SWTOR is proof subscription MMOs have peaked, says Pachter

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http://www.vg247.com/2012/07/10/swtor-is-proof-subscription-mmos-have-peaked-says-pachter/

SWTOR is proof subscription MMOs have peaked, says Pachter

Analyst Michael Pachter believes subscription MMOs have peaked, stating that if BioWare couldn't make a success out it with Star Wars: The Old Republic, "then no one can."

"I thought SWTOR would make it big, but it didn't," he said. "It looks like subscription MMOs are as big as they're going to get - there are only 6-7 million people willing to spend $15 a month.

"If Star Wars couldn't do it, made by Bioware, then no one can do it."

Pachter said during a lunch with John Riccitiello, he told the EA CEO the reason no one was buying stock in the firm was do to being in the "fifth year of a three year turn around."

Riccitiello reportedly told the analyst: "I thought new consoles would be out around 2010-2011," but Pachter said the reason publishers like EA and Activision are unwilling to take risks on new IP is due to the "over-stretched console cycle."
 
Or it could be that SWTOR was simply not fun at launch and lots of people, myself included, did not resub after 30 days.
 
The day of your traditional MMO is coming to an end. Get prepared for one of the two following business models to rule the scene from here on:

1. Free game with paid content updates and microtransactions for customization and/or convenience "products"

2. Pay for the game up-front and get free content updates with microtransactions for customization and/or convenience "products"
 
Is this some kind of joke? 6-7 Million people is a LOT of people for a single market/genre. They should be realizing their failure in the GAME, not the game in the genre. SWTOR is crap because it's DONE when you get to higher levels, and no one wants to stick around and pay money to do nothing, when we can do it for free with another game that actually has replay value and content. I don't know if they want pity or what, but they won't get any, that's for sure. Just because RIGHT NOW everyone and their mother is making an MMO, doesn't mean that this is the top of the chain for MMO's, that this is as good as they'll get. If that was the attitude of a lot of developers, we would have never gotten ANYTHING new at all.

This guy is the biggest pessimist and chump I've ever had the misfortune to read an article by. Ridiculous.

Anyway, flame on.
 
bullshit. absolute bullshit. it's just further proof that most MMO's are fucking bad games and very easy to ruin with stupid stuck up devs. if a mmo is really good and worth your time and money you will continue to fucking surrender it, like anything else you entertain yourself with.

now with Planetside 2 and Guild Wars 2(both my favorite mmo's this year, and the only ones i will jump into since i quit WoW four years ago) sure the other games will look a bit less worth their price since one game is totally free and the other is just a box price.

however saying that the sub model is over is just blanket ignorance. as ever, most mmo's are shitty games, behind the times AND unfinished on top of being the most expensive for the company and customer. this kind of judgement can't be made until there's a decently steady stream of actually good mmo's made at a reasonable budget, but i doubt that will happen any time soon.

if there were a mmo that offered a pretty polished, fun and new experience that was compelling enough to entice customers and not live in WoW's shadow it'd do ridiculous numbers, sub fee or not.
 
I think standard closed system grind mmos have peaked. It has nothing to do with subscription. If Wow didn't have a robust demo, there's something like 20-30 F2P mmos which has the same quality as swtor.

If big budget MMO's are going to survive it's time to take it to the next level and actually do what SWG did what 5 years ago?

Make a game where I can feel like I have some impact on the world around me. Build a house, buy a car, join an army that actually fights over territory.

SWG was very unbalanced but ultimately every job had a worthwhile purpose instead of being an optional offshoot job.
 
I think standard closed system grind mmos have peaked. It has nothing to do with subscription. If Wow didn't have a robust demo, there's something like 20-30 F2P mmos which has the same quality as swtor.

If big budget MMO's are going to survive it's time to take it to the next level and actually do what SWG did what 5 years ago?

Make a game where I can feel like I have some impact on the world around me. Build a house, buy a car, join an army that actually fights over territory.

SWG was very unbalanced but ultimately every job had a worthwhile purpose instead of being an optional offshoot job.


