Except MO was SVs first MMO. SV is a baby company compared to SOE. SOE has made many MMOs, and been in the business ALOT longer then SV, and are backed up by one of the biggest tech companies in the world, with millions of dollars in their pockets etc. For the guys at SV it was all new to them when they did MO. They have learned alot from the misstakes they did, and are improving all the time.
I suppose that "improving" is being used in a subjective way in your post. From my perspective the company at it's core is that same company as it was 3 years ago. The same guy making decisions. I know they have gone through quite a few community managers since they let Maralyn go (not even sure if thay have one now) but the only decision maker still on payroll is Henrick if I'm not mistaken. And each and every mistake made in the past was a result of his poor judgement. At least that's how I see it. If there are other folks in charge please let me know. I remember when they touted 2 publishers for the asian market (think both were Asia) but that was a few years ago and as far as I can tell the game never launched in Asia, so I think it's just Henrick making decisions still.
Anyhow, most folks have a similar experience to the OP and his review. That is why the game has a horrendous retention rate. That it has such a rate is not even open for debate. Your impression of the game is by far the minority of those who have actually tried it.
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Except MO was SVs first MMO. SV is a baby company compared to SOE. SOE has made many MMOs, and been in the business ALOT longer then SV, and are backed up by one of the biggest tech companies in the world, with millions of dollars in their pockets etc. For the guys at SV it was all new to them when they did MO. They have learned alot from the misstakes they did, and are improving all the time.
I suppose that "improving" is being used in a subjective way in your post. From my perspective the company at it's core is that same company as it was 3 years ago. The same guy making decisions. I know they have gone through quite a few community managers since they let Maralyn go (not even sure if thay have one now) but the only decision maker still on payroll is Henrick if I'm not mistaken. And each and every mistake made in the past was a result of his poor judgement. At least that's how I see it. If there are other folks in charge please let me know. I remember when they touted 2 publishers for the asian market (think both were Asia) but that was a few years ago and as far as I can tell the game never launched in Asia, so I think it's just Henrick making decisions still.
Anyhow, most folks have a similar experience to the OP and his review. That is why the game has a horrendous retention rate. That it has such a rate is not even open for debate. Your impression of the game is by far the minority of those who have actually tried it.
I dunno who the peeps that pulls the strings behind SV are. But ofc Henrik is one of them. I also think Seb has alot to say bout it being "the guy with the code", and he and whomever else there might be that runs it now, does it with 3 more years of knowledge in their back compared to when they launched it. I have never said SV did things wrong, but they sure seem to have learned from their misstakes. Will they make more misstakes? Probably, but I don't think they will be as bad as the once they made as a new company.
They are the only MMO company, except for Blizzard that has grown since release.
This statement just shows pure ignorance. It's not even open for debate. Look up some of the companys.
I formulated that wrong. Was to late for me. What I ment to say was that EVE and WoW were the only MMOs that has had it's population grow each year since launch. This was up until a few years back when I know WoW dropped in subs, and I think even EVE has dropped now. But for many years this was true.
No one can deny that SV was and still is inexperienced company. I strongly believe that former and current devs are competent in their technical field (coding), but running customer oriented company is totally different area of business. When creating business model based on distributed physical copies of MMO game and building up customer support system, they hugely overestimated their abilities. When realizing they cannot fulfill their own set standards and commitment stated to customers (delivering usable DVDs, efficient customer support and hacking protections), after hitting the brick wall, even like major companies which have running difficulties, they had to break their commitments.
Therefore, SV was forced to withheld information from their customers that they are unable to comply to even some of basic customer support standards and that they are not capable to fix their game in required pace. I am sure that no one in SV wish to lie to their customers, by my professional experience, and because of market/capitalist system that gaming companies operate in, SV was forced to use PR approach that in general terms may seem unethical. Due to their inexperience, they made bad past decisions and didn't communicate to their customers in a right way. What also constrained SV is that they have public stock listings, which incentives them to withhold all the bad news. Nevertheless, if SV learns from previous experience, they can slowly remedy their situations and all past mistakes will remain in the past, shadowed by current success.
In a nutshell, SV's future and realizations of MO's potentials depends more on current financing source and business strategy than on current development status. If SV gains enough money and makes good strategical development decision, it is a small problem to hire couple of excellent developers and PR expert.
In a nutshell, SV's future and realizations of MO's potentials depends more on current financing source and business strategy than on current development status. If SV gains enough money and makes good strategical development decision, it is a small problem to hire couple of excellent developers and PR expert.
Umm... SV had money and resources (people) in the beginning. MOrtal Online will never amount to more than it is now unless Henrik is removed and they use an entirely new engine.
In a nutshell, SV's future and realizations of MO's potentials depends more on current financing source and business strategy than on current development status. If SV gains enough money and makes good strategical development decision, it is a small problem to hire couple of excellent developers and PR expert.
Umm... SV had money and resources (people) in the beginning. MOrtal Online will never amount to more than it is now unless Henrik is removed and they use an entirely new engine.
Actually, they didn't have enough financing to keep the needed staff to develop/polish game at faster pace. After they ran out of money, they had to layoff most of staff. In fact, because of lack of funding, they had to release game prematurely, since they needed subs to finance continued development. If they had enough financial backup and had dedicated tester/tweaking team, I am sure that now game would be more quite polished and balanced, but some crucial faults would still be here today like AI and network issues.
Perhaps if they had more experience or better counceling, they would make better and more focused team from the start with business strategy that would grant them more stable income with less gamers dissillusionment. Development plan could have been more conservative, saving up time for crucial polish. Still, I can also see that Henrik is wiser, having more focused goals (Territory control major update, bug fixing and ingame economy enhancement with new trade broker system) and thinking about game being ready for larger distribution (Steam), but still struggling with issue that crucial updates are delivered at really slow pace.
