So developers should be encouraged by the potential revenue they could earn should they launch with the best possible combination of High Quality Design and F2P.
You really need an "in theory" tag.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
I strongly disagree with Rift. Rift did well initially because of a massive PR campaign and it was indeed fun initially. Rift's descent started long before defiance and EoN. It was in fairly sharp decline by month 3 from a retention standpoint, but the PR was able to keep new players coming for a while.
Rift was the game to have most blatantly copied WoW, it was clearly built with WoW as a starting point. But what it didnt have was the well developed game world WoW had. people werent in Azeroth, they were in blandsville. The class system gave players lots of choice but also gave the classes a huge lack of depth and identity. Go dig up favorite MMO class/spec posts and see just how little rift shows up despite being one of the most tried MMORPGs of recent times.
And Trion got desperate, throwing out tons of ideas in hopes some would stick. A halfassed AA system. Hardmode dungeons of which i think a total of 2 got released. Chronicles. Three faction PvP in a two faction game world (right at the same time a major 3 faction game was releasing). And the one idea that stuck and got expanded on? Mindless quest grinding without the quest text or running to quest givers. yes, Instant Adventures, perhaps the most mindless idea to come to an MMORPG in years, was what stuck. Says as much about the current playerbase as it does for Trion really.
What that says to me is Trion never had a clear vision with Rift. It was simply trying to make a better WoW.
The two most successful post WoW MMORPGs are probably GW2 and FFXIV. GW2 may have been a little shaky in its vision, but it certainly did not try to build upon any one game. It tried a fresh take on the genre. FFXIV failed initially, but then it settled on a themepark formula but with an old school slant where things needed to be earned. And again, FFXIV feels like its own unique game. Sure, its a themepark, but its obviously not WoW. Its influenced by WoW of course, but its not used as a base.
I get your points on Rift, and I don't even think I can argue what you are saying. But what I am trying to say is that there are examples of successful Post-WoW Theme Parks. People will play them.
But I am also saying that it doesn't have to be innovative and new. It can be like WoW and still work if the design is engaging. Most of what I have seen hasn't been.
The problem with GW2's design vision, is that they didn't have a foundation for what they wanted to create as much as they had a foundation for what they didn't want to create. ANET tried too hard to not be WoW.
Square Enix had a chance to beat WoW with FFXIV but they shirked everything that made the latest FFXI patches so good. A modern FFXI type MMORPG with great graphics and expanded gameplay would have killed it.
We need a great group oriented long term MMO that doesn't cater to the instant gratification crowd and instead focuses on harder to achieve goals and a dependence on teammates and skill.
I honestly dont' know how beating wow have anything to do with it.
There are already tones of mmorpg out there. Just look at the list on this site.
People just think everything is a wow clone, because FF14, swtor, ESO is.
Like how LOTRO's revenue doubled after going F2P. (The actual long-run multiplier will tend to be less than 2x -- as that was a comparison against LOTRO's subscriber base after decaying quite a while after launch -- but the multiplier is still well above 1x)
LOTRO is also almost dead now.
There is no right or wrong answer. If there is a right answer, every restaurant in the world would be the same.
That is also the reason why this topic is here. People want choices. As great as Wow is, people dont' believe there should be so many "Wow clone".
Like how LOTRO's revenue doubled after going F2P. (The actual long-run multiplier will tend to be less than 2x -- as that was a comparison against LOTRO's subscriber base after decaying quite a while after launch -- but the multiplier is still well above 1x)
LOTRO is also almost dead now.
There is no right or wrong answer. If there is a right answer, every restaurant in the world would be the same.
That is also the reason why this topic is here. People want choices. As great as Wow is, people dont' believe there should be so many "Wow clone".
I don't believe WoW was really ever successfully cloned. Cheap knockoffs maybe.
I think devs with deeper pockets (like EA) should mimic Blizz. The reason why Blizz games are so good (essentially every game they put out is a hit .. except may be HOTS) is that they iterate many times, try many things, and are not shy to throw away what is not working (like Titan).
Sure, if you don't have a deep pocket, you can't mimic Blizz .. but they are not the only company that makes lots of money out there. I bet Riot Games can do what Blizz has done if they want to.