They could have done so much with SWTOR, SO much. Think about it, they had an ENORMOUS budget, yet they made a single playthrough story, that ends abruptly and leaves the player not having anything else to do. There wasn't even a social aspect at all, which is THE #1 point of an MMO. You don't play it to play it alone, at least that's my opinion anyway. They could have done meaningless things like housing, buying cosmetic things, pretty much stuff that doesn't really affect much, but people would have jumped all over it. World events, varied missions, just in general, THINGS TO DO. They didn't do anything new, and they didn't even become aware of it, if at all. How is that even possible?
 
MMOs are hard to make nowadays... WoW leaves a lot to live up to after so many years of refinement and its well executed gameplay.


I wanted SWTOR to be successful but man I had no motivation to play after 50. Other MMOs can be successful but SWTOR is no WoW killer..
 
What a load of fucking bollocks, it's the old "too big to fail" argument.

WoW had at peak about 13 million subscribers? But it took a good number of years to reach that mighty peak, it didn't get all of that inside a year, continual feedback and improvement gained it status over time. SWTOR was a failure more or less off the bat losing most of its peak subscribers in the first few months, the feedback is pretty clear it's a poorly disguised WoW clone with no end game and no reason to keep subscribing past your initial play through.
 
Is this some kind of joke? 6-7 Million people is a LOT of people for a single market/genre. They should be realizing their failure in the GAME, not the game in the genre. SWTOR is crap because it's DONE when you get to higher levels, and no one wants to stick around and pay money to do nothing, when we can do it for free with another game that actually has replay value and content. I don't know if they want pity or what, but they won't get any, that's for sure. Just because RIGHT NOW everyone and their mother is making an MMO, doesn't mean that this is the top of the chain for MMO's, that this is as good as they'll get. If that was the attitude of a lot of developers, we would have never gotten ANYTHING new at all.

This guy is the biggest pessimist and chump I've ever had the misfortune to read an article by. Ridiculous.

Anyway, flame on.

No. He is not saying 6-7 million per game he means 6-7 million TOTAL across ALL games. Which in reality is not a big group of people, especially when the vast majority are only playing one game.
 
No. He is not saying 6-7 million per game he means 6-7 million TOTAL across ALL games. Which in reality is not a big group of people, especially when the vast majority are only playing one game.

I was saying 6-7 Million across everything, I guess I should have worded it differently. Idk, to me 6-7 million is a lot of people for a genre, that's more than several cities and towns full of people.
 
I was saying 6-7 Million across everything, I guess I should have worded it differently. Idk, to me 6-7 million is a lot of people for a genre, that's more than several cities and towns full of people.

It sounds like a lot of people but in terms of how many people are playing games these days it is pretty small. It is also a shrinking market, it seems like a lot of people moved to F2P games.
 
I was saying 6-7 Million across everything, I guess I should have worded it differently. Idk, to me 6-7 million is a lot of people for a genre, that's more than several cities and towns full of people.

no you're right thats a fuck ton.. especially for an MMO

most people are confused about what a healthy amount of MMO subs are.

500k and up is healthy and living.

500,000x15=7,500,000 <--- thats one month.. pretty sure SWTOR had 1.3 million subs still


i dont even think thats an accurate number 6-7 million. WOW has more subs then that still.. and there are other mmos with healthy sub numbers SWTOR , Rift , EVE , TERA all considered alive and well.
 
all i use to judge if a mmo is healthy is does the game have as many or more players as it did in the first 4 weeks, and is the game being supported well.

500k and up is healthy and living.

numbers can't be used as a yardstick for them all. EVE online is south of half a million players, but it's extremely beloved, it's supported and it has grown i these last 8 years. more play i now than did in the release window. no signs of stopping, EVE online is a healthy sandbox MMO.

besides, swtor has nowhere near 500k players logging in to it, regardless of the sub numbers EA presents. the server traffic is more indicative of 300K at best. not to mention that with the soft mergers dumping batches of six to eight server populations into one...there's no way in hell that server capacity for the game is even above 10,000, so given the number of active servers now there is nowhere close to 500K people playing the game now, let lone 1.3 million.
 
Plenty of opportunity to rake in with sub based MMO's, still.

Hint: make fun non-WoW games.
 