In a nutshell, SV's future and realizations of MO's potentials depends more on current financing source and business strategy than on current development status. If SV gains enough money and makes good strategical development decision, it is a small problem to hire couple of excellent developers and PR expert.
Umm... SV had money and resources (people) in the beginning. MOrtal Online will never amount to more than it is now unless Henrik is removed and they use an entirely new engine.
Actually, they didn't have enough financing to keep the needed staff to develop/polish game at faster pace. After they ran out of money, they had to layoff most of staff. In fact, because of lack of funding, they had to release game prematurely, since they needed subs to finance continued development
Actually, They didn't let people go until AFTER they released.
Why do you suppose they couldn't keep the people around? Ummm... because the games been losing money since it was released. Why has it been losing money? Because it doesn't have enough paying players. Why doesn't it have enough players? Not too hard to figure that out.
We've all witnessed what SV can produce with money and people, it's laughable to think it'd change.
MO had the player base initially to be profitable, yet many didnt stick around. It's been 3 years now and the game still has the same core problems.
MONEY will never fix the MO we have now.
The free to play demo model didnt help, nor will Steam.
In a nutshell, SV's future and realizations of MO's potentials depends more on current financing source and business strategy than on current development status. If SV gains enough money and makes good strategical development decision, it is a small problem to hire couple of excellent developers and PR expert.
Umm... SV had money and resources (people) in the beginning. MOrtal Online will never amount to more than it is now unless Henrik is removed and they use an entirely new engine.
Actually, they didn't have enough financing to keep the needed staff to develop/polish game at faster pace. After they ran out of money, they had to layoff most of staff. In fact, because of lack of funding, they had to release game prematurely, since they needed subs to finance continued development
Actually, They didn't let people go until AFTER they released.
Why do you suppose they couldn't keep the people around? Ummm... because the games been losing money since it was released. Why has it been losing money? Because it doesn't have enough paying players. Why doesn't it have enough players? Not too hard to figure that out.
We've all witnessed what SV can produce with money and people, it's laughable to think it'd change.
MO had the player base initially to be profitable, yet many didnt stick around. It's been 3 years now and the game still has the same core problems.
MONEY will never fix the MO we have now.
The free to play demo model didnt help, nor will Steam.
You are definitely right that they started losing money because SV couldn't keep subs after release due to MO being underdevoleped at the date of the release. But reason for the premature release is lack of money to keep game developing until it is truly ready for release. I know this because I am following SV since late alpha development. During the late open beta I warned that game is not ready for release, SV's only funding was revenue from one time pre-sold game clients and it was not enough to keep development for more than a year. Money plays here major part, but I agree it is not the only main issue. Any starter company has to make good decision what will it do with the current funds and how they can invest their money and how optimally they can allocate their developers. SV made errors in this area. Henrik as CEO and major owner did not have enough experience in this area to make good strategic decision, he was less than 25 years old when starting handling his huge project (Zuckenberg was only exception to prove the rule).
Another argument why money plays major part is that if SV had much better initial funding, Henrik could higher a team of experienced game developer councelers (like Zenimax did on ESO) that would help him make much better development plan and inovative business model . If you look at the SV team, when game started developing, it consisted solely of inexperienced average 25 year old developers. I would say that it is no surprise MO turned out as it is now. But IMO, they did make, despite the bad situation and lack of funding, MO keeping alive and progressing for more than 3 years till today. SV did make MO only FPV fantasy sandbox full loot PvP based MMO on the market. If everything turns well, only consequences of past bad decisions could be that development has been prolonged. If SV makes MO polished enough, I believe they will attract investors that will finance expanded development team.
Steam can mostly be used as marketing platform over source of new subs. If SV relies only on steam platform, there would be too few people that notice MO, and that does no actual good. SV needs to pay Valve to make on Steam front page to be noticed.
You are definitely right that they started losing money because SV couldn't keep subs after release due to MO being underdevoleped at the date of the release. But reason for the premature release is lack of money to keep game developing until it is truly ready for release. I know this because I am following SV since late alpha development. During the late open beta I warned that game is not ready for release, SV's only funding was revenue from one time pre-sold game clients and it was not enough to keep development for more than a year. Money plays here major part, but I agree it is not the only main issue. Any starter company has to make good decision what will it do with the current funds and how they can invest their money and how optimally they can allocate their developers. SV made errors in this area. Henrik as CEO and major owner did not have enough experience in this area to make good strategic decision, he was less than 25 years old when starting handling his huge project (Zuckenberg was only exception to prove the rule).
Another argument why money plays major part is that if SV had much better initial funding, Henrik could higher a team of experienced game developer councelers (like Zenimax did on ESO) that would help him make much better development plan and inovative business model . If you look at the SV team, when game started developing, it consisted solely of inexperienced average 25 year old developers. I would say that it is no surprise MO turned out as it is now. But IMO, they did make, despite the bad situation and lack of funding, MO keeping alive and progressing for more than 3 years till today. SV did make MO only FPV fantasy sandbox full loot PvP based MMO on the market. If everything turns well, only consequences of past bad decisions could be that development has been prolonged. If SV makes MO polished enough, I believe they will attract investors that will finance expanded development team.
Steam can mostly be used as marketing platform over source of new subs. If SV relies only on steam platform, there would be too few people that notice MO, and that does no actual good. SV needs to pay Valve to make on Steam front page to be noticed.