Sure, if the companies that could afford to be this dedicated to tinkering and releasing newer and more solid experiences that would be great for both pushing the genre as well as giving people better products.
Problem is that's a very subjective thing to follow and it's influenced heavily by how hard some companies chase numbers. The release of Diablo 3 is still a good example of this, as it's a title that got many sales off company and brand alone. It was marketed and hyped to hell, and then the playerbase just kept shrinking and shrinking once people actually experienced it. Once the lead dev changed and the team prioritized the redevelopment of many of the title's features is when it finally took off as the experience that people have much more stably enjoyed.
Starcraft 2 was shown to have similar issues with it's userbase because of the weaker story, recycled plot points, and unexpected limitations of the editor and multiplayer tools for battlenet. It took a long time for those aspects to be refined and rebuilt into things that are usable on the same scale that we saw in SC1 and WC3.
Titan is an interesting one because the core systems were not actually bad, the creative direction was simply falling flat.
This is why I generally state that Blizzard is successful in spite of themselves. Under any other circumstance they would be seen as a company wasting tons of money on projects going nowhere. Essentially in the same boat as SOE/Daybreak. The saving grace is that they have a much stronger presence in gaming, they cemented themselves in popular culture, and they can rely on products that deliver plenty of income to fund their otherwise lacking practices.
EA is very unlikely to ever follow such behavior because they are considerably more minded for profit and they don't have properly equivalent crutches.
Riot ends up falling into this same scenario as far as examples goes. They struck early and heard and the thing they do best is marketing, not game development. The game hasn't dramatically evolved or changed, and Riot primarily depends on the launch of new characters and the perpetual media of MLG/competition and marketing. The biggest thing from Riot recently was that Project event, which was rather literally skin packs for characters, but it had enough hype around it that people were chattering everywhere. If Riot tried to extend their finances elsewhere they'd have to spend a long time trying to develop a game design that would be marketable, which they have not shown they can do that beyond the niche the built out of LoL. As such, it's more of a gamble that they'd be losing money on something that wouldn't provide a sufficient return.
So...yes, if the companies that are big enough wished to push things the way Blizz does they certainly could do so, but that doesn't change that it's not necessarily a good business strategy in the first place nor that the developers will be delivering better experiences.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
I get your points on Rift, and I don't even think I can argue what you are saying. But what I am trying to say is that there are examples of successful Post-WoW Theme Parks. People will play them.
But I am also saying that it doesn't have to be innovative and new. It can be like WoW and still work if the design is engaging. Most of what I have seen hasn't been.
The problem with GW2's design vision, is that they didn't have a foundation for what they wanted to create as much as they had a foundation for what they didn't want to create. ANET tried too hard to not be WoW.
Definitely agree on your second and third paragraphs. FFXIV didn't reinvent anything besides itself. And it works. GW2 never clicked for me. But it does have its audience.
I think there are a lot of companies that don't fully understand the player base and the genre Wildstar is a perfect example. I feel there *is* a market out there for hardcore still. But hardcore is more about long time commitments, and they designed the game in a style that goes against long play times. Busy, twitchy, non immersive combat. Screen constantly spitting stuff at you. This doesnt mix well with hardcore. Its a shame because there was actually more care put into their world than most games.
Sure, if the companies that could afford to be this dedicated to tinkering and releasing newer and more solid experiences that would be great for both pushing the genre as well as giving people better products.
Problem is that's a very subjective thing to follow and it's influenced heavily by how hard some companies chase numbers. The release of Diablo 3 is still a good example of this, as it's a title that got many sales off company and brand alone. It was marketed and hyped to hell, and then the playerbase just kept shrinking and shrinking once people actually experienced it. Once the lead dev changed and the team prioritized the redevelopment of many of the title's features is when it finally took off as the experience that people have much more stably enjoyed.
So...yes, if the companies that are big enough wished to push things the way Blizz does they certainly could do so, but that doesn't change that it's not necessarily a good business strategy in the first place nor that the developers will be delivering better experiences.
I would argue that what Blizz did with D3 is not a problem .. but great game dev. They were not afraid to admit that the real money AH did not work, and completely changed the game after RoS (which obviously is great).
