A lot of it comes down to how the company reacts when the downturn starts.
Everquest II for example doubled down on multiple bad design decisions, insisting they were right. They never took the feedback of disgruntled players into account, listened primarily to a vocal minority of the community that said "This is fine they're just whining" and insisted on putting short term gains over long term retention. The original Everquest is still considered by many who chose to stick around to be the superior game, despite being equally flawed due to bad decisions and a failure to course-correct.
Rift is another one where the Devs doubled down on bad decisions, put the cart before the horse, and then sold themselves to Gamigo, leading ot the games' inevitable doom.
What developers need to do when fans say there is a huge problem, and start leaving because of it, is choose at that point to take the players seriously and consider course-correcting. The players of your game are not just credit cards with feet, they are people, and they tend to know their own feelings pretty well.
Live Service games like Marvel's Avengers stand no chance at recovery if they continue to try to monetize through "box" sales + microtransactions. They will have turned off enough of the original players with the early problems and lose the potential for others to buy-in with all of the bad reviews/press. One of the only ways to pivot is to flip to FTP so that you give more people a reason to "give it a try" and switch monetization to game passes, paid expansions, and/or cosmetics (which they do have).
I personally liked the single-player content for Avengers and played the campaign, but the multiplayer was a slog and probably stopped playing a few weeks after release. Almost nothing they have added since has been interesting enough for me to try again.
Cannot say I have seen either an exit survey or a why don't you play anymore survey in a long time. Guess the developers already know why I don't play their game any more. Telepathy alive and well, who would have known /s
Ha! Whose definition of 'failing' This community? Many predict failure within 36 hours of launch...no scratch that...before launch. They get it right sometimes of course. MMOs are a complicated business and many will fail. Doesn't take much predicting, although, they'll post about how right they are.
Well saying something has failed is not a precise defintion. People all have there own view on what failure looks like. Somethings can be a success to one person and a failure to another depending on the viewpoint.
Maybe your standards are just really really low?
In the last 5 years, my guess is the people predicting the latest MMO to be a failure have overwhelmingly been right. Are MMO's that shuts down within a few years or close before it release successful in your definition?
Lets look at some of the top "arguable successes" recently.
Diablo Immortal: Made a bunch of money early on, not as much as was predicted, however metacritic user rating is only .3 yeah thats like 2% positives. Success? depends on your definition.
New World: Jeff Bezos said New world was a success at launch, then 5 months later fired the executive in charge because it lost 99.9% of its playerbase. Now the lead designer has left/fired. Was this success? Depends on your definition I guess, its a grey area. But if it was a resounding overall success I would bet the lead dev and executive would still be there.
Lost Ark: ratings on steam - 27% recently, 71% overall Most would probably say this is a success. For me personally I would call this failure, any game that gets less than a very positive rating, for me is gernerally too low for my standards so for me thats failure.
So yeah if you think MMO's have been really successful in the last 5 years, more likely than not your standards are much lower than the vast majority of gamers.
Hard to get a 2nd impression. Only 2 MMO's I know of to really come back from the brink are FFXIV and Albion Online (sort of).
New world has a core game loop problem and its minor resurgence despite the tons of money they are throwing at this game is only temporary and as steamcharts is showing its dropping down quickly again. Expect more server merges.
Why do people think they can change the trajectory of a game without changing the fundemental problems causing its demise? Until the devs can figure out what the public actually wants, these games will continue to death spiral.
What do you think Albion Online changed to make the come back? I have heard about them adding more PvE, but that's about it.
They went F2P and now have more of a cash store ie cosmetics.
I don't know about many times. I think staying alive is hardly considered recovering.
What I hate to see are games that just sit in maintenance mode with maybe one "major content update" a year or something, and it's usually like 5 hours of content they try to stretch for weeks.
I loved that game and Earth & Beyond were played at the same time by me along with Anarchy Online. I was really into the sifi mmo's. I always look at the company running these games as a big issue. Wildstar would be still running if the devs didn't make the choice it being focused on raids.
mmos issues are that no one wants that grind of old time eq . no one has time nor the patience to wait a couple of days at a camp that takes forever to spawn . the kids today dont want to work for it , they need it all handed to them . and the paywalls are dumb you buy the software at release then they soak you with expansions which contain nothing and are very expensive.
Zero new ideas also . New world only works if the games servers are full and the 3 factions have the correct amount of folks in each so one color cant dominate the map as we see in the game now.
New world has no real direction. and at some point the devs will understand that in an mmo no one wants to really pvp all the time. pve is what sells the game.
New world just saw smedly leave . I mean that guy has ruined how many games now?
companies seem to think that just because a guy has messed up so many other games he wont do that to us . well he did.
I really wanted to love new world but here we are.
I play guild waRS 2 ITS JUST OK . gets boring pretty fast .
Nothing ground breaking .
take eq they have such low populations that there is no run thru starting from level 1 without buying accounts or platinum.the buying and selling of in game items for real cash is also the dethknell. when third parties are selling and buying accounts and items that goes against the eula just to ppay a game. you also to thrive in eq right now is to multi box. normally with another third pasrty program which now they have decided to ban folks for using after years of turning a blind eye.
so the devs create a system that will be circumvented once they allow thrid party websites to buy and sell . to play eq right now will cost you about 200 bucks just to buy a naked account thats at level 120 . so for that money you stop needing what the game has to offer .
lost ark same thing . pay to win period ... so when a dev makes a better game that fits into the current century then the mmos will be packed once again . but pvp and paywalls will never help
Honestly, I do think people are just tired of the same ol stuff.
...
Just look at some of the long time MMO games still running. Minus WoW & FFXIV, you still have people playing games like Destiny 2, Warframe, POE, etc. They all entered the market not confined by whatever time the cookie cutter was.
