The problem with MMO's shutting down

[Craig234]

MMO's need to do a lot better at planning for low income.

Players invest a lot in MMO's, and they're going to do that less and less the more they see players get burned.

Marvel Heroes just released on consoles this summer, and has already lost its license and is closing down in December. People spent hundreds of dollars planning for a long time to play.

MMO's have clauses about the right to close down, but there is an element of trust there. Just in the last month the developer was stating big plans for the game and denying critics saying the company was doing fine.

Whether they plan for longer (permanent) licenses, or permanent low-cost hosting, or private hosting, or single-player versions of the game, or whatever other options players want, they need to do better.

Otherwise they're threatening to kill their golden goose of the free to play MMO model and wronging players.

Some games have admirably continued with seemingly huge player drops - such as 'Fallen Earth' and other MMO's run by the same company you almost never hear of that are still maintained somehow.

 

[JSt0rm]

maybe dont spend hundreds of dollars on video games. We are in this problem because companies see people buying pre pre alphas and space ship jpegs for thousands of dollars. Pay to win weapons in fps games and all other kinds of stupid stuff. When we stop paying for unfinished games and stop giving people money for "digital goods" that have no value we will see games come back to where they should be.

 

[XavierMace]

It's a MMO. Planning on it being around forever is poor planning at best and keeping a dying one running is a losing battle. Especially when it's a PWE/Cryptic MMO. Expecting private servers and/or single player versions of the game is just a bad expectation. Permanent licenses isn't happening. "Low cost hosting" is a very relative term and even then there's still other costs that would eat up what little money they'd still be making off it.

The cost to keep Marvel Heroes running is far greater than Fallen Earth (which I'd never even heard of) if for no other reason than licensing. If Steam is right, Fallen Earth only has 50 people on it right now. Marvel Heroes has 390. Star Trek Online has been dying off for some time although seems to be trying to make a come back. This is especially important because it's the same owners as Marvel Heroes. Despite it's declining player base, STO currently has 1,400 people playing right now. If you were PWE/Cryptic, how much would you invest in a game that's got 1/3rd the player base of one of your other products that's been around longer? I have a sneaking suspicion that the return on STO ($ per player) is quite a bit higher too, because Star Trek.

Mainstream MMO's generally have one of two fates. They make it big like WoW or they roll over and die. Those companies have no incentive to keep a dying MMO running. Insinuating that people are going to stop playing F2P MMO's because they eventually shut down is just silly.

Edit: I thought Marvel Heroes was still tied to Cryptic/PWE but it looks like that may not be the case. The rest of the point still stands.

 

[UsandThem]

Yeah, it's pretty bad. My teenagers are always asking to buy expansion this, items that, monthly "special access", etc. It's crazy how they spend $60 on a game, but to get a character or play certain maps, they have to pay more. Smart business strategy (many gladly pay it), but I personally think it's horrible. I can't remember the title off hand, but several years ago I remember there being a Star Wars MMO game that was a pretty penny, and it wasn't up for very long.

 

[XavierMace]

Yeah, it's pretty bad. My teenagers are always asking to buy expansion this, items that, monthly "special access", etc. It's crazy how they spend $60 on a game, but to get a character or play certain maps, they have to pay more. Smart business strategy (many gladly pay it), but I personally think it's horrible. I can't remember the title off hand, but several years ago I remember there being a Star Wars MMO game that was a pretty penny, and it wasn't up for very long.

But to play devils advocate, it's a bit different on a regular retail game than a Free To Play game. Microtransactions are the only source of income on F2P games. I've played my share of them and it never ceases to amaze me how many F2P players don't seem to understand this. There's a lot of players who genuinely believe they shouldn't have to pay for anything and seem to take a special pride in avoiding spending even a single dollar on the game. The catch is there has to be a balance. Yes, some games excessively milk this and make it impossible to play without spending large sums of money. But then you have others where you can be competitive while spending little or no money on it but then players refuse to spend anything because they don't feel like they're getting their money worth. I don't envy MMO developers for that dilemma. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

 

[JSt0rm]

old mmo games with monthly subs can put them on ice. Meaning no more development but as long as the monthly subs pays for the servers then who cares let it run. Modern mmo's that are free to play arent gonna have that ability and will drop fast. Anyways stop buying stuff in these things.

