SWG wasn't a failure... when it first started it was one of the hottest games and it made SOE millions no doubt. A game is a failure if it's cost to make is larger than the revenues it garnered. I've known games like Dark Ages (release in 1998) that have only a few hundred subscribers still alive to this day. Obviously the game is making money and supporting the continued operation of the game servers.
I do wish I had plugged in to that game all those years back. It looked awesome at the time. My major concern is that WoW will continue to blight the attempts of hardcore games recognition. Blizzard created a demon and i'd love to see it fall.
Originally posted by Eyelids But thats what suprises me with SWG, what with the huge potential fan base ready to jump in to star wars internets they must have made a major f'up to send em packing.
I'm a Star Wars geek, and a mmo player. I'll tell you why I(and many other people I know) refused to play SW:G. It was a a Star Wars game where, at release, you could play a hairdresser but you couldn't play a jedi.
Now, I personally don't have much interest in playing a jedi(I'm more of a Fett fan than a Skywalker fan). However, the fact that you could play a hairdresser but not a jedi showed quite clearly how flawed the game design was. This was a Star Wars game for everybody that wanted to be Princess Leia's hairdresser, a moisture farmer, or one of the thousands of independant plumbers, aluminum siders, and roofers that died due to the destruction of the second Death Star. The problem is, most people want to be Luke, Vader, Han, or Fett. All the development time they spent on hairdressers and the like was utterly wasted considering how few players it would bring in.
NGE was basically an acknowledgement that the way they designed the game orginally was incredibly stupid. Unfortunately, it was way too late. People had already made their judgements on the game. All changing it did was drive off a bunch of people that loved being moisture farmers.
Pre-NGE SW:G may have been a good game for all the "sandbox" type players you hear complaining constantly about "theme park" mmos. It was a -really- terrible Star Wars game though. Big liscences like Star Wars pretty much demand a theme park game. People play Star Wars games because they want to have lightsaber duels and blow up death stars and stuff like that. People that play them to do Princess Leia's hair for her are pretty few and far between, and catering to them is stupid.
ppl adding swg to the list are just been funny.love or hate it ,its made profit even if it folds today its more then made up its money.
its like someone coming and screaming AC1 has only 10k subs or so now and is a failure.it made loads of money for years so its made it up.
so lets stick on topic not about why SWG nge is bad and bleed customers.it made a profit,live with it .it was hot and minting money for years rivalling only EQ1 at that time.
while i or doubt anyone here has full data on mmorpg that were big commerical flops i would say likely TR is top of list after so long in dev with a big dev team and then probably commerical rights ncsoft paid and shut down in under a year never really even hitting past 50k or so if i recall.
others probably include vanguard(again long development and expensive) but at least still making some cash be it little.same story for WAR.AC2 would be a good next.Horizons probably comes next.
games like dark and light probably did not cost much to make as an indie mmorpg and did con loads of ppl think 50k pre orders at 70$ each which might have even covered their cost as a small indie company.so loads of failed small indie mmorpg but the cost was probably not much and some might have scrapped thru with pre orders due to small dev team cost such as roma victor.
Originally posted by Reklaw Have box sales of 1.5 million where the game topped at only having 300k subs playing doesn't really sound succesful
The sands of time (and the completely absurd levels of success of WoW) have obscured the fact that "only" 300,000 subscribers made SWG the #2 North American MMO at the time, next to Everquest 1 which "only" had 450,000.
1.5 million boxes sold ($75,000,000. Sony gets...30%?), and with the game averaging around 225k subscribers between 2004-2008 (300k in 2004, a little less than 150k in 2008) means SWG made roughly 162,000,000 for Sony Online Entertainment.
I don't see how $185 million in revenue over 4 years could be considered a failure?
NGE in terms of taking a successful game and ruining it, also in terms of ruining the image of a company.
TR in general terms.
WAR in terms of ruining the potential of an excellent IP.
Overall winner (or failure depends how you look at it) is STO, for reasons see one of the 1000 or so threads on the subject (which is incidentally probably higher then the current number of active subs in the game lol).
I wish people would stop being liars about SWG being a winner. It wasn't. Sure it had a vocal group of supporters but NGE was trying to "fix" the game to stop it from bleeding subs. They keep the lie going and will never shut up about it.
