Originally posted by Kayyd It makes you wonder if there isn't something larger happening in economies around the world that is forcing people to be more frugal with their gaming dollars.
Not really things are as good economically as they've been since 2007. Maybe if you live in the Middle East or are concerned that there is going to be thermonuclear war between the U.S. and Russia you might want to cut back on your gaming dollars but otherwise things are going pretty good. For the first time in a long time there are help wanted signs up at every fast-food place in town.
"It feels like your parents saying, Well, your brother went off to college, what are you doing with your life?"
Quite so.
But seriously, EA is the epitome of corporate culture in gaming, with all the good and bad that brings. Here you are seeing the bad, as you so often do from EA.
Do I trust them with SWTOR? No, but then I joined that MMO at launch and had a great years play there. Is SWTOR safe? No, but what game is safe?
For nobody not under drugs would ever ask of EA to care about their games... they care about profit, and then about even more profit, and then profit is on their agenda, and then - nothing else, obviously.
One might as well ask a lion to turn into a vegetarian.
It doesn't sound like we are missing much from peoples descriptions.
I don't believe they are doing this because of financial problems. It seems game companies have found more lucrative and less expensive games to produce that people seem to be content with.
You can make a garbage mobile phone/tablet game for a tiny amount of money and less work that will have more profit then a AAA game.
Companies always follow the money and that's why MMOs have been going downhill IMO.
In the right situation following the money can lead to more complex and innovative games. Right now that is not the case though. It seems when a product reaches mass market appeal things are almost always dumbed down because mass market doesn't care about complexity. They want something simple that won't take much time.
The best years for things seems to come when they first start out and people are still learning and experimenting.
Do entities that have a monopoly innovate ? Try to lower costs ? Provide world class customer service ? Listen to customers who might want them to change a bit ? Should a business be punished if it closes a business that fails to make enough money to support it ?
Where do businesses come from ? From the government ? Or from individuals who feel they can offer goods or services in exchange for money (that money is spent to pay expenses ...like their employees,raw materials,taxes etc). Why do people start businesses( they might like to be their own boss.....provide a standard of living for their family that is above average......they feel they have a great idea that is valuable and want to implement it to get rewarded for it etc etc)
Game companies are businesses who decide to risk their money to provide entertainment. By assuming that risk ...they expect to have the potential for rewards beyond the expenses of providing the entertainment services.
That left over money is called profit. It rewards the risk takers..it provides funds to expand the business and continue to innovate etc etc.
What entities are not interested in making a profit ? Some non-profit businesses(very few in number) AND governments. Governments don't produce wealth.....they consume it by confiscating the wealth of individuals and businesses (taxes) and spending that confiscated tax money on goods and services.
Oh look, 4 low budget games with item shops are shutting down, who could have predicted that. 90% of the games on this site's game list could be shut down tomorrow and I wouldn't give a damn. It's pathetic to watch all these idiot devs scrambling to make money off this genre with their underdeveloped garbage that has more thought put into monetisation than the actual game.
Can't say i'm surprised at Battlefield Heroes shutting down, in fact i'm surprised it didn't happen before now.
When it first came out it was a fun little game that i played with some guildies now and then for breaks from MMO's. As time passed it just ended up filled with people using aimbots though and was ruined pretty quickly as it was always less than 24 hours after each patch to fix it they were back in force.
Originally posted by Ranyr SWTOR still draws hundreds of millions, it'll be fine.
Technically isn't less than 200M not "hundreds of millions" but sure, it have done pretty fine the last 2 years.
The problem is that EA expected it to earn far more then that when they calculated it before launch so if you think like an investor the game is losing money (yeah, they really think like that, if they assume to get in a 300 millions and get in 250M instead they see it as a loss of 50M, not a win of 250M as it is). And they tend to pull the numbers out of their butts with zero real backing.
EA think they earn more money on making singleplayer games and selling microtransactions and expansion to them instead of making MMOs (they might be right), that is why they cancelled the Dragon age MMO they were planning.
Same thing with Blizzard, if Heartstone actually earns more money than Wow, why bother making Titan when you can make something earning more for a lot less.
The reason they closing down these games however is because they aren't mking enough money by far, and that is because they ain't good enough. Good games make money, the problem here is that MMOs do make money but they also cost a lot to make so you might get more income per spent dollar for Dragon age 4 then from Dragon age online and you surely take less risks.
