How Long Have They Been Axe Grinding?

Actually for as much grief SOE has gotten over the years, the concept of the station pass, I guess they call it "All Access" pass now was an innovative idea. It takes into account thrashing of the player base as they become bored with one MMO and go to another get bored there and come back. It also allows games with small but loyal populations to survive.

Out of curiosity, Father Xmas, do you know if Front Mission Online was part of that station pass system SOE set up?

It's not now, don't know historically.

So they've made 80 odd of their 200 redundancies here then.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

The gaming market in a nut shell

Bob! Look at these new graphics! -sam


OMG that’s amazing! -bob


Hey, we need to do that if we want to make money so get on it -sam


*bob and his development team work for several months making new concepts to showcase pretty graphics but bring something new to the table*


What’s taking you guys so long, we need to get a move on -sam


Hey, we're doing the best we can here. You want something innovative right? -bob


No, i want graphics and i want it done fast! Just redesign something old, or rework that WoW game! You guys are costing me money! Be more productive! We don't want new. People want pretty! They don't want something new, it'll just confuse them. -sam


*facepalm -bob


This isn't meant to offend anyone, just a thought so please there is no need to attack. I've just noticed this with the gaming industry. Not just MMO's either. Not just games as a matter of fact. I mean resident evil 3D was crap! It was insulting. It was crap wrapped in a pretty 3d package. Now mind you graphics are what get most people when they first look so it can’t look like garbage but come on, we want different. CoX was successful because it's not the same thing like most of the other games. With a little advertising it could have been way more successful.

How does this pertain to the subject? Seems NCSOft just cuts games that are innovative everytime new graphics comes out. I mean look at GW2, again not meant to offend. It has stunning visuals and yes it is a little dfferent. They have made improvements on its genre but come on. Same crap different game pretty graphics. So logically instead of advertising for the odd game out they drop it instead. I'm not even attacking NC, thats just how they do business, they are forign, guess thats what their market likes. Same old same old better graphics. I really hope Paragon can get the game and become their own company. They have all the good ideas. I'm so bored of armor swapping fantasy. Letting Paragon have it would really redeem NC's name. They really have tarnished their reputation over the years cutting games like this. It makes people in the USA fearful to invest in any of their games. It would help so much if they would reverse their decision or let Paragon have it.

Lot of good points in this thread

I'd like to chime in with a historical example that incorporates a lot of the notions raised here, namely Star Trek

When Star Trek first hit our tv screens in the 1960s it was like nothing out there. Visually, thematically, and in terms of pushing boundaries, it was so out of left field that it's a wonder it ever got aired at all. And once on air, the network execs didn't know what to do with it - they bounced it from day to day, timeslot to timeslot, in the hope of finding some sort of magic demographic with ever increasing viewing figures. When that didn't appear, they shunted the show to a dead zone slot, out of the way of their preferred ratings grabbers. And after 3 series of this, they pulled the plug.

What they failed to notice however, was even though the show wasn't pulling in increasing numbers of viewers, it had developed a hardcore of dedicated fans that went to great lengths to watch the show, no matter what timeslot it had been moved to. And that number didn't decline.

Fast forward to the groundbreaking release of Star Wars at the movies, and the revitalisation of a genre thought to be in decline - scifi. It was only natural that with the success of Star Wars, interest should be rekindled in Star Trek.

And so we had Star Trek The Movie, and subsequent TOS movies, and Star Trek The Next Generation, and then DS9, and Voyager, Enterprise...

...and somewhere along the way, things went weird. Shows started to be cancelled again (Voyager, Enterprise). This was because the next generation of network execs had done the exact opposite of what their predecessors had done : where their predecessors sidelined a cult series, they spun Star Trek out into a thin, watered down mass produced version of itself.

And so it is with MMOs, and indeed many artistic concepts. Familiarity is comfortable, but it also breeds contempt. Novelty ceases to have value when it becomes mass production.

You see the same thing with Supermarkets today - we accept the convenience they offer, the wide range of products, but at the same time we bemoan the loss of smaller stores with their more personalised services and higher quality goods.

Such small stores still do exist of course, and they accept (as they've always done) that their business isn't going to pull in millions of dollars, but they can still do quite nicely thankyou, for a small operation. Supermarkets and big corporations do not and indeed cannot operate in the same business mindset because they deal in quantity. It's nice if they can have quality too, but the reality of large market forces push them towards lower costs, so they sacrifice quality for quantity.

