Future of CoX..

Hey emb, not to argue or anyhting, but check out post 6, 12, 14, 15 & 16 from this: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=255429

It is a good lesson to not judge someone by there join date on the forums.

Note: 1000% of nothin' is still nothin.'

Aion NA/EU has had one round of server merges to concentrate population, but it wouldn't surprise me to find that it still has well over a million subs globally. KAion has 43 servers, and there are separate servers for China and Japan besides. Numbers here have dropped, but the culture is different over there. They view and treat PvP a great deal differently.

A statement like this ignores the fact that the industry is changing dramatically.

I have no clue about the status of CO, nor do I particularly care. What I do know is that freemium is no longer the red-headed stepchild of the gaming industry. It's the way that the industry is moving.

Someone mentioned Turbine as if Turbine was a failure because they went freemium, when Turbine is the poster child of how to successfully make the transition to freemium.

The gamers who are willing to subscribe monthly to a game as a service are quickly becoming a minority. In comparison to the entire potential gaming market, they always WERE a minority.

Freemium seems to be a successful inroad into that elusive "mainstream market" that so many MMO's have tried to reach and mostly failed. The success of Turbine is a recognition that the market changed and they changed to accomodate it rather than sit on their hand and insist that the market adapt to them.

Will all games succeed as freemium games? No. It's not a guarantee any more than subscriptions are a guarantee. Will CO make it? I have no idea.

What I know is that Turbine is making it. SOE is in the middle of making a very tentative and cautious transition. They have a slew of freemium Facebook games. Free Realms began as a MMO light with a freemium sidekick, that is now all freemium for all intents and purposes. EQ2X appears to be doing at least as well as EQ2. Pirates of the Burning Sea has, so far, successfully made the transition. For SOE, it doesn't matter one whit about how one single game is doing or if it becomes freemium. What matter is that they sell of a lot of Station Cash overall, and that overall revenue goes up. From that perspective, the subscription numbers of DCUO aren't all that important. If it transitions to freemium, all that it means is that it will get a wider audience and people who already play SOE games will give it another look because they can use their station cash there.

This is one strength of the freemium model. It can become capable of supporting a PUBLISHER rather than supporting any one product of the publisher.

To bring this back around to being somewhat on topic, DCUO's current subscriber base may not be the whole story. It's ability to attract new players and people who will buy wad of station cash to play with it are what the real story is. SOE is the original umbrella publisher, anyway. They're whole story is about station access, not about any one game under the umbrella.

But, then, that just goes to show that every publisher has their own story and painting all of them with a single brush is a mistake when it comes to understanding their place in the market. Particularly when it comes to making broad statements about the viability of a game based upon its revenue model.

Right now, I'd be more inclined to say that a game that focuses solely on subscription revenue is a game whose publishers are the ones taking a risk and being shortsighted, at least insofar as revenue and player growth are concerned.

No lesson needed, seeing as I know personally that he joined the game on or about his forum regdate.

The other common thread of your games is that none of them (except Free Realms which was intended to have F2P from the start) were really cutting it before switching models. Pirates of the Burning Sea was a joke that no one was playing. EQ2 and CO shared the same thing: A failed launch where they immediately stumbled and lost momentum with one foot past the gate. They started losing people straight off when population should have been growing and couldn't reverse the momentum. DDO was going nowhere. LotRO was on a slow slide downward.

These were all games that were fully intended to succeed under a subscription model and failed to do so, causing their publishers to say "Oh crap" and start trying to find a way to keep them afloat. A F2P model has kept them alive, but I wouldn't raise it as a banner of overwhelming success. Numbers like "Three times as much revenue" and "1000% more accounts" are meaningless fluff without knowing real numbers regarding where the game started at, where it was at when they finally decided to go F2P and where they're at today. But none of these games had staff that said "We're sooooo successful as a subscription game, let's change models to F2P!"

That's why subscription games going F2P is still regarded as a bad thing.

Now the question is do you mean a failed launch by the standards of say everquest or our own CoH or do you mean failed by the standards of say WoW, which the none industry share holders and directors would be judging it on?

And the same applies to 'succeed under a subscription model' while DDO, LOTRO and CO may very well of been coasting along with modest profits, since they weren't pulling WoW figures they could of been deemed as failures by the higher ups.