And each patch after that makes the game better. Few companies can do that kind of iteration. The only other example may be Marvel Heroes (launch was meh, also bad scores on metacritic, and the 2015 version fixed everything with a 80+ metacritics score). I suppose MH can do that because marvel fans (which obviously is a big fan base) stick with the game.
I think the point you are trying to make (just do it better in the first place) is not always possible. Devs are not omnipotent, and i guess many just don't know exactly what works, or what combination of things work. The only way to find out what works is by experimentation and iteration, and that is what Blizz is willing to do (and it is not cheap).
The polish in their games is not done by being clever. It is done by hard work. Again, try again, test, and iterate. I remember a GDC talk where a Blizz dev is talking about trying different ways just to make sure the players input is processed in a way that feels fluid and responsive. I couldn't believe the amount of trial and error (and work) going into such a simple thing. But that is blizz.
There is no right or wrong answer. If there is a right answer, every restaurant in the world would be the same.
That is also the reason why this topic is here. People want choices. As great as Wow is, people dont' believe there should be so many "Wow clone".
When it comes to business model, virtually all evidence across many many games (not just LOTRO) supports the fact that F2P is the stronger model. This is not a question where "there is no right or wrong answer". The clear answer in virtually every case is that F2P is superior. DDO and LOTRO posted huge revenue improvements, and nearly all of the emerging financial successes in games over the last 5 years have been F2P.
As for restaurants, nearly all restaurants do use the same business model: "Pay for what you get". Hardly any restaurants break from that format, with the only significant variation being whether you pay for it before or after getting the food.
As for "choice"?
Blizzard Bakeries saw that pizza (MMORPG) was a fairly popular food. Many of them enjoyed eating pizza too.
They didn't change the basic recipe all that much, but they improved on it substantially with expert chefs and high-quality ingredients.
This caused their pizza place to be incredibly successful.
Other companies assumed that the reason Blizzard was successful was because they chose to make a pizza place, or because their pizza menu was green.
In reality the success was driven only a little bit by being a pizza place (pizza is a popular food) but was mostly driven by their decisions that led to an extremely high-quality product.
The other companies created enough bad pizza places that some began to wonder if pizza was just a bad food -- but of course that wasn't it at all. Pizza is fine, but you can't expect much success if you never create a better pizza than what Blizzard Bakeries provided.
That's about where the food analogy has to stop though, as it doesn't capture the fundamental consumption of entertainment: you might choose to periodically enjoy pizza once every couple weeks for your entire life, but it's unlikely you'll choose to watch Star Wars every couple weeks for your entire life.
The pattern itself is what's consumed with entertainment, and while you can go back several times to suck the juice out of a really juicy entertainment product, eventually it gets sucked dry...whoops, back to food analogies. I really should order delivery and drive home from work already!
Anyway, the main points were these: while it's a somewhatimportant decision what type of restaurant you choose (a brussels sprouts restaurant isn't likely to do better than a pizza place), it's an extremely important decision that your product is high quality. So your assumption that anyone is asking for only pizza places kind of misses the "quality, quality, quality, quality!" point I've been trying to make for the last several posts.
Quality is a large (probably the largest) reason why Blizzard games do so well. (And when they don't do as well, as with HotS, it's usually also because of quality. HotS is good solid fun, but it's not pushing-the-quality-bar-amazing like Blizzard's better titles.) Other factors matter too (we covered genre selection) but things like UA (advertising) aren't really what this thread is about and aren't a differentiating factor to Blizzard's success (a lot of companies have tried through millions of dollars into advertising, but none of them got the same mileage as Blizzard.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Square Enix had a chance to beat WoW with FFXIV but they shirked everything that made the latest FFXI patches so good. A modern FFXI type MMORPG with great graphics and expanded gameplay would have killed it.
We need a great group oriented long term MMO that doesn't cater to the instant gratification crowd and instead focuses on harder to achieve goals and a dependence on teammates and skill.