Even though i agree with you on your conclutions you are wrong in a lot of your assumptions. SV from times to times had funds but instead of hiring professinal devs as you said they did spend the money in god knows where. Remember the preorders fiasco: people who preordered the game were supposed to get Beta access in 4 Blocks. Starting from Beta Block A and ending to beta block D, each block was supposed to host 2000 players and each week they were supposed to add 2000 more on top of each block to end up in block D with 8000 players. A plan like that though went the "SV" way and just because they did better than expected they sold 5x the games copies (that was their official excuse for all the beta testers that were unable to login in game: the servers were designed to host 10k players tops and not 30 to 40k that bought the game) they were initialy planning to sell. Since they had no publisher and since they didnt send the boxed game copies or the ones who did actually send were discs with 1 link for downloading the game via torrent in an empty tin box, my guess is that the cost for that project was very close to zero and the incomes were several hundreds of thousands of Euro's enough to keep the developement running for more than a year or if you prefer enough for Henrik to hire some developers instead of amateur unreal engine coders. But since we are talking about Henrik and SV here thats not the case. The money went to a bottomless sink exactly as the money from donations going as we speak. Its not that we disagree here ofc but felt like pointing out that SV had its chances and blow them. So if i remember correctly SV didnt released MO in a half assed state due to the fact that they didnt had funds for developement. They did it because they pushed back the release so many times and they started losing their future playerbase due to the fact that they were inconsistent since day one and under that presure they made the terrible decision to release MO. Tbh dunno what would have being worse for them and at this point it doesnt really matter. What does matter is that the game today 3 years after release is in maybe worse state than it was back then. So allow me to be confident that even if those guys had all the money and all the time in the world they wouldnt be capable of creating any kind of game unless they were hiring competend people to do their job.
Discussing about today and the MO's status as we speak is like beating a dead horse with a stick. But the fact that SV dev team is crippled down to 1 "important developement dude" and 1 coder that is hiding behind a forum Avatar is solely Henrik's fault. Gamers cannot be blamed due to the fact that the game today, 3 years after its release is in a terrible state nor the genre itself. Sandbox games have a limited audience but that is not the reason for MO's low population. Personnaly i believe that Sandbox games playerbase is so desparate for a good title and are more than enough as they are devoted to fully support a title. The thing is that we might be desparate but not desparate enough to play and support a pile of crap just because Henrik said years ago that MO will be the modern version of UO. Its not.
And to end this i also dont believe that anything changed to SV's ways. If they had the chance to change things i m afraid that they would do the same mistakes all over again due to lack of vision, devotion, talent, education and professionalism. After 5-6 years around SV even the freelance devs that are supposed to be contracted with donations money for delivering new content/ features or whatever sound as a big bad joke, but that just a speculation of mine based on the evasive and half assed excuse that the company gave to players questions regarding a timeline manner of delivering the new content and deadlies regarding the contracts. Honestly i dont believe that Henrik is more mature now. He proved several times that each time he is cornered he loses his temper and resorts to all kind of ridiculous behaviours from lying to deceiving or promissing miracles.Henrik may completely failed as SV's CEO and as a game designer but i give him that he is an awesome comedian and offers good laughs to many people talking about MO's lore being hard to translate cause its written in "advanced Sweedish", about "MO's revolutionary AI", about "MO going out in the Asian market", about investors willing to invest money in MO etc etc.
You are definitely right that they started losing money because SV couldn't keep subs after release due to MO being underdevoleped at the date of the release. But reason for the premature release is lack of money to keep game developing until it is truly ready for release. I know this because I am following SV since late alpha development. During the late open beta I warned that game is not ready for release, SV's only funding was revenue from one time pre-sold game clients and it was not enough to keep development for more than a year. Money plays here major part, but I agree it is not the only main issue. Any starter company has to make good decision what will it do with the current funds and how they can invest their money and how optimally they can allocate their developers. SV made errors in this area. Henrik as CEO and major owner did not have enough experience in this area to make good strategic decision, he was less than 25 years old when starting handling his huge project (Zuckenberg was only exception to prove the rule).
Another argument why money plays major part is that if SV had much better initial funding, Henrik could higher a team of experienced game developer councelers (like Zenimax did on ESO) that would help him make much better development plan and inovative business model . If you look at the SV team, when game started developing, it consisted solely of inexperienced average 25 year old developers. I would say that it is no surprise MO turned out as it is now. But IMO, they did make, despite the bad situation and lack of funding, MO keeping alive and progressing for more than 3 years till today. SV did make MO only FPV fantasy sandbox full loot PvP based MMO on the market. If everything turns well, only consequences of past bad decisions could be that development has been prolonged. If SV makes MO polished enough, I believe they will attract investors that will finance expanded development team.
Steam can mostly be used as marketing platform over source of new subs. If SV relies only on steam platform, there would be too few people that notice MO, and that does no actual good. SV needs to pay Valve to make on Steam front page to be noticed.
Even though i agree with you on your conclutions you are wrong in a lot of your assumptions. SV from times to times had funds but instead of hiring professinal devs as you said they did spend the money in god knows where. Remember the preorders fiasco: people who preordered the game were supposed to get Beta access in 4 Blocks. Starting from Beta Block A and ending to beta block D, each block was supposed to host 2000 players and each week they were supposed to add 2000 more on top of each block to end up in block D with 8000 players. A plan like that though went the "SV" way and just because they did better than expected they sold 5x the games copies (that was their official excuse for all the beta testers that were unable to login in game: the servers were designed to host 10k players tops and not 30 to 40k that bought the game) they were initialy planning to sell. Since they had no publisher and since they didnt send the boxed game copies or the ones who did actually send were discs with 1 link for downloading the game via torrent in an empty tin box, my guess is that the cost for that project was very close to zero and the incomes were several hundreds of thousands of Euro's enough to keep the developement running for more than a year or if you prefer enough for Henrik to hire some developers instead of amateur unreal engine coders. But since we are talking about Henrik and SV here thats not the case. The money went to a bottomless sink exactly as the money from donations going as we speak. Its not that we disagree here ofc but felt like pointing out that SV had its chances and blow them. So if i remember correctly SV didnt released MO in a half assed state due to the fact that they didnt had funds for developement. They did it because they pushed back the release so many times and they started losing their future playerbase due to the fact that they were inconsistent since day one and under that presure they made the terrible decision to release MO. Tbh dunno what would have being worse for them and at this point it doesnt really matter. What does matter is that the game today 3 years after release is in maybe worse state than it was back then. So allow me to be confident that even if those guys had all the money and all the time in the world they wouldnt be capable of creating any kind of game unless they were hiring competend people to do their job.
