Of course he is going to say that, because that is the route he is taking with games. I would dare say because almost all of the games he has helped produce have been horrible and had to go f2p to be viable. I could be way off, just my opinion
I don't really value Smedley's opinion in the least bit and am skeptical of anything he has to say.
This. That guy has a habit just saying whatever pops in his mind whether is has any basis on fact, or it might offend potential costumers.
If anything, for the comment about F2P games having little initial cash flow to offset development costs, I could easily see a modified guild wars method, where you still pay an initial, albiet slightly cheaper, box cost for the complete game, and instead of that initial free month that you would get, you would get an inital budget of whatever shop currency the game uses, and after that its typical free to play. So essentially, the inital box cost is not paying for the game, but is really your first currency purchase. So instead of buying the game for say 20 bucks, and then having to still buy item shop currency, which would turn alot of people off, you just pay 20 bucks, get the game plus 20 bucks worth of store currency. The publisher gets there inital sales, why the customer does not feel as cheated.
Smedley is just full of crap, this guy will never ever get it. He ruined a company that once had all the cards: Everquest 1, Star Wars IP, quality and a nice portfolio but his greed has ruined them.
Soe sabotaged Vanguard, SWG and made Everquest pay 2 win. Judging by their quality charging a monthly fee and having an item shop on top of that is just *lol*.
Glad I didnt get too overanxious for Everquest 3.
Failhammer was about 80 $ million showing, that big budget and PR crap isn't enough to make a good game. I hope the same will happen to other big budget games catering to the lowest of the lowest common denominator. So we can finally see our niche games again.
There are many people already sick of rip off games such as Lotro, AoC, Everquest and TSW will soon be in the same boat. I highly doubt the p2w "free(minium)" model will create more revenue. Those who claimed it did never proved it by actual number so its a big PR ploy for failed games.
I think we will see more strict modells in the future again, p2p, b2p and f2p but rip off combinations of both will (hopefully) be gone.
We need a MMORPG Cataclysm asap, finish the dark age of MMORPGS now!
"Everything you're bitching about is wrong. People don't have the time to invest in corpse runs, impossible zones, or long winded quests. Sometimes, they just want to pop on and play." "Then maybe MMORPGs aren't for you."
What's all this nonsense about some guy having no credibility? This "Smedley" character may be lieing, cheating scum but how does that suddenly make everything he says invalid?
If I were to ruin my reputation down to the core, causing every single person on this earth to have zero respect for me, and then I told you the sky is blue, would I be wrong?
Take every argument and statement by itself. You cannot say with any validity that a person's argument is wrong simply because they did some bad things in the past. Some people may be scum, but if you're going to respond to said scum, at least do it with some modicum of intelligence.
Same here, people just like to spout of misinformation and then claim "NDA".
The info out right now is actually pretty vague thanks to that NDA. I figure the NDA is going to be lifted in October or maybe November and then full details will come out. You are going to see this argued far more into the life of this game on if it qulifies as a mmo or not.
Primary reason is thanks to that companion system. It almost eliminates the reason to group for anything in the game.
Feel free to name me one other mmorpg currently out on the market that makes it impossible to get to level cap unless you group. Newsflash for you: They ALL are solo-friendly. SWTOR is just doing it in a different fashion by making every class a pet class. And are you honestly saying that a player doesn't have to group for ANYTHING in the game because he has a companion? Really? Flashpoints? Missions? Quests that require groups? Any of that ring a bell?
So yeah...you're going to need a better argument than that to prove that SWTOR isn't an mmorpg.
Same here, people just like to spout of misinformation and then claim "NDA".
The info out right now is actually pretty vague thanks to that NDA. I figure the NDA is going to be lifted in October or maybe November and then full details will come out. You are going to see this argued far more into the life of this game on if it qulifies as a mmo or not.
Primary reason is thanks to that companion system. It almost eliminates the reason to group for anything in the game.
Feel free to name me one other mmorpg currently out on the market that makes it impossible to get to level cap unless you group. Newsflash for you: They ALL are solo-friendly. SWTOR is just doing it in a different fashion by making every class a pet class. And are you honestly saying that a player doesn't have to group for ANYTHING in the game because he has a companion? Really? Flashpoints? Missions? Quests that require groups? Any of that ring a bell?
So yeah...you're going to need a better argument than that to prove that SWTOR isn't an mmorpg.
i think classing SW;TOR as an MO rather than an MMO is grossly incorrect, i think by now there should be little doubt that it probably has more claim to the MMO title than several MMO's currently out there.. having said that.. its a game that doesnt require much in the way of 'group' participation, group sizes are limited to 4 anyway, which means you can easily achieve this with just 1 other person (+ pets) so players who have a hard time associating with others, arent unduly disadvantaged.. as has already been stated.. its not exactly the only solo friendly MMO ..