1. WOW never had 7 million people paying $15 a month. Their asian payments work totally different.

2. MMOs are the hardest and most expensive type of game to develop. Only having a total audience of 7 million people is just not worth investing that much money in. Modern Warfare 3 sold that many copies in the first 24 hours of release. That took how much effort to develop compared to SWTOR?
 
1. WOW never had 7 million people paying $15 a month. Their asian payments work totally different.

2. MMOs are the hardest and most expensive type of game to develop. Only having a total audience of 7 million people is just not worth investing that much money in. Modern Warfare 3 sold that many copies in the first 24 hours of release. That took how much effort to develop compared to SWTOR?

lol, yea. almost no effort outside of marketing.
 
numbers can't be used as a yardstick for them all. EVE online is south of half a million players, but it's extremely beloved, it's supported and it has grown i these last 8 years. more play i now than did in the release window. no signs of stopping, EVE online is a healthy sandbox MMO.

besides, swtor has nowhere near 500k players logging in to it, regardless of the sub numbers EA presents. the server traffic is more indicative of 300K at best. not to mention that with the soft mergers dumping batches of six to eight server populations into one...there's no way in hell that server capacity for the game is even above 10,000, so given the number of active servers now there is nowhere close to 500K people playing the game now, let lone 1.3 million.


Right and I'm not saying that 500k subs and up is the only way to define a MMOs success although EVE is a pretty special and unique game which is why it has so many participants.


"all i use to judge if a mmo is healthy is does the game have as many or more players as it did in the first 4 weeks, and is the game being supported well."

as many or more players in the first 4 weeks isnt really a good assessment since MMOs grow in popularity with their age.. look at WoW which really boomed later in its lifetime.


All I am speaking on is the last reported sub number which is 1.3m I'm sure the player base is much smaller but I am also pretty sure its above 500k. A lot of people bought that game and a lot of people like it believe it or not :p.. we just dont like it hahha
 
1. WOW never had 7 million people paying $15 a month. Their asian payments work totally different.

2. MMOs are the hardest and most expensive type of game to develop. Only having a total audience of 7 million people is just not worth investing that much money in. Modern Warfare 3 sold that many copies in the first 24 hours of release. That took how much effort to develop compared to SWTOR?

most games dont sell like modern warfare though... a couple million in sales is a good number !

but i agree zero effort to make modern warfare haha
 
I think standard closed system grind mmos have peaked. It has nothing to do with subscription. If Wow didn't have a robust demo, there's something like 20-30 F2P mmos which has the same quality as swtor.

If big budget MMO's are going to survive it's time to take it to the next level and actually do what SWG did what 5 years ago?

Make a game where I can feel like I have some impact on the world around me. Build a house, buy a car, join an army that actually fights over territory.

SWG was very unbalanced but ultimately every job had a worthwhile purpose instead of being an optional offshoot job.

In my opinion, the closest game that may come close to that is ArcheAge Online, which recently did a survey for North America and Europe. They asked what's important in porting a game over and what to focus on before launch and after launch such as endgame, social activity, business model, localization, audio, etc.

I've been following ArcheAge for quite some time for the past few years already. It shows a lot of promise on improving upon MMOs in general.

Think of it as EVE Online's open world, sandbox environment and take something similar to SWG's and Mabinogi's job system where you can do whatever you want in the game and be whatever you want. You can build ships from the ground up and use them for combat, actively participate in trading between nations, build houses from scratch, farm, active combat system, zoneless worlds, large roaming areas and so on.

That's pretty much ArcheAge in a nutshell, and I'm hoping it comes to the US. I honestly hope they do not dumb it down and WoW-ify it just for Western audiences. Having played FFXI for 7 years then World of Warcraft for a whole month, and now in TERA and still playing EVE Online, I want a challenge. I do not want WoW's difficulty or ease of leveling or that tired-and-overused questing system. I play an MMO for several things-- a challenge, fun factor, story, and uniqueness. Final Fantasy XI had its story, challenge, its music, and its community (to a degree). TERA has its combat system which I'm having a hard time moving away from it since no other MMO at this time has come up with something similar. EVE Online for its challenges and unique sandbox features. I may join The Secret World because its questing is unlike the usual "Go to X, collect Y, return to NPC" questing system that seems to plague nearly every MMO out there to date including WoW. TSW has you actively look for clues, solve puzzles, and involves you and makes you think for once in an MMO to do the quests. Other MMOs using WoW's questing system is basically just skip the text, hit "Accept", run to location and kill these mobs, collect the items, and run back. Boring, fucking boring. It's why I couldn't stand WoW for longer than a month. I let my 30 day trial end and have no intention of going back.

