[WoW] $60 for a level 90!

[stormlord]

Originally Posted by dreama1 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Fail. You know what a gaming COMPANY is right? It's there to make money, their primary goal is to make you addicted & make money. They don't give a shit about you or your nostalgia.

This is not something new, and this will be a trend in the coming decades of MMORPG. Precedence was already set with EQ2 and its heroic characters.

Companies no longer care and will ever care again about the neckbeard, 30 year old + no -lifers. Indeed, they will soon be a minority in the gaming world. So get used to it.

Teenagers + Women are target demographics for gaming marketers from now on. There are so many females in EQ2 now and they are the ones that buy so much shit from station exchange for houses and fluff, that this, too, will be a common occurrence. Women gamers tend to play casual but long term, which is a marketer's dream, as they are relatively easy to please in terms of content.

Hardcore players were always a minority but they will eventually be ignored completely as companies don't care if you play 10 mins per month or 400 hours per month, which is why you see EQ live now trying to cater to new players. Although EQ live will probably tank, because it's been around too long & not enough marketing is there. WoW actually is a good business model, it caters to every gamestyle, i.e., you can level quickly but high ranking pvp rating etc are ways to differentiate hardcore vs. casual players.

People act as if noobs that are max level can't be excluded from gameplay.. There are many ways to weed 'noob' players out, with achievements, gear, guild etc.. Plus, I think people are overestimating how easy it is to play. You may have knowledge over the other people but seriously it's not that difficult with the web to figure out things all by themselves.

WoW still cares about hardcores and nostalgia. They keep saying their next expansion will bring back the old times. They even did a revamping of old content some time back where htey painstakingly tried to preserve the character of what was there. And even in your own post you mention how the high ranking pvp ratings are ways to differentiate hardcores from casual players. Well, I've made a couple posts here where I mention how they moved the grindy gameplay to the end-game in WoW to appeal to the casuals while not alienating the hardcore 24/7 players. This was easy to do because grindy gameplay is cheap and they used it to keep the neckbeards playing.

I agree they don't go out of their way to satisfy the nostalgia itch, nor do they go out of their way to make content for hardcores, BUT they do at least go far enough to rake in some cash. Generally, I have to agree with you that the market is moving towards woman and teenagers and also console players and this is like a tidal wave washing over the industry, but as another poster states, this doesn't leave everybody else abandoned. If there's an untapped market, even if it's niche and small, companies will go after it because that's how markets work. Even the big games will try to tap into those things in small amounts, just as WoW uses pvp rankings to keep hardcores playing.

Here're some examples of companies appealing to the neckbeards:

1) Wurm Online
2) Mortal Online
3) Xsyon (formerly known as Xyson)
4) Secret World
5) Entropia Universe (expensive mmo and real cash economy)
6) ArcheAge (1) and other asian MMORPG's (tend to be more hardcore)
7) DayZ
8) Demon Souls/Dark Souls (single-player/multi-player)
9) Dwarf Fortress (single player)
10) The Dark Mod (2) (standalone version of the Thief series single-player games)
11) Path of Exile (more like diablo 2 than diablo 3)
12) GoG.com (sells older classic games)
13) Hundreds or thousands of small scale single-player and multi-player games

(1) - http://nobodyplaysgames.com/forums/i...february-2013/
(2) - http://www.thedarkmod.com/main/