EQ Never

gogojira_sl said:

Betwixt the strands of Dave Georgeson's ponytail.

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I wonder if he arranges his pubes into little mini-ponytails.

a_skeleton_02_sl said:

Wrong.

Vanguard was a flop because it failed to turn a profit even after all it's changes.

Swtor NEVER stopped making money. I know you think video games revolve around you or one core set of gamers you identify with but it does not. SWTOR from day one was making money then they realized they could make MORE money by ignoring raiders and went straight to f2p.

Again, I don't play SWTOR and I don't really like SWTOR but listening to you make up shit is silly.

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Yeah, I think your giving them more credits than due (yay star wars pun).

It was more that SWTOR bled subscriptions after a month and the devs had to put it in the FTP intensive care ward. Your statement is technically correct, but the framing is suspect.

overbyte_sl said:

Yeah, I think your giving them more credits than due (yay star wars pun).

It was more that SWTOR bled subscriptions after a month and the devs had to put it in the FTP intensive care ward. Your statement is technically correct, but the framing is suspect.

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Nitpick much? Hes right, but its "suspect"?

SWTOR was a failure in almost everyone's eyes, especially the investors. STWOR was regularly touted as the real WoW killer, and if anyone had a chance to do that it was SWTOR. The fact that they failed, especially with the Star Wars IP behind them, is why nobody talks about WoW killers anymore.

Imo it's also the reason so much investor money dried up in the mmo space after that. You can't promise WoW sub numbers to a money man when he can look at SWTOR and then laugh at your face. They expect a gusher from their investment, not the trickle of pennies and nickels that most mmos bring.

Sure SWTOR made a profit, enough to keep it running and provide minimal upgrades, but almost every mmo does that. However, the investors were promised their own private ATM, ala WoW. They never got close to that. Why the fuck do you think so many of the original team were canned.... errr.... "retired".


Some of you may disagree, but then your memories are very short, or you are just another SWTOR nut sucker. Check back to the original posts in the SWTOR thread if you can't remember back that far. And stop hitting the wacky weed.

I guess when you were a kid and the only other kid you knew that sold Weed said the area was dry - you believed him. Investors are still investing, left and right, and its evident everywhere you look. Investors market wide may have learned a thing or two about taking such a monumental fucking risk with SWTOR, but theyve got their money back with interest.

People still talk about WoW killers - just not here as much (If you havent noticed, this forum doesnt get the 4k/5k unique hourly visitors it used to get). But if you think back, WoW killer has been tossed around pretty liberally for even the shittiest of fucking MMO's. Star Wars was destined to be no different in receiving that tag.

SWTOR is alive right now based on its IP, there is no debate in that (and thank you for proving the original point 5 fucking pages ago), but its not a failure. The majority of the people in this forum know that the game was a steaming pile of shit at release, and to an extent, it still is. So we dont need to revisit that fact, nor does anyone have rose tinted glasses about that shitty ass game.

Regardless of the criteria you put upon it. There are different degrees of success here. Making a profit, and a good one it succeeded at. You want a failure? Scoop of Vanguard. Scoop up Horizons, etc. Those games had a good heart, but were truly failures in the MMO market. If the only thing you can compare success or failure to is whether it killed an existing, high user base MMO or not is just short sighted as fuck and you know it.

For the record, I believe that SWTOR screwed up more than any other title ever....


That being said...

The Official Raptr Blog Home | Most Played PC Games: August 2014 League of Legends, World of Tanks get an eSports boost

What are you bitches babbling about? SWTOR failed but makes money now in an entirely different way than it was intended; that's more than VG could say so yeah, it wears the bigger failure hat. Done. Let's get back to voxels and dark elf horns.

The fact that star wars is now FTP is proof of its failure. If it was truly a success, they'd still be charging a monthly sub like they did at launch. Trying to sell a steak for $50 but then realizing no one wants your shitty steak so you give away the steak for free but charge $5 for the potato doesn't make your steak all of a sudden good.

etchazz_sl said:

The fact that star wars is now FTP is proof of its failure. If it was truly a success, they'd still be charging a monthly sub like they did at launch. Trying to sell a steak for $50 but then realizing no one wants your shitty steak so you give away the steak for free but charge $5 for the potato doesn't make your steak all of a sudden good.