First of all SWG has given me the best MMORPG experiance I ever had in a MMORPG, but NEVER was it a succesfull game. It was succesfull at delivering me a great experiance, but I know for a fact I am a niche gamer when it comes to MMORPG's. The game was bleeding subscribers well before even the CU hit. Have box sales of 1.5 million where the game topped at only having 300k subs playing doesn't really sound succesfull, would have been if atleast 1mil would stick subscribed, would have made a huge difference, but we all know who played the game regardless how much we enjoyed it that things had to change, sure we didn't ask for the change we got, but you had to be completely blind to not see the underlying problems the game had and call it a succesfull game.
To OP, simple go to the VET section to get some glimps of what went wrong, tho keep in mind some really push it.
shows little you know about how much mmorpg need to make money .firstly SWG peaked at it hit close to 400k and it was over 250k for years.do your maths and u see even at 250k per year for 4 years it made 15m$ and probably way more since at least 1 of those years it saw 400k+,add in all those 50$ box sales and still has some subs left you probably looking at 125m$ easy.Remember it sold well over 1m copies plus xpacs .
fact that it has some many haters now is a testiment to it have a huge fans base for years who paid $15 a month and $50 per box + xpacs .
As long as a game makes more then its cost of production and distrubution and running its certainly not a flop.using 1m as a target is a joke tbh considering maybe 2 or 3 mmorpg in history has held 2m for more then 1 year .So a mmorpg that has 400k for 3 years = makes more money then a mmorpg with 1m for 1 year.
if EQ1 with 300-500k for 5 years is considered a runaway success then you have an idea.Fact mr x made $100m and then mr b(in this case WoW) made $1 billion only means mr b is richer then mr x but mr x is certainly doing well.
next you say everyone in the world in poor and misreable because bill gates has loads of $ billions.
Have box sales of 1.5 million where the game topped at only having 300k subs playing doesn't really sound succesful
The sands of time (and the completely absurd levels of success of WoW) have obscured the fact that "only" 300,000 subscribers made SWG the #2 North American MMO at the time, next to Everquest 1 which "only" had 450,000.
too true.it amazes me that not so many years ago a panel of devs sat down and agreed most AA mmorpg would be proftiable with 50k subs within 2 years.But fact 1 mmorpg called WoW made so much seems to mean to people anything less is rubbish .
So basically we all poor and should hang our heads in shame because we are all poorer then Bill Gates
It is looking like APB right now but I would have to say sadly, Tabula Rasa. Seemed like Tabula Rasa could have been really fun but both NCsoft and Destination Games gave up on it.
Originally posted by hercules Too true.it amazes me that not so many years ago a panel of devs sat down and agreed most AA mmorpg would be proftiable with 50k subs within 2 years.But fact 1 mmorpg called WoW made so much seems to mean to people anything less is rubbish . So basically we all poor and should hang our heads in shame because we are all poorer then Bill Gates
Indeed.
World War II Online celebrates it's *10 year* anniversary in about 6 months.
~20 people have been gainfully employed for half of their working lives thanks to the subscriptions of a very, very, very small community (~15,000 players)
That smells a lot like success to me!
Originally posted by SaintViktor It is looking like APB right now ...
APB is a tremendously fun game when played for short bursts (trigger control joke!) of an hour or two. I'm finding that there is no shortage of people online to play with, despite all the bad press.
I'd like to get a feel for the failures of the MMORPG time line. Might help me (and possibly others) in spotting future failures on the horizon. Now the only one that comes straight to mind is Star Wars, oh yeah that was a long time ago, what the hell happened to that? My firend used to play that thing to death (im trying to remember, probably 6-7 years ago), what happened to that anyway? Run its course, failing support, lack of updates? Would be interesting to know what happened there.
What was the purpose of this thread?
In your second post you make it obvious that you are perfectly capable of doing the research you ask advice for.
This is just a thread made for the sole purpose of game bashing and there already is way too much of that going on in these forums.
Really? For most of thread/post I have seen lately, I thought the whole purpose of mmorpg forums is bashing games and feel strong and powerful doing it behind the keyboard.
To me, a huge flop has to come with huge hype. Some of these games were never even blips on the radar before they were launched, so it's hard to fault them for not being blips now.
