Clone Wars Adventures (SOE) F2P

[Ghambit]

Perhaps you're getting it mixed up with dial-up fees back then, which many times were hourly.

[Cyrrex]

Perhaps you're getting it mixed up with dial-up fees back then prostitutes, which many times were hourly.

Fixed.

[Stabs]

In any event I was talking about development costs, how much the game cost to make rather than the cost to players.

[UnSub]

How expensive UO was compared to now requires some sort of inflation calculation - since UO launched the 'average' cost of game development has increased many fold.

Now, SWOR will still likely be more expensive on that comparative basis, but the gap won't be as great.

And then there is Clone Wars Adventures, which will be comparatively cheaper still and puts SOE in a better place to make money from a new SW title.

[Stabs]

Comparing a game that made a fat profit at 100k subs to a game that is projected to need 2 million subscribers to be a success should be an inflation-proof comparison.

Development costs have risen but so has the amount of money MMOs extract from their players.

SWTOR wanted to be an expensive big budget game.

[Grimwell]

Holy shit, have we really progressed to the point where we don't remember what UO cost the player each month??? 

DDO and LOTRO don't prove that you should do AAA budget games for F2P. Turbine isn't the market leader in the West either. The market leader is one of those companies pusing the Asian MMO's that are F2P and have high production quality, and make a mint. Turbine is just one of the Western companies who is really starting to figure that out.

Their bragging point is that they are learning faster than others about what works in this market. SOE is definitely making that adjustment, but the EQ franchise does not yet have a F2P option, so they aren't as up to speed. Others, if they are considering it, are just as forced as Turbine was with DDO.

Big budget is fail as a plan, unless you are an established studio with the funds to suck it up off of other games. The studios who try to come out the gates and play for millions are making bad business. They would be better served to think in smaller packages and release something that can profit at 100K subs and iterate, iterate, iterate. What's better? One game that needs a million to break even, or ten that need 100,000 each?

I'm calling the second option win.

Even in that ten, most will fail, but the odds that a few of them will carry the load is much higher.

Going back to the subject in this thread, that's exactly what folks are speculating about CWA right? That it's Free Realms in a new package?

I never decided the business at SOE so don't read too much into this - but I think that's a wise idea. Cheaper, faster, and easier to profit from. Win, win, and win.

/tirade :)

[Lantyssa]

Going back to the subject in this thread, that's exactly what folks are speculating about CWA right? That it's Free Realms in a new package?

I never decided the business at SOE so don't read too much into this - but I think that's a wise idea. Cheaper, faster, and easier to profit from. Win, win, and win.

Very much so.  While I am the resident Free Realms fan-girl, a lot of that is for design decisions and as a role-model for what to do right.

From an entertainment perspective, it's the most casual I have ever played an MMO(G for Stormwaltz) before.  Yet they make from from me averaged out than probably all other SOE games averaged out over the years, including a long-time SWG sub.

[LK]

So the future is a bunch of small-scale F2P MMO's like all those Asian ones I see in banner ads and stuff, which are incredibly hard to distinguish themselves and are as disposal as toliet paper? Nexxon, GPotato, etc.

I actually saw a new one called Aika (http://aika.gpotato.com/landing/) that looked interesting but I was afraid to click past the trailer.

[Soln]

Sorry, that was kind of rude, but some of the folks who can still get frothing mad about SWG years after the fact and this is humorous since I'm now an outsider.

Grim buddy, did you leave SOE ?  If so, can you say who manhandled you away?

[Numtini]

I'm hoping that there will be companies that do games for adults, but yes, I think that's the general notion, build one engine, reskin it and toss in a few systems and run it cash shop for a lot fewer people than a WoW. I don't really have a problem with the structure of the business, just that most of the examples we've seen of it have been aimed at children or Koreans.

Give me an adult aimed EQ3 with more sophisticated combat and group and raid content stuffed into the Free Realms framework and I'll be very very happy.

[LK]

I'm worried about games created under this new paradigm being like my experience with Frontiersville so far: every action generates a spammy popup trying to get your friends in on the action and notify them of the most frivolous shit. It's not the game wanting me to do something; it's the company that created it, speaking through these digital entities. Like Iron Man advertising Dr. Pepper, or any number of scenarios where the evil entity assumes the guise of a normal person and manipulates the main character into performing an action that will benefit the entity.

It infuriates me and ruins my game experience.

[Lantyssa]

Grim buddy, did you leave SOE ?  If so, can you say who manhandled you away?

Yes.  The [redacted] would imply no.

[Grimwell]

Yeah, I work for Zynga now - on FarmVille. 

