gaining some traction after extensive overhauls and reboots years after release.

Mendel

Where's the outcry for UO2?  It was probably the first real serious flop I can recall.  From everything I could gather, it was aiming to be far different than the gank-fest that UO turned into, much more like the various Ultima standalone games with a focus on the various virtues.  That seemed a bit ambitious for the early 2000s, but I half expected it to be as focused on pvp as its predecessor.

But EQII and EQ:N rank pretty high up on the list, too.  Titan might also gather some of my disappointment.  It *might* have been that game I have been looking for, the game that pushes the boundaries of "what is an MMORPG".  Then again, innovation is always difficult, especially for the money-men.

Nebless

Ungood said:

SWG - NGE. Top pick, because it was a cautionary tale. As I see it, for something to be a fantastic flop, like a perfect fail video, you need to be able see how and why it went as bad as it did, like a solid line drive to the nuts, and I really think SWG - NGE, owned that.

I think SWF-NGE was only a flop in that it changed the game from what it was.  SWG to SWG-NGE .... flop?  Sure.

But taken by itself the NGE version (while not the SWG we wanted) wasn't all that bad of a game.  It became more streamlined, more quests were added, some easy content was actually made more challenging.

I'm just saying if you look at the NGE version as a game in it's own right, it wasn't a flop.

Shaigh

Winner: FF XIV online
Honorable mentions: APB: All Points Bulletin and Firefall.

I go for ff XIV since its just such a huge company behind such an awful mmorpg. With apb and firefall its more about horribly mismanaged studios burning through a sick amount of investor money. 

If I could include projects that never made it to launch Its Everquest Next closely followed by Project Copernicus. WTF were those guys thinking. However, mmorpg projects are shut down all the time because developers understood that the game would be a turd on release. It takes a special something to release that turd so that's why i go for the first three titles mentioned.

Ungood

Nebless said:

Ungood said:

SWG - NGE. Top pick, because it was a cautionary tale. As I see it, for something to be a fantastic flop, like a perfect fail video, you need to be able see how and why it went as bad as it did, like a solid line drive to the nuts, and I really think SWG - NGE, owned that.

I think SWF-NGE was only a flop in that it changed the game from what it was.  SWG to SWG-NGE .... flop?  Sure.

But taken by itself the NGE version (while not the SWG we wanted) wasn't all that bad of a game.  It became more streamlined, more quests were added, some easy content was actually made more challenging.

I'm just saying if you look at the NGE version as a game in it's own right, it wasn't a flop.

That was why is such an amazing Flop.. because it was a cautionary tale. It was not just about game design or even if a game was good or bad, but it was a lesson about changing the game on your players in a drastic way.

Which is also why I mentioned WoW. WoW is still AFIK king of the MMO's.. but.. whatever it did with Cataclysm, was like.. Dayum.. you dun screwed up something.

Iselin

EQN for sure. It was a a marquee AAA MMO from a huge studio. You kind of expect indie B level attempts at complex games like MMORPGs to flop so when they do we really shouldn't be all that surprised.

EQN though was a monumental flop of epic proportions.

AlBQuirky

Quizzical said:

AlBQuirky said:

Agree with EQ Next.

Can we predict? If so, Star Citizen will be the biggest (monetarily-wise) flop if it does not release.

PS: Isn't "flop" a computing speed term, ie: teraflops? And does that term mean Terra is a "flop?"

Tera is just a metric prefix.  You can have teraflops or terabytes, for example.  You could also have terameters (a little more than the distance from Jupiter to the sun) or teraseconds (about thirty thousand years) or teraliters (better known as cubic kilometers), but those aren't commonly used units.

I see my "LOL" at the end of the post went over a few people's heads

It's cool and I do know what "tera" (kilo, mega, giga, etc...) and "teraflops" are.

Guess who's not quitting their day job to become a comedian... ME!

Iselin

@AIBQuirky


Nah keep trying. And now for something completely different:

bentrim

I don't see how you guys consider EQN...since it never released...to me a flop is something that was released to the public and wasn't well received. EQN was not in that group. However it was a PATHETIC concept all the way around!! My 2 BTW are FFXIV, and TR.

Amathe

Part of the fun of message board posting is making up definitions for your words. To me, a flop includes pre-release failures. The mileage of your words may vary, however. 

Ridelynn

bentrim said:

I don't see how you guys consider EQN...since it never released...to me a flop is something that was released to the public and wasn't well received. EQN was not in that group. However it was a PATHETIC concept all the way around!! My 2 BTW are FFXIV, and TR.

EQN did pre-release, with paid early access. 

Which once you start taking money counts as released in my book

Nalo

EQ Next

City of Steam - If they had just left it like the first alpha test without keep changing it and cash shopping everything it would have done great in western market.

Quickslivers Masters of Orian 3 -  Was so bad that Quicksliver dropped it 72 hours after releaase.

Nebless

"To me, a flop includes pre-release failures"

Ahhh, well in that case I'm going to go with Stargate Worlds.   Would have been pretty sweet if what they said would have come to pass, instead we got a pyramid scheme.

MightyUnclean

Biggest flop for me, because I was so hopeful as a Lord British fan since childhood, was SotA.

BeansnBread

For me Vanguard was the most bitter disappointment.  A few people around here still praise it, and there is no doubt it had some good ideas that separated it from other games, but it was a mess. 

Kyleran

MightyUnclean said:

Biggest flop for me, because I was so hopeful as a Lord British fan since childhood, was SotA.

Considering his poor track record for any work done since the 90s you probably should have seen that flop coming.