Discussing about today and the MO's status as we speak is like beating a dead horse with a stick. But the fact that SV dev team is crippled down to 1 "important developement dude" and 1 coder that is hiding behind a forum Avatar is solely Henrik's fault. Gamers cannot be blamed due to the fact that the game today, 3 years after its release is in a terrible state nor the genre itself. Sandbox games have a limited audience but that is not the reason for MO's low population. Personnaly i believe that Sandbox games playerbase is so desparate for a good title and are more than enough as they are devoted to fully support a title. The thing is that we might be desparate but not desparate enough to play and support a pile of crap just because Henrik said years ago that MO will be the modern version of UO. Its not.
And to end this i also dont believe that anything changed to SV's ways. If they had the chance to change things i m afraid that they would do the same mistakes all over again due to lack of vision, devotion, talent, education and professionalism. After 5-6 years around SV even the freelance devs that are supposed to be contracted with donations money for delivering new content/ features or whatever sound as a big bad joke, but that just a speculation of mine based on the evasive and half assed excuse that the company gave to players questions regarding a timeline manner of delivering the new content and deadlies regarding the contracts. Honestly i dont believe that Henrik is more mature now. He proved several times that each time he is cornered he loses his temper and resorts to all kind of ridiculous behaviours from lying to deceiving or promissing miracles.Henrik may completely failed as SV's CEO and as a game designer but i give him that he is an awesome comedian and offers good laughs to many people talking about MO's lore being hard to translate cause its written in "advanced Sweedish", about "MO's revolutionary AI", about "MO going out in the Asian market", about investors willing to invest money in MO etc etc.
I did some research out of SV's financial reports for year 2009 (year of pre-orders) and for 2010 (year of release). From pre-orders SV had gross income of 784.971,15$, if average client cost was about 60$ (as I remember) they sold out around 13K copies. They had profit of around 138K $. Other important thing is that they had 18 employees that had average 50K $ yearly (total 900K $ of employee yearly costs). Do the math if this number of employees is sustainable. It can be seen that they needed much more funding to continue the game development with that number of employees (which in proposed area is a small number). As for year 2010, they had similar income as in 2009. (coming from subs and client sales), but due to heavy employment costs, they had losses (85K $). As from reports and contemporary game state, it seems to me that bad decision was made not to employ truly experienced MMO game project manager who can make development/financial planning. They had only one 10+ year experienced employee, and he was a 3D artist. Also, I believe Henrik overestimated capabilities of Unreal 3 engine and Atlas MMO platform, I think he had fallen for a good Epic's marketing and presentation skills, promising him hills and valleys, and he believed that platform can actually support 10K+ simultanious players out of the box. In this part business experience comes handy. Other thing is that he overestimated capabilities of his development team when he believed that MO could be prepared for launch in 1 year (closed/beta) period which even AAA MMO companies cannot accomplish as as goal, and underestimated development costs and overestimated future subs revenues. Still, if he had more financing and better HR strategy, he could have postponed release for another year, and come up with more stable game.
Considering Henrik "lying" and overpromising to a community, it was because he was "forced" to. From my experience, when developing new game or any platform, you have to rely on external vendors who will promise you and present you all magical wonders, but after you pay them and wait for them to deliver, there comes disappointment since they do not deliver on time nor quality, but in meantime you set your own time goals which you cannot complete due to external factors, and you have to "lie" to your community and investors why delay is happening. This happened before with Epic china, this happens now with donation goals, because external developers mostly exagarate their capabilities and timegoals to sell their products. Legal suits in this case is not an option, since it will past years until you can remedy the damage of changing vendor.
Current status is that Henrik is capable enough to attract new investments, which means he is capable to convince others that he has a good plan at least, and MO has delivered significant improvements since release. Today he got injection worth of around 400K $ to prepare for Steam release. He got 4 different investors.
Mortal Online got 70K of votes on Steam greenlight (to vote you have to buy at least one game on steam, therefore no fake accounts), which means 70K of potential sub payers. There is hope and opportunity, we have to wait and see what happens. Why is this generally important for sandbox community? Only because MO is only game in the market providing desired features for a niche.
No one can deny that SV was and still is inexperienced company. I strongly believe that former and current devs are competent in their technical field (coding).
Actually, even their main programmer comes from a very light programming background, being a scripter for various mods. That wasn't nearly enough to code a MMO from grounds up. He has probably caugth up by now in programming, but his early inexperience really shows in the games core.
Originally posted by argirop
A plan like that though went the "SV" way and just because they did better than expected they sold 5x the games copies (that was their official excuse for all the beta testers that were unable to login in game: the servers were designed to host 10k players tops and not 30 to 40k that bought the game) they were initialy planning to sell.
No way in hell did MO have 30-40k beta players at any point imo.. Even during launch/preorder release there were under 10k players active, if I remember correctly.
No one can deny that SV was and still is inexperienced company. I strongly believe that former and current devs are competent in their technical field (coding).
Actually, even their main programmer comes from a very light programming background, being a scripter for various mods. That wasn't nearly enough to code a MMO from grounds up. He has probably caugth up by now in programming, but his early inexperience really shows in the games core.
Originally posted by argirop
A plan like that though went the "SV" way and just because they did better than expected they sold 5x the games copies (that was their official excuse for all the beta testers that were unable to login in game: the servers were designed to host 10k players tops and not 30 to 40k that bought the game) they were initialy planning to sell.
