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1.5 million copies sold in 2 years yet 1/5 was actually playing?
Reklaw
Member UncommonPosts: 6,495
Which to me proofs we always been a minority no matter how I or anyone else would like to twist it, the fact remains we who enjoyed SWG where the minority.
I would even say that of course 1/5 can NEVER be a company's target audience, as a company you want to get atleast 4/5 and not 1/5.
Yes I know it might suck, but seriously have any of you ever looked at it this way, or shall we contineu to see it only a one-sided way?
Comments
are you trying to make a point?
If so, you have failed.
Nope I wasn't making a point, but was asking a question, but then again that seems to be to difficult for certain people. You could have tried to answer the question. Keep in mind the asnwer does not require for you to agree on it, but it could open a discussion on forums, you know a place to discus things.
I would say 1/2 of that number couldnt play due to system requirements. When swg was released 256m of memory was not even average yet. Game is unplayable. I dont know how many people i tried to get into swg only for them to quit after 1o minutes because their pc couldnt run it. I also didnt know anyone who didnt have to upgrade to play swg.Back then having to buy the game and pay a sub fee and have to upgrade was just too much. Then WOW came out and they could play on their 400 dollar dells..and they never looked back at swg.
I know of very few people who quit or didnt play because they didnt like the game, or what the game was supposed to be. Most people i know thought swg sounded like the perfect game. They quit for the reasons above, SOE, afk'ing, jedi, and the never-ending relearning how to play the game after each update.
My opinion...i said opinion...is your are incorretly agreeing with soe/la the the desing was the problem that caused only 1/5 of the people who bought it to play it. I say its because they only released 1/5 of a game and messed with that until it was broken beyond repair rather than making due on their original design (promise) and expanding on it.
People can say til their blue in the face that sandboxes are nich games, or worldy type sims like swg, but it simply isnt true. A good game sells..period. The majority of people that play wouldnt know the difference between sandbox and linear if it was a good game.
How my one-sided view? Make any sense?
edit: i spelled stuff wrong and dont really care atm.
See you in the dream..
The Fires from heaven, now as cold as ice. A rapid ascension tolls a heavy price.
Yup makes sense and agree partial on it, and it definitly not something I would consider to be one sided at all.
Yup makes sense and agree partial on it, and it definitly not something I would consider to be one sided at all.
What dont you agree with? not that it matters..just your pretty well spoken so im curious to hear as I may be wrong.
See you in the dream..
The Fires from heaven, now as cold as ice. A rapid ascension tolls a heavy price.
I agree on the part you speak of why people left.
The part I do not agree on is that you actually didn't answer to my topic.
I agree on the part you speak of why people left.
The part I do not agree on is that you actually didn't answer to my topic.
I think that to be able to answer that question we have to determine what the industry average is (ratio of boxed units sold to customer retention after the 1st month), and what the average length of time people pay to play an MMO is?
Yeppers. $OE's mismanagment of the game caused the poor player retention. What is even sadder, and also attests to SOE's biggest business blunder (NGE), is having less than 1/10 of the pre-NGE playerbase.
Instead of dedicating resources to fixing the core game and adding regular content , those resources were directed to the next expansion and the next unwanted revamp, Most of the players I knew that left prior to the CU left primarily due to the piss poor customer service and exploits/bugs that were not addressed in a timely manner. The game truly had potential, but at the hands of $OE, it was never realized. Smedley got what he wanted, a WoW knock-off, albeit a very poorly done one.
1.5 million sold, 300k retained, in 2 years 20% i wonder how many units were sold in the next 3 years and how many they retained from those.
With the 25k present player base it appears the players who enjoy SWG continue to be the minority.
So yes i would agree, but the question is "Why are the people who enjoy SWG a minority"?
Something wrong with the ip? Something wrong with SOE's bungling? Something wrong with the "target audience"? What exactly went wrong for this game to crash so hard?
Well we know the answer to that now don't we.