I'm tired of the WoW-like games. They get boring fast, and they offer no challenge, and nothing unique about them. I stopped playing SWTOR, Allods and Rift because they were nothing more than WoW+1 with a different take on the overused WoW combat and questing system, and by changing the story. You cannot stick to one thing all the time or risk obsolescence in this industry. For example, something I've learned in an economics class-- you have to offer variety in your business to different markets. If you stick to one market and sell just one product, what do you do if that market tanks or the demand for your product decreases? You either adapt, offer something different alongside your regular product, or you go out of business. No exceptions. Even television manufacturers don't just sell TVs. VIzio, for example, has moved from TVs to computers and bluray players. If you stick to just making one product, it has to be in a market that isn't crowded or flooded with the same product or you won't survive. There aren't many bicycle shops in my area, and one of the few that still exist has gone out of business. You can buy a bicycle from Walmart or Kmart, yet they survive because they offer other things that keeps business afloat in a changing market.

The same thing applies to MMOs. You cannot just stick to one feature or a tired-and-overused formula and expect to survive long enough. WoW survives because of its fans and its community. Even with millions of subscribers, and being at the top of the food chain in the MMO market, they have lost subscribers. Subscribers that are looking for something different or are tired of doing the same thing day-in, day-out, or how the company has treated its playerbase in general.

If SWTOR is to survive, they have to adapt, fix the issues they currently have, and improve the game that would sustain its survivability in this market. Story and voice acting alone can only take you so far if everything else-- such as gameplay, endgame, and social and community aspect-- doesn't support it for the long term.
 
In my opinion, the closest game that may come close to that is ArcheAge Online, which recently did a survey for North America and Europe. They asked what's important in porting a game over and what to focus on before launch and after launch such as endgame, social activity, business model, localization, audio, etc.

I've been following ArcheAge for quite some time for the past few years already. It shows a lot of promise on improving upon MMOs in general.

Think of it as EVE Online's open world, sandbox environment and take something similar to SWG's and Mabinogi's job system where you can do whatever you want in the game and be whatever you want. You can build ships from the ground up and use them for combat, actively participate in trading between nations, build houses from scratch, farm, active combat system, zoneless worlds, large roaming areas and so on.

That's pretty much ArcheAge in a nutshell, and I'm hoping it comes to the US. I honestly hope they do not dumb it down and WoW-ify it just for Western audiences. Having played FFXI for 7 years then World of Warcraft for a whole month, and now in TERA and still playing EVE Online, I want a challenge. I do not want WoW's difficulty or ease of leveling or that tired-and-overused questing system. I play an MMO for several things-- a challenge, fun factor, story, and uniqueness. Final Fantasy XI had its story, challenge, its music, and its community (to a degree). TERA has its combat system which I'm having a hard time moving away from it since no other MMO at this time has come up with something similar. EVE Online for its challenges and unique sandbox features. I may join The Secret World because its questing is unlike the usual "Go to X, collect Y, return to NPC" questing system that seems to plague nearly every MMO out there to date including WoW. TSW has you actively look for clues, solve puzzles, and involves you and makes you think for once in an MMO to do the quests. Other MMOs using WoW's questing system is basically just skip the text, hit "Accept", run to location and kill these mobs, collect the items, and run back. Boring, fucking boring. It's why I couldn't stand WoW for longer than a month. I let my 30 day trial end and have no intention of going back.