The OP is aware that SWTOR is already not the last bid-budget MMO. Unless they delay it to no end, it's looking to be the first of this new wave of MMOs. Then you have GW2, TSW, Titan, there's talks of planetside 2, etc...
Eventually our economy has to get better or we're going to destroy ourselves in a resource war. If our economy gets better, the individual purchasing power rises. Given enough time, most of humanity will eventually rise above poverty level. It will be during this time that the world will be filled with subscriptions everybody can easily afford.
The Free-2-Play shift is only a result of the global economic crash caused by GW Bush.
First off, I couldn't care less about SWTOR. IMO the game is an epic fail already because of the Dev's lack of care when it came to the piss poor space layer that they put in. Secondly, I am all about the monthly sub fee.
The F2p model is just confusing to me.....Do I buy stupid points and not sub? If I sub to the game the monthly alotments of points is never enough to buy anything worth while....so I have to buy points too?
To me the F2 p is just a giant SCAM!
WoW is a scam in and of it self....you have to buy expansions to play. And your out of luck if you don't buy them.
I don't see SWTOR the pinnical of progression for MMO's, There is PLENTY of subject matter to base a major MMO title off of that will have monthly subscriptions.
With the invention of the internet, Richard can pretty much search for anything at all that might support his stance of a P2P free world. In addition, it would be unheard of that a publisher would claim taht anyone else coming up behind them wouldn't be good enough to follow in their footsteps... nope that never happens. heh.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.
If I were the head of a company that makes ridiculously lame, over-hyped, and stale MMO's... yes, I would probably feel the same way.
Great games will come in time. Countless garbage F2P games will fill the gaps in time, and rare free-gems like Guild Wars will maintain the mass interest in the medium.
Star Wars won't be the last... Blizzard is working on Titan for christ's sake. I can't imagine they are slacking on that endeavour.
What SOE needs is a new head. It sounds like their current one is infected.
Guild Wars 2 and when Blizzard finally announces what Titan is. You also have the Kingdoms of Amalur mmo coming as well as Undead Labs zombie console mmo on the way.
While i feel ToR, won't be the last big budget MMOG, i do think F2P will become the dominate payment style. I expect Blizz to go Big-Budget with ''TiTan'' maybe even bigger than WoW and while every publisher don't have the money to go big, quality titles will come and go. F2P / Micro-Transaction will be the dominant way to go because the average consumer feels less restricted in puchasing an item for $10 than paying $15 a month . Yes there will still be games that choose the $15 a month route but players tend to expect more out of those games than they do F2P.
I can see Bioware putting up some cool rides in the EA Store, weather it be Speedsters/Ships and a majority of the player base buying it...
I would love to see a developer change the monthly subscribtion cost. I remember hearing sometime ago that the $15 model was based on what it would effectively take to keep servers running given a certain population and still see some profit. But that was then. I could see maybe $10/month in this day of age being more reasonable considering the market if the developer can sustain a certain amount of accounts, such as SWTOR. Would be a nice lil surprise.
Smed thinks that TOR is going to be the last big budget MMO to use a subscription model because it's too risky to fund big budget MMOs via subscription?
And how is developing a big budget F2P less risky?
At least with the sub model, you have a whole lot of ways to generate revenue before the game is launched and after the game launches. You also have a direct correlation between subscriber interest and revenue. It's what Nassim Taleb talks about as 'non-scalable": your revenue is directly related to the number of boxes and subscriptions sold.
To develop a free to play game, however, takes a lot of money up front in the hopes you'll get paid...eventually. There are fewer ways to generate revenue pre-launch, and a huge risk that interest won't be high enough to get players to commit to the item store. While the revenue model is "scalable," or not linked to the number of subscriptions sold, this cuts both ways. Yes, you have the potential to make more, but you also have the potential to bomb with the demographic that really matters: the hardcore spenders.
At least with the sub model, you can see that x amount of players is going to generate y amount of revenue. But with the FTP model, x number of players can in no way predict what y revenue will be. It could be more, it could be less, it could be that you are the most popular game under the sun, but go broke regardless.
I think Aihoshi made an exceedingly good point towards the end: "Although F2P operators are getting better at monetizing their games, they simply don't have any way of immediately generating comparable cash inflow. "
And that--more than anything else in my opinion--is going to make the "box & sub" model much more preferable than free to play when it comes to developing games (not necessarily running games), especially in this uncertain economic climate. Indeed, most of the AAA F2P games we have now started as P2P, and there's a reason for that. It's because you have to understand what you have before you can start to speculate, realistically, about what you could have.
And how can you realistically justify the $200 million for a top notch F2P game when you'll never quite know what you paid for...until it's too late to do anything about it?
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Do big budgets require the subscription model? What if GW2 is hugely successful, and makes a ton of money? It's not exactly small budget, right? How would that play into the future of big budget MMOs?