This may be because of people paying for multiple accounts.
You could only have one character per server per account. That made people like my friend Shalaine have around 6 accounts per household to store all the stuff they wanted, have all the harvesters running they wanted, and maintain several professions at the same time. You also had the option of temporarily letting some of your accounts go inactive when life's demands became incompatible with this playstyle.
In other words - your statistics are invalid.
I think most people frankly admit that the game was not as successful as it ought to have been -- any star wars MMO should have been the first to break one million subscribers.
Also, it's not that the game didn't need improving. No, the question was and is and always will be: was the CU/NGE the right way to deal with that situation?
Then one asksthe questions that lead to the answer to that question:
what was wrong with the game?
what could have been done to make it better?
The main reason that the game had lower than expected subs was the low quality. The game was a bug ridden mess, and had broken quests, broken character abilities, and just broken gameplay features all throughout the world.
the second reason was they didn't fix these problems.
the third reason was the lowe level of "content," or developer made story elements for people to play through.
The game had low retention rate due to these factors.
Now, instead of rectifying that situation, they attempted to cover up the piss poor management with the CUNGE.
Thus, it failed.
fishermage.blogspot.com
I think most people frankly admit that the game was not as successful as it ought to have been -- any star wars MMO should have been the first to break one million subscribers.
Also, it's not that the game didn't need improving. No, the question was and is and always will be: was the CU/NGE the right way to deal with that situation?
Then one asksthe questions that lead to the answer to that question:
what was wrong with the game?
what could have been done to make it better?
The main reason that the game had lower than expected subs was the low quality. The game was a bug ridden mess, and had broken quests, broken character abilities, and just broken gameplay features all throughout the world.
the second reason was they didn't fix these problems.
the third reason was the lowe level of "content," or developer made story elements for people to play through.
The game had low retention rate due to these factors.
Now, instead of rectifying that situation, they attempted to cover up the piss poor management with the CUNGE.
Thus, it failed.
just think if SWG was released with the polish WoW was released with...
--------
Ten Golden Rules Of Videogame Fanboyism
"SOE has probably united more gamers in hatred than Blizzard has subs"...daelnor
We have to keep in mind that there was no trial available until December '04, and even then it was only a promo in an issue of PCGamer. I don't remember when the d/l trial become available but I believe it was quite some time after.
So in the past people had to buy the game to try it, which really was unfortunate and could explain why there was a significant difference between boxed sales and customer retention.
I think most people frankly admit that the game was not as successful as it ought to have been -- any star wars MMO should have been the first to break one million subscribers.
Also, it's not that the game didn't need improving. No, the question was and is and always will be: was the CU/NGE the right way to deal with that situation?
Then one asksthe questions that lead to the answer to that question:
what was wrong with the game?
what could have been done to make it better?
The main reason that the game had lower than expected subs was the low quality. The game was a bug ridden mess, and had broken quests, broken character abilities, and just broken gameplay features all throughout the world.
the second reason was they didn't fix these problems.
the third reason was the lowe level of "content," or developer made story elements for people to play through.
The game had low retention rate due to these factors.
Now, instead of rectifying that situation, they attempted to cover up the piss poor management with the CUNGE.
Thus, it failed.
just think if SWG was released with the polish WoW was released with...
It probably would have surpassed the expectations of one million subs. The market IS there, if you give people a good game they want to come back to.
fishermage.blogspot.com
Polish is too much of a drain on the hookers and blow slush find of SOE's execs.
They don't do polish. Cuts into profit.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Yup the system requirements put all my friends off playing and even on the lowest settings the game was getting like 5FPS in towns and I only played because I had the patience for it back then. I told my friend to buy the game and he did and he was getting so much stuttering after 5 mins he was "screw this" lol.
People don't play it now though because it sucks.