 

[Craig234]

maybe dont spend hundreds of dollars on video games. We are in this problem because companies see people buying pre pre alphas and space ship jpegs for thousands of dollars. Pay to win weapons in fps games and all other kinds of stupid stuff. When we stop paying for unfinished games and stop giving people money for "digital goods" that have no value we will see games come back to where they should be.

Players have brought this about, by preferring 'free to play games' supported by whales. Games have to compete.

 

[Craig234]

Xavier, you're really missing the point of my saying what MMO's should do, as you discuss how it is now.

They're hurting the industry and the players and should improve the design.

 

[Craig234]

Yeah, it's pretty bad. My teenagers are always asking to buy expansion this, items that, monthly "special access", etc. It's crazy how they spend $60 on a game, but to get a character or play certain maps, they have to pay more. Smart business strategy (many gladly pay it), but I personally think it's horrible. I can't remember the title off hand, but several years ago I remember there being a Star Wars MMO game that was a pretty penny, and it wasn't up for very long.

Sounds like Sony's Star Wars Galaxies, which was shut down because of Star Wars: The Old Republic launching.

 

[Craig234]

But to play devils advocate, it's a bit different on a regular retail game than a Free To Play game. Microtransactions are the only source of income on F2P games. I've played my share of them and it never ceases to amaze me how many F2P players don't seem to understand this. There's a lot of players who genuinely believe they shouldn't have to pay for anything and seem to take a special pride in avoiding spending even a single dollar on the game. The catch is there has to be a balance. Yes, some games excessively milk this and make it impossible to play without spending large sums of money. But then you have others where you can be competitive while spending little or no money on it but then players refuse to spend anything because they don't feel like they're getting their money worth. I don't envy MMO developers for that dilemma. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

That model works because of market segmentation.

One of the things that makes a game attractive is having players - even free ones. Spellweaver is a great card game, but you can go 10 minutes waiting for a match and give up - it's currently developing mobile as 'make or break'.

It's fine for those to be 'free players', as long as others foot the bills.

Try not doing this - to have everyone pay some share, much less a 'free share', and watch many players move to the 'free' games instead. So the competition nearly forces them to offer 'free'.

Then there are the whales - the 2% who will spend large amounts, and some who will spend some on the game.

They've experimented with what to offer the whales. Offering them advantages in competitive games works for some games, but most find that the 'free players' are driven away.

There are two main things left: cash for time, and cosmetics.

Marvel Heroes had an especially good option: for free you could play any hero you want, just like anyone else. But they had over 50 heroes and when you want variety - you could pay cash or grind to get them for free.

And this is where things have settled - mostly 'fair' games where cash doesn't buy advantage, but does buy many things as conveniences, reducing grinding, and cosmetics.

I think Rift has a pretty typical history. Started when subscriptions were the norm but ending, it charged the usual $15/month, discount for annual pricing, and sold expansions every two years.

Free to play competition drove it to adopt the model, and replacing it primarily meant selling in-game currency and 'premium membership' with dozens of time saver and cosmetic benefits.

In addition, they added the idea of 'loyalty' as a currency for money spent - but it would take thousands of dollars to get the higher levels. Some did. The rewards were actually not all that impressive.

And of course, the things like lockboxes and mounts (a cosmetic feature). This did drive the game to develop some pretty attractive and creative things like mounts, since the company needed them to sell for money.

They experimented. In the next to last expansion they tried things like making 20% of the armor drops require an attribute that people who spent extra got, but it wasn't really 'better' armor and got a lot of complaints. They also added a gear slot that sold for cash, and then a long grind as an alternative, which pissed off the raiders big time since they viewed the slot as needed, not optional. They got a lot of complaints with these attempts.

For the most recent expansion, they switched to selling it for cash and not having the 'pay for extras' included. This seems fairer to me and I didn't see many complains. It leaves the game free level 1-65, and pay for 65-70.

Unsurprisingly, Xavier is right that they have trained many customers to demand games for free and to perversely take pride in not paying a cent. All part of the business model.

They want to attract the whales, the moderate paying customers, and the customers who will want free in order to keep the player numbers up - that's the competitive market they have.

What I'm saying is to better design the MMO's to protect the players, all of them but especially the whales, instead of the careless approach used now.

And that COULD be a competitive advantage, if they do it right. Imagine an MMO sellling that it has protection for the game, saying pick that one rather than the ones that will just close with almost no notice and lose it all.

