breaking news: eq passes wow in total subs!

[Bardp1999]

Why is a company making money a bad thing? Evrequest was as much a money grab as anything else in the gaming industry and you are a retard if you think differently. Soon as the game took off they sold it to Sony as fast as they could for a large cash pay out.

[Shawk]

Making money off a game isn't a bad thing, it is when they turn the development of the game into a Early Access to where it takes 10 years to develop the final product.. So they have all the excuses in the world to just take forever, and keep collecting money, and keep paying bills.. They prolong development now so they can keep cashing in on the hype of its eventual release.. then they don't release anything. When you have a "fan" base of people, it is very easily to manipulate them like a cult.

I think the issue is on the creationist side of things in that it is kind of like if you show off something mid-creation, it is easy to be demoralized, it is a bad idea if you can't learn to not take criticism, if you take criticism from people who aren't part of the creation's development, you potentially taint production or the end result..

Now they have just turned that creation process into a profitable means of production, probably out of spite.. it is so backwards even if you think of it rightfully as a capitalistic sort of gain, it isn't capitalistic, it is as if they created a welfare form of state to where you have to feed them and cloth them so they will release your game, like they are holding it over you after you already gave them noney.. Just so weird... I wouldn't think this if I hadn't seen at least 5 MMORPGs doing this.

Star Citizen as amazing as it is is a good example in the sense of "insecurity", to actually just release the thing and call it a final product.. EQNext had this same issue when they copped out with Landmark.. It has been going on forever, like a weird new form of the TV sales commercials, Buy buy buy and get yourself a unique horse no one else will have when/if the game actually releases.. Everyone is just waiting for a MMORPG to actually release and it hasn't happened properly for the last 10 years now it seems.



Cynical Brit was screaming this shit long ago, we should never have been giving these people money before they finished the product, half our faults.

[Arteker]

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

Isn't that guy a professional streamer? I can see why a person doing that for a living wouldn't want to bother with an outdated-looking, slow-paced product. That job demands something that's not just entertaining as a user, but also entertaining to watch as a spectator sport of sorts. That is not EQ.



Heck, you see that type of comment even on this forum. I assume it's a sort of projection at work: Folks who're here solely as "nostalgia tourists" can't fathom that others might actually like the game for its own sake.

the hillarious part he did admit he saw his mother playing it for years and was what got him into wow

[Danth]

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

Part of what made EverQuest a good game is the people who designed it set out to make an amazing game that they themselves would enjoy playing.

Companies don't set out to make good games anymore, they set out to make profitable games. At so many Q&As and annual reports to investors, Activision has straight up said they are very okay with releasing subpar, low-quality content as long as it's more profitable than releasing high-quality content that players love. They literally leave major bugs and balance issues in the game so they can later sell the fix as new content.

Too much money involved nowadays. The cost of video game development has been ever-increasing for more than 40 years. A high-quality MMO-RPG these days can be expected to cost many tens of millions of dollars to produce and launch. It's one of the reasons so few of them are made at all anymore. Hence the accounts get involved and start veto'ing anything that doesn't seem safe or data-proven. Cuts both ways, too. EQ would've broke even with an average 50K user base over its projected 5 year lifespan, and matching Ultima Online's 100K would've made it a success. ~500K was a huge (and unanticipated) success. Today, costs have increased such that similar numbers aren't adequate anymore. You're not going to get the accountants out of it until you figure out a way to get the cost of video game development back under control.

Hence why mobile games are so common--they're cheap. You don't need millions of sales, and if you make one that flops it won't bankrupt your studio.

Danth

[RecondoJoe]

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

Making money off a game isn't a bad thing

The argument Blizzard used to make for years was that the subcription fee helped them develop new content

and now they've spent the last 10 years explaining that they can only offer new content or development via new expacs, so it's like... but i thought thats what you spent years saying the subscription fee was for? I would rather them just say its for greed straight out, but youll notice that subscription games are becoming less and less viable as time goes on

like when you pay a sub to play WOW you are not paying to play a higher quality game
you are paying to play a game that feels like it has less effort dumped into it than most F2P games on the market (Fortnite, League of Legends to name a few)...

like for years when I paid to play EQ or WoW it felt justified because you were truly getting an online gaming experience that was lightyears ahead of non-sub games

just doesnt feel like that anymore

and the original argument that sub pays for content development has long been abandoned

[RecondoJoe]

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

and now they've spent the last 10 years explaining that they can only offer new content or development via new expacs

like how many times have we been told that a certain class of spec will have to remain bad for years until the next expac comes out and theyll have enough resources to address the problem properly

i know in the case of the rogue they didnt do it

they claimed rogues were so bad at the end of cataclysm that they had to give them legendary daggers just for them to be viable, and that the next expac they would be fixed, but then the next expac came out (MoP) and rogues were so bad that even Reckful quit playing the class and became a warrior.... so here is like a 6 year window with lots of posts from Ghostcrawler promising that they would fix Rogues, and just to wait for the next expac etc. and then never following through with it

[Shawk]

Ya I got out around WotLK, was obvious where things were heading..

[RecondoJoe]

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

Ya I got out around WotLK, was obvious where things were heading..

I missed WOTLK and most of TBC completely thanks to deployments and army schools..

the funny part is when i played Cataclysm the general consensus was how terrible it was and how WoW was dying.. now like 10 years later people look back at Cataclysm as one of the last good expansions.... it's so funny because at the time it was considered bad... this is how bad things have gotten