Quote:
Originally Posted by yorumi
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
<snip>
|
Yeah, I should maybe have quantified that I'm speaking about AAA titles here, and by commercial success I'm not just meaning anything in the profit margins, but something that meets the expectations of the developers and their backers (hence I don't consider WAR particularly successful, for example, even though it probably turns a profit).
FFXI, like EQ, was released at a time when MMOs were still a relatively niche market. The reason so many emulate WoW (I feel the term 'Wow clone' is applied too liberally) in many respects is due to the fact that WoW brought the genre into the mainstream by cutting out a lot of things that kept it niche. Pretty much any big developer who wants to release an MMO which is successful by the standards of 2011 (rather than 1999 or 2003) wants a slice of that mainstream audience. From what i've seen of FFXIV (I could be totally wrong here), it doesn't seem as if Square were very confident the FFXI formula would work for them in today's market.
Vanguard is actually the perfect example of what I'm talking about here. It started out on a path towards The Vision, and I doubt they strayed from it because they themselves lost faith rather than caving in to the demands of the mainstream audience they hoped to attract and/or the finacial overseers.
If someone comes out with a low budget game that aims to make a large profit from 100k subs or the equivelent in item transactions (see: Korea), I'm not going to know their relative success, but it's not really on the scale I was talking about considering the size of the MMO market.
The most interesting blip on my gaming radar at the minute is the MMO under development by Curt Schilling's 38 Studios. Here is a guy who loved EQ, who also loves WoW, and is a player first-and-foremost rather than a developer; here is a player putting his money, time and reputation on the line. Will his game be more comparable to EQ or to WoW? No one knows at the minute, but if someone like him isn't going to bring back corpse runs and 40 minute hoofs across a continent to get a group, I wouldn't be too hopeful that any other big players will.