Originally posted by Ranyr SWTOR still draws hundreds of millions, it'll be fine.
Technically isn't less than 200M not "hundreds of millions" but sure, it have done pretty fine the last 2 years.
The problem is that EA expected it to earn far more then that when they calculated it before launch so if you think like an investor the game is losing money (yeah, they really think like that, if they assume to get in a 300 millions and get in 250M instead they see it as a loss of 50M, not a win of 250M as it is). And they tend to pull the numbers out of their butts with zero real backing.
EA think they earn more money on making singleplayer games and selling microtransactions and expansion to them instead of making MMOs (they might be right), that is why they cancelled the Dragon age MMO they were planning.
Same thing with Blizzard, if Heartstone actually earns more money than Wow, why bother making Titan when you can make something earning more for a lot less.
The reason they closing down these games however is because they aren't mking enough money by far, and that is because they ain't good enough. Good games make money, the problem here is that MMOs do make money but they also cost a lot to make so you might get more income per spent dollar for Dragon age 4 then from Dragon age online and you surely take less risks.
A lot of people are probably wishing they had made another elder scrolls or knights of the old republic single player game then an MMO variant. I am among those people.
Originally posted by fivoroth EA shut down 4 games no one ever heard about and probably that one one plays. Call the care bear squad. Will read topic again. 11/10.
Chances are the games are shut down because nobody is interested in them, can't say i've heard of them either so they can't have been that big of a deal, and if virtually nobody is playing them, why not shut them down, seems fairly straight forward to me too tbh
Oh look, 4 low budget games with item shops are shutting down, who could have predicted that. 90% of the games on this site's game list could be shut down tomorrow and I wouldn't give a damn. It's pathetic to watch all these idiot devs scrambling to make money off this genre with their underdeveloped garbage that has more thought put into monetisation than the actual game.
The problem is actually the other way around - at least in FIFA World's case. There just wasn't really anything to justify spending money on, since the game was just a older, cheaper version of FIFA 15's Ultimate Team mode in every way. Buying packs to get players seemed like kind of a lost cause, since you can do the same thing in FIFA 15, which looks better, has more features, and more people playing. It offered nothing beyond that.
So I'd say it was less about the budget and the cash shop, and more about a lack of design forethought. They seemed to have no real goal with FIFA World, beyond launching it and seeing what happens.
Originally posted by Ranyr SWTOR still draws hundreds of millions, it'll be fine.
No proof. Please don't post Superdata guesstimates. The last actual data - from EA - was posted with their last quarter SEC filing when they said that their f2p revenue was up but would have been better if not for a $62M decline (compared to a year earlier) primarily due to SimCity and SWTOR. So SWTOR last quarter did "significantly" less well than it did 12 months earlier (significant as a big enough number for EA to mention it in dispatches.)
However as SW BF isn't launching until mid-November I think we can assume it is safe until then. And that EA won't want to suggest it is closing "soon" as that would stop people trying out the game. As a publisher that is something you won't want to do
One of the factors will be what these games are costing to support. I don't think any of these games use Frostbite - which is what all of EA studios are moving towards; even EA Sport. In fact based on what EA have said previously I suspect these 4 games use 4 different software engines.
Supporting unique software is expensive and - at some point - it will become hard to keep / motivate staff on these games. As Frostbite grows developer / programmer / writers etc. will increasingly want to work on Frostbite projects if they want a long term future etc. New games are increasingly using Frostbite so they will want to.
I gave EA the middle finger when they shut down battlefield 2142 servers. That is the most balanced battlefield game they ever made. Then they turn around and turn new battlefield games into CoD knock offs. Done with EA.
Once again, four more mmos/online games dying at the hand of EA. This time the victims are Battlefield Heroes, Battlefield play4free, Fifa World, and Need for Speed World.
The funny thing is that while they are announcing these shut downs they also add in the same post that Swtor is doing very well. I just find that funny....
Im still very skeptical about playing Swtor again with EA managing it.
Originally posted by Ranyr SWTOR still draws hundreds of millions, it'll be fine.