The [redacted] went up at my request while I was in that magical place where I didn't work at SOE and wasn't due at Zynga. I called it "vacation!" and it was good.

To Numtini's point about the games needing to be for adults, I think there are and that we would differ only on semantics. The diversity of games being cranked out of Asia is pretty wide, but they get lumped into one general "Bah, it's Korean!" stereotype. :D

[Lantyssa]

Dear gods, FarmVille really is taking over the world.

[Kageru]

Big budget is fail as a plan, unless you are an established studio with the funds to suck it up off of other games. The studios who try to come out the gates and play for millions are making bad business. They would be better served to think in smaller packages and release something that can profit at 100K subs and iterate, iterate, iterate. What's better? One game that needs a million to break even, or ten that need 100,000 each?

Sounds more like "we've given up competing with blizzard". Companies have spent either more (Warhammer) or a significant percentage yet met little success. This is because the games they released were fundamentally flawed due to their poor design not something inherent in the market. I'd probably lump SOE in there if they released something that wasn't a pop-cap like kids game... maybe they'll release the agency one day. There's too much emphasis on flashy, consumed while levelling, content and too little thought on providing a stable foundation and plan for evolution. Heck, APB looks like a lot of cash has been invested but most of it seems to be on flash and I really wonder how they plan to evolve it or keep the game fresh. SWTOR may well be in this category too.

Indeed the champion of your scheme would be cryptic with their shallow pump and dump masterpieces. The problem of course being that their retention is far too terrible to actually fund meaningful iteration on the product. So they strip the team to work on the next product and the game slowly dies.

To Numtini's point about the games needing to be for adults, I think there are and that we would differ only on semantics. The diversity of games being cranked out of Asia is pretty wide, but they get lumped into one general "Bah, it's Korean!" stereotype. :D

That's because a lot of them are fairly terrible and digging through the mass to find the potential jewel is way too hard. Assuming they are all pretty but shallow grind-fests is an eminently defendable heuristic.

[UnSub]

This is because the games they released were fundamentally flawed due to their poor design not something inherent in the market.

WoW (plus the huge number of other competitor games) gives new titles little time to shake out some of their poorer / unpopular design decisions, which means the new MMO enters a negative loop as it is unable to pay back its immense development costs. It isn't surprising that titles are starting to compete on price as a result and going smaller to start.

[Grimwell]

Sounds more like "we've given up competing with blizzard".

That may be what it sounds like, but I personally would rather phrase it as "Blizzard was an accident, even by their own estimations they went above and beyond hopes; if you are spending money and hiring people to make one of these damn games, why not try to do it in a way in which you can profit? That way you don't screw the pooch, your investors, and your employees when your game does not sell millions and you have to scale back staff and serve the much smaller audience you were more likely to get."

The goal of business is to make a profit. If you don't have a cash cow rolling already, in a HUGE way, or have very deep pockets of your own to fund the Next Big Thing, you should go with simpler expectations and make a smaller game that is great at a few things, and rake in the cash from the people who want just that. Please who you can and they will be happy customers, try to please everyone and you will fail 99% of the time.

Cryptic is not the champion of my scheme, Champions and Star Trek were targeting millions. They didn't get them.

EVE is the champion of my scheme if I had to pick a winner.

[tazelbain]

Cryptic is not the champion of my scheme, Champions and Star Trek were targeting millions. They didn't get them.

Huh?  Neither were were robust content launches that marked previous AAA attempts. Its hard to think that either was attempt to dethrone WoW.  WAR and AoC and where the last attempts.

[Numtini]

EVE is the champion of my scheme if I had to pick a winner.

But didn't eve crash and burn and get sold back to the devs by the publisher? I always figured it was a success largely because the publisher ate the loss.

[Sky]

Win for creators, win for fans, loss for corporate middlemen = WIN

 

[Shatter]

Higher budget doesnt mean better games in most cases with MMO's, it just means more free lunches. 

[Soln]

Congrats ole man.


I wonder if Grim and Schild will ever bother to look each up in the corp directory.

[Merusk]

Dear gods, FarmVille really is taking over the world.

Things that make tons of money in their industry do that.  Hence his evangelization of the F2P, cash for fun, quick to publish model.

[UnSub]

EVE is the champion of my scheme if I had to pick a winner.

But didn't eve crash and burn and get sold back to the devs by the publisher? I always figured it was a success largely because the publisher ate the loss.

This. EvE flopped at launch and it was only because Simon & Schulster Games sold the rights back to CCP rather than cancelling the title entirely that EvE is still around.