No way in hell did MO have 30-40k beta players at any point imo.. Even during launch/preorder release there were under 10k players active, if I remember correctly.
You can calculate from 2009 year report that they sold around 13K pre-orders.
Toferio i never said that 30+k were playing in Beta. All i said was that more than 30k people preordered the game and the server was unable to host a number like that. I m not even sure if the server was capable at the start of the last Beta Block D to host the 8k people that was supposed to. The only known fact is that they claimed as an excuse aimed for all the people that were unable to login that they had to lock login at a certain number, cause a lot more people than the 8k expected at the beggining had acess to the beta since they sold a lot more copies of the game.
Zeeraha i cannot do the math since i dont know exact numbers and can only speculate exactly as you re doing. I highly doubt that each of the 18 wannabe developers that SV had in its ranks at those first days had an annual cost of 50k dollars. If that was the case i would love to be in the place of one of them. I m almost sure that i would do better than the sound artist dude, having in mind among other things that today 3 years after release slashing with a sword on a zombie sounds like hitting an empty barrel with a bat. What they should have done at those first days and untill release was to keep the operation costs at minimum amounts and throw all their resources in developement and aim at a decent product. Unfortunatelly that wasnt in their vision and they thought it was better to pretend they are bussinesmen that are running a company instead of focusing at their product.
Originally posted by ilives The game can only support 1500 concurrent players, per Henrik.
Please state the linked source of that information. Frankly, I am interested how much players server can take. I also remember Henrik mentioning that each node can handle up to 200 players. But limitation is due to client that cannot handle more than 200 actors. At release it was mentioned that limit is 2000 players, but also it was vaguely mentioned that server can handle 10000 players.
Considering Henrik "lying" and overpromising to a community, it was because he was "forced" to. From my experience, when developing new game or any platform, you have to rely on external vendors who will promise you and present you all magical wonders, but after you pay them and wait for them to deliver, there comes disappointment since they do not deliver on time nor quality, but in meantime you set your own time goals which you cannot complete due to external factors, and you have to "lie" to your community and investors why delay is happening. This happened before with Epic china, this happens now with donation goals, because external developers mostly exagarate their capabilities and timegoals to sell their products. Legal suits in this case is not an option, since it will past years until you can remedy the damage of changing vendor.
Current status is that Henrik is capable enough to attract new investments, which means he is capable to convince others that he has a good plan at least, and MO has delivered significant improvements since release. Today he got injection worth of around 400K $ to prepare for Steam release. He got 4 different investors.
Mortal Online got 70K of votes on Steam greenlight (to vote you have to buy at least one game on steam, therefore no fake accounts), which means 70K of potential sub payers. There is hope and opportunity, we have to wait and see what happens. Why is this generally important for sandbox community? Only because MO is only game in the market providing desired features for a niche.
I guess that when you are the CEO of a company that its out in the stock market you are probably forced to lie now and then. Now if you are a CEO of a company thats out in the stock market and you are using lies similar to the ones that a parent will use to his/her 2 year old child to convince him/her eat his/hers vegeatables then something is terribly wrong. Saying to your customers that MO's lore its not published 3 years after release because its written in "advanced Sweedish" and no one can translate it to English (and thats only one example of that kind of behaviour) is an act that should be punished with public ear pullimg or maybe spitting right in the face.
Henrik is totaly incapable of attracting investors. Unless investors are 15 year olds ofc. Cause we have to admit that he has a lot of success at 15-17. Look at his playerbase. I m sorry but i cant see whats the significant improvements that delivered in MO since release. I can start right here and now a never ending list with gamebreaking bugs and issues that comes attached with the game since early BETA days. Dunno were he got the 400$ injection you mentioning but i have a very strong idea were those 400k $ will go.
Now concerning the 70k votes you mentioned on Steam Greenlight i wouldnt have the slightest idea how a number like that came up. I m sure though that arent people that know MO's/ SV's history nor their current state. Whats importand for the sandbox community from my point of view is that hungry for money wanna be developers around the world should realize that sandbox fans maybe are desperate for a sandbox title, but this doesnt mean that we re gonna support the first piece of crap that they gonna serve us. MO doesnt provide not even a single working Sandbox feature worth mentioning or supporting but since we are discussing here please help yourslef and name one that you consider "desired".
As someone who pre-ordered the numbered limited edition of this game, I'm surprised it's still alive. The company, their service and their product we're all very sub-par at launch and from what I've seen the company hasn't learned much.
When I heard about MO, I say that this is my dream and last MMO I will play.After spending several months in beta, something like half year in total with release and Awakening, I really give up. Give up to MMOs at all, now I have so much time for real things. I can only thank to MO that opened my eyes. RL is much better than any MMO.
Where themepark games try to hide that they are copying WOW, games like Mortal Online and Darkfall make no attempt to hide their inspiration ______\m/_____ LordOfDarkDesire
I really couldn't give a fair review, the game was so horrid looking I didn't last 15 minutes. The starting zone I ended up in was just god awful looking. Probably the worse I have seen an any mmo in the past decade. I also remember some terrible animations as well. Not sure how the game plays out, but I do judge a book by it's cover, and it was an ugly ass cover. I don't care if it has the best crafting, combat or whatever, they seriously need to put some love into the starting zone if they plan to snag people om first impression.
Yeah, compare SOE, a huge multimillion company, with hundreds of employees, to SV with their pocket money and 3-4 devs... How bout seing things in some perspective? In this regard SV are doing wonders with their little game. Sure it has tons of bugs etc, but seing what they have to work with, and how few they are, they do great. But still nice to see that the hate on SV is strong on this site. Keep it up guys!!!
Minecraft is one man company, Terraria is one man company, Mount & Blade was 2-man company. THEY did wonders with their little game.