The MMO market today is in a similar state at the moment, with endless bland clones being pumped out (predominantly fantasy games from Korea) into an already saturated market. Total global subscriptions to MMOs reached a plateau some two years ago, leaving companies like NCSoft panicking that long development titles such as GW2 and Blade & Soul won't be able to generate a return on their investments. This has led them to invest in hugely expensive marketing campaigns for these titles in the hope they will save them from the profit slide they've been experiencing for several years now.

The global MMO bubble is about to burst - or indeed may have already burst, and the MMO companies just haven't realised it yet. I expect NCSoft to ultimately retreat back to within Korean borders, despite their claim to be "aggressively tailoring" Balde and Soul for the western market.

So where does this leave us?
Well oddly enough, I think we're actually in terra incognita here - we're off the edge of the map, here be dragons! City of Heroes is unprecedented in the MMO world, quite literally, being the first superhero MMO after all. And all NCSoft's previous game closures have indeed followed a more predictable pattern. Something about the way they're handling CoH feels different though.

It feels to me almost like they're hedging their bets, as it were. Sure, it's one thing closing a minor profitable game, but it's another to do it when your company is already in the red. NCSoft was still nicely profitable when they axed Tabula Rasa, and there were long standing development disagreements with that one. Plus, they still actually owe Richard Garriott $32 million in damages. The original figure decreed by a Texas court was $28 million, but NCSoft appealed, and subsequently lost their appeal, incurring additional costs.

Perhaps they don't want a repeat back home of the embarrassment they've already suffered at the hands of the US courts? If I was a betting man, I'd be wondering if they were trying to work out a way of saving money by closing US operations, while also profiting from a franchise which, while never numerically profitable like their domestic grindfest titles, was still definitely in the black. Perhaps they plan to sell CoH, thereby mitigating any chance of legal issues, while also saving financial face.

*shrug*

tbh there's really no way of knowing what they're up to, except to say one thing - the way they're behaving now is not consistent with how they've handled things in the past. Guess we wait and see...

Just to throw a quick point into the US vs Japanese car issue, I should also point out that it took American car makers a while to realize that not all cars are driven by large American men. When I was shopping in the early 80's for my first car, I gave up on the US models after running into so many that I couldn't drive because I couldn't reach the pedals. I am 5'2", and with the driver's seat run all the way up I was barely touching them with the tips of my toes. When I pointed it out to a dealer, he actually had the nerve to say, "Don't you have a boyfriend to drive you places?"

IMO, it might be enlightening to compare the "Asian model" of MMOs - extremely repetitive grinding, played not at home but in cyber-cafes, with long hours and regular infusions of cash expected, and the chance of (for example) not only failing to improve the enchantment on your gear, but losing all your gems and having to start over - with traditional gambling parlors.

Mahjong, slot machines, and now MMOs. The more things change.

Turjan's analysis isn't far off from mine. MMOs were a tiny niche market until WoW. After WoW, venture capitalists and game companies threw billions of dollars at game studios to try to make a competitor to WoW that would draw in the same kind of revenue that Blizzard was bringing in.

(None of those companies show any sign of having any idea how much Blizzard was spending, though; they were chasing revenue, not profit. But that's another rant.)

Not a single MMO released in the last four or five years has paid back its initial investment. That's why, two years ago at GDC, Scott Jennings gave a speech in which he declared the MMO bubble to be about to burst. He said he was getting out of the industry to develop Facebook games, which cost 1/1000th of what an MMO does and bring in as much revenue in two months as even the most successful MMOs do in two years.

(An awful lot of of that Facebook games revenue turned out to be fraudulent cramming of charges onto phone bills, and/or taking advantage of the fact that parents didn't know that their kids could stuff charges onto the credit card bill and ran up huge bills, two revenue streams that have since gone away. I think that bubble has already popped, too, so Eris only knows what Jennings is going to do next.)

At this point, it looks like every publisher and studio is pushing their probably-last-ever MMOs, at least as we know them, out the door and getting out of the business. There's just no money in it.

But how much of the fact The Secret War is "bombing" is due to the fact players don't want to try new things either.

Look at the threads discussing other MMOs. Look at the reasons people find to reject each and every one of them because they aren't enough like CoH? From my understanding it plays very differently from other MMOs. No fix classes, no obvious levels, one mission at a time instead of a choice, missions that aren't always "kill everything you see". It's a two way street.

Players want the familiar and game companies are only too willing to comply.