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Main reason why SWTOR flopped?
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I put "Other reason" but it's really alot of factors. Without getting into a terribly long post to sling poo at SWTOR, I'll just keep it very short and simple:
BioWare didn't get the memo on exactly what "Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games" are.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
The reasons because this game tanked are easy. I have said this for the past 3+ years. hell I have been screaming it on these forums but was attacked by fanboys and told to shut up. ( I never bought the game And I have never played it, but its easy to see were it was lacking, just by doing some basic reserch and listening to the feedback for the past 6 months)
1. Lack of Endgame content, and by this I dont mean raids and BG battlegrounds. What I mean is a lack of sustainable endgame for the player to do. You need to have something other then waiting for raids and PvP battlegrounds to do when you reach max level. Options are, Explorataion, Reaserch, Crafting, Politics and social interaction with other players, guild activites etc.. Rerolling is not engame content, that is what "MOST" people do when they are so bored at endgame that they only reason to keep playing is to reroll..
2. To much focus on STORY, players blow through content. I said it from the start and what happend was that people spacebared through dialog.. Cant focus the development on leveling, Nobody wants to level its a chore you have to get through as fast as possible.
3. No flying in space.. Its called STAR WARS for god sake, not PLANET WARS. Not making flying in space was a hughe mistake
4. Holy trinity tank and spank.. people have played this type of gameplay for way to many years now, it gets old after a while..
5. Class system, its been done, Skill system or some other type of charecter development would haven been better..
6. Mouse wheel item grind, people dont want to play this, they have done it for years and its not fun.. And I certainly don't think they are willing to pay a subscription to do it.
7. 2 Faction warfare? who thinks this is fun? Forced Factions takes away freedom for the player and if you are going to do it 2 Factions is way to few you need atleast 3 or more to make it Interesting...
Overall SWTOR had outdated gamemechanics and a lack of key fetures that is needed to keep the player interested in the product and they are now paying for it...
Railpark LOL, catchy, I like it, going to start using it, congratulations you made history coining a new word.
Speaking of coining words, I wonder if TORtanic is going to be used now on to describe all overhyped and over budgeted flops. Can it dethrone NGE as king of failures?
Probably not.
The NGE took a game, that if not hugely successful in its time, was at least well liked by many of its players (and had a solid playerbase for its time), and then did a radical revamp and in so doing removed most/much of what people liked. In attempting to remove/mitigate some perceived shortcomings to the game, the NGE introduced massive problems worse than were there in the beginning: it replaced the inefficient with the massively broken. And nearly everyone quit.
With TOR, all of its problems were there at the beginning, only made marginally worse by a lukewarm effort to fix them.
In the end, the NGE was a bigger failure, because the management INTENTIONALLY took a financially successful game (it was generating around $3 mil a month when the NGE hit, and SWG was pretty cheap to make as MMOs go, by today's standards) and one with a core game liked by its playerbase, and dumped it attempt to gain the fans of a different game.
It is one thing to not get a winner, it is another to have one and drive it into the ground.
Not so sure. Only time will tell, but so far not so good
Even in 2009, over 3 years after the NGE, when they did free transfers for the first time, only half the servers were struggling population-wise. Looking at server population in SWTOR, it looks like everyone has quit SWTOR, but that was not the case with SWG, although having said that I never checked on populations in 2006, so could have done, but if they did, they came back.
What kept SWG going was the many unique systems in it, that do not exist in any game or other MMO.
After the NGE, I quit too, but tried many other MMOs, but none beat SWG even in NGE form, and others did too, and that is what kept it going for as long as it did.
And then when you thought it was safe, and at the time of the shutdown announcement, populations quadrupled in a couple of months during May and June 2011, LA strike again and force you out of SWG to TOR. You could not play pre-NGE and play NGE versions, and you now can not play SWG at all and play TOR.
If Bioware can turn SWTOR around, and do an actual literal NGE (New Game Enhancements, not the bad term it got from SWG and actually improve the game), then SWTOR will be the more successful game.
SOE kept the NGE up for 6 years. If TOR gets shut down within 6 years, then TOR is the bigger failure than the NGE, as with all that it cost to develop TOR and Bioware at the helm, it should have been more succesful than this, plus EA predicts it had enough oomph to last ten years.
The thing with games being bad from the start they stay bad - you log in play and then quit when you are done or think you are done, but if they start good and gets a place in your heart you will keep at it even if it turns bad, and eventually like or just accept what it has to offer, especially after many updates, especially with SWG being unique in many ways. I also like LOTRO, more than WOW, but if it shuts down, then WOW would be a good replacement, there never has been a decent replacement for SWG. There are many replacements for SWTOR too, as it is close to WOW, which a lot of MMOs are like. If I had not got a LT sub to STO, or it did not go F2P, I probably would have ditched that too after the first few months, and not be playing it again today.
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For when Themepark gaming isn't confining enough.
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i told from the early betas this game will fail heavy, although the IP was promising the game was a huge disappoint.
its lack of feeling (exactly), but worst of all , bad copy of WoW interface/gameplay, its more from the same,
GW2 haves its solid player base that will migrate from GW1, and the money involved its much lesser by lightyears
"Bring me 10 cheeze, so that I may reward thee with The Lord's Cup That Runneth Over".