Yes you do need an MMO that is more Group FOCUSED than the current SOLO crap that is out there. But you cannot go back to the Days of EQ1 or FFXI, you cannot that type of game will not last. You need something like WOW was in its first 4 years. Yes you could solo to max level, however you didnt learn your class, and you wouldnt progress at all. You also need to add in that you get more EXP by grouping rather than soloing. You cannot have a FFXI game because for example if you have a person like me who averages about 10 hours a week in MMO, 2 to 4 hours during the week is all I have time for and its 45 to 90 minutes so forced grouping will not work. Now you also shouldnt have LFD tools like WOW, a FFXIV Party Finder is good. The problem is if I only have 45 minutes I might just spend that time doing some solo stuff and calling it a night. When I have the most time on weekends I am grouping. So you need some mix, but you do need to reward grouping a lot more.
I'll admit, I only read the first few posts in this thread. That said, I don't play WoW. I played for years on private servers up until around Burning Legion first came out. Beyond that, I'll say, I'd kinda LIKE to play WoW now, but I know the basic game and I don't wanna shell out money for 20 or so expansion packs in order to play current content. So however good WoW may or may not be, it's dead to me until WoW 2 comes out.
I would argue that what Blizz did with D3 is not a problem .. but great game dev. They were not afraid to admit that the real money AH did not work, and completely changed the game after RoS (which obviously is great).
Yes, and that only happened after the game lead changed hands and the team was forced to refocus on the problems the players were complaining about. It's good that Blizzard can respond to problems, and it's good that they constantly test and tweak things, but that's again a scenario that only works for a company that can afford to fail a ton of times and lose a bunch of money in prototyping things before getting something right to release.
And that's not even a constant, as we have seen the last few Blizzard launches with more issues or questionable standards (again hence why they'd have anything to own up to for the mistakes and problems of D3's launch).
It's good and bad. They do what they do and reach the success they do because they can afford the cost it takes to reach that far. It's again why any other company is just not prepared to pull off that kind of design philosophy.
Like taking Axe's analogy. Sure it's great that a company spends the effort to make a higher quality pizza, but to think another company can rock in and waste their budget scrapping 500 pizzas for every one good one they deliver, is irrational. Unless you have the budget to lose, it's not a good development model.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Square Enix had a chance to beat WoW with FFXIV but they shirked everything that made the latest FFXI patches so good. A modern FFXI type MMORPG with great graphics and expanded gameplay would have killed it.
We need a great group oriented long term MMO that doesn't cater to the instant gratification crowd and instead focuses on harder to achieve goals and a dependence on teammates and skill.
If Square had taken the best of XI and mashed it with what modern gamers wanted they would of made a great MMO (this is what XIV was destined to be if not for the suits pushing it out long before it was ready), instead they put some know nothing guy in charge who copied wow point for point and have low player numbers leading to them triple dipping players with a horrible cash shop in a p2p game.
I'm disgusted with the lost opportunity and the lies and misleading rubbish they resort to in order to make their failure appear to be a success. Players regularly say that XIV is a success when SWTOR and ESO had better sub numbers.
XIV gets more updates to the cash shop than the actual game.
I'll admit, I only read the first few posts in this thread. That said, I don't play WoW. I played for years on private servers up until around Burning Legion first came out. Beyond that, I'll say, I'd kinda LIKE to play WoW now, but I know the basic game and I don't wanna shell out money for 20 or so expansion packs in order to play current content. So however good WoW may or may not be, it's dead to me until WoW 2 comes out.
You know what really amazes me about Blizzard is they let so many private servers run and take players and money from them. I can't understand why they are so easy going when they could shut them down in a day.
Regardless of what people think about WoW, it's still the best MMO out right now. Like others have said, incompetence, lack of vision and quickly cranking out junk is what's wrong with MMO's right now.
I'll admit, I only read the first few posts in this thread. That said, I don't play WoW. I played for years on private servers up until around Burning Legion first came out. Beyond that, I'll say, I'd kinda LIKE to play WoW now, but I know the basic game and I don't wanna shell out money for 20 or so expansion packs in order to play current content. So however good WoW may or may not be, it's dead to me until WoW 2 comes out.
You know what really amazes me about Blizzard is they let so many private servers run and take players and money from them. I can't understand why they are so easy going when they could shut them down in a day.