I dont know about the Lore since i didnt play it enough but the buggy gameplay, animations, mechanics are enough to kill any game for me.
As far as I know, the lore is not fully implemented because they're having troubles translating it from advanced Swedish.
They aren't having trouble translating it, they are to lazy to bother.
This "game", if you can call it a game, has been out for over 4 years maybe 5 now. I just know it is still now as big a pile of dung as it was then. It is unfortunate that the same problems are still there, and still going on. I am pretty sure the same hacks and exploits are still around which only makes it worse.
I dont know about the Lore since i didnt play it enough but the buggy gameplay, animations, mechanics are enough to kill any game for me.
As far as I know, the lore is not fully implemented because they're having troubles translating it from advanced Swedish.
They aren't having trouble translating it, they are to lazy to bother.
This "game", if you can call it a game, has been out for over 4 years maybe 5 now. I just know it is still now as big a pile of dung as it was then. It is unfortunate that the same problems are still there, and still going on. I am pretty sure the same hacks and exploits are still around which only makes it worse.
Seriously man... Theres absolutely no lore behind MO. Translating something that doesnt exist can be really hard.
Comments
I suppose that "improving" is being used in a subjective way in your post. From my perspective the company at it's core is that same company as it was 3 years ago. The same guy making decisions. I know they have gone through quite a few community managers since they let Maralyn go (not even sure if thay have one now) but the only decision maker still on payroll is Henrick if I'm not mistaken. And each and every mistake made in the past was a result of his poor judgement. At least that's how I see it. If there are other folks in charge please let me know. I remember when they touted 2 publishers for the asian market (think both were Asia) but that was a few years ago and as far as I can tell the game never launched in Asia, so I think it's just Henrick making decisions still.
Anyhow, most folks have a similar experience to the OP and his review. That is why the game has a horrendous retention rate. That it has such a rate is not even open for debate. Your impression of the game is by far the minority of those who have actually tried it.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
This statement just shows pure ignorance. It's not even open for debate. Look up some of the companys.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
I dunno who the peeps that pulls the strings behind SV are. But ofc Henrik is one of them. I also think Seb has alot to say bout it being "the guy with the code", and he and whomever else there might be that runs it now, does it with 3 more years of knowledge in their back compared to when they launched it. I have never said SV did things wrong, but they sure seem to have learned from their misstakes. Will they make more misstakes? Probably, but I don't think they will be as bad as the once they made as a new company.
I formulated that wrong. Was to late for me. What I ment to say was that EVE and WoW were the only MMOs that has had it's population grow each year since launch. This was up until a few years back when I know WoW dropped in subs, and I think even EVE has dropped now. But for many years this was true.
No one can deny that SV was and still is inexperienced company. I strongly believe that former and current devs are competent in their technical field (coding), but running customer oriented company is totally different area of business. When creating business model based on distributed physical copies of MMO game and building up customer support system, they hugely overestimated their abilities. When realizing they cannot fulfill their own set standards and commitment stated to customers (delivering usable DVDs, efficient customer support and hacking protections), after hitting the brick wall, even like major companies which have running difficulties, they had to break their commitments.
Therefore, SV was forced to withheld information from their customers that they are unable to comply to even some of basic customer support standards and that they are not capable to fix their game in required pace. I am sure that no one in SV wish to lie to their customers, by my professional experience, and because of market/capitalist system that gaming companies operate in, SV was forced to use PR approach that in general terms may seem unethical. Due to their inexperience, they made bad past decisions and didn't communicate to their customers in a right way. What also constrained SV is that they have public stock listings, which incentives them to withhold all the bad news. Nevertheless, if SV learns from previous experience, they can slowly remedy their situations and all past mistakes will remain in the past, shadowed by current success.
In a nutshell, SV's future and realizations of MO's potentials depends more on current financing source and business strategy than on current development status. If SV gains enough money and makes good strategical development decision, it is a small problem to hire couple of excellent developers and PR expert.
Umm... SV had money and resources (people) in the beginning.
MOrtal Online will never amount to more than it is now unless Henrik is removed and they use an entirely new engine.
Where have all the "good" shills gone?
Actually, they didn't have enough financing to keep the needed staff to develop/polish game at faster pace. After they ran out of money, they had to layoff most of staff. In fact, because of lack of funding, they had to release game prematurely, since they needed subs to finance continued development. If they had enough financial backup and had dedicated tester/tweaking team, I am sure that now game would be more quite polished and balanced, but some crucial faults would still be here today like AI and network issues.
Perhaps if they had more experience or better counceling, they would make better and more focused team from the start with business strategy that would grant them more stable income with less gamers dissillusionment. Development plan could have been more conservative, saving up time for crucial polish. Still, I can also see that Henrik is wiser, having more focused goals (Territory control major update, bug fixing and ingame economy enhancement with new trade broker system) and thinking about game being ready for larger distribution (Steam), but still struggling with issue that crucial updates are delivered at really slow pace.
Actually, They didn't let people go until AFTER they released.
Why do you suppose they couldn't keep the people around? Ummm... because the games been losing money since it was released. Why has it been losing money? Because it doesn't have enough paying players. Why doesn't it have enough players? Not too hard to figure that out.
We've all witnessed what SV can produce with money and people, it's laughable to think it'd change.
MO had the player base initially to be profitable, yet many didnt stick around. It's been 3 years now and the game still has the same core problems.
MONEY will never fix the MO we have now.
The free to play demo model didnt help, nor will Steam.
Where have all the "good" shills gone?