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
No it won't be the last , 20 Million is nothing compared to the initial income "lets take SWTOR as an example"
Pre orders have almost reached 1 million & thats to be expected with all the hype & fanboys , with just the standar edition being 59.95 thats $60 Million Dollars that not including Collector edition prices , so for most AAA MMO there is zero risk as long as you have a decent IP & build the hype you can't fail . well unless you spend 100 Milion on development
Comments
This. That guy has a habit just saying whatever pops in his mind whether is has any basis on fact, or it might offend potential costumers.
If anything, for the comment about F2P games having little initial cash flow to offset development costs, I could easily see a modified guild wars method, where you still pay an initial, albiet slightly cheaper, box cost for the complete game, and instead of that initial free month that you would get, you would get an inital budget of whatever shop currency the game uses, and after that its typical free to play. So essentially, the inital box cost is not paying for the game, but is really your first currency purchase. So instead of buying the game for say 20 bucks, and then having to still buy item shop currency, which would turn alot of people off, you just pay 20 bucks, get the game plus 20 bucks worth of store currency. The publisher gets there inital sales, why the customer does not feel as cheated.
Smedley is just full of crap, this guy will never ever get it. He ruined a company that once had all the cards: Everquest 1, Star Wars IP, quality and a nice portfolio but his greed has ruined them.
Soe sabotaged Vanguard, SWG and made Everquest pay 2 win. Judging by their quality charging a monthly fee and having an item shop on top of that is just *lol*.
Glad I didnt get too overanxious for Everquest 3.
Failhammer was about 80 $ million showing, that big budget and PR crap isn't enough to make a good game. I hope the same will happen to other big budget games catering to the lowest of the lowest common denominator. So we can finally see our niche games again.
There are many people already sick of rip off games such as Lotro, AoC, Everquest and TSW will soon be in the same boat. I highly doubt the p2w "free(minium)" model will create more revenue. Those who claimed it did never proved it by actual number so its a big PR ploy for failed games.
I think we will see more strict modells in the future again, p2p, b2p and f2p but rip off combinations of both will (hopefully) be gone.
We need a MMORPG Cataclysm asap, finish the dark age of MMORPGS now!
"Everything you're bitching about is wrong. People don't have the time to invest in corpse runs, impossible zones, or long winded quests. Sometimes, they just want to pop on and play."
"Then maybe MMORPGs aren't for you."
What's all this nonsense about some guy having no credibility? This "Smedley" character may be lieing, cheating scum but how does that suddenly make everything he says invalid?
If I were to ruin my reputation down to the core, causing every single person on this earth to have zero respect for me, and then I told you the sky is blue, would I be wrong?
Take every argument and statement by itself. You cannot say with any validity that a person's argument is wrong simply because they did some bad things in the past. Some people may be scum, but if you're going to respond to said scum, at least do it with some modicum of intelligence.
Sarcasm is not a crime!
Feel free to name me one other mmorpg currently out on the market that makes it impossible to get to level cap unless you group. Newsflash for you: They ALL are solo-friendly. SWTOR is just doing it in a different fashion by making every class a pet class. And are you honestly saying that a player doesn't have to group for ANYTHING in the game because he has a companion? Really? Flashpoints? Missions? Quests that require groups? Any of that ring a bell?
So yeah...you're going to need a better argument than that to prove that SWTOR isn't an mmorpg.
Dear sir,
Titan
Regards
Reality.
i think classing SW;TOR as an MO rather than an MMO is grossly incorrect, i think by now there should be little doubt that it probably has more claim to the MMO title than several MMO's currently out there.. having said that.. its a game that doesnt require much in the way of 'group' participation, group sizes are limited to 4 anyway, which means you can easily achieve this with just 1 other person (+ pets) so players who have a hard time associating with others, arent unduly disadvantaged.. as has already been stated.. its not exactly the only solo friendly MMO ..
The OP is aware that SWTOR is already not the last bid-budget MMO. Unless they delay it to no end, it's looking to be the first of this new wave of MMOs. Then you have GW2, TSW, Titan, there's talks of planetside 2, etc...
Hopefully it'll be the last big bang for this stagnating generation of software / hardware.
It's time to move on.
I used to play MMOs like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee.
I'll drink to that idea. Long been time to move on.
It is best for the industry the MMO throne remains an dusty empty seat never to be filled.
Dear OP,
Guild Wars 2.
Regards,
Truth.
Eventually our economy has to get better or we're going to destroy ourselves in a resource war. If our economy gets better, the individual purchasing power rises. Given enough time, most of humanity will eventually rise above poverty level. It will be during this time that the world will be filled with subscriptions everybody can easily afford.
The Free-2-Play shift is only a result of the global economic crash caused by GW Bush.
