Who will be the next owners of EQ?

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Faltigoth

Faltigoth

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Agraza said:
There is so much potential for a simple reboot of EverQuest. It doesn't have to be fancy. Release it zone by zone. Every attempt so far has been such an unnecessarily complex undertaking. Now they've got players helping model shit for their pixel stores. Do the same for the new ones. So much fucking incompetence has been steering the property since its inception.
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I feel like they have already tried to do this with the progression servers. At the end of the day, people want to play 99-2003 EQ, not 2016 EQ, and rebooting it would capitalize on that.

You are right, if someone just re-released the whole goddamn thing with updated graphics / systems while keeping most of the lore/world/quests/combat intact, handing it out expansion by expansion or all at once, that would be about the best thing that could happen to EQ. While I loved my run on Phinigel this summer and enjoyed the shit out of the nostalgia - and the like-minded people drawn by the nostalgia - it is still clunky as hell. When I left to get up to speed for Legion it was like trading a Razr flip phone for an iPhone 7.
 
RobXIII

RobXIII

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EQ2 is juuuuust barely supported. Even the cash cow TLE servers they don't bother with for the most part (ie forget to post vote results, bork itemization for every single expansion).

People are somehow surprised everytime. I have no idea why, unless some gamers really just are that dumb.
 
Grim1

Grim1

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Faltigoth said:
I feel like they have already tried to do this with the progression servers. At the end of the day, people want to play 99-2003 EQ, not 2016 EQ, and rebooting it would capitalize on that.

You are right, if someone just re-released the whole goddamn thing with updated graphics / systems while keeping most of the lore/world/quests/combat intact, handing it out expansion by expansion or all at once, that would be about the best thing that could happen to EQ. While I loved my run on Phinigel this summer and enjoyed the shit out of the nostalgia - and the like-minded people drawn by the nostalgia - it is still clunky as hell. When I left to get up to speed for Legion it was like trading a Razr flip phone for an iPhone 7.
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Most mmo gamers understand and agree with you. However, you have to convince the people who have their hands on the money. And all they see is over a decade of failure at the hands of Smedley and his ilk. EQ doesn't even have name brand at this point.

I give credit to Smedley for taking a chance on Brad, etc. They helped create the blueprint for WoW and every mmo to come. But Smedley quickly succumbed to hubris and EQ was forever fucked because ot it.
 
pharmakos

pharmakos

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i bet game card sales have gone way down since they introduced Krono.
 
R

Reca

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I'm curious to know how much deferred revenue they're sitting on right now. There is like a river of Krono everywhere, if the company had half a brain they'd make krono consumable for station cash. They're bleeding subscription revenue like no other.
 
Flipmode

Flipmode

EQOA Refugee
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Reca said:
I'm curious to know how much deferred revenue they're sitting on right now. There is like a river of Krono everywhere, if the company had half a brain they'd make krono consumable for station cash. They're bleeding subscription revenue like no other.
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No one with a brain has run this company for a very long time. I just wish they'd sell the EQ ip to a competent team and be done with it. This slow death spiral is dumb.
 
Dandai

Dandai

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I'm extremely skeptical that they could demonstrate that "EverQuest" as an IP has any significant value to a prospective buyer. EQ has minimal name recognition, same-as no market penetration, etc - these are the qualities that a potential buyer would be interested in. The only thing EQ ever had going for it was that it was the first; by virtue of there being essentially no competition in 1999, for a couple years at least, it was also the best.

The venture capitalist firm that bought SOE and turned them into DBG did so because of their DayZ clone (and purportedly Planetside, but I'm skeptical of that). EQ may be in the black (no idea if there are hard numbers to support this), but it's far from a guaranteed ROI.

tl;dr: EverQuest is deader than Dredd 2.
 
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Agraza

Agraza

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Concur. Same was true when they started on EQ:N. Argued it shouldn't even be called EQ anything anymore. No value.
 
Q

qwertyqweqwertwqert

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Planetside name is probably worth more, but both are pretty crappy because they are bad at making games. They already had their chance to bring EQ back to a new generation, it was called EQ2 and it was a piece of shit. They also had a chance to make Planetside into a huge game too, and it was called Planetside 2 and it was boring. Then they ran the original EQ into the ground, killed Vanguard, wasted lots of money on other shit, most of which never even released. At some point you have to see that names of the games have nothing to do with it. It is a company that has had retarded management since the start, their whole company has only survived so long because they got lucky with EQ and they were completely incapable of turning that good fortune into anything. They deserved to just go under. And now Daybreak bought them and did nothing positive too. Let it die. Also nobody is going to buy any of those names, if someone had the budget to make an MMO, they wouldn't want some shitty old name, they would just make a new game like what Panetheon is doing. The only thing SOE/DB have of value is their infrastructure, but even that is probably shit and could be done better by a new company if they just started from scratch.
 
Braen

Braen

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Well I think I might just see EQ proper for the first time in years on Test...
 
Muligan

Muligan

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Everquest is going to go down in history in terms of name much like your Quest for Glory, Kings Quest, etc. It's probably slightly more recognizable than those titles but it will suffer the same fate by having other titles just overshadow its name. It did it's job and it really is a shame the IP couldn't be laid in the hands of a small, dedicated indy group that loves it for what it was back in the day. I think it could still be successful as long as you maintain a sober definition of success. I think there is even a place for a third chapter but again, I think you really have to consider how to get the buy-in from the player base because if they're not willing advertise for your via word of mouth, it's going to flop. Overall, I don't think you can make a living off its name and produce a bunch of games and/or spin-offs that say Everquest and have millions come running. It just never made it to that level. People have to remember, 250,000 people playing an online game was unheard of at the time but even the worst of MMO's and console games garner that amount with minimal effort. I have to give WoW credit though with this latest expansion. I'm as cynical and vocal of the "days of old" as anybody and I have enjoyed this as well as I ever enjoyed any MMO in over a decade so there's a formula that's still working.
 
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