Ironik

You are Plasticman and I claim my five pounds.

The only standard that really matters is "Did it earn back a significant portion of our investment?" When you spend fifty million bucks on an MMO, you need to sell a million games to make half of that back. High-profile IPs have the best chance to do that which is why companies gamble on it, but they've all failed to do so.

Companies are going to have to find ways to create their AAA games for a fraction of that kind of price tag. You make a game for $5 million and you can sell a more reasonable 100k in order to make half your money back from box sales. If you can keep three-quarters of those people subscribing, within a year you make the rest of your money back. After that you start earning money even when you factor in overhead.

Sure, if you lay off a significant portion of your staff just before Christmas (2008), two weeks after your big expansion fails to elicit any interest in your multi-million-dollar game, closing a studio and then selling themselves to Warner Brothers (2010). (I live an hour north of Turbine and heard some horror stories.)

Fixed.

It's an Adams! (Apologies to Addams Family Values.)

Two sequels and a prequel. Totally out of ideas, aren't they?

When you factor in that it cost $50 million to make, DCUO really needs to be charting somewhere. Either in sales or subs, and it's doing neither.

BrandX summed it up rather succinctly: DCUO doesn't appeal to either console kids or PC gamers because it suits neither platform nor playerbase well. It's a classic example of completely misreading your audience.

They were empty before I13. I did the rocket thing on a couple of my characters, which took me a few days and I never saw a single person in there. I hit a blank spot in one toon's late-20s leveling curve where I'd done all missions before (this was long before all the new content), so I just took a tour of all the PvP areas I could get into. Once I got tired of fighting street battles in one, I'd go to another, seeking the zone badges. I think I saw two other players that entire time, which was over the course of 7 or 8 levels when I got to 35.

As you says, only Recluse's Victory had any number of players in it, but I would often find it empty on Guardian. It's a myth PvP was fine before I13 -- it was just as anemic then. The best thing about the changes is that we no longer have the worst of the juvenile tools running around the forums now.

I found just the opposite. I can't even find it on any of the usual charts.

I wish I could recall where I saw it, but the study I referenced earlier showed that about 95% of all MMO players didn't do PvP. 85% or so actively hate it and another 10% simply can't be bothered with it. That leaves 5% of the MMO audience. Developers are better off simply ignoring that tiny portion of the gaming audience in favor of better things. PvP in CoH is widely regarded as the single biggest waste of resources by players and critics alike. Imagine what we could have if they hadn't wasted all that time and money on those zones, which even on Freedom and Virtue stand empty 99% of the time.

They'd be better off converting the PvP zones to co-op zones and remove PvP entirely from this game.

I disagree with pretty much all of that. There are only two things DCUO does right: first is the look and scope of the cities. They really feel like cities. Second are the two travel powers of Superspeed and Acrobatics. (Flight is terrible.) With a slight addendum of not taking falling damage as a positive.

Other than that, DCUO is simply a generic Fantasy MMO with "elf" crossed out and "superhero" written in. Since the development team is comprised of people from Everquest and the like, that's not really surprising. I mean, item decay? Really? I can kind of see that if you're using swords in Azeroth, but using ray guns in Metropolis? And notice that the gear your character has affects his powers. It was a good choice to allow you to show it or not, but my lightning-throwing mutant doesn't need a freaking magical anklet in order to have better defense. That's what is known in gaming circles as RETARRRRDED. The sound effects for DCUO might as well all go, "derp derp derp."

Other than the look and feel of the game, DCUO gets almost everything wrong, and that's one of the reasons why it's failing.

Okay, catching up...

...*hic*... washted...

Why would it be distracting? Directors always have a bunch of actors they like to work with. James Cameron and Michael Biehn (& Bill Paxton, Schwarzenegger, Sigourney Weaver), Hitchcock and Cary Grant (& Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman), Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro (& Leonardo DiCaprio, Joe Pesci), Steven Spielberg and Richard Dreyfus (& Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford), Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell (& Ted Raimi, Dan Hicks), John Ford and John Wayne (& Jimmy Stewart, Maureen O'Hara, Henry Fonda)... I could go on all night.

Nolan has worked with all these actors a number of times:

Ken Watanabe -- Batman Begins, Inception
Michael Caine -- Batman Begins, Inception, The Dark Knight, The Prestige
Christian Bale -- Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Prestige
Cillian Murphy -- Batman Begins, Inception, The Dark Knight

/shrug

Yeah, that's kind of a bizarre assertion. Spending development time catering to a miniscule number of users, of which only a fraction will play your game, is wasted effort and money. Windows is still, what, 85-90% of the OS market share? The real contender is OSX, and that's mostly from Apple's domination of the tab and phone market.

If the Devs at Paragon Studios are smart, they'll create a costume creator app for the iPhone, iPod and iPad and sell it for 99 cents. Put every available costume in there and clearly indicate which ones are "standard," which are Vet unlocks, which are effort unlocks or level-based unlocks, and which ones cost money in the form of Boosters. Then add a bunch of minimally-animated backgrounds your character can pose against and a screenshot export function. At the very least you'll make some money, and you might get a few more subscribers from it.

And because I came up with the idea and gave it away for free, give it away top active subscribers.

You know, I got so caught up in this discussion that I totally forgot we're not allowed to talk about this stuff any more. Well, IBTL, anyway. Might as well continue before it gets deleted tomorrow morning.

As for DCUO bleeding players, all the available data supports that, and the anecdotal evidence backs it up. When I was in beta, the most common refrain I heard from PS3 players was that there was no way they were going to pay a monthly fee to play a game after buying it for $60. For gamers weened on FPS multiplayer games that they play for free for years, that's an entirely expected reaction. On the DCUO forums, players are calling for server merges, and on other fora the exact same refrain of "not paying a sub" is repeated again and again.

Within a month of its release, DCUO had dropped off the Xfire Top 100 games played list. For a brand new game that had so much buzz, that's pretty telling. People are buying the game, hitting the level cap, getting bored and dropping it when the first month is up. On Steam, the highest number of players this month was 1,018. For the past week it's been around 700. It's not even on Steam's sales charts any more. These are all what one could call "troubling portents" if you're on the DCUO Dev team.

PC sales so far have been 158,889. PS3 sales are similar. So that's 320k box sales. Throw in another 250k for Steam and D2D sales for a wildly-high number just for generosity's sake. Let's just round it up and say they've sold 750,000 copies of the game (which they haven't)... oh, what the hell, let's say they've sold one million copies (ROFL). Considering they keep about 30% of each box sale (split between developer and publisher, box price at $45 currently), that means they've earned about 13,500,000 bucks. From all accounts, DCUO cost $50 million to make. Since the reality is that the actual sales are probably in the neighborhood of 300k, they've made $4 million dollars. That's a flop.

In order for DCUO make most of its money back, they have to retain 250k subscribers for an entire year. They won't. For some of the cool ideas they have, it's just not that good of a game overall and it's not retaining players. People are going to be playing the new Batman Arkham game instead.

There's a video floating around from Pax that have a bunch of MMO industry types (including a guy from NCSoft) talking about DCUO's failed launch. (It's not mentioned by name, but it's clear from the question which game the guy is asking about.) These guys kinda know what they're talking about. I'd guess DCUO will go F2P sooner rather than later in order to try and recoup some of their losses.

Everything comes down to poo.