 

[Craig234]

old mmo games with monthly subs can put them on ice. Meaning no more development but as long as the monthly subs pays for the servers then who cares let it run. Modern mmo's that are free to play arent gonna have that ability and will drop fast. Anyways stop buying stuff in these things.

Well, they'll drop faster if people - especially the 2% who are whales - don't buy things. It's hard to say what the answer is, other than the message the thread is about on the design. This is what the market has demanded.

 

[Craig234]

I suspect there's a similar story about the pricing of movies. The market segmentation part comes by offering 'premium' editions like IMAX and 3D, 'Collector's Edition' discs for the whales, theaters segmenting by showtime (matinee), with theater itself being a more premium pricing but with pretty standard pricing so that they don't make the industry eat itself by competing on price - you pick which movie you want to see for the same price, rather than a worse move because it's half the price. And then come the rental markets and streaming for the 'cheaper' customers.

I suspect an answer to the question, 'why don't they make a movie that's 5 times better, with 5 times the budget and 5 times the ticket price' is that you'd be lucky to get 1/5 of the customers, defeating the purpose, reducing the quality.

And an answer to, 'why don't they make a movie 1/5 the price for the cheaper customers' is, if they did that, they'd be losing the higher income from the higher priced movies, so it'd hurt the industry.

Some theaters do get around this by offering older or foreign or unusual movies for low prices, but they don't seem to take a big market share. So, it's standardized on the pricing and theaters making their money from the food.

Home theaters and streaming have created such competition for the movies - and now even more with the streaming development of many series - that movies seem reluctant to raise ticket prices, keeping them low to compete.

That is done I'd guess between squeezing the theaters who as I mentioned now make the money on the food, and the growing international markets.

 

[XavierMace]

Here's the problem, you're arguing that Marvel Heroes had the "better" way of doing it. But their player count doesn't reflect that. Now or in the past. As far as I can tell Rift is also pretty much dead. STO has been pushing the lockboxes pretty hard these days to which the "masses" complain about. But they still have more players than any of the other MMO's you've mentioned. Check the player count of some of the laughably Pay 2 Win mobile games. They make the player count of any of the games mentioned here look like a joke.

Money speaks louder than words. If "whales" account for 2% of the player base and spend say $1,000 on the game (which is low) and the other 98% spend $20, they still make more money off the whales than the rest of the player base. So what incentive do they have to do anything other than continue appealing to the whales?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I have some experience here, at least in the development aspects of MMOs, but not really the marketing.

I think that, before, MMOs were mostly subscription-only, and only for the "hardcore" players, because they demanded a lot of player time per week. They were designed around weekly raids, daily grinds, and questing.

But somewhere along the line, things changed, and became more accepting to "casual" players.

 

[TechBoyJK]

MMOs can be expensive to run. Before I retired, I was a sales engineer for a niche datacenter for mission critical systems (one of my prize deals was gov of Pakistan where we hosted all of their military systems during the Iraq war).

While the cost of bandwidth and servers have definitely gone down, throughout my career anytime a prospective client was talking about running an MMO, I definitely licked my chops.

Part of what I like about Star Citizen's long term plan is if the project ever has to fold, they can pretty much post everything they have to github, and anybody can download Amazon's Lumberyard. There's real discussion about the 'end game of star citizen' being well funded private modded servers after CIG (dev) has moved onto SC 2.0 or w/e since many supporters of the project are wealthy and could afford the $35k-$100k per year it would cost to run a busy server.

 

[bystander36]

All things considered, ever since WotLK on WoW, the MMO genre has been on life support. There is an inherent problem with the genre that wasn't a problem when all the MMO's were on the same page. The problem stems from what makes an MMO good, and what draws people to play them are on opposite ends of the spectrum.

To make an MMO mean something to people, you have to pretty much force a social aspect to the game as the types that play them in the first place often are not extroverts. And forcing people to play in groups, and socialize doesn't work if there is an option to not interact with people. Once WoW broke the MMO cardinal rule, to not give into the solo players demands, no MMO can get away with making a group/social oriented MMO. And without the group and social aspects of an MMO, they are terrible games, and people simply get bored of them faster than they ever have.

 

[Ns1]

Meanwhile UO still chugging along 2 decades later. How big is that team now, 4 people?

 

[Gryz]

Game makers figured something out. About 7-10 years ago.

