SlickRiptide

Ummm...

I'm not even sure how to respond to that except to ask, "Where did you come up with an idea like that?"

Keeping in mind that all of this is idle speculation, given that the only evidence of anything is a few job listings, I'm curious what you think the "heart of the current MMO market" means?

Between Champions, CoH, DCUO, Super Hero Squad, and an upcoming Marvel game that appears to be a more adult version of Super Hero Squad, the super hero genre is getting pretty well saturated. There isn't a lot of room for a "new" game that is a rehash of a previous game and not really new at all.

Saying "this is an engine thing" makes it appear that you are saying that the "heart of the MMO market" means "fancy graphics".

I don't think you can name any successful MMO that was successful due solely to fancy graphics. On the other hand, one can easily come up with a list of less successful to outright unsuccessful games that DID have fancy graphics but had less than stellar gameplay.

SOE already tried the sequel approach, with both a sequel and a prequel to their flagship game, and NCSoft has also gone the sequel route, with Lineage. I believe that NCSoft has learned some valuable lessons from those experiences that ought to preclude trying to sell a "City of Heroes 2". As you say, though: time will tell.

If that was ever true, it certainly is not true today.

Something new and different that shows that Paragon Studios is a real game studio and not a one-trick pony.

They already announced it. It's called "Freedom".

I don't see there ever being a "City of Heroes 2". This new version of the game is as close as you're going to get to that, IMO.

I wasn't talking about other games either. I was talking about the attitude that any City of Heroes player suggesting an alternative to subscriptions is a freeloading cheapskate who just wants to ride on the coattails of the people who are really paying for the game.

It's not as if you posted "The discussion first came up from a forum posting a year or two ago", Forbin. The extra added dose of judgment of the poster(s) was my point there.

This is all starting to sound personal so I'm going to step off of the subway train at this point. I've already ventured my opinion that the whole thread is mostly a waste of time, except as a thought exercise and that opinion hasn't changed.

How does it become less offensive if he was speaking about someone other than the reader?

You're not familiar with the old recreational drugs adage about how "the first hit is free", are you?

Freemium isn't about people wanting to freeload. It's about publishers getting players in the door with the free offering and then selling the hell out of them to get them to part with their money.

The attitude quoted above is one of the reasons I noted previously that a freemium version of the game is not targeted at people who already subscribe. Condemning your fellow players as cheapskate freeloaders for favoring a different monetization model is doing them a disservice, IMO.

In any case, it doesn't matter if 90% "freeload" and 10% pay if the company turns an overall profit on that 10%.

None of this matters here, though. I've seen this discussion on other game forums before and the same tired arguments, FUD and name calling by the anti-freemium crowd. In the end, the decision by a publisher/developer to use a freemium model is based on projected profitability, not based on the personal opinions of a few forumites, regardless of which side of the equation they land on.

I'm not really sure how to respond to a statement like this. The fact that you're making it tells me that you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the game industry as a whole over the last couple of years.

I'll simply say this - Freemium is being widely adopted because it IS profitable. Like every other monetization strategy, it is appropriate for some properties and less appropriate for others. The implementation is key and I have observed that poor implementations can have as detrimental an effect as poor content.

The one thing you can say about that other company is that they are in a unique position in the industry. They are an umbrella game publisher and they have been such for years. There were a lot of us that hoped that NCSoft might develop their own umbrella rather than completely close down underperforers like Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa. I digress.

The umbrella gives them a unique opportunity. In my opinion, they are attempting to move away from being "The MMO publisher" towards being "The Station Cash economy". You buy their currency and use it with ALL of their games, and it doesn't really matter which game motivated you to buy it or which game you spend it on. As soon as you buy the virtual currency, they have their revenue. If you don't "spend" any SC at all, they still have your money as revenue. Offering you multiple games to "spend" it on just means that you have that many possible money sinks to drain it away and encourage you to buy more.

Freemium for them is just another avenue for encouraging customers to purchase their funny money. They are Disney World selling Disney Dollars and their games are the various theme parks under the Disney World umbrella where you can go and spend your funny money on amusements; just as long as you don't ask to have it converted back into real dollars. (Homer Simpson learned about that the hard way at Crusty Land.)

Other game publishers don't have the luxury to be an umbrella company, so in that sense you can call them a special case. In general, though, they are really feeling their way through this transition to freemium just like everyone else.

Another company already did it right and the proof is that the freemium game is draining customers away from its sister subscription game. Those "Live" subscription players who swore that freemium would destroy their game and they wanted nothing to do with it are being drawn over by the prospect of the huge influx of new players to adventure with. A fact that also addresses the concern of the poster upstream who asked for proof that making a freemium version of a subscription MMO would actually draw in an influx of new players.

What they did wrong, actually, was that when the experiment began their goal was NOT to really create a freemium game so much as to create a freemium gateway that would funnel the freemium players into subscriptions.

They learned the hard way that the majority of the freemium players were resistant to subscriptions to the point that they would rather quit the game when they hit the edges of the freemium tier than subscribe and get blanket access to everything.

This is a factor in freemium game customers that I have frequently observed, yet seen little discussion about from the standpoint of design. Many (I feel I should say "most" but have no statistical basis for saying it) are motivated to stay freemium because they enjoy the sense of control and planning afforded by the ala carte purchasing system. There is a sense of both freedom and investment in buying exactly what it is that you want or feel you need; no more and no less.

This is one reason that a faction of the freemium players are willing to spend MORE on ala carte purchases than they might on the equivalent subscription access. There is a sense of ownership and a sense of empowerment that comes from buying the parts of the game that you want and having permanent access to them as opposed to buying blanket access to the whole game, including parts you don't care about, and then losing your access entirely if you decide to terminate payments.

