It briefly topped on 400k subs, before settling at 200-250k??
Oh dear....
Nice to finally know the truth. And the obvious truth is that the game were NEVER as popular as the pre-NGE vets on these forums wants us to believe. I've seen some of them claiming it had close to 2 million subs
It's because hardcore fans count themselves as five.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Also in defense of the NGE: MMOs try new things all the time to gain a bigger audience, sometimes they work, sometimes they fail utterly. There's no way the devs could've known which way the NGE would turn out. And the fact that they had to resort to such an overhaul means the numbers probably weren't that great pre-NGE either.
In defense of the Rage against SOE and the NGE, most companies would have the decency to back-pedal and remove the changes once they realized that they had just blown the airlocks and jettisoned all their customers into space.
What really enraged me, and to a point still does, is that they refused to change things back. It was blatantly apparent 24 hours after they brought the new system up that they had made a terrible decision.
I suppose they thought that if they weathered the storm of apoplectic fans, they would soon be swimming in millions of subs and mentions on popular TV shows.
Even more stupidly, from a business perspective, is that maintaining a couple of "limited support" pre-NGE servers would have cost them almost nothing and gone a long way to reducing the anger of some fans. Hell, they could have charged $50 to server transfer people to those and made a ton more money, on top of collecting many more $15/mo sub fees from all those that canceled.
But Smed is a tone deaf moron when it comes to his (former) customers, and his handling of SWG was only one of many decisions over the years that drove SOE into the ground.
The only surprise is that it took SOE so long to go under and get sold off to VCs.
It's not as easy as splitting it off like that, though. I mean if you're just building in rule sets, it's pretty easy. When it's fundamental changes then you're talking about managing two completely separate code bases. So, no, it's not a matter of throwing up an extra couple servers. That is unless they simply branched it, dropped a copy of the pre-NGE build to the server, never to be updated again. Problem is there were issues that needed to be fixed in that, too.
Actually it was/would be that easy.
The only large expense for MMO development is writing new code. And if they had launched a server with only existing code up to that point, which they had, on servers they already had, it would have cost them essentially nothing.
After that, have 1 junior dev/GM per server and you are set. Even a paltry 5k subs (and there would have likely been more) for the 2 servers would have generated $75k per month which would have been more than enough cashflow to justify doing it.
But even beyond that, it would have gone a long way to mitigating the reputation hit that SOE took from long time paying customers, that had the NGE dropped on them. How many of those people will not buy another SOE product to this day? More than a few. (Companies with actual leadership that know what they are doing, are concerned about "reputation management" as much as anything else, but not so with SOE.)
I have to agree it was more about ego than anything else, SOE/LA management "knew" they were "right" and everyone else's opinion counted for nothing, especially the paying customers.
It briefly topped on 400k subs, before settling at 200-250k??
Oh dear....
Nice to finally know the truth. And the obvious truth is that the game were NEVER as popular as the pre-NGE vets on these forums wants us to believe. I've seen some of them claiming it had close to 2 million subs
It's because hardcore fans count themselves as five.
No one (who is rational) ever believed SWG had that many subs.
It is possible that SWG got into the range of "2 million units sold" at some point, SOE announced they had sold over 1 mil sometime after JTL.
But that is not the same thing as concurrent subs, obviously.
Should SOE and LucasArts have seen before SWG launched that it wasn't going to be the type of game capable of attracting the number of players they were aiming for?
No. They had the IP to carry the game, and SWG had the depth and diversity to appeal to their anticipated number of players. However, I think they should've realized their decision to release the game in such an incomplete and unpolished state would do nothing but hinder its potential of reaching those numbers.
Why do you think SOE and LucasArts felt that the risk in changing the game so substantially by implementing NGE was justified?
The belief that making the game more like WoW would bring them WoW numbers.
How popular do you think SWG would have become if it had been designed more like NGE in the first place? Would it have become the first MMOG to reach a million subscriptions?
Anything's possible. For that matter, if SWG had launched in the state of completion and polish that it had reached by its 1st anniversary, I think it would have been a lot more successful.
Should SOE and LucasArts have seen before SWG launched that it wasn't going to be the type of game capable of attracting the number of players they were aiming for?