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Extremely flawed logic. Bad analogy too. The MMO space is a dynamic market, selling steaks isn't. One payment model wasn't profitable so they moved to a different payment model that was. Its not a sign of failure, its a sign of smart management.

etchazz_sl said:

The fact that star wars is now FTP is proof of its failure. If it was truly a success, they'd still be charging a monthly sub like they did at launch. Trying to sell a steak for $50 but then realizing no one wants your shitty steak so you give away the steak for free but charge $5 for the potato doesn't make your steak all of a sudden good.

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They pulled in something like 140 million dollars in the last year. Failure?
Remove WoW from the comparison with any other game, it's just not even on the same planet. SWtoR didn't meet the expectations they had at launch, given the cost, but sure as fuck they got their money hats sorted out by now.

Miele_sl said:

They pulled in something like 140 million dollars in the last year. Failure?

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You can only judge that if you know the profit the investors expected from the game, both within the launch months and for year 1, 2, and so on. If they expected 800 mill per year and get 140 mill, that's a failure. Does anyone actually know the returns that were expected from TOR before it launched and crashed (not the "adjusted for failure" expectations they are holding now)?

Mr Creed_sl said:

You can only judge that if you know the profit the investors expected from the game, both within the launch months and for year 1, 2, and so on. If they expected 800 mill per year and get 140 mill, that's a failure. Does anyone actually know the returns that were expected from TOR before it launched and crashed (not the "adjusted for failure" expectations they are holding now)?

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Even if they expected 15$ per month from a 2 million subs loyal base that never unsubs, so 300m $, 130m in one year is a good return, given that by now the staff is as large as it's needed and all the extra people has gone elsewhere. Under their original expectations? Likely yes.
Considering it was called Tortanic,, I give them that their cash shop made the game profitable.

If a 50% recovery rate on investment per year could be considered 'failure' I need to reexamine my portfolio.

Oh the many many neg nets and flames I got when, on official announcement of SWTOR I said that "it will not be the second coming of Jesus in a game" and that bioware has sung its last big song- after all that I only got one "You where right" lol... but still I told ya so

as for investors it really is just margins on return... look at, lets say- Darden restaurants- Olive Garden etc. profit etc. it up- but their ROI and growth is like down OMG 1% and its chaos and mass layoffs and changes blady bla bla- sooo to say the investors on SWOTR should be happy with what they got is way, way off.

Utnayan_sl said:

... Really the next course of action you will see is a smaller sub fee with a cash shop. $7.99 a month with a lot of extra perks if you pay that, with a cash shop along side of it. So they will have both a predictable baseline, and a cash shop to go with it.

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isn't that the EQ2 etc. model?

Big W Powah!_sl said:

Extremely flawed logic. Bad analogy too. The MMO space is a dynamic market, selling steaks isn't. One payment model wasn't profitable so they moved to a different payment model that was. Its not a sign of failure, its a sign of smart management.

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No, it's a sign of "holy fuck our game sucks and no one is going to be playing it if we don't go FTP." WoW still has a monthly sub and has been out for 10 years, and the star wars IP is a thousand times bigger than WoW's. Hell, even EQ charged a monthly sub for 13 years. I don't care how much money SWTOR makes, you can't tell me honestly that they still wouldn't be charging a monthly sub if they didn't start hemorrhaging players only a few months after launch.

At the free to play conversion in 2012 swtor still had 500,000 paying subs. They boasted 17mil+ monthly revenue after the introduction of a cash shop, and retained their premium subscriber base.

They didn't do it because they weren't making money. They did it because they knew they could make more. Blizzard introduced limited microtransactions in Nov 2009, long before subscriptions peaked a year later in Q4 2010. Microtransactions now make up ~20% of WoW's revenues. Players willing to pay a monthly sub are dropping industry-wide, while microtransaction revenue is on the rise.

These are companies who are very aware of current consumer trends & desires, and they will continue to craft strategies that reflect them.