Cause just because someone plays on a private server does not mean if they all magically disappeared one day all them people would go play on the offical servers.
There is no right or wrong answer. If there is a right answer, every restaurant in the world would be the same.
That is also the reason why this topic is here. People want choices. As great as Wow is, people dont' believe there should be so many "Wow clone".
When it comes to business model, virtually all evidence across many many games (not just LOTRO) supports the fact that F2P is the stronger model. This is not a question where "there is no right or wrong answer". The clear answer in virtually every case is that F2P is superior. DDO and LOTRO posted huge revenue improvements, and nearly all of the emerging financial successes in games over the last 5 years have been F2P.
I don't know that the evidence is clear.
LOTRO is a game where a large portion of its players werent giving sub money due to the lifetime subscriptions. It needed to do something due to a poor decision at launch.
If the game is performing poorly as a sub game, then yes a switch to f2p or freemium will likely help. However, if a game with the sub model is doing well (WoW, FFXIV) than sub model does just well.
Also, i wouldnt consider most freemium games f2p. SWTOR, EQ/EQ2...these games are primarily sub games. They just have a f2p option which allows them to get away with a bigger cash shop, but i would consider them sub games at heart. And this ultimately is probably the most profitable model. You get the steady income of subs, along with the sales of gambling packs (swtor) or housing stuff (eq2). While swtor probably gets whales that buy stuff in bulk, eq2 is a bit friendlier because it doesnt have the gambling element (unless it was added recently). Still, its extra money on top of the subs. And the f2p option draws fresh blood in.
I'll admit, I only read the first few posts in this thread. That said, I don't play WoW. I played for years on private servers up until around Burning Legion first came out. Beyond that, I'll say, I'd kinda LIKE to play WoW now, but I know the basic game and I don't wanna shell out money for 20 or so expansion packs in order to play current content. So however good WoW may or may not be, it's dead to me until WoW 2 comes out.
You know what really amazes me about Blizzard is they let so many private servers run and take players and money from them. I can't understand why they are so easy going when they could shut them down in a day.
Shutting down private servers angers people.
For instance, for all the hate SoE and Smed got, he was well aware of certain servers/projects and was pretty obvious about his support for them even if he had to be a little cryptic with that support. And i bet because of that EQ still gets some business by people playing both versions.
IMPORTANT: Please keep all replies to my posts about GAMING. Please no negative or backhanded comments directed at me personally. If you are going to post a reply that includes how you feel about me, please don't bother replying & just ignore my post instead. I'm on this forum to talk about GAMING. Thank you.
There is no right or wrong answer. If there is a right answer, every restaurant in the world would be the same.
That is also the reason why this topic is here. People want choices. As great as Wow is, people dont' believe there should be so many "Wow clone".
When it comes to business model, virtually all evidence across many many games (not just LOTRO) supports the fact that F2P is the stronger model. This is not a question where "there is no right or wrong answer". The clear answer in virtually every case is that F2P is superior. DDO and LOTRO posted huge revenue improvements, and nearly all of the emerging financial successes in games over the last 5 years have been F2P.
That is why we have this topic. Not everyone want the same thing.
No one is arguing F2P is a great model, in fact arguable superior to subscription. But there are "still" people that want different things. That is why you have wow, lineage, Eve, FF11, FF14.
All I'm saying is if 90% of the people want certain things, 10% want different things. You can try target the 10% market instead of fighting with other company on the 90% market.
LOTRO is a game where a large portion of its players werent giving sub money due to the lifetime subscriptions. It needed to do something due to a poor decision at launch.
If the game is performing poorly as a sub game, then yes a switch to f2p or freemium will likely help. However, if a game with the sub model is doing well (WoW, FFXIV) than sub model does just well.
Also, i wouldnt consider most freemium games f2p. SWTOR, EQ/EQ2...these games are primarily sub games. They just have a f2p option which allows them to get away with a bigger cash shop, but i would consider them sub games at heart. And this ultimately is probably the most profitable model. You get the steady income of subs, along with the sales of gambling packs (swtor) or housing stuff (eq2). While swtor probably gets whales that buy stuff in bulk, eq2 is a bit friendlier because it doesnt have the gambling element (unless it was added recently). Still, its extra money on top of the subs. And the f2p option draws fresh blood in.