It failed by any standards

It beat CoH Europe into the ground several times over, for user numbers at least.

Interesting sidenote, it appears that CoH's numbers were comparable to EQ2's numbers before EQ2X launched.

Sure it did, Jack

Here's the thing - How many subscription games are there right now that are racking up fantastic revenue numbers?

Outside of Korea, I can only think of WoW and maybe Eve, and that's only because Eve is the "little game that could" that defied the odds and succeeded despite doing everything the opposite of the way that the other game publishers did them at the time. Aion seems to be holding its own also, but I don't know anything about its numbers stateside.

CoH is in a decent position. It's got a mature, loyal audience that tends to stay right at about the number of subs that make the company profitable. It's not growing, but it's not shrinking particularly either.

Yes, it's true that all of those games changing from wholly subscription to some hybrid of freemium and subscription are games that were losing subscriptions. Chalking it up to the quality of the games is disingenuous. A bad game, is a bad game, even if it's freemium. If those games were truly bad games, they would not have found a freemium audience either.

What happened is that the market became saturated and everyone was chasing the same players - those willing to pay a subscription. WoW enlarged that pool hugely, but most of those it added were playing, well, WoW.

Most of the available players didn't want to pay for two games at once. That meant that if a player signed up for City of Heroes, she didn't typically subscribe to LOTRO or DDO or EQ2 or AOC or WoW or any other game at the same time except for short periods of time.

The switch to freemium was as much an acknowledgement of that fact as it was about trying to reach an expanded audience. People who won't pay for two subscriptions are still people who will occasionally purchase something from a cash shop in a free-to-play game when it strikes their fancy to do so.

Those games were doing poorly because the market changed. Adapting is what saved them and allowed them to grow again. If they HAVE grown, and they're still in business, then I don't see how to count them as anything other than successful. Saying, "Well, it doesn't matter that they are succeeding now because they were originally designed for subscriptions and they failed at THAT." is being a little nit-picky about your definitions of success.

Frankly, I think that if NCSoft had launched Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa today as freemium games instead of a few years ago as subscription games, that both of them would be acceptably successful instead of being failures. (Well, the whole development debacle of Tabula Rasa being overlooked, at least.)

Will CO make it as a freemium game? Who knows? It all comes down to having a compelling cash shop or a compelling reason to subscribe and I'm not sure they have either. Time will tell. It might have made more sense to take STO freemium at the same time, but I suppose that moving CO there first is a bit of an experiment, just as Free Realms and EQ2 Extended were experiments by SOE as to what the market would and would not bear.

Who says they have to be "fantastic"? Obviously, the games who changed models to F2P weren't even racking up "modest" revenue numbers.
Again, it sort of matters if they've grown from where, doesn't it? Making up numbers for illustration, if the game has a million subscribers and two dozen servers at launch, loses all but 15,000 of them a year later and then manages to have 35,000 F2P users on two servers, is that "successful"? I suppose it's more successful than going out of business but I'm sure that's not what the accountants were praying for back at that million man launch.

Which is why, again, without real numbers all the "We've grown 14,500,000%!!!" stats are just press release garbage.

Ahh...

False. LotRO was never hurting for subs. In fact, it has always done far better than CoX since it was released. It was only moved to the F2P platform after Warner Bros bought out Turbine, and not because the game was actually hurting. The new bosses at WB saw what a massive success F2P was for DDO, and decided to try to cash in on it. DDO however, was about to close shop.

If you have credible sub numbers I'd like to see them because I was playing LotRO and it was sure looking emptier month by month.

Seconded.

NPD and other tracking agencies typically don't track online sales or subscriptions, so unless an online vendor states any given number of sales / subscriptions openly in a financial report, proving whether or not sales were good or bad can be difficult.

That being said, the financial numbers published by AOL Timer Warner for Warner Brothers Home Entertainment after the buyout do indicate that Turbine was a financial sinkhole, indicating that Lord of the Rings was indeed loosing money, and was indeed hurting for subscribers.

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.)

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.