You are definitely right that they started losing money because SV couldn't keep subs after release due to MO being underdevoleped at the date of the release. But reason for the premature release is lack of money to keep game developing until it is truly ready for release. I know this because I am following SV since late alpha development. During the late open beta I warned that game is not ready for release, SV's only funding was revenue from one time pre-sold game clients and it was not enough to keep development for more than a year. Money plays here major part, but I agree it is not the only main issue. Any starter company has to make good decision what will it do with the current funds and how they can invest their money and how optimally they can allocate their developers. SV made errors in this area. Henrik as CEO and major owner did not have enough experience in this area to make good strategic decision, he was less than 25 years old when starting handling his huge project (Zuckenberg was only exception to prove the rule).
Another argument why money plays major part is that if SV had much better initial funding, Henrik could higher a team of experienced game developer councelers (like Zenimax did on ESO) that would help him make much better development plan and inovative business model . If you look at the SV team, when game started developing, it consisted solely of inexperienced average 25 year old developers. I would say that it is no surprise MO turned out as it is now. But IMO, they did make, despite the bad situation and lack of funding, MO keeping alive and progressing for more than 3 years till today. SV did make MO only FPV fantasy sandbox full loot PvP based MMO on the market. If everything turns well, only consequences of past bad decisions could be that development has been prolonged. If SV makes MO polished enough, I believe they will attract investors that will finance expanded development team.
Steam can mostly be used as marketing platform over source of new subs. If SV relies only on steam platform, there would be too few people that notice MO, and that does no actual good. SV needs to pay Valve to make on Steam front page to be noticed.
Even though i agree with you on your conclutions you are wrong in a lot of your assumptions. SV from times to times had funds but instead of hiring professinal devs as you said they did spend the money in god knows where. Remember the preorders fiasco: people who preordered the game were supposed to get Beta access in 4 Blocks. Starting from Beta Block A and ending to beta block D, each block was supposed to host 2000 players and each week they were supposed to add 2000 more on top of each block to end up in block D with 8000 players. A plan like that though went the "SV" way and just because they did better than expected they sold 5x the games copies (that was their official excuse for all the beta testers that were unable to login in game: the servers were designed to host 10k players tops and not 30 to 40k that bought the game) they were initialy planning to sell. Since they had no publisher and since they didnt send the boxed game copies or the ones who did actually send were discs with 1 link for downloading the game via torrent in an empty tin box, my guess is that the cost for that project was very close to zero and the incomes were several hundreds of thousands of Euro's enough to keep the developement running for more than a year or if you prefer enough for Henrik to hire some developers instead of amateur unreal engine coders. But since we are talking about Henrik and SV here thats not the case. The money went to a bottomless sink exactly as the money from donations going as we speak. Its not that we disagree here ofc but felt like pointing out that SV had its chances and blow them. So if i remember correctly SV didnt released MO in a half assed state due to the fact that they didnt had funds for developement. They did it because they pushed back the release so many times and they started losing their future playerbase due to the fact that they were inconsistent since day one and under that presure they made the terrible decision to release MO. Tbh dunno what would have being worse for them and at this point it doesnt really matter. What does matter is that the game today 3 years after release is in maybe worse state than it was back then. So allow me to be confident that even if those guys had all the money and all the time in the world they wouldnt be capable of creating any kind of game unless they were hiring competend people to do their job.
Discussing about today and the MO's status as we speak is like beating a dead horse with a stick. But the fact that SV dev team is crippled down to 1 "important developement dude" and 1 coder that is hiding behind a forum Avatar is solely Henrik's fault. Gamers cannot be blamed due to the fact that the game today, 3 years after its release is in a terrible state nor the genre itself. Sandbox games have a limited audience but that is not the reason for MO's low population. Personnaly i believe that Sandbox games playerbase is so desparate for a good title and are more than enough as they are devoted to fully support a title. The thing is that we might be desparate but not desparate enough to play and support a pile of crap just because Henrik said years ago that MO will be the modern version of UO. Its not.
And to end this i also dont believe that anything changed to SV's ways. If they had the chance to change things i m afraid that they would do the same mistakes all over again due to lack of vision, devotion, talent, education and professionalism. After 5-6 years around SV even the freelance devs that are supposed to be contracted with donations money for delivering new content/ features or whatever sound as a big bad joke, but that just a speculation of mine based on the evasive and half assed excuse that the company gave to players questions regarding a timeline manner of delivering the new content and deadlies regarding the contracts. Honestly i dont believe that Henrik is more mature now. He proved several times that each time he is cornered he loses his temper and resorts to all kind of ridiculous behaviours from lying to deceiving or promissing miracles.Henrik may completely failed as SV's CEO and as a game designer but i give him that he is an awesome comedian and offers good laughs to many people talking about MO's lore being hard to translate cause its written in "advanced Sweedish", about "MO's revolutionary AI", about "MO going out in the Asian market", about investors willing to invest money in MO etc etc.
I did some research out of SV's financial reports for year 2009 (year of pre-orders) and for 2010 (year of release). From pre-orders SV had gross income of 784.971,15$, if average client cost was about 60$ (as I remember) they sold out around 13K copies. They had profit of around 138K $. Other important thing is that they had 18 employees that had average 50K $ yearly (total 900K $ of employee yearly costs). Do the math if this number of employees is sustainable. It can be seen that they needed much more funding to continue the game development with that number of employees (which in proposed area is a small number). As for year 2010, they had similar income as in 2009. (coming from subs and client sales), but due to heavy employment costs, they had losses (85K $). As from reports and contemporary game state, it seems to me that bad decision was made not to employ truly experienced MMO game project manager who can make development/financial planning. They had only one 10+ year experienced employee, and he was a 3D artist. Also, I believe Henrik overestimated capabilities of Unreal 3 engine and Atlas MMO platform, I think he had fallen for a good Epic's marketing and presentation skills, promising him hills and valleys, and he believed that platform can actually support 10K+ simultanious players out of the box. In this part business experience comes handy. Other thing is that he overestimated capabilities of his development team when he believed that MO could be prepared for launch in 1 year (closed/beta) period which even AAA MMO companies cannot accomplish as as goal, and underestimated development costs and overestimated future subs revenues. Still, if he had more financing and better HR strategy, he could have postponed release for another year, and come up with more stable game.