Two big ones that come to mind to me as major flops are Darkfall and AOC.
Darkfall probably had more hype from it's dev team for 8 years than any game on the market. The head guy made it sound like the game would revolutionize everything. It probably launched with 25k suscribers and failed to ever get to that level in the months after launch. How can a game that got more pre-launch coverage than WOW only have 15k subscribers?
The second game is AOC because of the IP and again, the big mouth of the developing company. At one point, they went so far as to call their game steak, and wow hamburger. Their hype (and deceptive beta) generated them 1 million in box sales, but within 3 months of launch, most servers were ghosttowns and players were begging for mergers. Despite the huge box sales (which the developer sees a small portion of revenues from), Funcom had to write off a $25 million dollar loss on the game. At this time, it has 4 normal servers and a bunch of dead server (probably around 50k subscribers). Again, 1 million boxes sold, down to 50k subscriber in what was less than a year.
Of course, this is because I use 'hype' as the scale of how hard a game can flop... expecially if it is hype coming from the dev company.
Played: Pretty much any fantasy MMO, some did not even make it to release ... Favorites: UO, EQ2, Vanguard, Wurm Online, Salem, ESO, Creativerse Playing: ESO, Creativerse, Guild Wars 2 Anticipating: (sigh) ... maybe Ashes of Creation
I'd like to get a feel for the failures of the MMORPG time line. Might help me (and possibly others) in spotting future failures on the horizon. Now the only one that comes straight to mind is Star Wars, oh yeah that was a long time ago, what the hell happened to that? My firend used to play that thing to death (im trying to remember, probably 6-7 years ago), what happened to that anyway? Run its course, failing support, lack of updates? Would be interesting to know what happened there.
What was the purpose of this thread?
In your second post you make it obvious that you are perfectly capable of doing the research you ask advice for.
This is just a thread made for the sole purpose of game bashing and there already is way too much of that going on in these forums.
That is a lol right there.
Anyway...SWG, thats coming up often and im glad it has, looks liek my hunch was right. Although i never actually played it my mate did and swore by it for a long time. It did seem interesting at the time but i never did take it up.
Lets get more specific about this. Now I never even heard of a Matrix MMO and tbh even if i had there is no way i would of touched it with a ten foot barge pole. Let me guess SONY? Hmm. With the exception of star wars and star trek most cross media attempts fail very quickly. But thats what suprises me with SWG, what with the huge potential fan base ready to jump in to star wars internets they must have made a major f'up to send em packing. Or maybe i need to realise the age of star wars reach is long over, guess its faded in to cult pop. Anyway, well STO thats just sad as i said earlier, bad vibes.
Im not sure any cross media game could survive in the MMO sector now. So developers need to really think carefully in the future with the way they set a game up.
So whats the main causes in the failure? Lack of support, failure to listen to what the customer base want, undelivered promises or just poor from the outset. Lets break it down and work on this one.
Matrix Online was Warner Brothers until after release when Sony took it off their hands. Sony didn't develop or even produce it.
Starwars Galaxy is not a flop. It may have not lived up to certain peoples expectations but it is still earning them a profit.
Matrix Online and Tabula Rasa are probably the two biggest commercial failures.
Although not much of a failure as other things, Aion was a huge disappointment for me after level 30 or so. The game came to a screeching halt at 30, and the real grindfest started.
Been subbed to SWG since launch. Went through lotta changes I hated, but the game is still good imho. Only reason some folks think its a flop is because theres too much bitterness from the community that had their original SWG yanked out from underneath them. Cant blame em, I was one of em for a while tbh. But I kept my sub and logged on from time to time checking it out, asking about game features on the forums. Currently, tbh, its one of the better mmorpg on the market. yeah it prob coud be at a much better place right now if they hadnt messed with it so drastically, but its definitely not a flop.
Its nice to not see Shadowbane listed in the first few pages. Its like that game had honorable discharge due to a mental illness that couldnt be prevented. It had the best concept ever but worst engine ever. RIP Shadowbane, well, until you rise from the grave (soon).