Runescape is the champion of your scheme - started simple, got the money coming in, improved over time. Problem is that this model really only seems to work if you are among the first to market on your particular platform unless you can include / beat every other feature offered by your competitors.

Finally, Cryptic didn't plan for millions of players. They planned for a couple of hundred thousand. Alleged profitability for both titles kicked in at 100k active accounts or so (according to public statements).

[Grimwell]

Dear gods, FarmVille really is taking over the world.

Things that make tons of money in their industry do that.  Hence his evangelization of the F2P, cash for fun, quick to publish model.

Actually, I have been onto the merits of F2P since about 2004 when I was still doing the (paid) web journalism for gaming thing. I couldn't find writers to explore the first wave of F2P from Asia, so I did. I figured out that they may have been looked down upon by Western gamers, but secretly they had impressive numbers.

So I kept watching.

They have their flaws, as do any games, but there was something to learn and yes I'm completely insensitive to the "OMG a cash shop is so evil!!" point of view. Play and don't give them money and you can enjoy that free part or go play a subscription game, there is still a market for it and a smart studio could carve a very profitable niche.

Quick to publish isn't a newer thing for me either.  We have all railed about how insanely stupid it is to have a game in development for years and years while you try to build the new awesome. It pisses down a lot of money and the tech generations move so fast that you end up scrapping your work more than once.

Start simple, build fast, and iterate newness on top of it.

You can't blame Zynga there though. Blame Disney.

ToonTown launched as a very simple game that was feature complete (all features in the game worked completely from beginning to end and no new features were needed for it to be a complete game). In the years since they have added a lot to that game and made it even deeper, but they only did so after the revenue stream was set and rolling - proving the value in reinvestment.

Sounds like smart business and good games to me; but I'm an evil capitalist. 

[WindupAtheist]

I've been in the "everyone but Blizzard is just fuckups" camp all along. Every piece of crap MMO that comes out sells a million-plus boxes to bored WoW players wanting something new, but collapses after everyone realizes it's a festering shitpile. Then we have to listen to a bunch of industry types sublimate their shame by going "No no our 4% retention rate is the norm, Blizzard is just a freak of nature! Nobody else could ever make a successful subscription MMO! That's like some craaazy business model that would never work!"

Mythic, Funcom, Turbine, etcetera? Collections of hacks who enjoyed some success because no one competent had entered the MMO space yet. If they had been forced to make... say... console games, their general boneheadedness would have put them all out of business years ago.

[Lantyssa]

Several MMO sites are reporting it will launch September 15th, two days ahead of the third season of the show.

The Clone Wars Adventures site itself has finally been updated.  It has a place for beta key redemption.  Unfortunately I haven't found any place which has them yet.

[NiX]

Several MMO sites are reporting it will launch September 15th, two days ahead of the third season of the show.

The Clone Wars Adventures site itself has finally been updated.  It has a place for beta key redemption.  Unfortunately I haven't found any place which has them yet.

So, have they said anything about beta? I've been eagerly awaiting this one.

[Ratman_tf]

The goal of business is to make a profit.

[Ratman_tf]

I've been in the "everyone but Blizzard is just fuckups" camp all along. Every piece of crap MMO that comes out sells a million-plus boxes to bored WoW players wanting something new, but collapses after everyone realizes it's a festering shitpile. Then we have to listen to a bunch of industry types sublimate their shame by going "No no our 4% retention rate is the norm, Blizzard is just a freak of nature! Nobody else could ever make a successful subscription MMO! That's like some craaazy business model that would never work!"

Mythic, Funcom, Turbine, etcetera? Collections of hacks who enjoyed some success because no one competent had entered the MMO space yet. If they had been forced to make... say... console games, their general boneheadedness would have put them all out of business years ago.

Yup. I have no real problem with F2P, microtrans, RTM, whatever the fuck is the new industry buzzword this week. I have a problem with businesses that miss the important step: Offer something people want.

[Lantyssa]

So, have they said anything about beta? I've been eagerly awaiting this one.

I've heard nothing about beta and very little on the game itself.  I've been checking the site periodically and today was the first I had noticed any changes.

[Merusk]

"Cuppycake" just posted on Facebook not more than 5 mins ago that the Beta has gone live and is open for everyone.  Head to the site and sign up if you're interested.

http://www.clonewarsadventures.com/

[Lantyssa]

You're my hero, Merusk.

[Riggswolfe]

Well, I tried it. It wasn't bad but it seemed to mostly be just a collection of mini-games and some stuff to buy for your character. It wasn't an MMO in the sense of wandering around and killing stuff/questing.

[DraconianOne]

 

Club Penguin. With Jedi.



My boy is going to love this!