SlickRiptide

Well, I wouldn't argue with that, nor would I argue with the freemium conversion being Hail Mary pass.

I was thinking of the industry as a whole.

I'd count that as having been in the pipeline already, and planned from the start for a subscription. Have they announced a pricing plan?

I'd agree that after having one Star Wars MMO already perform way under expectations (maybe two - I'm not sure how well Clone Wars Adventures is doing) I'd expect that this would spell the end of big budget licensed games.

One of the interesting things about freemium is that it counts on the fact that some people enjoy spending lots of money on junk. I heard an interview recently with the CEO of Night Owl Games, who are the developers of Dungeon Overlord, one of SOE's Facebook games. The game so far was offering very small, reasonably-priced microtransactions that had real value in the game. (That's my opinion, there, not his stated opinion.)

I had posted a question about whether purchases were meeting expectations (the game was in early launch and even now still carries a big "beta" tag) and while he was understandably vague, he made an interesting observation:

What he said was that they needed to find something expensive to offer what Facebook called "the whales". That is, the big spenders who are happiest when they ARE spending lots of money on their pastime. These people, apparently, make up a significant chunk of the revenue of any particular freemium game.

This is why, for instance, a kid's game like Wizard 101 offers a $30 shark mount that is not really good for anything except impressing people with how much money you are able to spend to look unique.

I've noticed, also, that there are more than a few people like myself who won't subscribe to multiple games but who, over the course of several months, are willing to make microtransactions that come out to more or less the equivalent of having subscribed to multiple games.

It's partly the "get the shiny while it's hot" thing. Ironically, partly thriftiness, like "Ooh, a sale on NC Coin! I better stock up now, so I have more later on." Partly just the freedom to make impulse purchases which tend to be large sometimes and small sometimes.

I think the new Facebook generation of gamers is going to grow up with microtransactions as the norm and they won't think twice about spending money that way, where many of us old-timers still look down on it or even see it as somehow an evil or corrupting influence.

The next couple of years will be interesting, alright.

Donald Trump would disagree.

Nobody said that changing to meet a changing market would be painless. They did what they had to do. If they trimmed all of those expenses, it's because those expenses weren't helping the bottom line.

I suppose the real test will be if Turbine becomes profitable enough to start taking on other projects now.

I also think that you've not only seen the end of MMO's with the budget of a major motion picture. You've also seen the end of subscription-only MMO's. There might still be a couple in the pipeline (I still haven't heard a revenue model for The Secret World) but I think any new game is going to be either freemium or a hybrid from the beginning.

It will be interesting to see what the next year or two hold.

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.

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.

It is. I was there.

It's a great idea. So great, that I have to fall back onto my standard thought about such things - If they haven't already done it, then there must be a good reason for it.

I know that the common explanation for the continued lack of props situated on the character's back is that there is a limited number of mounting points and they are pretty much all in use. This was an explanation from the devs, not speculation by players.

I suspect that there must be a similar explanation for skin textures being "baked in" instead of being something that you apply the same way you apply clothing and props.

Things change, of course. At one point, power customization was a dream that the devs said "never gonna happen", then they found a way to make it happen. If skin texturing ever became some kind of priority, they might find a way to do that too.

Unfortunately, that's a deliberate design decision and you can blame the early adopters of the game for it.

It only took a couple of "Captain Naked Man" characters and some assorted brouhaha on the early forums to insure that the skin tone palette would get nerfed and silliness such as the removal of nipples from breast models would get implemented.

In the very early stages of beta, the costume and skin palettes were identical or close enough as made no difference. Human nature being what it is, enough people used that fact to create naked toons that the ability was nerfed.

Yes, it's a pain in the butt and no, it's unlikely to ever get changed. Feel free to try, though. I'll be right there cheering for you.

This is more or less what the poster in That Other Game's forum was proposing.

I guess I'm not seeing what is particularly abnormal about it. It's as valid an origin story as any of the hundreds of completely fictional ones we see every day that involve some measure of death, destruction and personal grief.

I want to emphasize that I'm not picking a fight with you here, Gale. Each of us has his or her own level of tolerance for various things and clearly where one person might see this action as something commemorative, you see it as diminutive (though I'm not real clear on why you see it as pathological).

The place where you draw the line of "recent" is likewise a personal one. 9/11 was nearly ten years ago now but I'll wager that there are many who would still consider it too "recent" to be eligible for using in an origin story while there are others who are not emotionally invested in it enough to be concerned about it.