The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.
star trek ip and they failed? its like they gave them access to all the printing presses that produce american currency.... and they made pennies instead of 100$ bills
IF THE ONLY DEFENCE FOR CRITICISM OF A GAME IS CALLING SOMEONE A TROLL OR HATER, THAT SAYS A LOT ABOUT THE QUALITY OF THE GAME
I'm thinking MMO flops and failures are ones that go ut of business, because then you know something went wrong.
Hellgate:London, FURY, and Tabula Rasa (they all came out relatively around the same time) are the biggest "flops", because they all tried being vastly different and all bit the dust very hard. I liked all three of them too. I think FURY was broken from the start, and should have been setup like a Modern Warfare game, but the other two just needed money and time.
Comments
SWG wasn't a failure... when it first started it was one of the hottest games and it made SOE millions no doubt. A game is a failure if it's cost to make is larger than the revenues it garnered. I've known games like Dark Ages (release in 1998) that have only a few hundred subscribers still alive to this day. Obviously the game is making money and supporting the continued operation of the game servers.
I do wish I had plugged in to that game all those years back. It looked awesome at the time. My major concern is that WoW will continue to blight the attempts of hardcore games recognition. Blizzard created a demon and i'd love to see it fall.
I'm a Star Wars geek, and a mmo player. I'll tell you why I(and many other people I know) refused to play SW:G. It was a a Star Wars game where, at release, you could play a hairdresser but you couldn't play a jedi.
Now, I personally don't have much interest in playing a jedi(I'm more of a Fett fan than a Skywalker fan). However, the fact that you could play a hairdresser but not a jedi showed quite clearly how flawed the game design was. This was a Star Wars game for everybody that wanted to be Princess Leia's hairdresser, a moisture farmer, or one of the thousands of independant plumbers, aluminum siders, and roofers that died due to the destruction of the second Death Star. The problem is, most people want to be Luke, Vader, Han, or Fett. All the development time they spent on hairdressers and the like was utterly wasted considering how few players it would bring in.
NGE was basically an acknowledgement that the way they designed the game orginally was incredibly stupid. Unfortunately, it was way too late. People had already made their judgements on the game. All changing it did was drive off a bunch of people that loved being moisture farmers.
Pre-NGE SW:G may have been a good game for all the "sandbox" type players you hear complaining constantly about "theme park" mmos. It was a -really- terrible Star Wars game though. Big liscences like Star Wars pretty much demand a theme park game. People play Star Wars games because they want to have lightsaber duels and blow up death stars and stuff like that. People that play them to do Princess Leia's hair for her are pretty few and far between, and catering to them is stupid.
ppl adding swg to the list are just been funny.love or hate it ,its made profit even if it folds today its more then made up its money.
its like someone coming and screaming AC1 has only 10k subs or so now and is a failure.it made loads of money for years so its made it up.
so lets stick on topic not about why SWG nge is bad and bleed customers.it made a profit,live with it .it was hot and minting money for years rivalling only EQ1 at that time.
while i or doubt anyone here has full data on mmorpg that were big commerical flops i would say likely TR is top of list after so long in dev with a big dev team and then probably commerical rights ncsoft paid and shut down in under a year never really even hitting past 50k or so if i recall.
others probably include vanguard(again long development and expensive) but at least still making some cash be it little.same story for WAR.AC2 would be a good next.Horizons probably comes next.
games like dark and light probably did not cost much to make as an indie mmorpg and did con loads of ppl think 50k pre orders at 70$ each which might have even covered their cost as a small indie company.so loads of failed small indie mmorpg but the cost was probably not much and some might have scrapped thru with pre orders due to small dev team cost such as roma victor.
1.5 million boxes sold ($75,000,000. Sony gets...30%?), and with the game averaging around 225k subscribers between 2004-2008 (300k in 2004, a little less than 150k in 2008) means SWG made roughly 162,000,000 for Sony Online Entertainment.
I don't see how $185 million in revenue over 4 years could be considered a failure?
shows little you know about how much mmorpg need to make money .firstly SWG peaked at it hit close to 400k and it was over 250k for years.do your maths and u see even at 250k per year for 4 years it made 15m$ and probably way more since at least 1 of those years it saw 400k+,add in all those 50$ box sales and still has some subs left you probably looking at 125m$ easy.Remember it sold well over 1m copies plus xpacs .
fact that it has some many haters now is a testiment to it have a huge fans base for years who paid $15 a month and $50 per box + xpacs .