No proof. Please don't post Superdata guesstimates. The last actual data - from EA - was posted with their last quarter SEC filing when they said that their f2p revenue was up but would have been better if not for a $62M decline (compared to a year earlier) primarily due to SimCity and SWTOR. So SWTOR last quarter did "significantly" less well than it did 12 months earlier (significant as a big enough number for EA to mention it in dispatches.)
However as SW BF isn't launching until mid-November I think we can assume it is safe until then. And that EA won't want to suggest it is closing "soon" as that would stop people trying out the game. As a publisher that is something you won't want to do
SWTOR is safe until after new SW movie appears, after that it will depend, if they dont get significant increase everything is possible.
I gave EA the middle finger when they shut down battlefield 2142 servers. That is the most balanced battlefield game they ever made. Then they turn around and turn new battlefield games into CoD knock offs.
Done with EA.
Isn't it great when a developer doesn't let you host your own servers, then shuts down the only ones running. EA was pretty clear that they had a problem with people getting too much value out of their games and playing games longer than anticipated. The reason they stopped players from running their own servers. Now they decide how long you will play the game. At least they reneged on making people buy bullets after play for x number of hours.
Ok.. before anyone make this sound like a big deal.....
BF:Heroes was a broken mess of a browser game in a cartoon skin
BF2P was the same but in a more realistic skin...
FIFA World was a P2W Fifa light with weird controlls (most likley a mobile port)
Need for Speed:World was a poorly managed mess of a game that for a very long time was so P2W that it was not funny and used wet paper as a anti-cheat system... (nothing kill a racing game as much as when there is a insta-finish cheat for it)
So i am not surprised that these games did not pass the grade in these somewhat tougher times. Most of the got 3-5 years (fifa got one but it was a blatant cash grab so who cares)
This is not EA being evil... this is EA spring cleaning... Heck NFS:W has had something close to 4 different "dev" studios working on it and have been in life-support mode for over a year...
The EA hate bandwagon is getting really tiring to see. Just because it's always the same old same old. EA does something EVERY OTHER publisher/dev would do to games that are doing poorly. All you hear is "EA!? Ramble Ramble Ramble evil...... fire burn...ramble".
Originally posted by Ranyr SWTOR still draws hundreds of millions, it'll be fine.
Technically isn't less than 200M not "hundreds of millions" but sure, it have done pretty fine the last 2 years.
The problem is that EA expected it to earn far more then that when they calculated it before launch so if you think like an investor the game is losing money (yeah, they really think like that, if they assume to get in a 300 millions and get in 250M instead they see it as a loss of 50M, not a win of 250M as it is). And they tend to pull the numbers out of their butts with zero real backing.
EA think they earn more money on making singleplayer games and selling microtransactions and expansion to them instead of making MMOs (they might be right), that is why they cancelled the Dragon age MMO they were planning.
Same thing with Blizzard, if Heartstone actually earns more money than Wow, why bother making Titan when you can make something earning more for a lot less.
The reason they closing down these games however is because they aren't mking enough money by far, and that is because they ain't good enough. Good games make money, the problem here is that MMOs do make money but they also cost a lot to make so you might get more income per spent dollar for Dragon age 4 then from Dragon age online and you surely take less risks.
I work in finance/banking and trust me no one thinks like you described...You have a target for your investment but that changes all the time. If I got 250M back and it cost me 200M (considering all factors including cost of capital/return) then I made 50M profit. No one is going to call it 50M loss. They tend to pull the numbers out of their butts with zero backing? It's cute someone maknig statements like that when he himself is completely clueless about how finance and businesses work. Good try though. Your prior 2 sentences show how little you know. Maybe you should stick to critiqueing games as opposed to business decisions cause you clearly have no idea what you are talknig about.
If MMOs have lower return and higher risk, which is probably true, then of course there would be no point in developing them as opposed to other genres. Why the hell would you take on extra risk for lower return? It's completely illogical and makes no sense.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
I gave EA the middle finger when they shut down battlefield 2142 servers. That is the most balanced battlefield game they ever made. Then they turn around and turn new battlefield games into CoD knock offs.
Done with EA.
Isn't it great when a developer doesn't let you host your own servers, then shuts down the only ones running. EA was pretty clear that they had a problem with people getting too much value out of their games and playing games longer than anticipated. The reason they stopped players from running their own servers. Now they decide how long you will play the game. At least they reneged on making people buy bullets after play for x number of hours.