I'm tired of the WoW-like games. They get boring fast, and they offer no challenge, and nothing unique about them. I stopped playing SWTOR, Allods and Rift because they were nothing more than WoW+1 with a different take on the overused WoW combat and questing system, and by changing the story. You cannot stick to one thing all the time or risk obsolescence in this industry. For example, something I've learned in an economics class-- you have to offer variety in your business to different markets. If you stick to one market and sell just one product, what do you do if that market tanks or the demand for your product decreases? You either adapt, offer something different alongside your regular product, or you go out of business. No exceptions. Even television manufacturers don't just sell TVs. VIzio, for example, has moved from TVs to computers and bluray players. If you stick to just making one product, it has to be in a market that isn't crowded or flooded with the same product or you won't survive. There aren't many bicycle shops in my area, and one of the few that still exist has gone out of business. You can buy a bicycle from Walmart or Kmart, yet they survive because they offer other things that keeps business afloat in a changing market.

The same thing applies to MMOs. You cannot just stick to one feature or a tired-and-overused formula and expect to survive long enough. WoW survives because of its fans and its community. Even with millions of subscribers, and being at the top of the food chain in the MMO market, they have lost subscribers. Subscribers that are looking for something different or are tired of doing the same thing day-in, day-out, or how the company has treated its playerbase in general.

If SWTOR is to survive, they have to adapt, fix the issues they currently have, and improve the game that would sustain its survivability in this market. Story and voice acting alone can only take you so far if everything else-- such as gameplay, endgame, and social and community aspect-- doesn't support it for the long term.



you make some excellent points. fuck FFXI was definitely challenging.. especially trying to communicate with the japanese to get a group hahah. bought FF14 with such high hopes fucking collectors edition and everything -_-... when 2.0 comes out i think it will be one of the best MMOs available.

although I felt SWTOR had better story and questing then any mmo the problem was once you hit 50 i was bored to death and didnt want to level again
 
Right and I'm not saying that 500k subs and up is the only way to define a MMOs success although EVE is a pretty special and unique game which is why it has so many participants.


"all i use to judge if a mmo is healthy is does the game have as many or more players as it did in the first 4 weeks, and is the game being supported well."

as many or more players in the first 4 weeks isnt really a good assessment since MMOs grow in popularity with their age.. look at WoW which really boomed later in its lifetime.


All I am speaking on is the last reported sub number which is 1.3m I'm sure the player base is much smaller but I am also pretty sure its above 500k. A lot of people bought that game and a lot of people like it believe it or not :p.. we just dont like it hahha


think you misread. i said that a successful mmo has as many or more players later in its life than in the first month. raw numbers and many other things are different but the things in common between successful mmo's is the playerbase 3, 6, 9, 12, 18 months+ down the line compared to the first 30 days is usually as big or bigger and the game is supported and satisfying most of its customers.

maybe i didn't word the post that well.


EDIT: can't wait for ArcheAge as well.
 
think you misread. i said that a successful mmo has as many or more players later in its life than in the first month. raw numbers and many other things are different but the things in common between successful mmo's is the playerbase 3, 6, 9, 12, 18 months+ down the line compared to the first 30 days is usually as big or bigger and the game is supported and satisfying most of its customers.

maybe i didn't word the post that well.


EDIT: can't wait for ArcheAge as well.

oh yeah I must of misread / misunderstood! I agree definitely.
 
I have no idea why so many people think the SW IP is good for an MMO, honestly it's the WORST IP for an MMO. Jedi being an OP god class is the whole idea behind the SW universe, but how can you make an MMO where one supposedly rare group is supposed to be much much much more powerful than anyone else?

Make a SW MMO where nobody can be jedi? What's the point just remove "star wars" from the title, make a regular futueristic MMO and save the licensing fees to LA, nobody's going to want to play a SW game where you can't be a jedi.

Make the jedi class difficult to unlock? See SWG. Players will do anything and everything to get that unlock including completely destroying large parts of the game and the economy to do so, and eventually everybody will have a jedi anyway.

Make jedi the only class? Then you have to come up with some sort of crazy jedi hierarchy to make jedi classes, and wtf kind of monsters and enemies do you have to come up with that would require small much less medium size groups of JEDI to take down?!? The kinds of things in the SW universe that would require 10-20 jedi masters to defeat that weren't armies of tens of thousands were even more rare then the jedi themselves. Not to mention Jedi "farming" masses of monsters and people isn't exactly very "jedi".

In a normal MMO you can't keep everybody happy all of the time, but with a SW MMO you're just going to disappoint most of the people most of the time because you just can't get that epic SW feel for more than a few hours of play time.
 