If this is yet another attempt at trying to get the vets to admit the original game was flawed I don't think you'll find many that disagree. Of course the pre-cu game had problems and if SOE had just fixed those problems instead of destroying the game in an attempt to replace us with WoW's playerbase the game would be in good shape today.
We get accused all the time of looking at the old game with rose-colored glasses but we knew the game was a mess and we loved it anyway.
This topic was NOT about WHY people left.
"Proofs?" "Proofs?" Really?
OMG, please take an english class! Please!
Sure it is. It is a known fact that it is cheaper to keep a current customer than it is to obtain a new one. A lesson mind that SOE has never learned.
Now if 4/5's as you say failed to stay then why did they not stick around? The answers are various of which several land directly at the feet of the poor management decisions made by SOE.
--------
Ten Golden Rules Of Videogame Fanboyism
"SOE has probably united more gamers in hatred than Blizzard has subs"...daelnor
The thing is, while 1.5 million copies were sold, and there were what, 350k active subscriptions tops over the life of the game, it means there was a LOT of churn of players.
One reason might be system requirements. You install the game and discover the box recommendations are BS and you can't play the game. You can't return it after you've opened it, so, there you go.
The other reason might be you can play it, but it's not your cup of tea. Cool.
But why wasn't it your cup of tea? Didn't like the game system? Too many bugs? Not enough to do? No perceived value (and value is very subjective) for playing it long term for many who bought the client and left after their first included in the price month?
As we all know, there are a lot of fanatical SWG preCU fans about, who had muliple accounts who may have also skewed the numbers in that there might have been 350k subscriptions, but significantly fewer individual players, because many had 2 or more accounts.
This is not an easy thing to suss out, because the information available to us just isn't adequate to lend to conclusive support for any theory.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
--------
Ten Golden Rules Of Videogame Fanboyism
"SOE has probably united more gamers in hatred than Blizzard has subs"...daelnor
Now that number is closer to 1%.
Some people will buy ANYTHING with a Star Wars label on it. Hell, I've purchased expansions and box sets that I didnt' need just to get some cheesy ingame item.
I don't play SWG anymore. I've been done for a while. I have tried to go back from time to time, but just couldn't stay for more than a week or so. But... I can't just pay for 1-2 weeks, I had to pay for an entire month. Same scenario. I only played for 1/2 the time I paid for.
I agree on the part you speak of why people left.
The part I do not agree on is that you actually didn't answer to my topic.
There wasnt a question. No kidding they are always gonna target the bigger audience. You were implying I thought, that they were targeting people who quit instead of played because that number is larger. I would assume you were implying again that other groups are larger as well, so they will target them, not us for a new game. I'm saying you dont, nor do soe/la know how big the original audience is because they targeted that group with a broken unfinished everchanging game. The 200k of us left were just the remnants of that original never realised audience that were willing to put up with developers. Thats what the 200k were. Given even a 50% complete game and that number would have been 400-500k. Make that game playable on a 400$ dell and that audience is 600k. All my opinion. Did I answer yout topic..or am I way off here?
I agree no one is gonna target 150-200k suckers...they'll get us anyway more than likely. that doesnt mean the original design couldnt be just as popular as the typical tread mill. The NGE proved that it had nothing to do with the design of the game. So did the CU. If you look at only the historical evidence, which is all that there really is..the more linear and typical design of a sw mmo..the less popular it is.
To ignore the few vets on the forums is fine. But swg in its original form is still the most popular and played version of a sw MMO. To ignore that isnt wise. Obviously biowares version will be more popular, but lets see them get 300k subs if they release a game were half of the stats on all looted items dont work because those stats were removed in beta. Lets see if 200k people will stick around for that. The fact that there are people STILL playing this game shows that swg design is very popular. Any other game released in swg condition or in its current condition would fail instantly...yet swg had 200k suckers still.
Bah, im rambling ..sorry. Prolly still didnt answer your original topic hehe.
See you in the dream..
The Fires from heaven, now as cold as ice. A rapid ascension tolls a heavy price.