F2P games topping this list at $946 million/year while high end titles like Madden 25 estimated to sell 5 million in the year (times $50 would be $250 million)
I welcome more evidence, of course. But thus far everything I've seen rather strongly points towards F2P's dominance.
This makes it a rather safe assumption that both WOW and FFXIV would make quite a lot more money as F2P titles.
F2P is free to play. Any game where the majority of gameplay is free to play is F2P. "Freemium" provides no useful distinction because the definitions of F2P and freemium are virtually identical, and even if there was a distinction it wouldn't matter because we're discussing F2P vs. P2P (eg the natural major split between business models.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You realize your examples are games that were all considered under-performing in terms of standards, some of which still are...
Lower standards doesn't matter as much for F2P and that lets them get a muh higher percentage of users that are ok playing a lower quality game because it's "free" (which in turn is the attractor for whales and such), but there is ultimately a plateau when it comes to game quality and garnered user base.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
F2P games topping this list at $946 million/year while high end titles like Madden 25 estimated to sell 5 million in the year (times $50 would be $250 million)
I welcome more evidence, of course. But thus far everything I've seen rather strongly points towards F2P's dominance.
This makes it a rather safe assumption that both WOW and FFXIV would make quite a lot more money as F2P titles.
F2P is free to play. Any game where the majority of gameplay is free to play is F2P. "Freemium" provides no useful distinction because the definitions of F2P and freemium are virtually identical, and even if there was a distinction it wouldn't matter because we're discussing F2P vs. P2P (eg the natural major split between business models.)
I'll ask a simple question. Do those games "sustain" their profit?
When games turn f2p, they'll have a "spurt" of new players. And their profit spike. That don't necessary mean it sustain.
Also a f2p games where the majority of the players pay subscription.... I'm not sure I should call it f2p. It just mean it have extended trial.
I'm not saying what you said is wrong. I'm just saying the "big" number is a bit misleading.
Comments
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
But I am also saying that it doesn't have to be innovative and new. It can be like WoW and still work if the design is engaging. Most of what I have seen hasn't been.
The problem with GW2's design vision, is that they didn't have a foundation for what they wanted to create as much as they had a foundation for what they didn't want to create. ANET tried too hard to not be WoW.
There are already tones of mmorpg out there. Just look at the list on this site.
People just think everything is a wow clone, because FF14, swtor, ESO is.
"This may hurt a little, but it's something you'll get used to. Relax....."
There is no right or wrong answer. If there is a right answer, every restaurant in the world would be the same.
That is also the reason why this topic is here. People want choices. As great as Wow is, people dont' believe there should be so many "Wow clone".
Cheap knockoffs maybe.
Sure, if the companies that could afford to be this dedicated to tinkering and releasing newer and more solid experiences that would be great for both pushing the genre as well as giving people better products.
Problem is that's a very subjective thing to follow and it's influenced heavily by how hard some companies chase numbers. The release of Diablo 3 is still a good example of this, as it's a title that got many sales off company and brand alone. It was marketed and hyped to hell, and then the playerbase just kept shrinking and shrinking once people actually experienced it. Once the lead dev changed and the team prioritized the redevelopment of many of the title's features is when it finally took off as the experience that people have much more stably enjoyed.
Starcraft 2 was shown to have similar issues with it's userbase because of the weaker story, recycled plot points, and unexpected limitations of the editor and multiplayer tools for battlenet. It took a long time for those aspects to be refined and rebuilt into things that are usable on the same scale that we saw in SC1 and WC3.
Titan is an interesting one because the core systems were not actually bad, the creative direction was simply falling flat.
This is why I generally state that Blizzard is successful in spite of themselves. Under any other circumstance they would be seen as a company wasting tons of money on projects going nowhere. Essentially in the same boat as SOE/Daybreak. The saving grace is that they have a much stronger presence in gaming, they cemented themselves in popular culture, and they can rely on products that deliver plenty of income to fund their otherwise lacking practices.
EA is very unlikely to ever follow such behavior because they are considerably more minded for profit and they don't have properly equivalent crutches.