So true, the money men could not stand the fact we would play a game that was a few years old. They want players dropping their old games to play the latest release as soon as it comes out. Buying bullets after x hours is an example of the casino mentality that is nearly throughout the MMO land. Was it at all surprising that sort of design should creep into FPS? If it makes money you will see nearly the whole gaming genre take it up.
Comments
Not really things are as good economically as they've been since 2007. Maybe if you live in the Middle East or are concerned that there is going to be thermonuclear war between the U.S. and Russia you might want to cut back on your gaming dollars but otherwise things are going pretty good. For the first time in a long time there are help wanted signs up at every fast-food place in town.
"It feels like your parents saying, Well, your brother went off to college, what are you doing with your life?"
Quite so.
But seriously, EA is the epitome of corporate culture in gaming, with all the good and bad that brings. Here you are seeing the bad, as you so often do from EA.
Do I trust them with SWTOR? No, but then I joined that MMO at launch and had a great years play there. Is SWTOR safe? No, but what game is safe?
Dude, seriously ? Drugs arent cool !
For nobody not under drugs would ever ask of EA to care about their games... they care about profit, and then about even more profit, and then profit is on their agenda, and then - nothing else, obviously.
One might as well ask a lion to turn into a vegetarian.
It doesn't sound like we are missing much from peoples descriptions.
I don't believe they are doing this because of financial problems. It seems game companies have found more lucrative and less expensive games to produce that people seem to be content with.
You can make a garbage mobile phone/tablet game for a tiny amount of money and less work that will have more profit then a AAA game.
Companies always follow the money and that's why MMOs have been going downhill IMO.
In the right situation following the money can lead to more complex and innovative games. Right now that is not the case though. It seems when a product reaches mass market appeal things are almost always dumbed down because mass market doesn't care about complexity. They want something simple that won't take much time.
The best years for things seems to come when they first start out and people are still learning and experimenting.
Do entities that have a monopoly innovate ? Try to lower costs ? Provide world class customer service ? Listen to customers who might want them to change a bit ? Should a business be punished if it closes a business that fails to make enough money to support it ?
Where do businesses come from ? From the government ? Or from individuals who feel they can offer goods or services in exchange for money (that money is spent to pay expenses ...like their employees,raw materials,taxes etc). Why do people start businesses( they might like to be their own boss.....provide a standard of living for their family that is above average......they feel they have a great idea that is valuable and want to implement it to get rewarded for it etc etc)
Game companies are businesses who decide to risk their money to provide entertainment. By assuming that risk ...they expect to have the potential for rewards beyond the expenses of providing the entertainment services.
That left over money is called profit. It rewards the risk takers..it provides funds to expand the business and continue to innovate etc etc.
What entities are not interested in making a profit ? Some non-profit businesses(very few in number) AND governments. Governments don't produce wealth.....they consume it by confiscating the wealth of individuals and businesses (taxes) and spending that confiscated tax money on goods and services.
Oh look, 4 low budget games with item shops are shutting down, who could have predicted that. 90% of the games on this site's game list could be shut down tomorrow and I wouldn't give a damn. It's pathetic to watch all these idiot devs scrambling to make money off this genre with their underdeveloped garbage that has more thought put into monetisation than the actual game.
More like Jeff Hickman and Paul Barnett did.
Can't say i'm surprised at Battlefield Heroes shutting down, in fact i'm surprised it didn't happen before now.
When it first came out it was a fun little game that i played with some guildies now and then for breaks from MMO's. As time passed it just ended up filled with people using aimbots though and was ruined pretty quickly as it was always less than 24 hours after each patch to fix it they were back in force.
Technically isn't less than 200M not "hundreds of millions" but sure, it have done pretty fine the last 2 years.
The problem is that EA expected it to earn far more then that when they calculated it before launch so if you think like an investor the game is losing money (yeah, they really think like that, if they assume to get in a 300 millions and get in 250M instead they see it as a loss of 50M, not a win of 250M as it is). And they tend to pull the numbers out of their butts with zero real backing.
EA think they earn more money on making singleplayer games and selling microtransactions and expansion to them instead of making MMOs (they might be right), that is why they cancelled the Dragon age MMO they were planning.