I have no idea why so many people think the SW IP is good for an MMO, honestly it's the WORST IP for an MMO. Jedi being an OP god class is the whole idea behind the SW universe, but how can you make an MMO where one supposedly rare group is supposed to be much much much more powerful than anyone else?

Make a SW MMO where nobody can be jedi? What's the point just remove "star wars" from the title, make a regular futueristic MMO and save the licensing fees to LA, nobody's going to want to play a SW game where you can't be a jedi.

Make the jedi class difficult to unlock? See SWG. Players will do anything and everything to get that unlock including completely destroying large parts of the game and the economy to do so, and eventually everybody will have a jedi anyway.

Make jedi the only class? Then you have to come up with some sort of crazy jedi hierarchy to make jedi classes, and wtf kind of monsters and enemies do you have to come up with that would require small much less medium size groups of JEDI to take down?!? The kinds of things in the SW universe that would require 10-20 jedi masters to defeat that weren't armies of tens of thousands were even more rare then the jedi themselves. Not to mention Jedi "farming" masses of monsters and people isn't exactly very "jedi".

In a normal MMO you can't keep everybody happy all of the time, but with a SW MMO you're just going to disappoint most of the people most of the time because you just can't get that epic SW feel for more than a few hours of play time.

The Jedi are only rare during the time of the Empire. Before the Empire and after Luke started the school on Yavin there are quite a few of them. As for balancing easy: Jedi or Sith. Prior to the rule of two there were a lot of Sith running around. Jedi/Sith aren't unkillable either. They're powerful and mystical but in an era where there are thousands of them running around people would develop ways to stop them. They only seem so powerful in the movies because of their rarity and even at the time of Ep 1 a lot of the knowledge of the Jedi had been lost.
 
Not every Jedi is Luke Skywalker...

That's beside the point. I think the Asian market at least has realized that subscription based games don't really work. Nothing really trumps free to play in terms of accessibility.

The real issue with F2P games (for me) is that they have to make money somehow, so individuals (like myself) are really their targeted source of income (gamers that have disposable income).
 
The Jedi are only rare during the time of the Empire. Before the Empire and after Luke started the school on Yavin there are quite a few of them. As for balancing easy: Jedi or Sith. Prior to the rule of two there were a lot of Sith running around. Jedi/Sith aren't unkillable either. They're powerful and mystical but in an era where there are thousands of them running around people would develop ways to stop them. They only seem so powerful in the movies because of their rarity and even at the time of Ep 1 a lot of the knowledge of the Jedi had been lost.

lol, see SWG when jedi were added. as a playable class in a GAME, they are far beyond anything else. SWG handled it the best that could be done though. strict limits, having jedi be hunted by other players and such. but still it was a OP class and always will be, unless you take the SWTOR route and reskin WoW classes.
 
lol, see SWG when jedi were added. as a playable class in a GAME, they are far beyond anything else. SWG handled it the best that could be done though. strict limits, having jedi be hunted by other players and such. but still it was a OP class and always will be, unless you take the SWTOR route and reskin WoW classes.

Looking it in terms of lore Jedi being OP in that era would make sense. That said, it can work in terms of a MMO it just needs one hell of a development team behind it and quite frankly Bioware Austin/Mythic weren't up to the task.
 
Jedi are rare as in "one in a billion" rare all the time, just more rare in the time of the empire as in "one". An exceptional bounty hunter/trooper/smuggler might be the equivalent of the barney fife of jedi, but who wants to play a game ballanced around the best smugglers, bounty hunters, troopers in the universe pitted against all the worst jedi.
 
secret world is a paid mmo..its way more fun than swtor at launch

but yes, i agree..sub based mmo's are goin bye bye UNLESS they can release quality content fast enough for us to pay for it..thats a big IF
 
I'm not sure even massive amounts of content would do it either though. I mean, look at EQ2, which has more content than 10 WoW's put together and while it still chugs along with its roughly 500k subs, its not growing and will not grow. If they turned around and released EQ3 tomorrow, using all of the content of EQ2, people would still bitch about content IMO...
 
