2010 4Q earnings

The game keeps finding a new lowest-revenue ever. That's not what I want to see.

Looks like people came for GR, but once their free month was up didn't stick around (revenue for the quarter after GR is lower than the one preceding it). Yeah, only 20 levels of content will do that. If GR was 1-50, like it should have been, those people would probably still be around. I guess the 1-20 thing was a simple lack of development funds.

And yes, CoV did bring in a lot of people. I'm one of them, I started in Issue 6. At the time I had never heard of ED.

Certain other games have tripled their revenue by going F2P. It's time for CoH to do some serious thinking about moving in that direction.

The server loads looks like can be explained by the hardware being reduced at the time they were moved to, IIRC, Texas. Or at some other point. The only other explanation is increased concurrency, and given the current revenue I have a hard time believing that, but I suppose it's possible.

I fully expect this game to be around another 7 years, though. Ultima Online is still running. Everquest is still running. Ahseron's Call is still running. Of course, those games don't have the trigger-happy NCSoft in possession of their kill-switch.

WARNING: I bold names.

The following post is not intended to impart any message aside from contribution to the conversation:

There's a right way and a wrong way to introduce free to play aspects to a preexisting game. A lot of people are looking at recent offerings with a very critical eye these days. There's a lot of things that companies have done well with (personally I respect what LOTRO has accomplished) and some that are missteps that the entire industry will look for ways to improve upon.

It's a personal belief that companies seeking to change their current business model should always do so with their current Communities in mind. Any sort of change should be done so that it gives your veteran (existing) players a show of appreciation and recognition of their support over the years. Yes, the prospect of expanding a Community via F2P is attractive, but the reason they're able to consider such a thing is because of their existing Community.

Putting on my CM hat briefly...

Thanks for continuing to keep negativity out of the conversation.

Z

I think the biggest question would be, "Is the game profitable?" Certainly UO, AC, etc., have been going on for eons (in gamer-years) and profitably, so I don't see why COH has to be any different.

And I agree - GR (and its related content) is very much about player retention. It does provide a good starting point, of course. Pity the i19 Fitness changes weren't available when GR launched - that would've been useful, methinks.

The fun thing, to me at least, is the idea that COH's physical servers could eventually be come virtualized servers on some other game's servers. That could potentially reduce costs. Same with Guild Wars for that matter. Computing power is only getting cheaper, so that could be to the benefit of the game. If the devs ever pull cross-server teaming out of a hat, there'd be no real reason to reduce the number of servers to enable activities.

Oh, and I should point out that I, and people like me, are partly to blame for the numbers going down. I went annual, so they make less money off of me than people on monthly. And I've got friends who might've gone for the annual when NCSoft had that special going on

Well if a lot of people went to longer pay periods in Q3 that could explain it...people also could have let subscriptions lapse in anticipation for DCUO which means some of those will be coming back.

But who knows, we'll get a better idea after Q2 2011 is released.

let's see, earnings steady enough to justify continued production?
Yes?

Great, I get to keep sending them money then!


*wanders back out of thread *

We should probably report him for breaking the forum rules though, just to be on the safe side.

"Free to play" is a tricky thing isn't it? I'm not exactly opposed to it, but Lord Of The Rings Online aside, many M.M.O.'s tanked when they went free to play. Introducing such a system in City Of Heroes would be a difficult task by the devs. and possibly an even harder pill to swallow by the player base.

Gating content is unwise because it can very easily lead into, "I have a monthly subscription, but I can't become an incarnate unless I pay "x" amount." At the first sight of gating content to subscribed players I would leave immediately and I am sure that I am not the only one who feels this way.

One day City Of Heroes will inevitably become free to play in some form, that much I know.

The Devs could go F2P in a very very slow manner. Just make the Costume Creator free to everyone at first. The only good thing about that F2PMMO I can see is you can play with the the costume creator all you want and not have to worry about getting ahold of a new trial accountant every week or two.

Start small and then add more to F2P if that is the way the game has to go. Giving free access to the costume creator isn't going to hurt the game, and compared to the other two herommos ours is the best.