If you made games for smart people, you have a potential target audience of a few million people.
If you make games for idiots, you have a potential target audience of a billion people.

Guess what. The last 10 years game studios mainly make games for idiots.
As a side effect, it's easier to extort extra money from idiots than it is to earn extra money from smart people.
And the idiots are all on board. They happily pay extra money for another cow in farmville, or for extra bullets in a shooter.

I've given up. I hardly play games anymore. (Got other stuff to do now too).
If there ever is another game that is a bit like some older games, I will give them a try. Those are still produced. But in very small quantities. Nowadays it is not about producing a good game. No. It's all about selling expansion packs, adding in-game purchases, etc. And as long as the idiots are buying, it won't change. Too bad. Yet another industry down the drain.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Some people are claiming Disney yanked the Marvel Heroes license because of allegations of sexual harassment by the Gazillion CEO (FYI, Gaz is not part of PWE).

We may never know, but my guess is they simply ran out of money to pay for the Marvel license. They had hoped the consoles would add enough revenue but that didn't happen, and they were not able to secure another round of investment to keep the lights on. They were close to shutting down before, but found investors willing to fund the console versions.

Either way, without the Marvel IP license (which could never have been perpetual, Marvel doesn't do that anymore after Fox), there is no way for Gaz to open-source the content or offer an offline version.

The most they could do is strip out all the Marvel content from both the client and server and open-source the empty shell, but if they are going bankrupt the code is an asset that belongs to their creditors. There would also be the issue of the client using the Unreal engine.

Star Citizen is different since development is customer-funded and is not licensing an existing universe or using a royalty-based game engine.

 

[Jaskalas]

If this is what spurred the topic of discussion, then I present the best article I know for the details.

Disney has canceled Marvel Heroes, Marvel has ended its relationship with Gazillion

What sort of planning can be done, when the owner yanks the license?

 

[Craig234]

That article didn't have new information that I saw, but it has the little info we have. What planning can be done? All kinds of things from a game conversion without the licensed content, to a requirement in the licensing agreement for a longer term phase-out to end the license like at least a year's notice to the license holder having an obligation to at least keep the game running in maintenance mode a while.

Selling things that cost hundreds of dollars in the game and shutting it down less than 2 months later, isn't right.

It's wrong to players and bad for other games - why would players pay in that case?

 

[ImpulsE69]

If I've learned anything...nothing game companies do hurts them in the end. Sure the little guys get bought out and shut down, but the main players that cause all the commotion and chaos still thrive and churn out garbage.

Licensed games in general have always been mostly bad. There are very few exceptions to this. Rule #1, don't buy additional crap if you are concerned it is going to shut down. You are under their whim, and they can shut down at anytime for any reason. Nothing you or anyone else says is going to change that.

 

[clok1966]

I read Marvel hero's shutting down is not a cash problem but a Disney (next EA) greed problem. They are starting there own game studio and do not want to compete with other devs products (understandable when you own the product) they just chose to not re licence the IP to the devs of Marvel hero's, it was not a cash flow problem as far as i read. Maybe i read wrong. I do know many of the games shutting down are just wishful thinking, strike gold in a played out stream. Most the Asian MMORPG reuse the same models and beloved patriot them, i would guess same 2-3 game engines too. They all promise new game play and honestly, the tweek what we have all seen, and call it new. There will never be another WoW, but since I enjoy these games, please some DEV, prove me wrong. Heck several of you prove me wrong.

 

[Craig234]

Well I think I'm done giving any money to any marvel games for at least quite some time. They sold to Disney without any protection for the players.

 

[ElFenix]

MMOs can be expensive to run. Before I retired, I was a sales engineer for a niche datacenter for mission critical systems (one of my prize deals was gov of Pakistan where we hosted all of their military systems during the Iraq war).

While the cost of bandwidth and servers have definitely gone down, throughout my career anytime a prospective client was talking about running an MMO, I definitely licked my chops.

Part of what I like about Star Citizen's long term plan is if the project ever has to fold, they can pretty much post everything they have to github, and anybody can download Amazon's Lumberyard. There's real discussion about the 'end game of star citizen' being well funded private modded servers after CIG (dev) has moved onto SC 2.0 or w/e since many supporters of the project are wealthy and could afford the $35k-$100k per year it would cost to run a busy server.

don't they need to release 1.0 first?