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Biggest MMORPG flops/failures?
Eyelids
Member Posts: 76
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.
Comments
WAR and TR blowed much more money than SWG, both well over $100m.
SWG also is still running at the moment and has been for almost 7 years, TR shut down for good after 1 year and WAR is on its death bed after 2.
there are much bigger catastrophical failures out there than SWG
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).
"Come and have a look at what you could have won."
Horizons and Dark and Light come to mind.
@arcenemy
TR, don't know it. But Christ what the hell did they do to it to make it shut down after only 1 year! Thats pretty serious.
@bunnyhopper
Star Trek Online, well I looked in to that prior to release and being an old school ST fan thought this might be the game for me. But being old and wise enough the hype had no effect on me and as more stuff was leaked to the forums it became apparent to me that this game was going to suck. I remember them offering something like 1-2 year special subscriptions for something like $300+ dollars and that got you an extra character slot and a borg... Something felt wrong with that game and I just decided not to bother. Did they even have a free trial on release? One thing I still remember from the offical forums was the amount of nay saying before the game came out, but it was the staunch defence fanboys were putting up that really made me chuckle! How can you defend a game you've not played!
For all the crying and whining that SWG gets about its NGE and CU, the game's not actually doing that badly as far as I know. Certainly not as bad as WAR and some others.
Controversial one: EQ2. Why? EQ1 has the same number (if not more) subs than EQ2live does (as opposed to the f2p.) Go figure.
RIFT was a *crushing* disappointment; a shallow, loveless, generic MMO the likes of which hasn't been seen in a P2P format since, well, forever.
Eagerly awaiting: World of Darkness, ArcheAge.
Sims Online. They expected 500.000+ players in 6 months and in the end settled with way less than 50.000.
SWG is on life support, any time i've logged in on another one of SOE's 'please come back, pleeeeease' free months its a wasteland. Regardless comparing SWG to WAR doesn't really say much for either of them, one might be slightly better off then the other, but both are in the doldrums.
I don't want to open the can of worms that debating about the NGE is, so i'll simply say it isn't looked upon as a glorious success in the history of mmos.
"Come and have a look at what you could have won."
Biggest MMORPG flops/failures?
Every AAA title that was published after WOW.
Reason: money greed and the wrong idea of "easy money".
Even now their makers are more involved about thinking how to generate money by changing subs models (Lotro, War ...) than anything else.
Upcoming : FF14 and SW:TOR. Easy to predict if watching their hype levels tumble after every show.
Looking back into history perhaps the only ones intelligent enough to produce a success is Arenanet.
They had the intelligence and time to analyse what made AoC and WAR fail and adapted and postponed. In view how intelligent they tackled GW1 - both in limited fiancial development and in marketing - I think they might have a big chance in getting the job done.
Being backed up by a shrewed.half crook but very smart NCsoft I can't see this one fail. to deliver.
While it is too little to topple Blizzard as a whole, GW2 could be disastrous to all other AAA titles planned and so the history of giant sub based MMO's will come to an end.
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.
Dark & Light... compared to this, everything else was just a moderate fail.
A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true...
Major Commercial Failures:
DDO (before f2p)
Dark & Light
Auto Assault
Tabula Rasa (very sad actually was a fantastic game that needed minor tweaks, certainly wasn't bad enuf to shut down that fast)
Vanguard
Star Trek Online
Matrix Online
Champions Online
Games that are/were commercially successful but did not meet expectations:
SWG
AoC
AION
Successes:
EQ2, LoTRO, L2,
Major Exceptions:
EVE, WoW (duh)
"Id rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
- Raph Koster
Tried: AO,EQ,EQ2,DAoC,SWG,AA,SB,HZ,CoX,PS,GA,TR,IV,GnH,EVE, PP,DnL,WAR,MxO,SWG,FE,VG,AoC,DDO,LoTRO,Rift,TOR,Aion,Tera,TSW,GW2,DCUO,CO,STO
Favourites: AO,SWG,EVE,TR,LoTRO,TSW,EQ2, Firefall
Currently Playing: ESO
My opinion as well.
So no Asheron's Call 2 on this list of failures? No Chronicles of Spellborn? To name just a couple of more...your list is very incomplete.