As long as a game makes more then its cost of production and distrubution and running its certainly not a flop.using 1m as a target is a joke tbh considering maybe 2 or 3 mmorpg in history has held 2m for more then 1 year .So a mmorpg that has 400k for 3 years = makes more money then a mmorpg with 1m for 1 year.
if EQ1 with 300-500k for 5 years is considered a runaway success then you have an idea.Fact mr x made $100m and then mr b(in this case WoW) made $1 billion only means mr b is richer then mr x but mr x is certainly doing well.
next you say everyone in the world in poor and misreable because bill gates has loads of $ billions.
I really hope someone mentioned darkfall online
My EVE YouTube Channel
too true.it amazes me that not so many years ago a panel of devs sat down and agreed most AA mmorpg would be proftiable with 50k subs within 2 years.But fact 1 mmorpg called WoW made so much seems to mean to people anything less is rubbish .
So basically we all poor and should hang our heads in shame because we are all poorer then Bill Gates
It is looking like APB right now but I would have to say sadly, Tabula Rasa. Seemed like Tabula Rasa could have been really fun but both NCsoft and Destination Games gave up on it.
To me a game is only a failure if it closes down so
DnL
TR
Spellborn
Auto Assult
Dungeon Runners.
March on! - Lets Invade Pekopon
Dungeon Runners was a great dungeon crawler! Very fun to play from time to time. I still miss it sometimes
Edit: to stay on topic, Alganon is what I call a big failure.
"EVE is likely the best MMORPG that you've never really understood or played" - Kyleran
World War II Online celebrates it's *10 year* anniversary in about 6 months.
~20 people have been gainfully employed for half of their working lives thanks to the subscriptions of a very, very, very small community (~15,000 players)
That smells a lot like success to me!
APB is a tremendously fun game when played for short bursts (trigger control joke!) of an hour or two. I'm finding that there is no shortage of people online to play with, despite all the bad press.Tabula Rasa was just...confusing.
Has anyone mentioned Hellgate : London or FURY? Those were kinda MMO disasters.
I think it has to be AC2 and WAR. Both were pretty hyped. One shut down, and the other is probably not too far off.
Those are my totally subjective picks.
I would have to break it down into categories. Here is my wall of shame.
Had something really good going and stumbled over their own shoelaces so they could never get it to market: Heroes Journey
Had every possible industry advantage you can imagine and still dropped the ball: SWG
Had hyped the game so much that every gamer between the ages of 8 and 70 were ready to embrace it, and produced a turd: WAR
Had hundreds of thousands of loyal fans waiting for this game for years, counting the minutes until they could play, and whiffed it: Vanguard
Competed against an almost empty field with the introduction of a car based game, and crashed hard: Auto Assault
Took one of the most popular IPs of all time, with millions and millions of fans all over the world, and douched it: STO
Made the same damn game as their only decent game ever, and still couldn't deliver: CO
Made the world's largest mmo into something akin to the world's largest oil spill: Dark & Light
Learned not one single thing from anything that has ever happened in the gaming industry, to deliver epic fail: APB
Could not keep people geeky enough to like the Matrix entertained: The Matrix
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
No-one has mentioned The Chronicles of Spellborn?
(Edit - yes someone did a few posts ago)
(Which shuts down within a month - BTW)
This game is so close to being a success - but it just lacks... something.
It has a lore and feels like a real 'world' - it's just that it's empty - and a bit of a grind.
I will be sad to see it go because there are a couple of things about it that really stick in my mind.
A couple of epic moments... like the first time you climb the mountain at Athenaeum and the music crescendo as you crest the summit.
I would suggest that if you haven't seen it you have a look before it closes down (it's free ATM)
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
I laughed, and I laughed hard.
"When it comes to GW2 any game is fair game"
To me, a huge flop has to come with huge hype. Some of these games were never even blips on the radar before they were launched, so it's hard to fault them for not being blips now.
Two big ones that come to mind to me as major flops are Darkfall and AOC.
Darkfall probably had more hype from it's dev team for 8 years than any game on the market. The head guy made it sound like the game would revolutionize everything. It probably launched with 25k suscribers and failed to ever get to that level in the months after launch. How can a game that got more pre-launch coverage than WOW only have 15k subscribers?
