General Discussion

With Tabula Rasa, one of the highly anticipated titles of the past is going to shut down. That said, when looking at the other titles that fell back behind their expectatios do you think we will see more games closing their doors?

The pressure on pay to play games has definitely increased during the last years with many client based free to play games releasing that feature a very different, very profitable game model and draw low budget players out of the market, with an increasing number of browsergames that pull "on the fence" people, usually non-gamers, that might have played a F2P or even a P2P title.

When we look at the past 12 years, there were no actual competetitors to "the MMORPG". Games like EQ or DaoC were a unique kind of game. Sure, they had to establish a niche and settle in a market segment that was tiny compared to post WoW. But with the coming of WoW, the F2P wave and the multiplayer compability of even java-box games, the segment not only opened up and flooded with new players, it also got heavy competition.

In 2005, I had a long discussion about MMORPGs not shutting down, because even 30 000 players are considered a success. I seconded to this back then, without any doubt.

Today,  what we see with Tabula Rasa, is the market kicking in. This was actually already the case with Vanguard, but because someone invested and the original developer team vaporized, it was granted a prolonged life.

But in the future, I think we will see more and more MMORPGs being failures and being shut down, because it is no longer a new, shiny, experimantal market, because development costs and quality expectations are skyrocketing and because players tend to shift a lot more than years ago (just because there is a lot more to shift to).

So in my book, this is a healthy thing and something that we, the players, can only profit from. The only way for pay to play games is down the "quality games, no ripoff" alley, because everything else will be smashed by the "free market" bat and hopefully, shut down.

M

Despite the success of the travesty of an MMO known as WoW I think the general MMO player has finally wisened up and decided to not play shitty, half assed, content barren games that were rushed out the door prematurely.

Well, not maintain subscriptions to them.  They're still buying boxes.

Quality expectations skyrocketing? Many people me included are praying to have a game like we had in 1999.

Originally posted by altairzq

Quality expectations skyrocketing? Many people me included are praying to have a game like we had in 1999.

By "quality" I mean quality in design, programming and stability. For example WAR is a quality game, you can argue about its concept, and god knows I did a lot recently, but it's a quality game.

Budget and target audience come into play here too, a game is, after all, a service product which relies almost completely on the customer base. Does the game work as a business model? - past games did sometimes not care a bit in this department...

M

You will have to differentiate between bigger companies and smaller ones.

Big companies expect a few hundred thousand subscribers to be successful while niche games can survive down to a few thousand (A tale in the desert for example)

For a big company, just because the game makes profit does not mean you should keep it alive, when the resources of the game could be used for more profit elsewhere.

I am sure TR could be continued by another company with profit, but I doubt NCSoft is interested in it.

Not long ago I made a poll asking if people wanted free to play or pay to play games, with the consequences of quality that that entailed.

They wanted to pay, and they wanted to up to $20, if the game was right.  So I currently believe that we will continue to have this business model out there, with variations maybe, but it wont go away.

Its the same with TV channel, you can get so many free channels, and yet... you still pay for some of them, just to get that right show, that you know the paying channels offer.

I don't have all the pieces to this puzzle.

What was the overhead for running Tabula Rasa, versus the money it was bringing in?

The big question I have, is do these games shut down because they are losing money, or because they just aren't making enough money?

If they are losing money, and it's obvious that's not going to change in the future, it's obviously a no brainer to shut the thing down so you don't continue to lose even more money.

But, what if you are making a profit, no matter how small?

The cost of development are sunk costs, and therefore should play no part in the decision to keep the game running or not.

It would seem that the correct conclusion is that the game was simply losing money, in other words, after paying employees, servers, and other operating costs, there was a shortage of revenue from paid subscriptions. Since MMORPG revenues almost never increase once they peak, then the best course of action if you are losing money after subscriptions peak is to cancel the game as fast as possible.

 I think if we want to see more variety, more viable indie type games (even if they are made by commercial companies )  the only important thing in the equation is the overhead of running the game.

How much does it cost to run an MMORPG, and what is the minimum amount of subscriptions needed to make that much revenue?

That is the number you'll need to stay up and running, regardless if development costs are 10K, or 25 million.

All good things must come to an end.  Every MMO out today will of course shut down in the future at some point.  The demise of some will come much faster than that of others.

Originally posted by Deathstrike2

All good things must come to an end.  Every MMO out today will of course shut down in the future at some point.  The demise of some will come much faster than that of others.

well gee, thank you Mr. Nostradamus.