No. They had the IP to carry the game, and SWG had the depth and diversity to appeal to their anticipated number of players. However, I think they should've realized their decision to release the game in such an incomplete and unpolished state would do nothing but hinder its potential of reaching those numbers.
Why do you think SOE and LucasArts felt that the risk in changing the game so substantially by implementing NGE was justified?
The belief that making the game more like WoW would bring them WoW numbers.
How popular do you think SWG would have become if it had been designed more like NGE in the first place? Would it have become the first MMOG to reach a million subscriptions?
Anything's possible. For that matter, if SWG had launched in the state of completion and polish that it had reached by its 1st anniversary, I think it would have been a lot more successful.
If the game had been developed to be more like the NGE to begin with, then i think we would have seen a repeat of what happened with FFXIV 1.0, it would have failed, probably even more spectacularly, the real problem with SWG was that they failed to fix the game, they had the basis of a great game, that needed fleshing out and bug fixing, it didn't need changing, all that happened, by adding Jedi, and then levels, and then the whole game rewrite, was the equivalent, of a car spinning off the road into a tree (jedi) catching fire (CU) and then being crushed in a wrecking yard (NGE).
The worst part of all, is that SOE/LA had plenty of warning that this would happen, but they chose to ignore all the feedback from the test servers, because you know, what do players know about games, they obviously knew better, result, an oil leaking cube of crushed metal.
SWG might have achieved the status of Eve Online, but greed blinded certain people to reality, it always does
in my work experience 99% of major work related mess up can be traced back to management poor knowledge .
whenever an idea comes out there always that annoying manager who will suddenly come up and twist it into an "amazing" idea and eventually mess it up.
it happens in all industries sadly.
only managers i met worth their salt are ones who actually came up in the ranks of that particular field.sadly,incompetent managers hire other incompetent manager and the chain just continues .
i am willing to bet the "boss" who approached him was not smed because for all smed faults he actually understands the industry he works in.
How popular do you think SWG would have become if it had been designed more like NGE in the first place? Would it have become the first MMOG to reach a million subscriptions?
For me personally, I don't like themeparks, I like sandboxes wherer I can enjoy my own content instead of being on a gear treadmill.
That said: I liked SWG for the fact that I love Star Wars -the original saga-, I like playing my own role in that 'universe', I don't want the be THE hero the galaxy is waiting for, yes I liked to be that unknown moisture farmer trying to make a few bucks on Tatooine or be that new Bounty Hunter on the block. I didn't want to be Boba Fett.
So the NGE was a fatal killer for me.
Apart from that SWG lacked severely, unfinished content, massive lag, not enough new content released, poor customer support and blatant lies by management. You know the history.
SWG would have been a success for me if it had a Galactic Civil War that worked, and some dungeons and being a complete themepark on a full server. 500k subs or 500M, I don't care.
This is the thing, UO & AC proved sandbox games weren't as popular as the themeparks, though even EQ lacked the structure of what came later. The NGE would never have existed without WoW.
I enjoyed SWG for the same reasons you did, but I also accept the fact that it was as big as it would ever be. I like a lot of types of games, even within the MMO genre and the reality is, the average or majority of the MMO market, prefers structured gameplay.
Im trying to understand why a game has to grow? Once you get your core audience why cant you just be pleased with that? MMOs failed when they started chasing the subscription number for the sole purpose of having more subscriptions. As someone said earlier... its greed, plain and simple.
I would have been completely contented had SWG just stuck with the CU form of the game and added stuff like the Heroics, the GCW, etc along the way...I thought the game was more than fine at that point...in fact I loved it...I was in a thriving Guild on Flurry and we were having a blast grinding to Jedi together...We really were having a great time...Hunting groups constantly going...Everyone running at least 2 accounts...Crafting...Space...The Village Quests...It was fine...And it would have been much more than fine compared to the mess the NGE caused...
The NGE killed SWG for me because it caused 15 of my 20 best friends on the game to quit...3/4...Yep...Gone...Not saying everyone would have stayed forever...but still...I was actually sad...It was depressing...Walking through my city that only 2 weeks before was hopping with action, only to find a ghost town...Ugh...And even worse...They were gone for good...Most never came back even years later when the NGE had a little spike... People can say what they will about the PreCu...But all I care about is my friends made it through the CU conversion without a problem and were perfectly content logging on every single day...Up until day #1 of the NGE of course...Then they disappeared...
