Is the MMO Market imploding?

tad10

tad10

Elisha Dushku
5,534
601
Blizzard. 600 Layoffs in March. Subs plummenting between 600,000 to 1,000,000 a quarter for last 3 quarters. More layoffs soon?

Trion. San Diego/EU studios closed. Up for sale. ArcheAge dubious.

SOE. Today (8/28) just hammered EQ2 and DCUO staffs. Not sure about EQ, VG and everything else except EQN/Landmark.

NCSoft. Layoffs last December. Not sure what they're doing now.

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I'm now glad I didn't follow my dream of being a game designer ;-)

Are there any big layoffs that I've missed? And if people aren't playing MMOs anymore what they hell are they doing (in my case waiting for EQN).
 
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Murked

Bronze Knight of the Realm
388
53
How many different threads does this forum need rehashing the same thing over and over again? Jesus.
 
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Felmega_sl

shitlord
563
1
Looks like the nature of a highly competitive market. Two many poor products(MMO's) have been flooding in and failing as a result. Good MMO's, read: programmed well and a good art team, are still doing well, will do well into the future.

Themepark money machines may be dead for the time being though. Also, what constitutes success may have to decoupled from WoW. For instance, 500,000 subs may be a benchmark now to say, yes this MMO is successful, as opposed to 10 million.
 
kudos

kudos

<Banned>
2,363
695
It's hard to gauge because the industry itself is always laying off. It's a shitty industry honestly and it needs to be reworked.

That said, MMO's have lost their luster in the gaming community because the majority of people see them for what the modern MMO is - a carrot on a stick errands game. What MMO developers fail to realize is that if you make a game that REQUIRES people to interact in order to do anything then those people will stick around longer because they've made friends and there is a camaraderie among the server population. If you quit in any modern MMO nobody will give a fuck. You are just another ant in the colony. Which is why I can shit talk WoW all day and it means nothing because there is no community to black list me from in the game. I could call everyone in a top raiding guild a cunt faggot and it wouldn't matter because I could just level a new character in a week and be right back where I was because my reputation means nothing in that game and the time required to get back into raid worthiness is minimal. Let's not forget also that as long as you can breath through your nose and have two hands a raid guild will suck your dick just to join nowadays.
 
McCheese

McCheese

SW: Sean, CW: Crone, GW: Wizardhawk
6,933
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Looks to me like shitty products and/or companies resulting in lay offs. Nothing to do with MMOs.
 
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Toxxulian_sl

shitlord
227
0
kudos_sl said:
It's hard to gauge because the industry itself is always laying off. It's a shitty industry honestly and it needs to be reworked.

If you quit in any modern MMO nobody will give a fuck. You are just another ant in the colony. Which is why I can shit talk WoW all day and it means nothing because there is no community to black list me from in the game. I could call everyone in a top raiding guild a cunt faggot and it wouldn't matter because I could just level a new character in a week and be right back where I was because my reputation means nothing in that game and the time required to get back into raid worthiness is minimal. Let's not forget also that as long as you can breath through your nose and have two hands a raid guild will suck your dick just to join nowadays.
Click to expand...
Wrong on all accounts.

I agree no one would give a fuck if you quit the game. But that is just you. For some people that have worked on building a guild or have been with a guild for a decent amount of time it hurts when someone leaves. That can be said about any game including EQ, if you were in a shit guild or in a guild that had hundreds of members, no one would give a fuck.

Again, no one cares what you say because you are nobody, same would be if you shit called people in a top guild in EQ, if you are nobody then nobody would care. The time it takes to get back into normal mode raiding? That would take a while, we're talking 4-6 weeks maybe longer if you have shitty luck / playing casually. That might not be a decent amount of time to regear but for most people that is. That doesn't include leveling either. And your last point is laughable at best, not going to respond to that shit.
 
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Dumar_sl

shitlord
3,712
4
Yup, shitty industry is shitty. The blame can certainly be spread around, from the inept retarded designers, to allowing the bean counters to make decisions, to we the consumers buying up shit products.

A circle of poo that never ends.
 