First off, I couldn't care less about SWTOR. IMO the game is an epic fail already because of the Dev's lack of care when it came to the piss poor space layer that they put in. Secondly, I am all about the monthly sub fee.
The F2p model is just confusing to me.....Do I buy stupid points and not sub? If I sub to the game the monthly alotments of points is never enough to buy anything worth while....so I have to buy points too?
To me the F2 p is just a giant SCAM!
WoW is a scam in and of it self....you have to buy expansions to play. And your out of luck if you don't buy them.
I don't see SWTOR the pinnical of progression for MMO's, There is PLENTY of subject matter to base a major MMO title off of that will have monthly subscriptions.
No.
"Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted.
Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world."
Hans Margolius
No.
He who keeps his cool best wins.
With the invention of the internet, Richard can pretty much search for anything at all that might support his stance of a P2P free world. In addition, it would be unheard of that a publisher would claim taht anyone else coming up behind them wouldn't be good enough to follow in their footsteps... nope that never happens. heh.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.
I would imagine that Richard only shops with coupons.
If I were the head of a company that makes ridiculously lame, over-hyped, and stale MMO's... yes, I would probably feel the same way.
Great games will come in time. Countless garbage F2P games will fill the gaps in time, and rare free-gems like Guild Wars will maintain the mass interest in the medium.
Star Wars won't be the last... Blizzard is working on Titan for christ's sake. I can't imagine they are slacking on that endeavour.
What SOE needs is a new head. It sounds like their current one is infected.
Guild Wars 2 and when Blizzard finally announces what Titan is. You also have the Kingdoms of Amalur mmo coming as well as Undead Labs zombie console mmo on the way.
no
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
While i feel ToR, won't be the last big budget MMOG, i do think F2P will become the dominate payment style. I expect Blizz to go Big-Budget with ''TiTan'' maybe even bigger than WoW and while every publisher don't have the money to go big, quality titles will come and go. F2P / Micro-Transaction will be the dominant way to go because the average consumer feels less restricted in puchasing an item for $10 than paying $15 a month
. Yes there will still be games that choose the $15 a month route but players tend to expect more out of those games than they do F2P.
I can see Bioware putting up some cool rides in the EA Store, weather it be Speedsters/Ships and a majority of the player base buying it...
I would love to see a developer change the monthly subscribtion cost. I remember hearing sometime ago that the $15 model was based on what it would effectively take to keep servers running given a certain population and still see some profit. But that was then. I could see maybe $10/month in this day of age being more reasonable considering the market if the developer can sustain a certain amount of accounts, such as SWTOR. Would be a nice lil surprise.
So let me see if I get this straight...
Smed thinks that TOR is going to be the last big budget MMO to use a subscription model because it's too risky to fund big budget MMOs via subscription?
And how is developing a big budget F2P less risky?
At least with the sub model, you have a whole lot of ways to generate revenue before the game is launched and after the game launches. You also have a direct correlation between subscriber interest and revenue. It's what Nassim Taleb talks about as 'non-scalable": your revenue is directly related to the number of boxes and subscriptions sold.
To develop a free to play game, however, takes a lot of money up front in the hopes you'll get paid...eventually. There are fewer ways to generate revenue pre-launch, and a huge risk that interest won't be high enough to get players to commit to the item store. While the revenue model is "scalable," or not linked to the number of subscriptions sold, this cuts both ways. Yes, you have the potential to make more, but you also have the potential to bomb with the demographic that really matters: the hardcore spenders.
At least with the sub model, you can see that x amount of players is going to generate y amount of revenue. But with the FTP model, x number of players can in no way predict what y revenue will be. It could be more, it could be less, it could be that you are the most popular game under the sun, but go broke regardless.
I think Aihoshi made an exceedingly good point towards the end: "Although F2P operators are getting better at monetizing their games, they simply don't have any way of immediately generating comparable cash inflow. "
And that--more than anything else in my opinion--is going to make the "box & sub" model much more preferable than free to play when it comes to developing games (not necessarily running games), especially in this uncertain economic climate. Indeed, most of the AAA F2P games we have now started as P2P, and there's a reason for that. It's because you have to understand what you have before you can start to speculate, realistically, about what you could have.
And how can you realistically justify the $200 million for a top notch F2P game when you'll never quite know what you paid for...until it's too late to do anything about it?
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Do big budgets require the subscription model? What if GW2 is hugely successful, and makes a ton of money? It's not exactly small budget, right? How would that play into the future of big budget MMOs?
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
No it won't be the last , 20 Million is nothing compared to the initial income "lets take SWTOR as an example"
Pre orders have almost reached 1 million & thats to be expected with all the hype & fanboys , with just the standar edition being 59.95 thats $60 Million Dollars that not including Collector edition prices , so for most AAA MMO there is zero risk as long as you have a decent IP & build the hype you can't fail . well unless you spend 100 Milion on development