The Elder Scrolls Online

To me a failed MMO is if its cost vs its revenue is drastically lopsided in the red. Would be interesting to see the amount of loss vs profit for the above games.

Im pretty sure most of the above games ended up making money in the long run.

Boozecube_sl said:

If Blizzard can take Cleveland Steamer over a box and slap Diablo 3 on it and turn it into the best selling game, then I am sure TESO will be able to pull off at least a few box sales. Then it will fade into obscurity like

Asheron's Call
Anarchy Online
Dark Age of Camelot
Dungeons & Dragons Online
Vanguard
Age of Conan
Warhammer Online
Aion
The Matrix Online
Tabula Rasa
Star Wars Galaxies
Star Wars: The Old Republic
City of Heros
and on and on and fucking on.

Fact is 95% of MMO's suck massive donkey cock, either due to shitty corporate dick weasels or coked up developers or rushing it out before it's ready. Seems like they forget the first and most important thing above all over shit is making a smooth responsive game that's actually fun to play. That shit trumps all the other retarded bullshit these companies seem to care or worry about.

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I agree with the general premise and that's why we always have fanbois vs realists arguments post release, but people might want to split your list into two separate lists. Sure they all faded into obscurity (to greater or lesser extents), but on one hand you have your blatant, rushed IP moneygrabs (WHO, STO, etc) and then you have some of the older games that (to me at least) predated WOW and were more niche and perhaps just weren't as popular as EQ1 perhaps (AC, AO, etc). The latter I'd say were good games for their time and I knew people that played them for a long, long time. They also came out before WOW blew the market wide-open and everyone started tripping over themselves to make what you might call a "2nd Gen" MMO, based on a popular IP as many did. Sure they had their own issues (as did EQ1 on a massive scale lol) and I vaguely remember AO having a bad release for example, but I'd hesitate to put it in the same category as games like WHO or SWTOR.

We could probably debate the ins and outs of it though (like we always do anyways). Also I wouldn't necessarily hold "fading into obscurity" against a game on its own, that has to be expected for some of these games that are 10 years old or so. Like AO, came it in 2001, so I don't think it's realistic to expect it to keep competing in 2013.

Graphically I'd draw a distinction between a game like WHO that released on an IP, sold a lot of boxes then crashed or went F2P, and games like AC that released before 2005/2006 and had at the very least a few years of moderate subs (in proportion to the market at that time of course). You could probably even have a 3rd group for early bombs like EQOA, Shadowbane or whatever else. I'd still make a case for AO being better than it's subs indicate but again that's debatable. Plus these charts aren't guaranteed accurate and I wish we had data from when some of them switched over to F2P/Fremium.

MMOData.net

Tuco_sl said:

To me a failed MMO is if its cost vs its revenue is drastically lopsided in the red. Would be interesting to see the amount of loss vs profit for the above games.

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mkopec_sl said:

Im pretty sure most of the above games ended up making money in the long run.

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Well we always end up in these debates, and most of the time it seems like people take one of two stances: either they look at whether the game made money as an indicator of success, or they look at games that underperformed, had massive faults and ended up hemorrhaging subs until they had to go F2P as an indicator of failure. The former has the problem that you can still have a game that makes money but by almost any other metric failed horribly, and the latter has the problem that it's very hard to quantify moves to F2P and how well a game performs afterwards, and often people tend to write games off completely once they start tanking after release. STO could be an incredibly good MMO now but I'll never know because I wrote that shitfest off early on.

Erronius_sl said:

Well we always end up in these debates, and most of the time it seems like people take one of two stances: either they look at whether the game made money as an indicator of success, or they look at games that underperformed, had massive faults and ended up hemorrhaging subs until they had to go F2P as an indicator of failure. The former has the problem that you can still have a game that makes money but by almost any other metric failed horribly, and the latter has the problem that it's very hard to quantify moves to F2P and how well a game performs afterwards, and often people tend to write games off completely once they start tanking after release. STO could be an incredibly good MMO now but I'll never know because I wrote that shitfest off early on.

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Yeah either definition is fine even though they're very different. The other thing to consider is what help or hindrance a game does to its brand. SimCity 2013, Diablo3 and Dragon Age 2 all were hugely profitable games but really torpedoed the brand and owe their success largely to previous iterations.

Boozecube_sl said:

Erronius thankfully expanded on the point I was trying to make in that we have seen a plethora of games released that did truly tank after release. While I admit in my first list I probably added some that didn't deserve it the overall point remains the same.

I agree but it makes you wonder if the guys in charge even care. I mean depending on how to spin it you can say they tanked the brand but on the other hand they sit back and show the shareholders they latest quarter earnings showing the highest profits ever. Considering the amount of money it costs to produce an MMO you would think they want to build a cash cow and see the golden goose of a monthly sub (I.E. residual income). Yet all to often they do just as you listed and will tank a brand without a second glance.

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I don't really feel like the examples I gave really tried to tank a brand, or more accurately, tried to produce a minimal cost game to cash in on a strong brand. DA2 was rushed, yeah, but D3/SimCity were all hugely expensive games that had some serious misteps.

But then you see those games that accompany a movie release and are obviously just cashing in on the success of the movie ex:
Thor: God of Thunder for Xbox 360 Reviews - Metacritic

I do agree with you that shareholders look at quarterly profits as the true metric of success, but many companies take the long view, especially MMO creatign companies who know the cash cow is built from either long term subscriptions or cash shops

I froob'ed it for a while as a break from EQ1 and I didn't think it was that bad at the time. Crafting seemed damn interesting but I didn't get very far in before I went crosseyed, and wrangling...LOL. The starting area I thought was some sort of a crashed ship (?) with aliens or something similar but afterwards you got sent down with everyone else.

I will say that when it comes to new players or F2P players showing up in a game, AO may have been the friendliest that I've seen it be. After WOW released though...forget about it.

I remember there being some sort of "temple" dungeon at lower levels that people were taking me to for armor and some funky looking scythe, but damnit if I didn't want to use an I-beam instead. Also some of those character models and art in that game...some were pretty abominable, LOL.