The second game is AOC because of the IP and again, the big mouth of the developing company. At one point, they went so far as to call their game steak, and wow hamburger. Their hype (and deceptive beta) generated them 1 million in box sales, but within 3 months of launch, most servers were ghosttowns and players were begging for mergers. Despite the huge box sales (which the developer sees a small portion of revenues from), Funcom had to write off a $25 million dollar loss on the game. At this time, it has 4 normal servers and a bunch of dead server (probably around 50k subscribers). Again, 1 million boxes sold, down to 50k subscriber in what was less than a year.
Of course, this is because I use 'hype' as the scale of how hard a game can flop... expecially if it is hype coming from the dev company.
For me the next huge flop is ... EQ2X.
But maybe I'm proven wrong.
Played: Pretty much any fantasy MMO, some did not even make it to release ...
Favorites: UO, EQ2, Vanguard, Wurm Online, Salem, ESO, Creativerse
Playing: ESO, Creativerse, Guild Wars 2
Anticipating: (sigh) ... maybe Ashes of Creation
What was the purpose of this thread?
In your second post you make it obvious that you are perfectly capable of doing the research you ask advice for.
This is just a thread made for the sole purpose of game bashing and there already is way too much of that going on in these forums.
That is a lol right there.
Anyway...SWG, thats coming up often and im glad it has, looks liek my hunch was right. Although i never actually played it my mate did and swore by it for a long time. It did seem interesting at the time but i never did take it up.
Lets get more specific about this. Now I never even heard of a Matrix MMO and tbh even if i had there is no way i would of touched it with a ten foot barge pole. Let me guess SONY? Hmm. With the exception of star wars and star trek most cross media attempts fail very quickly. But thats what suprises me with SWG, what with the huge potential fan base ready to jump in to star wars internets they must have made a major f'up to send em packing. Or maybe i need to realise the age of star wars reach is long over, guess its faded in to cult pop. Anyway, well STO thats just sad as i said earlier, bad vibes.
Im not sure any cross media game could survive in the MMO sector now. So developers need to really think carefully in the future with the way they set a game up.
So whats the main causes in the failure? Lack of support, failure to listen to what the customer base want, undelivered promises or just poor from the outset. Lets break it down and work on this one.
Matrix Online was Warner Brothers until after release when Sony took it off their hands. Sony didn't develop or even produce it.Starwars Galaxy is not a flop. It may have not lived up to certain peoples expectations but it is still earning them a profit.
Matrix Online and Tabula Rasa are probably the two biggest commercial failures.
Although not much of a failure as other things, Aion was a huge disappointment for me after level 30 or so. The game came to a screeching halt at 30, and the real grindfest started.
Been subbed to SWG since launch. Went through lotta changes I hated, but the game is still good imho. Only reason some folks think its a flop is because theres too much bitterness from the community that had their original SWG yanked out from underneath them. Cant blame em, I was one of em for a while tbh. But I kept my sub and logged on from time to time checking it out, asking about game features on the forums. Currently, tbh, its one of the better mmorpg on the market. yeah it prob coud be at a much better place right now if they hadnt messed with it so drastically, but its definitely not a flop.
Its nice to not see Shadowbane listed in the first few pages. Its like that game had honorable discharge due to a mental illness that couldnt be prevented. It had the best concept ever but worst engine ever. RIP Shadowbane, well, until you rise from the grave (soon).
The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.
sto.
star trek ip and they failed? its like they gave them access to all the printing presses that produce american currency.... and they made pennies instead of 100$ bills
IF THE ONLY DEFENCE FOR CRITICISM OF A GAME IS CALLING SOMEONE A TROLL OR HATER, THAT SAYS A LOT ABOUT THE QUALITY OF THE GAME
I'm thinking MMO flops and failures are ones that go ut of business, because then you know something went wrong.
Hellgate:London, FURY, and Tabula Rasa (they all came out relatively around the same time) are the biggest "flops", because they all tried being vastly different and all bit the dust very hard. I liked all three of them too. I think FURY was broken from the start, and should have been setup like a Modern Warfare game, but the other two just needed money and time.