The game was never even close to perfect...But who cares? I certainly didn't...Most of my Guild didn't...It had such amazing character and personality on it's own...It was always going to be a niche game anyway...An amazing niche game...It could have grown just fine and easily sustained respectable sub numbers had they just continued to build on the CU...
Comments
It's because hardcore fans count themselves as five.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Actually it was/would be that easy.
The only large expense for MMO development is writing new code. And if they had launched a server with only existing code up to that point, which they had, on servers they already had, it would have cost them essentially nothing.
After that, have 1 junior dev/GM per server and you are set. Even a paltry 5k subs (and there would have likely been more) for the 2 servers would have generated $75k per month which would have been more than enough cashflow to justify doing it.
But even beyond that, it would have gone a long way to mitigating the reputation hit that SOE took from long time paying customers, that had the NGE dropped on them. How many of those people will not buy another SOE product to this day? More than a few. (Companies with actual leadership that know what they are doing, are concerned about "reputation management" as much as anything else, but not so with SOE.)
I have to agree it was more about ego than anything else, SOE/LA management "knew" they were "right" and everyone else's opinion counted for nothing, especially the paying customers.
No one (who is rational) ever believed SWG had that many subs.
It is possible that SWG got into the range of "2 million units sold" at some point, SOE announced they had sold over 1 mil sometime after JTL.
But that is not the same thing as concurrent subs, obviously.
If the game had been developed to be more like the NGE to begin with, then i think we would have seen a repeat of what happened with FFXIV 1.0, it would have failed, probably even more spectacularly, the real problem with SWG was that they failed to fix the game, they had the basis of a great game, that needed fleshing out and bug fixing, it didn't need changing, all that happened, by adding Jedi, and then levels, and then the whole game rewrite, was the equivalent, of a car spinning off the road into a tree (jedi) catching fire (CU) and then being crushed in a wrecking yard (NGE).
The worst part of all, is that SOE/LA had plenty of warning that this would happen, but they chose to ignore all the feedback from the test servers, because you know, what do players know about games, they obviously knew better, result, an oil leaking cube of crushed metal.
SWG might have achieved the status of Eve Online, but greed blinded certain people to reality, it always does
in my work experience 99% of major work related mess up can be traced back to management poor knowledge .
whenever an idea comes out there always that annoying manager who will suddenly come up and twist it into an "amazing" idea and eventually mess it up.
it happens in all industries sadly.
only managers i met worth their salt are ones who actually came up in the ranks of that particular field.sadly,incompetent managers hire other incompetent manager and the chain just continues .
i am willing to bet the "boss" who approached him was not smed because for all smed faults he actually understands the industry he works in.
Im trying to understand why a game has to grow? Once you get your core audience why cant you just be pleased with that? MMOs failed when they started chasing the subscription number for the sole purpose of having more subscriptions. As someone said earlier... its greed, plain and simple.
Save us Kickstarter, you're our only hope...
I would have been completely contented had SWG just stuck with the CU form of the game and added stuff like the Heroics, the GCW, etc along the way...I thought the game was more than fine at that point...in fact I loved it...I was in a thriving Guild on Flurry and we were having a blast grinding to Jedi together...We really were having a great time...Hunting groups constantly going...Everyone running at least 2 accounts...Crafting...Space...The Village Quests...It was fine...And it would have been much more than fine compared to the mess the NGE caused...
The NGE killed SWG for me because it caused 15 of my 20 best friends on the game to quit...3/4...Yep...Gone...Not saying everyone would have stayed forever...but still...I was actually sad...It was depressing...Walking through my city that only 2 weeks before was hopping with action, only to find a ghost town...Ugh...And even worse...They were gone for good...Most never came back even years later when the NGE had a little spike... People can say what they will about the PreCu...But all I care about is my friends made it through the CU conversion without a problem and were perfectly content logging on every single day...Up until day #1 of the NGE of course...Then they disappeared...
The game was never even close to perfect...But who cares? I certainly didn't...Most of my Guild didn't...It had such amazing character and personality on it's own...It was always going to be a niche game anyway...An amazing niche game...It could have grown just fine and easily sustained respectable sub numbers had they just continued to build on the CU...
But anyway...