I wanted to touch on this topic directly since I brought up the AOL-Time Warner financial reports on Turbine after the sale. Ironik already pointed out the biggest problems with the idea that Turbine was a poster child, namely the laying off of large numbers of staff, the closing of an entire studio, and the fire sale to AOL-Timer Warner.

One of the subjects I've talked about before on the CoH boards is how Lord of the Rings Online was the right product at the right time to make a freemium model work. It was a high quality fantasy MMO in a market saturated with Fantasy MMO's. After going Free-to-play Turbine didn't need to draw from the WoW market. Turbine just needed to draw from the market that would like to play a WoW type game, but didn't want to invest in a subscription.

Does that make Turbine a poster child?

Oh hell no. They lost millions of dollars, and one of the reasons they succeeded in regaining profitable status is because they laid a massive amount of employees, shut down a whole studio, and stopped working on any other projects.

That's not really a business model that other companies want to follow.

If a game ever had PvP synching with PvE in mind from the first day of development, and were able to pull it off to a reasonable degree, you'd see a lot more than 5% (or whatever the number really is) of the player base participating in PvP. If it happens in first person shooters over XBox Live, it could theoretically happen in an MMO.

In CoH, it didn't happen that way, and we have what we have. That doesn't mean PvP is forever doomed to fail in an MMO.

I wouldn't call PvP zones a waste of resources compared to zones like Boomtown, where nothing interesting happens that couldn't happen in a different zone. At least you can go get Shivans in Bloody Bay, or Warburg nukes. If they didn't exist, there'd be a vocal group asking for something just like them.

Comparing FPS's to MMO's, at least in this matter, is inaccurate at best, and especially on a platform where games have to be dumbed down in order to function.

There have been lots of FPS games with both PvE and PvP play in the launch version that have had great sales, but never developed a real multiplayer community. Just off the top of my head, Aliens Versus Predator (the first one), AvP2 (the second one), Aliens Versus Predator (the third game), Pariah, No One Lives Forever, No One Lives Forever 2, Red Faction and it's subsequent sequels, Far Cry, Crysis, and Turok.

Even one of the great FPS games of all time, Half-Life, never really developed a multi-player community of it's own. Yet two of the Half-Life modifications, Counter-Strike and Team Fortress, went onto to become the most played Multi-player games in the world.

So, it's a bit of a mugs game to say that just because a game launches with PvP and PvE features, it will develop communities for both. The very real market fact is that very few games, even in the FPS realm, develop communities around the multi-player features. When a title is able to cultivate a multi-player community, publishers will go out of their way to hammer out franchises sequel after franchise sequel to cater to that limited market.

PvP is largely doomed to fail in any MMO where the game balance is focused on making classes inherently different.

A deliberately imbalanced game can work if leveraging the imbalances requires mechanical input skill on the part of the players, or if the underlying system can account for those differences.

For an example of how imbalanced multiplayer can be made to work even when the game is horribly unbalanced, go pick up a copy of Monolith's AvP2 (the GOOD Aliens Versus Predator game).

I don't disagree with any particular point you make here...

but I disagree with the sentiment.

Boomtown was an excellent idea... 7 years ago. I remember my first time going into Baumtown and having a Holy Excrement moment at the scale of the damage.

I think most players understand why Baumtown, as a zone, hasn't been moved forward, and it's for the same reason very few of the other zones have been updated / revamped. There was no intent on the part of Cryptic Studios to update the zones, and so no resources were furnished to make updating possible.

Now under NCSoft's ownership Paragon Studios has both the time and money to do things they couldn't do at Cryptic. However, doing things takes time. Paragon Studios has to make decisions about where to best apply available resources for each issue release. Do resources get focused on revamping older content? Do resources get focused on making new content? Do programmers work on fixing old sections of code? Do programmers just write entirely new sections of code to outright replace old sections? Etc. Etc.

To be fair, I wouldn't call any zone a waste of resources.

I would call PvP Development a waste of resources... because... let's face it... PvP is not what Paragon Studios does best.

Again to re-iterate the statement I've made before, Paragon Studios is going to best serve the PvP community by handing development of a PvP game off to another developer.

That removes the potential drain on resources from Paragon Studios, and allows Paragon Studios to focus on what they do best.

And I would think that you're awesome!