Hurricane Katrina. Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. Indonesia. Are any of these eligible? Is it pathological to want to express a strong emotional response to any real-life catastrophe in a game or through some kind of personal expression?

If an artist is inspired by the Japan disaster to create art and profit from it, is that a raising of awareness or exploitation? What if she donates proceeds to relief organizations?

If Moo's original question somehow involved doing exactly the same thing as far as creating commemorative heroes but it also in some fashion generated revenue that was donated to the cause of disaster relief, would THAT be pathological? I don't know how that might happen; it doesn't really matter. Let's say s/he offered to design costumes for people at five bucks a pop and the proceeds were donated, so that people sporting those costumes could say "Look, I helped Japan!"

Considering game companies that are selling in-game commemorative items whose proceeds are used in this fashion, this isn't such a far-fetched idea. As far as that goes, if I go into Ravenwood Fair and buy a buddha statue for my fair and LolApps donates that revenue to Japan relief, would that be pathological? It's still mixing happy, funtime games with serious real world trauma.

If Paragon Studios offered a Japanese themed costume pack tomorrow for $5 with all proceeds going to disaster relief, would you buy one? Would it be offensive?

Suppose a supergroup posted the following:

"Let's show our support for Japan by filling Freedom Square with heroes bearing a red sun symbol. We'll gather at thus-and-such date and time and take a screenshot showing our solidarity with the Japanese people."

Good? Bad? Offensive? Inoffensive? What about this:

"Let's show our support for Japan by donating $10 to the Red Cross (instructions on donating and specifying Japan relief). As a token of your donation, everyone who donates should add a red sun symbol to their costume. Nobody will police you, so you're on your honor. In a week, we'll gather in Freedom Square and take a screenshot showing all of the people who are standing united with Japan and encourage them to stay strong."

Good? Bad? Offensive? Exploitive? Is it automatically a pathological thing to do just because it involves happy funtime games dealing with a horribly unthinkable real world catastrophe? If it's just one person doing it on their own instead of an organized group, does that somehow turn it from "good" to "pathological"?

It's hard to draw a line in the dirt here and say "this is appropriate but that isn't", especially when every individual has their own emotional response to the catastrophe and their own set of values to measure that response against.

Again, ouch!

Different perspectives, maybe. To me, this falls under, "I donated money and I'm watching yet another video of people fleeing tsunami and hearing about how the death toll has doubled again. I wish I could do more."

I don't see that commemorating the event in a game is a bad choice as your "more". Some random googling shows people on Another Super Hero Game's forum grappling with similar issues of feeling like doing "something" inside their game, even if that something doesn't actually change the real world and mostly just makes the actor feel like they have taken some positive action.

You seem to be seeing it more as a way for people to dismiss reality and go back to their computer generated fantasy without having to deal with any guilt or horror from the real world events.

But like I said, maybe I'm reading too much into your condemnation.

I didn't forbid you to do that. I DID give you advice on how to do it effectively. It's your decision to take it under advisement or dismiss it. /shrug

/eyeroll

A merger of server farms is qualitatively no different than a merger of servers, as far as globals are concerned. It could be much worse. They could be choosing to just shut down the EU servers and have it actually be a merge of servers. Then you would really be looking at renaming characters.

My point was that these things happen and when they do there is no choice but to resolve the conflict by making somebody unhappy. I've yet to see a game company decide to resolve the conflict by saying "Let's make EVERYBODY equally unhappy!"

Speaking for myself, I'm all for easing the pain by giving the affected people a special badge or title as compensation.

However, I have to agree with this - If there's an official thread about this topic, why are we starting side threads instead of contributing to the discussion that the devs are reading and participating in?

What sort of "chance" would you like to have been given? A duel with the current owner of those names on the US server? A game of poker with the global as the stakes? A costume contest? A dice roll?

Would it make you happier if the current US owner of @Black_light was forced to change to @US_Black_Light, so that you were both caused an inconvenience?

It strikes me that anybody who currently knows you as @Black_Light, is a person who also knows that you are European. That means that once the change goes into effect, those people will know to contact you as @EU_Black_Light. You shouldn't lose contact with any of your current friends.

That makes this appear to come down to an issue of vanity. It hardly seems worth quitting the game over unless you were already leaning towards quitting anyway.

Honestly, in your situation, I'd just make my personal little rebellion by changing my global to @The_REAL_Black_Light and get on with my game afterwards.