Riot ends up falling into this same scenario as far as examples goes. They struck early and heard and the thing they do best is marketing, not game development. The game hasn't dramatically evolved or changed, and Riot primarily depends on the launch of new characters and the perpetual media of MLG/competition and marketing. The biggest thing from Riot recently was that Project event, which was rather literally skin packs for characters, but it had enough hype around it that people were chattering everywhere. If Riot tried to extend their finances elsewhere they'd have to spend a long time trying to develop a game design that would be marketable, which they have not shown they can do that beyond the niche the built out of LoL. As such, it's more of a gamble that they'd be losing money on something that wouldn't provide a sufficient return.
So...yes, if the companies that are big enough wished to push things the way Blizz does they certainly could do so, but that doesn't change that it's not necessarily a good business strategy in the first place nor that the developers will be delivering better experiences.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
I think there are a lot of companies that don't fully understand the player base and the genre
Wildstar is a perfect example. I feel there *is* a market out there for hardcore still. But hardcore is more about long time commitments, and they designed the game in a style that goes against long play times. Busy, twitchy, non immersive combat. Screen constantly spitting stuff at you. This doesnt mix well with hardcore. Its a shame because there was actually more care put into their world than most games.
And each patch after that makes the game better. Few companies can do that kind of iteration. The only other example may be Marvel Heroes (launch was meh, also bad scores on metacritic, and the 2015 version fixed everything with a 80+ metacritics score). I suppose MH can do that because marvel fans (which obviously is a big fan base) stick with the game.
I think the point you are trying to make (just do it better in the first place) is not always possible. Devs are not omnipotent, and i guess many just don't know exactly what works, or what combination of things work. The only way to find out what works is by experimentation and iteration, and that is what Blizz is willing to do (and it is not cheap).
The polish in their games is not done by being clever. It is done by hard work. Again, try again, test, and iterate. I remember a GDC talk where a Blizz dev is talking about trying different ways just to make sure the players input is processed in a way that feels fluid and responsive. I couldn't believe the amount of trial and error (and work) going into such a simple thing. But that is blizz.
As for restaurants, nearly all restaurants do use the same business model: "Pay for what you get". Hardly any restaurants break from that format, with the only significant variation being whether you pay for it before or after getting the food.
As for "choice"?
- Blizzard Bakeries saw that pizza (MMORPG) was a fairly popular food. Many of them enjoyed eating pizza too.
- They didn't change the basic recipe all that much, but they improved on it substantially with expert chefs and high-quality ingredients.
- This caused their pizza place to be incredibly successful.
- Other companies assumed that the reason Blizzard was successful was because they chose to make a pizza place, or because their pizza menu was green.
- In reality the success was driven only a little bit by being a pizza place (pizza is a popular food) but was mostly driven by their decisions that led to an extremely high-quality product.
- The other companies created enough bad pizza places that some began to wonder if pizza was just a bad food -- but of course that wasn't it at all. Pizza is fine, but you can't expect much success if you never create a better pizza than what Blizzard Bakeries provided.
That's about where the food analogy has to stop though, as it doesn't capture the fundamental consumption of entertainment: you might choose to periodically enjoy pizza once every couple weeks for your entire life, but it's unlikely you'll choose to watch Star Wars every couple weeks for your entire life.The pattern itself is what's consumed with entertainment, and while you can go back several times to suck the juice out of a really juicy entertainment product, eventually it gets sucked dry...whoops, back to food analogies. I really should order delivery and drive home from work already!
Anyway, the main points were these: while it's a somewhat important decision what type of restaurant you choose (a brussels sprouts restaurant isn't likely to do better than a pizza place), it's an extremely important decision that your product is high quality. So your assumption that anyone is asking for only pizza places kind of misses the "quality, quality, quality, quality!" point I've been trying to make for the last several posts.
Quality is a large (probably the largest) reason why Blizzard games do so well. (And when they don't do as well, as with HotS, it's usually also because of quality. HotS is good solid fun, but it's not pushing-the-quality-bar-amazing like Blizzard's better titles.) Other factors matter too (we covered genre selection) but things like UA (advertising) aren't really what this thread is about and aren't a differentiating factor to Blizzard's success (a lot of companies have tried through millions of dollars into advertising, but none of them got the same mileage as Blizzard.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
And that's not even a constant, as we have seen the last few Blizzard launches with more issues or questionable standards (again hence why they'd have anything to own up to for the mistakes and problems of D3's launch).