Once upon a time....
Thats only your point of view. Still would be nice to know how a game with more than 2.34 Mill of copies just 5 months after launch is an huge fail. What about tera then, who have sold just 170k.
TERA didn't pump over $200 million into the game and have one of the strongest IPs in history to piggy back off of. Besides that, I'll bet if you look at the percent of subs lost, SWTOR is losing subs at a faster rate. And the freefall is still continuing with no plateau in sight.
Also, you use VGCharts WAY too much.
......what? GAH! Epic facepalm!
You'd think a publisher like Game Informer would know this because they were raving before release how cool the little movies they were releasing were and that Bioware specifically did a really good job with them.
You said it was the only thing I really liked about the game and I decided to say it wasnt the only thing I really liked about it. So.....I've been sitting here for a solid minute. Hold on......
Something I really liked......been 2 min now........
Okay I give up. I tried. Really.
1. no. of copies sold means squat. Do you know how many copies LOTRO/AoC/WHO sold?
2. TERA has more players worldwide. If you didnt know, it was released in Asia over a year ago
3. Game which might not even break even on production/running cost is mega failure
You have to consider the budget of the game, and the other myriad of other costs such as marketing and data centers. If the budget for the game was smaller, than yea you could argue that the box sales actually generated some decent profit. However, that's not the case. They could've probably made a good profit evenetually if there was a sizeable playerbase. But, at the rate they're losing subscriptions that will be unlikely. Yea I know, especially on this site the word 'fail' is tossed around quite often even though the word doesn't apply. From a financial standpoint it can be considered as such.
"For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed:
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!"
~Lord George Gordon Byron
LOL flopped.... uhm OK? I didnt read the thread, dont need to. You guys want to believe the game flopped, go for it. All I see is a game that released with way too many servers and then added more at launch. This game is fine and has a bright future especially with what was shown at E3 today.
Maybe when more than half of that 2.34 mil quit within that 5 months.
Come on, anybody with half a brain and who's familiar with the MMO genre knew this was going to flop immediately. Not trying to be an ass, but seriously I don't understand how people can't see such obvious failures coming. Just my 2 cents.
I think too many people were looking for a SWG-like Star Wars game. Open worlds, open exploration, and a really kick ass space flight sim with PVP. They got a TOR game with some multiplayer. I'm a little miffed I fell for it...
A flop?
I played FFXIV day 1...you all have no idea what a flop is. Spend millions and literally have to give the game for free because it's so broken and know you will never make your money back from development. That is a flop.
Selling enough boxes to probably make most of development costs back...then enough subs to be in the black in a month or two...that's not a flop. Most developers would kill to have 1.7 subs immediately even if it does drop off.
I think what you want to debate is if the game has legs or not. Which literally no one on these forums has a clue of because that is often based on success of competition and future updates.
On a side note...why does everyone on these forums hate MMOs? You all do realize that if SWTOR was a true flop you would see a ton of development dollars disappear and then the possibility of a MMO that you may like will never come along.
Let people who enjoy linear story based amusement park MMOs enjoy themselves. Just because most here are bitter that their favorite MMO is either dead or not what they remember it to be (nostalgia is a bitch), does not mean you have to be such a downer.
WoW showed there is a huge growing market for MMOs...I'm sure there can be plenty of high quality, high population games that can exist at the same time.
If you grow the MMO market in general then it is not a zero sum game so you do not have to care anymore if the game you hate does well.
(sorry...this rant was a long time coming)
I'll go with no content and bad, very bad PvP.
Here's the kind of post defending the game I can respect. Far and few between on seeing post like theses for either side.
I don't agree with everything you said but I'll give you a pass on debating it.
its called the "Ahh Factor". That "Feeling" you get when something IS exciting and engaging...lol I get the same feeling every time I think abut FF11,and the first time I started playing it...its hard to redo imo...think your first is the best {grins},because it was your first.
SWTOR did not grow the market. Show proof if you've read this somewhere besides a MMO forum.
SWTOR has been reported to cost 300 million dollars with only 2.3 million box sales. You do the math.
Show us the 300M number for a fact, otherwise YOU do the math.
There is no doubt BW captured at least 1 Non MMO player....I hadnt played MMOs in several yrs, and actually quit playing reguarly back in 06. Just like Blizz did with their fans, bringing in gamers not playing MMOs is how you grow a market. Not every WoW fan was a MMO fan beforehand. A number of them showed up for the Bliz name, just as BW had their own brand of fans.
For you to attempt to suggest otherwise is the epitome of ignorance pertaining to the MMO sphere of gaming.
Thanks for playing.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
I dont know. I keep hearing all sorts of various numbers on the cost of the game. Yes Ive heard 300 million but also 250, 200,150,120 .
Anyways on box sales I did fuzzy math and if 2.3 is correct thats something like 138 million. With subs they may have made a profit. I guess. I cant be sure. Ive often wondered if income eventually surpased development/advertising costs thus turning any kind of profit many times. In other words I wonder if Swtor has ever gotten into the profit income.
If so I suspect so far it hasnt been overly substantial. What with the the upcoming free to play till level 15 demo mechanic, all the e-mails Ive gotten offering me yet another free weekend and all the other stuff.