EQ2, it had everything going for it and everything to lose.
.
They made a bunch of mistakes and miscalculations and they lost thousands if not hundreds of thousands of subs.
.
Male toons with female figures? Whose idea was that?
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
Tabula Rasa was the worst failure overall, in my opinion.
Dark and Light was utter trash "developed" by a fly-by-nite team of swindlers. Tabula Rasa, on the other hand, was a AAA effort with Richard Garriot at the helm. It failed miserably. To this day, I can't comprehend why people still defend that game. It was painfully shallow, crafting (if you can call it that) was tacked on as an afterthought, it suffered from a serious lack of variety and content in every imaginable area, and I personally feel that the art direction was rather bad.
There was no "fix" for Tabula Rasa. It wouldn't have become a great game after some "tweaking." Nothing short of scrapping 80-90% of it and starting over from scratch with a fresh approach (...a tabula rasa, if you'll pardon the pun) could possibly have saved it.
I'm not bitter anymore, though — and I mean that. All I feel for Tabula Rasa at this point is a vague sense of sadness and discomfort, a lingering bad taste in my mouth.
Currently Playing: EVE Online
Retired From: UO, FFXI, AO, SWG, Ryzom, GW, WoW, WAR
Tabula Rasa was a great game around the time of it's closing, much like AoC has turned around and become a great game now...Unfortunately the damage to reputation was already done, and AoC will never be a success, and TR had an even worse launch than AoC did. I don't think it needed to be shut down, but then again NCsoft is famous for having no idea wtf they are doing aside from actually coding a game.
How is EVE a major exception but L2 is only a success? L2 at one point had several million players and has had over 1 million subs ever since it's '03-04 release. Same goes for Lineage 1 since 1998.
EVE still hasn't hit the 500k mark albeit it has never dropped in subs once since it came out.
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.
bcause people around here are incapable of understanding that the market doesnt start and end with the west
its usually the same people that calls AIon a failure despite having several million more subs than the second biggest western MMO.
Biggest flop/failure - NGE SWG.
I think its more to do with L2 being er, a sequel and hardly breaking the mold thus it should expect decent numbers. Whereas EVE is a niche, sandbox and extremely ruthless mmo that defied expectations.
"Come and have a look at what you could have won."
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.
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.
Star Wars Galaxies veterans — of which I am one — speak of the game with great reverence, and for good reason. Yes, the game was bleeding subs. It had many flaws, and yes, that was part of the reason it was bleeding subs.
However, the primary reason Star Wars Galaxies was bleeding subs is simply that it was a hardcore game, and your average Star Wars fan is not a hardcore MMORPG player. They'd play for a while, then unsubscribe. Once World of Warcraft came along, SOE looked at SWG's declining subs, looked at World of Warcraft's success, and then made a gamble that didn't pay off. They tried to graft WoW's casual-friendly, new-school formula onto SWG, and the rest is history. The lesson learned was that you can't magically transmogrify your preexisting game into World of Warcraft and rake in big bucks.
Despite all of its flaws, Star Wars Galaxies had many virtues. The skill-based character advancement system is well known. You could own and operate a variety of land vehicles, and take friends along for the ride. You could bio-engineer and raise a variety of pets. You could select a house, construct it in a location of your choosing, and decorate it as you saw fit. You and your friends could build a functional little city together. You could construct your own starfighter and fly it into combat, fly with wingmen, or fly together as a crew on a larger ship. You could set up resource collectors to collect resources, craft a huge variety of items, and even sell them from your own vendor... and much more.
If you don't understand why those features are amazing to a certain niche of gamers, particularly in a science-fiction/Star Wars setting, then there's no sense in me trying to explain it to you, because you'll never understand.
I remember all of this clearly after many years away from SWG. You can still do most of these things in SWG today, but the skill system and the freedom it represented is gone, the game is stuffed full of five years' worth of stagnation baggage, playing a Jedi will be a hollow experience since you'll always know you're not a "real" Jedi, and I believe the devs have added a number of highly annoying, gimmicky lottery grinds in recent years.
Currently Playing: EVE Online
Retired From: UO, FFXI, AO, SWG, Ryzom, GW, WoW, WAR