Same thing with Blizzard, if Heartstone actually earns more money than Wow, why bother making Titan when you can make something earning more for a lot less.
The reason they closing down these games however is because they aren't mking enough money by far, and that is because they ain't good enough. Good games make money, the problem here is that MMOs do make money but they also cost a lot to make so you might get more income per spent dollar for Dragon age 4 then from Dragon age online and you surely take less risks.
A lot of people are probably wishing they had made another elder scrolls or knights of the old republic single player game then an MMO variant. I am among those people.
Chances are the games are shut down because nobody is interested in them, can't say i've heard of them either so they can't have been that big of a deal, and if virtually nobody is playing them, why not shut them down, seems fairly straight forward to me too tbh
The problem is actually the other way around - at least in FIFA World's case. There just wasn't really anything to justify spending money on, since the game was just a older, cheaper version of FIFA 15's Ultimate Team mode in every way. Buying packs to get players seemed like kind of a lost cause, since you can do the same thing in FIFA 15, which looks better, has more features, and more people playing. It offered nothing beyond that.
So I'd say it was less about the budget and the cash shop, and more about a lack of design forethought. They seemed to have no real goal with FIFA World, beyond launching it and seeing what happens.
No proof. Please don't post Superdata guesstimates. The last actual data - from EA - was posted with their last quarter SEC filing when they said that their f2p revenue was up but would have been better if not for a $62M decline (compared to a year earlier) primarily due to SimCity and SWTOR. So SWTOR last quarter did "significantly" less well than it did 12 months earlier (significant as a big enough number for EA to mention it in dispatches.)
However as SW BF isn't launching until mid-November I think we can assume it is safe until then. And that EA won't want to suggest it is closing "soon" as that would stop people trying out the game. As a publisher that is something you won't want to do
One of the factors will be what these games are costing to support. I don't think any of these games use Frostbite - which is what all of EA studios are moving towards; even EA Sport. In fact based on what EA have said previously I suspect these 4 games use 4 different software engines.
Supporting unique software is expensive and - at some point - it will become hard to keep / motivate staff on these games. As Frostbite grows developer / programmer / writers etc. will increasingly want to work on Frostbite projects if they want a long term future etc. New games are increasingly using Frostbite so they will want to.
Survival of the fittest i guess.
SWTOR is really profitable, one of the top titles still.
SWTOR is safe until after new SW movie appears, after that it will depend, if they dont get significant increase everything is possible.
Isn't it great when a developer doesn't let you host your own servers, then shuts down the only ones running. EA was pretty clear that they had a problem with people getting too much value out of their games and playing games longer than anticipated. The reason they stopped players from running their own servers. Now they decide how long you will play the game. At least they reneged on making people buy bullets after play for x number of hours.
The EA hate bandwagon is getting really tiring to see. Just because it's always the same old same old. EA does something EVERY OTHER publisher/dev would do to games that are doing poorly. All you hear is "EA!? Ramble Ramble Ramble evil...... fire burn...ramble".
I work in finance/banking and trust me no one thinks like you described...You have a target for your investment but that changes all the time. If I got 250M back and it cost me 200M (considering all factors including cost of capital/return) then I made 50M profit. No one is going to call it 50M loss. They tend to pull the numbers out of their butts with zero backing? It's cute someone maknig statements like that when he himself is completely clueless about how finance and businesses work. Good try though. Your prior 2 sentences show how little you know. Maybe you should stick to critiqueing games as opposed to business decisions cause you clearly have no idea what you are talknig about.
If MMOs have lower return and higher risk, which is probably true, then of course there would be no point in developing them as opposed to other genres. Why the hell would you take on extra risk for lower return? It's completely illogical and makes no sense.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
So true, the money men could not stand the fact we would play a game that was a few years old. They want players dropping their old games to play the latest release as soon as it comes out. Buying bullets after x hours is an example of the casino mentality that is nearly throughout the MMO land. Was it at all surprising that sort of design should creep into FPS? If it makes money you will see nearly the whole gaming genre take it up.
In some cases, decades after they had de facto passed away.
Money men observe the titles dispassionately.
Surprise?
I think the best way to retire an online game is to release the server client so people can run their own public or private servers.