Malakriss

Malakriss

Golden Baronet of the Realm
12,878
12,268
WoW created pandas, which roll over and crush their young. WoW killed itself as each successive reset baby was left as a splattered infanticide remnant.
 
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Fingz_sl

shitlord
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0
Sub numbers drop in the summer because many players do outdoor stuff during the warmer months.

That said, my guess is MMOs peaked a while back. First person shooters have taken a large chunk of the audience and games like LoL and Diablo have taken another chunk. This will mean that MMOs will get less money for development.

There might be some game company out there with a new idea that will attract huge multi million subs, but I really doubt it. And I certainly don't see anything like it in the current or near future games. But here's hoping.
 
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Illuziun

Bronze Knight of the Realm
209
16
MMO market has been dead for awhile now, people just continue to fool themselves into thinking it's hugely successful from WoW's numbers. Truth is people hate MMO's and that they are not meant for the average gamer. Fads are strong and the fad that generated from WoW was enough to catapult that game into being massively successful, and it pulled people into it because they wanted to be apart of the new cool thing. Once that feeling went away, the majority of the WoW spawns began to realize that MMO's aren't actually that fun to them, but rather it was WoW that was fun. Hence why every single MMO gets a massive influx of players for the first month, but then they all leave once they realize it's not WoW and it doesn't carry that fad with it. (example: South Park, YouTube spoofs like Leeroy etc etc. people fucking love that shit) I remember when EQ had its fad era, and all of those stupid guild shows and rap songs started popping up. The only difference was that it targeted nerds while WoW's fad material targeted the masses.

Simply put, the current MMO market was obsessed with WoW, not MMO's.
 
Borzak

Borzak

Silver Baron of the Realm
26,622
35,433
MMO's don't seem very massive nowdays, you log in and have contact with the same 40 people. Even if a new MMO comes out you take 20-30 from the old MMO that you know and play it with them.
 
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Fish1_sl

shitlord
188
0
They are just reaping what they have sewn all these past 10 years. All they have done is dumb everything down further and further each time, simplify everything, cater to the lowest common denominator players, fuck everyone else, and just reproduce each others ideas while never moving an inch from the original WoW clone template. That was their safe option and they went with it, even although they surely knew it was at the expense of quality and what many people really wanted. And now they pay the price.

I enjoy watching them all crash n burn, but the sad thing to me is that no underdog has really come out of nowhere and shown them the error of their ways. EVE sort of did, but still, I wanted to see some small indie teams get huge. But Darkfall didn't work out too well, Dawntide folded, and some others turned to crap. Maybe we'll get one eventually. But for now the entire genre is one big pile of turd.
 
Grim1

Grim1

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
4,918
6,929
They keep pumping out mmos faster than the audience expands. Back when WoW first came out you could count the number of mmo's on one hand. Now there are probably hundreds.

The industry is fine, but the competition is fierce now. You can't get away with the crap EQ and WoW pulled back in the day.
 
Sylas

Sylas

<Gold Donor>
4,265
5,677
Sub numbers are practically meaningless nowadays with nearly every MMO being cash shop games. Whether sub (WoW, Eve Online, and soon TESO, any others left?) or "F2P" cash shop (practically everything else), some games are making profits hand over fist, some aren't and are laying off employees.

Where are all the numbers going? Both the missing WoW subs and the next generation of would be WoW players? sure some of them were only interested in WoW because of WoW and are in other genre's (LoL, FPS, whatev) but a huge number of them (I'd wager the vast majority) are lost in the millions of unreported F2P players of the hundreds of F2P MMO games out there. For fuck's sake Neverwinter hit over 2 million "players". Even assuming half of those either quit or are bots I find it hard to believe that Neverwinter is one of the more successful (in terms of # of players) F2P MMOs out there. There's easily 10++ million MMO players out there which are simply unaccounted for due to the shift in business model from subscription to F2P.

What you're seeing with layoffs is the death of the WoW-Clone failures originally designed as subscription based games and retroactively converted into a F2P model to salvage the wreckage. The most recent crop of designed-as-cash-shop games seem to be doing alright.

Of all those games, I think only DCUO was originally designed as F2P? I could be mistaken don't feel like googling it, it's whatev.
 
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