MMO's were a niche market before WOW came onto the scene. Your average MMO had between 50k-200k subscribers and were doing well for themselves.

WOW entered the market and blew all previous competition out of the water gaining millions of subscribers in the first year. The rest is history, no other MMO has been able to achieve the success that WOW has.

Companies trying to replicate the WOW success have come to realize that it is all but impossible, the market is just not large enough for several 10+ million subscription based MMO's.

That's not to say that people will not pay a subscription for quality. Times have changed though, for a company to justify a $60 price tag + $15 a month requires offering an extraordinary experience. Maybe next gen MMO's with unique ideas and gameplay will be able to fulfill that promise. The only possible MMO I can think of on the horizon is Blizzard's Titan.
 
I have no idea why so many people think the SW IP is good for an MMO, honestly it's the WORST IP for an MMO. Jedi being an OP god class is the whole idea behind the SW universe, but how can you make an MMO where one supposedly rare group is supposed to be much much much more powerful than anyone else?

Make a SW MMO where nobody can be jedi? What's the point just remove "star wars" from the title, make a regular futueristic MMO and save the licensing fees to LA, nobody's going to want to play a SW game where you can't be a jedi.

Make the jedi class difficult to unlock? See SWG. Players will do anything and everything to get that unlock including completely destroying large parts of the game and the economy to do so, and eventually everybody will have a jedi anyway.

Make jedi the only class? Then you have to come up with some sort of crazy jedi hierarchy to make jedi classes, and wtf kind of monsters and enemies do you have to come up with that would require small much less medium size groups of JEDI to take down?!? The kinds of things in the SW universe that would require 10-20 jedi masters to defeat that weren't armies of tens of thousands were even more rare then the jedi themselves. Not to mention Jedi "farming" masses of monsters and people isn't exactly very "jedi".

In a normal MMO you can't keep everybody happy all of the time, but with a SW MMO you're just going to disappoint most of the people most of the time because you just can't get that epic SW feel for more than a few hours of play time.

The thing that SWG did right was they made Jedi a 'mystery' unlock, and the loss of that secondary 'hero' class was permanent. So even though you were a 'god' class, you can still lose it, meaning you certainly didn't want to flaunt it but remain all Obi Wan like. Once that mystery was discovered, they should have changed the parameters to unlock, instead they released holocrons and the grind fest began. Then they tried to tweak it and make it more WoW like and they destroyed it...
 
MMO's were a niche market before WOW came onto the scene. Your average MMO had between 50k-200k subscribers and were doing well for themselves.

WOW entered the market and blew all previous competition out of the water gaining millions of subscribers in the first year. The rest is history, no other MMO has been able to achieve the success that WOW has.

Companies trying to replicate the WOW success have come to realize that it is all but impossible, the market is just not large enough for several 10+ million subscription based MMO's.

That's not to say that people will not pay a subscription for quality. Times have changed though, for a company to justify a $60 price tag + $15 a month requires offering an extraordinary experience. Maybe next gen MMO's with unique ideas and gameplay will be able to fulfill that promise. The only possible MMO I can think of on the horizon is Blizzard's Titan.


Wasn't WoW the only MMO with a $60 pricetag?
 
http://www.vg247.com/2012/07/10/swtor-is-proof-subscription-mmos-have-peaked-says-pachter/

Pachter said during a lunch with John Riccitiello, he told the EA CEO the reason no one was buying stock in the firm was do to being in the "fifth year of a three year turn around."

Maybe if they didn't limit SWTOR to PC only, the consoles may have brought a more promising subscription turn around (certainly more than rehashing sodding ancient sports titles on an annual basis), it worked for DC heroes.

Riccitiello reportedly told the analyst: "I thought new consoles would be out around 2010-2011," but Pachter said the reason publishers like EA and Activision are unwilling to take risks on new IP is due to the "over-stretched console cycle."

Then what's the problem with publishing PC titles, 5 million people on STEAM any given weekend seems like a good customer base to me (oh wait EA jumped off the STEAM cash wagon), since the console market is more dried up than an 85 year hooker (according to EA anyway)?
 
Yeah pretty much. I know I'll never pay for another monthly subscription again. I don't need another bill.
 
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