It's an entirely different market of customers whose motivations only moderately overlap the motivations of the dedicated subscription customer. Any discussion of freemium that doesn't address that reality is a waste of breath and time, in my opinion.

You're correct that you phrased the question such that you would get the only answer that you wanted to hear, yes.

There's nothing special about the superhero genre in comparison to other genres. Suggesting that you can't apply the lessons or data points of other games because they are fantasy or space opera or golden age of piracy or cake baking is putting way too much emphasis on the genre at the expense of the one thing all of those activities have in common - that that they are multiplayer games. (Well, maybe not the cake baking, though it might be interesting to see just how you could gamify that as a MMO.)

Short version: In my opinion, you have a mistaken vision of both City of Heroe's position in the gaming world and a mistaken idea of what keeps gamers playing any particular game.

Long version:

My first real introduction to Penny Arcade happened because I was into my third year of Everquest and happened to be reading the EQ forum. Some random person had started up a thread about Dark Age of Camelot and how EQ was doomed. Note that this fellow and some of his supporters weren't just saying that EQ might lose some subscribers. They were saying "LOL, put a fork in it, it's done. It'll be shut down with a few months."

The reason wasn't even that Dark Age of Camelot was a better game that had just launched. It was that Penny Arcade had run a comic/blog saying that DAoC was a better game. The obvious conclusion these PA fanboys drew was that EQ was doomed and everyone ought to just acknowledge it and quit now.

I remember asking myself "Who the smeg is this Penny Arcade guy and what makes him so powerful that people just take his word for something as ludicrous as this claim that DAoC has already killed EQ before it's really even gotten started?"

Needless to say, when I finally found the comic and the website, I was more puzzled than enlightened. I'm a fan of PA nowadays, of course, but at the time it was merely bizarre.

As I mentioned above, I played EQ actively for three years and inactively for some time after that. I saw all of the doom and gloom. Every new game that was launched was going to destroy EQ and wipe it off the gaming map. DAoC. Anarchy Online. Vanguard. Asheron's Call 2. Anarchy Online 2. Mythica. Horizons. Earth & Beyond (EA, I still hate you over canceling E&B).

Vanguard was the truly amusing one. It was founded by Brad Templeton. It was going to be a return to the roots of what "originally made EQ great." It was going to be hard core. It was going to be fabulous. It was going to redefine what a MMO should be and set the world back on the path of righteousness.

When it launched it was already obsolete and irrelevant.

The plain truth of the matter was that every new game expanded the market a certain amount and Everquest's subscription numbers went UP every time one of them launched, instead of down.

EQ may not be the biggest gorilla in the zoo any more, but after more than a decade, it is still around and still profitable and still supplying just as much entertainment to its core subscriber base as it always has done. It does it with a graphics engine that would be considered deplorable by today's standards and with gameplay mechanics that fly directly in the face of what passes for generally accepted mechanics today. Hell, it's still nearly the only game at all where you actually SPEAK to a NPC in order to interact with it, instead of using pre-generated dialog trees.

I point out all of this archaic goodness inherent in Everquest in order to illustrate the fact that when a MMO has matured to the point that it is in a steady state subscription-wise, that it has reached the plateau where all of the subs are the people who are self-selected as being people who are happy with what the game offers.

Once you reach that plateau, you can maintain it pretty much forever, barring some kind of drastic change in the gaming scene. In EQ's case, it was World of Warcraft. However, even despite WoW, EQ is still alive, kicking, and profitable. Hell, even Anarchy Online is still alive and kicking after all of these years, for the same reasons.

City of Heroes has been at that plateau for a few years now. The game hovers right around 125k - 160k subscribers, depending on how recently a new issue or new expansion has been offered. That is plenty to support the game and to fund development of new features for it. It keeps that number up in the face of all competition, not because of good fortune that the competition is lackluster or incompetent, but because the people who play CoH enjoy playing CoH.

There's no need to create "CoH2" in that scenario. It won't "fix" anything unless, as Chase_Arcanum suggested, it replaces it entirely. All it will do is split the playerbase. While there are some players who have the inclination and the disposable income to subscribe to multiple MMO's, most players feel that they are fully committed at one subscription. They aren't going to subscribe to both, as was more than adequately demonstrated when City of Villains was launched as a "stand-alone" game with its own subscription fee.

All other considerations aside - The silliest notion in this whole line of speculation is that Paragon Studios has no ambitions to expand their offerings beyond the single niche that they now operate in and which is pretty thoroughly played out now. If Marvel ever successfully launches a MMO (and it sort of sounds like it will just be an adult version of Super Hero Squad Online) then the niche will be pretty well filled. All of those other games that were mentioned like The Old Republic and what-not are NOT a threat to City of Heroes. Not directly. They are in a different niche that is NOT well-filled. The people who make up the core audience here are not the core audience for those games, despite some overlap.

Looking at those job listings, I drew the same conclusions that someone upstream of here drew - These are all senior personnel, who are the top level of a new project that is in the very first stages of production. That means that you're looking at something that is a good four years away, at the earliest. That's not a CoH2. Especially if you believe for some weird reason that CoH is going to be six feet under at this time next year.

Whatever the game is, it will draw upon the lessons learned from CoH, but it will be unrelated to it. It certainly won't be a "next generation" CoH. It will be something that leads the development team in new directions and offers new challenges for them to overcome and define what a "next-gen" MMO actually means. Assuming, of course, that the project is even a MMO in the first place.

Basically, friend Robot, I feel that you are making a lot of speculation and a lot of baseless statements, which I really don't mind except for the vehemence with which you defend them, again completely with emotion and hyperbole and nothing at all in the way of evidence to support your opinions.

You mileage may vary, of course.