This. So much this. While mobile is a different scenario - one where you basically print money with the latest evolution of Mafia Wars or Evony - on PC, the ones that stand the test of time are the ones that break from the old EQ/WOW formula.
That formula being race-based, class-restricted, level-progression, raid-focused graphical DikuMUDs where every other gameplay option is either half-assed, barely a priority, or based on combat level.
The MMORPGs that deviate from that, especially the ones that rarely use the term 'MMORPG', have a better chance of avoiding failure in the first place. IMO, FFX IV and SWTOR recovered because they listened to what their core players said they wanted, built for it, and delivered it.
The cookie cutter EQ/WOW variants will repeatedly fail for no other reason than people played that game before a hundred times, and nothing new is going to be able to deliver 10 years worth of content in 5 years of development and have the content, quality, or community of EQ or WOW.
-- Whammy - a 64x64 miniRPG - RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right? - FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
Comments
Everquest II for example doubled down on multiple bad design decisions, insisting they were right. They never took the feedback of disgruntled players into account, listened primarily to a vocal minority of the community that said "This is fine they're just whining" and insisted on putting short term gains over long term retention. The original Everquest is still considered by many who chose to stick around to be the superior game, despite being equally flawed due to bad decisions and a failure to course-correct.
Rift is another one where the Devs doubled down on bad decisions, put the cart before the horse, and then sold themselves to Gamigo, leading ot the games' inevitable doom.
What developers need to do when fans say there is a huge problem, and start leaving because of it, is choose at that point to take the players seriously and consider course-correcting. The players of your game are not just credit cards with feet, they are people, and they tend to know their own feelings pretty well.
I personally liked the single-player content for Avengers and played the campaign, but the multiplayer was a slog and probably stopped playing a few weeks after release. Almost nothing they have added since has been interesting enough for me to try again.
Well saying something has failed is not a precise defintion. People all have there own view on what failure looks like. Somethings can be a success to one person and a failure to another depending on the viewpoint.
Maybe your standards are just really really low?
In the last 5 years, my guess is the people predicting the latest MMO to be a failure have overwhelmingly been right. Are MMO's that shuts down within a few years or close before it release successful in your definition?
Lets look at some of the top "arguable successes" recently.
Diablo Immortal: Made a bunch of money early on, not as much as was predicted, however metacritic user rating is only .3 yeah thats like 2% positives. Success? depends on your definition.
New World: Jeff Bezos said New world was a success at launch, then 5 months later fired the executive in charge because it lost 99.9% of its playerbase. Now the lead designer has left/fired. Was this success? Depends on your definition I guess, its a grey area. But if it was a resounding overall success I would bet the lead dev and executive would still be there.
Lost Ark: ratings on steam - 27% recently, 71% overall
Most would probably say this is a success. For me personally I would call this failure, any game that gets less than a very positive rating, for me is gernerally too low for my standards so for me thats failure.
So yeah if you think MMO's have been really successful in the last 5 years, more likely than not your standards are much lower than the vast majority of gamers.
They went F2P and now have more of a cash store ie cosmetics.
mmorpg junkie since 1999
What I hate to see are games that just sit in maintenance mode with maybe one "major content update" a year or something, and it's usually like 5 hours of content they try to stretch for weeks.
That's no way to recover
I loved that game and Earth & Beyond were played at the same time by me along with Anarchy Online. I was really into the sifi mmo's. I always look at the company running these games as a big issue. Wildstar would be still running if the devs didn't make the choice it being focused on raids.
mmos issues are that no one wants that grind of old time eq . no one has time nor the patience to wait a couple of days at a camp that takes forever to spawn . the kids today dont want to work for it , they need it all handed to them . and the paywalls are dumb you buy the software at release then they soak you with expansions which contain nothing and are very expensive.
Zero new ideas also . New world only works if the games servers are full and the 3 factions have the correct amount of folks in each so one color cant dominate the map as we see in the game now.
New world has no real direction. and at some point the devs will understand that in an mmo no one wants to really pvp all the time. pve is what sells the game.
New world just saw smedly leave . I mean that guy has ruined how many games now?
companies seem to think that just because a guy has messed up so many other games he wont do that to us . well he did.
I really wanted to love new world but here we are.
I play guild waRS 2 ITS JUST OK . gets boring pretty fast .
Nothing ground breaking .
take eq they have such low populations that there is no run thru starting from level 1 without buying accounts or platinum.the buying and selling of in game items for real cash is also the dethknell. when third parties are selling and buying accounts and items that goes against the eula just to ppay a game. you also to thrive in eq right now is to multi box. normally with another third pasrty program which now they have decided to ban folks for using after years of turning a blind eye.
so the devs create a system that will be circumvented once they allow thrid party websites to buy and sell . to play eq right now will cost you about 200 bucks just to buy a naked account thats at level 120 . so for that money you stop needing what the game has to offer .
lost ark same thing . pay to win period ... so when a dev makes a better game that fits into the current century then the mmos will be packed once again . but pvp and paywalls will never help
That formula being race-based, class-restricted, level-progression, raid-focused graphical DikuMUDs where every other gameplay option is either half-assed, barely a priority, or based on combat level.
The MMORPGs that deviate from that, especially the ones that rarely use the term 'MMORPG', have a better chance of avoiding failure in the first place. IMO, FFX IV and SWTOR recovered because they listened to what their core players said they wanted, built for it, and delivered it.
The cookie cutter EQ/WOW variants will repeatedly fail for no other reason than people played that game before a hundred times, and nothing new is going to be able to deliver 10 years worth of content in 5 years of development and have the content, quality, or community of EQ or WOW.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?