Considering Henrik "lying" and overpromising to a community, it was because he was "forced" to. From my experience, when developing new game or any platform, you have to rely on external vendors who will promise you and present you all magical wonders, but after you pay them and wait for them to deliver, there comes disappointment since they do not deliver on time nor quality, but in meantime you set your own time goals which you cannot complete due to external factors, and you have to "lie" to your community and investors why delay is happening. This happened before with Epic china, this happens now with donation goals, because external developers mostly exagarate their capabilities and timegoals to sell their products. Legal suits in this case is not an option, since it will past years until you can remedy the damage of changing vendor.
Current status is that Henrik is capable enough to attract new investments, which means he is capable to convince others that he has a good plan at least, and MO has delivered significant improvements since release. Today he got injection worth of around 400K $ to prepare for Steam release. He got 4 different investors.
http://www.aktietorget.se/NewsItem.aspx?ID=67118
Mortal Online got 70K of votes on Steam greenlight (to vote you have to buy at least one game on steam, therefore no fake accounts), which means 70K of potential sub payers. There is hope and opportunity, we have to wait and see what happens. Why is this generally important for sandbox community? Only because MO is only game in the market providing desired features for a niche.
Actually, even their main programmer comes from a very light programming background, being a scripter for various mods. That wasn't nearly enough to code a MMO from grounds up. He has probably caugth up by now in programming, but his early inexperience really shows in the games core.
No way in hell did MO have 30-40k beta players at any point imo.. Even during launch/preorder release there were under 10k players active, if I remember correctly.
You can calculate from 2009 year report that they sold around 13K pre-orders.
You can also calculate SVs starting capital with said reports, yet we all know what that got us.
Where have all the "good" shills gone?
Toferio i never said that 30+k were playing in Beta. All i said was that more than 30k people preordered the game and the server was unable to host a number like that. I m not even sure if the server was capable at the start of the last Beta Block D to host the 8k people that was supposed to. The only known fact is that they claimed as an excuse aimed for all the people that were unable to login that they had to lock login at a certain number, cause a lot more people than the 8k expected at the beggining had acess to the beta since they sold a lot more copies of the game.
Zeeraha i cannot do the math since i dont know exact numbers and can only speculate exactly as you re doing. I highly doubt that each of the 18 wannabe developers that SV had in its ranks at those first days had an annual cost of 50k dollars. If that was the case i would love to be in the place of one of them. I m almost sure that i would do better than the sound artist dude, having in mind among other things that today 3 years after release slashing with a sword on a zombie sounds like hitting an empty barrel with a bat. What they should have done at those first days and untill release was to keep the operation costs at minimum amounts and throw all their resources in developement and aim at a decent product. Unfortunatelly that wasnt in their vision and they thought it was better to pretend they are bussinesmen that are running a company instead of focusing at their product.
Where have all the "good" shills gone?
Please state the linked source of that information. Frankly, I am interested how much players server can take. I also remember Henrik mentioning that each node can handle up to 200 players. But limitation is due to client that cannot handle more than 200 actors. At release it was mentioned that limit is 2000 players, but also it was vaguely mentioned that server can handle 10000 players.
I guess that when you are the CEO of a company that its out in the stock market you are probably forced to lie now and then. Now if you are a CEO of a company thats out in the stock market and you are using lies similar to the ones that a parent will use to his/her 2 year old child to convince him/her eat his/hers vegeatables then something is terribly wrong. Saying to your customers that MO's lore its not published 3 years after release because its written in "advanced Sweedish" and no one can translate it to English (and thats only one example of that kind of behaviour) is an act that should be punished with public ear pullimg or maybe spitting right in the face.
Henrik is totaly incapable of attracting investors. Unless investors are 15 year olds ofc. Cause we have to admit that he has a lot of success at 15-17. Look at his playerbase. I m sorry but i cant see whats the significant improvements that delivered in MO since release. I can start right here and now a never ending list with gamebreaking bugs and issues that comes attached with the game since early BETA days. Dunno were he got the 400$ injection you mentioning but i have a very strong idea were those 400k $ will go.
Now concerning the 70k votes you mentioned on Steam Greenlight i wouldnt have the slightest idea how a number like that came up. I m sure though that arent people that know MO's/ SV's history nor their current state. Whats importand for the sandbox community from my point of view is that hungry for money wanna be developers around the world should realize that sandbox fans maybe are desperate for a sandbox title, but this doesnt mean that we re gonna support the first piece of crap that they gonna serve us. MO doesnt provide not even a single working Sandbox feature worth mentioning or supporting but since we are discussing here please help yourslef and name one that you consider "desired".
Where themepark games try to hide that they are copying WOW, games like Mortal Online and Darkfall make no attempt to hide their inspiration
______\m/_____
LordOfDarkDesire
Minecraft is one man company, Terraria is one man company, Mount & Blade was 2-man company. THEY did wonders with their little game.
SV did not.
SV even made indie developers looked bad.
They aren't having trouble translating it, they are to lazy to bother.
This "game", if you can call it a game, has been out for over 4 years maybe 5 now. I just know it is still now as big a pile of dung as it was then. It is unfortunate that the same problems are still there, and still going on. I am pretty sure the same hacks and exploits are still around which only makes it worse.
So much crap, so little quality.
Its a glorified hobby. Does it have some good concepts some interesting ideas? yes. Are those ideas implemented well?programmed well?..no.
Yes I have played it at the start and multiple times over the years. Has it improved? barely.
Simply put....
Great idea..Game though is absolutely horrible.
is that ok mod?..or is it not fanboi enough?
Seriously man... Theres absolutely no lore behind MO. Translating something that doesnt exist can be really hard.