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Bandai Namco Online Will Be Dissolved and Merge With Parent Company After Financial Woes, Blue Proto
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Member UncommonPosts: 12,599
Bandai Namco Online Will Be Dissolved and Merge With Parent Company After Financial Woes, Blue Protocol Cancellation | MMORPG.com
Bandai Namco Online, following severe financial losses, will be dissolved and merged with its parent company, Bandai Namco, which will also control the former's IP catalog.
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Fishing on Gilgamesh since 2013
Fishing on Bronzebeard since 2005
Fishing in RL since 1992
Born with a fishing rod in my hand in 1979
I don't think the Gaming Industry as a whole is doing that badly. The MMO Industry I guess so. At least from a player perspective, we got nothing exciting to wait for. The best MMO´s have been developed at least 10 years ago. Everything new is same old same old, and even worse.
I have ditched the MMO genre as a whole and have been focused on single-player games.
But that is just me.
Same.
The overall direction MMOs have taken is not what I had hoped for when I first played UO, EQ, DAoC, and even Asheron's Call (which I did not enjoy but appreciated the potential it represented). Greed has driven the genre into the ground, and no developer seems willing or capable of steering it back to the strategy of pleasing the player rather than trying to prey on them.
Meanwhile, games like Metaphor: ReFantazio, Elden Ring, and the Yakuza series just knock it out of the park by focusing on fun more than microtransactions.
As far as developers being greedy, I think that goes both ways. We demand AAA production values which costs a ton of money. $200 million to build a game these days easy. Then we expect them to release the game free to play. Do we really expect these developers to operate as charity organizations? That money has to come from somewhere. Back in the day when games like EQ1 and DAoC were being developed it cost a fraction of that amount to build them and yet both had a box price and a subscription. Yet we hold these games up as models of MMO excellence while we shout down anyone trying to release a game with a subscription. It truly boggles my mind the logic, or lack thereof, of the modern MMO gamer. I can think of no other group of people on this planet who are bigger cheap asses. They literally expect to pay nothing for Hollywood level production values.
Oh developers are greedy! Yah they have a $200 million dollar loan to pay off. You'd want to get paid too, I promise. Interest alone on that loan is insane.
The selling point behind MMORPGS is that they typically are open-ended. For example, if you step foot in a single player world, you know at some point that world is going to end in, 20, 30 or a 100 hours. WoW, for sake of example, by 100 hours in, you're just starting to make money with your professions for example.
Yuup, none would admit MMOs had a lot of fun to be had this year. I don't expect many MMOs to survive but there is always some fun to be had.
There is also fun to be had in Bandai Namco's online games but in my opinion the online games they developed in-house are often just monetized in an inflexible way, low quality, or both. Gundam Evolution was pretty fun...for a low budget mobile game in disguise. Had Bandai Namco taken the online space seriously, they could've at least helped their online studio get it to Mecha Break's quality before putting it out. Would've lived longer.
Heck it couldve been low quality and made money at least with actually OPTIONS to spend on.
I just want them to commit to a studio for a Naruto based MMO with the assets they have access to.
Guess you haven't noticed that only about half of their content is geared toward MMOs these days.