It's good and bad. They do what they do and reach the success they do because they can afford the cost it takes to reach that far. It's again why any other company is just not prepared to pull off that kind of design philosophy.
Like taking Axe's analogy. Sure it's great that a company spends the effort to make a higher quality pizza, but to think another company can rock in and waste their budget scrapping 500 pizzas for every one good one they deliver, is irrational. Unless you have the budget to lose, it's not a good development model.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
If Square had taken the best of XI and mashed it with what modern gamers wanted they would of made a great MMO (this is what XIV was destined to be if not for the suits pushing it out long before it was ready), instead they put some know nothing guy in charge who copied wow point for point and have low player numbers leading to them triple dipping players with a horrible cash shop in a p2p game.
I'm disgusted with the lost opportunity and the lies and misleading rubbish they resort to in order to make their failure appear to be a success. Players regularly say that XIV is a success when SWTOR and ESO had better sub numbers.
XIV gets more updates to the cash shop than the actual game.
LOTRO is a game where a large portion of its players werent giving sub money due to the lifetime subscriptions. It needed to do something due to a poor decision at launch.
If the game is performing poorly as a sub game, then yes a switch to f2p or freemium will likely help. However, if a game with the sub model is doing well (WoW, FFXIV) than sub model does just well.
Also, i wouldnt consider most freemium games f2p. SWTOR, EQ/EQ2...these games are primarily sub games. They just have a f2p option which allows them to get away with a bigger cash shop, but i would consider them sub games at heart. And this ultimately is probably the most profitable model. You get the steady income of subs, along with the sales of gambling packs (swtor) or housing stuff (eq2). While swtor probably gets whales that buy stuff in bulk, eq2 is a bit friendlier because it doesnt have the gambling element (unless it was added recently). Still, its extra money on top of the subs. And the f2p option draws fresh blood in.
Shutting down private servers angers people.
For instance, for all the hate SoE and Smed got, he was well aware of certain servers/projects and was pretty obvious about his support for them even if he had to be a little cryptic with that support. And i bet because of that EQ still gets some business by people playing both versions.
That is why we have this topic. Not everyone want the same thing.
No one is arguing F2P is a great model, in fact arguable superior to subscription. But there are "still" people that want different things. That is why you have wow, lineage, Eve, FF11, FF14.
All I'm saying is if 90% of the people want certain things, 10% want different things. You can try target the 10% market instead of fighting with other company on the 90% market.
"we get scams like "F2P" and DLC, all that. "
- DDO 500% increased revenue
- SWTOR 100% increased revenue
- LOTRO 100% increased revenue
- DCUO 700% increased revenue
- EQ2 200% "increase in item sales"
- F2P games topping this list at $946 million/year while high end titles like Madden 25 estimated to sell 5 million in the year (times $50 would be $250 million)
I welcome more evidence, of course. But thus far everything I've seen rather strongly points towards F2P's dominance.This makes it a rather safe assumption that both WOW and FFXIV would make quite a lot more money as F2P titles.
F2P is free to play. Any game where the majority of gameplay is free to play is F2P. "Freemium" provides no useful distinction because the definitions of F2P and freemium are virtually identical, and even if there was a distinction it wouldn't matter because we're discussing F2P vs. P2P (eg the natural major split between business models.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Lower standards doesn't matter as much for F2P and that lets them get a muh higher percentage of users that are ok playing a lower quality game because it's "free" (which in turn is the attractor for whales and such), but there is ultimately a plateau when it comes to game quality and garnered user base.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
I'll ask a simple question. Do those games "sustain" their profit?
When games turn f2p, they'll have a "spurt" of new players. And their profit spike. That don't necessary mean it sustain.
Also a f2p games where the majority of the players pay subscription.... I'm not sure I should call it f2p. It just mean it have extended trial.
I'm not saying what you said is wrong. I'm just saying the "big" number is a bit misleading.