Sorry, Scott, you’re incorrect on both counts. Habbo Hotel has used the business model in both markets. Maple Story was introduced to North America a while ago; Min Kim from Nexon gave stats about the game in a keynote at last year’s AGC. So, this business model has been in North America for a while. They’re just not as big as subscriptions are. Yet.

This is, of course, ignoring Matt Mihaly’s text games, too. He’s used to it by now.

As for Europe, when I was in Germany I saw ads on German MTV for “kostenlos spiel” (free games). Yeah, they were dinky little web-based games, but they made a metric fuckton of money.

Count Nerfedalot blathered:
“I disagree with the basic premise that $50 Million is a ridiculous sum of money to spend on something that, if successful, will return something on the order of $5-20 Million (income, not profit, I know) month after month after month.”

Contact me through my blog site to where you can send the $50M check. You actually have that money you can so blithely throw around, right?

Here’s the problem with your math there. At $5M per month income at $15/month, that’s 333k players. Okay, that’s pretty reasonable. The high end figure requires 1.333M players. No other game besides WoW has gained even half of that. So, not so much. Of course, this is assuming your game actually launches. As Scott’s previous post shows, many games in development don’t ship. I was lead designer on a game based on a AAA franchise that didn’t ship, myself.

But, let’s assume you ship, get 333k players, and your company is a well-oiled machine that makes 40% profit margins like EQ1 did at peak. On $5M income, you’re making $2M profit; Math time: how long will it take to make back that initial investment. If you said 25 months, you are wrong. Someone putting up $50M is going to want to see a good return on investment.

Further, nobody writes a $50M check and walks away. Hell, one person I was talking to wanted to own 75% of the company (and therefore complete control all voting issues) just for investing $300k (and having someone else invest another $300k) into a company we were talking about forming. So, with $50M you’re going to have a repeat of the same problems we have currently: people writing the checks wanting a say in the process to “protect their investment”, while really just getting in the way of the creative types. And, that bit above about repaying the investment is all bullshit; the person writing the massive check is going to want to sell the company to get a big cash-out, pocketing most of that money and leaving the creative types stuck with a multi-year contract not to leave their new owners (and perhaps a shiny new noncompete agreement, too!)

So, uh, yes, $50M is a lot of money. Even if there’s the possibility that you can make back your money in “only” a few years. The thing you’re forgetting is the number of games that you never even hear about. That number is staggering, and why $50M isn’t a slam-dunk even if you are willing to wait a few years for repayment.

http://www.home-entertainment-news.co.uk

All of that is being done by many companies providing entertainment on the internet today. One has to at least catch up in order to lead.

I myself stopped playing around level 40 because performance was getting increasingly worse to the point of being unplayable, though for the record my video card was actually below their system requirements. Too much lag while being grouped up just meant I would be useless in a PvP situation, and in some sections (the Tarantia noble district comes to mind) I could not even stand a chance in PvE fights because my enemies wouldn’t even have loaded up by the time they had killed me. But if system performance had not forced me to quit, I would have lost patience with other aspects of the game before my next renewal anyway.

The fact that Age of Conan is Norway’s most expensive entertainment product to date is neither here nor there, since Funcom was dealing with an international franchise, based on the works of an American author, with a strong appeal despite its age — in this case a double-edged sword, since all too many companies have likewise been riding on the coattails of a profitable franchise to release a third-rate effort, as though a bankable name alone would be enough of a selling point without needing quality to enter the equation.

If anything, this should give a pretty good indication as to how much of a mess AoC was/is. Yet no matter how bad the game is with its mechanics, I tend to blame Funcom in other areas for the alleged poor performance of their game — unreliable billing practices, promising things it could not deliver, correcting peccadilloes in patches while leaving major issues unaddressed, etc., all capped by heavy-handed censorship on the official forums.

As much as I despise the logic that, as all MMO games ship broken in one way or another, we should count our blessings, I can’t avoid thinking that in the case of AoC at least, the community would have been willing to put up with all its major shortcomings if Funcom had been forthright about them. Instead, we got things like avoiding any discussion of the slower hitting rate of female characters (compounded by this taking place in a game where women are… shall we say objectified?), or a refusal to take action on the many examples of exploiting supposedly taking place.

The game has potential, I can see it there, but I think it’s going to turn into a classic case where company mentality might have ruined it. Compare this to Pirates of the Burning Sea, a rather mediocre game, but where the company has maintained a steady and healthy exchange with the community until maybe a couple of months ago when it began to dry up. But put the PotBS forums and the AoC boards side by side and you get a good idea of the difference between them; on the latter, the only “official” presence is either a Statement from Above dumped as an announcement (they even have a section called “Voice of Crom”!), or moderators engaged in a zeal competition.

Worse still is that Funcom cannot claim it is completely inexperienced in the matter of underachieving games — they have had Anarchy Online to learn from.

To summarize things: I think people are prepared to settle for inferior graphics and even a somewhat broken and buggy game that shows potential, but they won’t tolerate being taken for a ride by its makers. You don’t need a WoW-level budget to score a hit if you’re being smart about it.

But lets take a look at AoC. It looks terrible. Everquest 2 looks about the same, and frankly, WoW looks better. Mass Effect destroys it.

Good gameplay is cheap to create (compared to great graphics) and yet not a single MMO company wants to focus on gameplay. Yes, uber screenshots get all the press, but press doesn’t equal success (Sims Online, AoC, etc.).

The PC/MMO industry is doing this to itself.

-Cambios
Blogging about Online Gaming and Virtual Worlds:
http://www.muckbeast.com

As an aside, the whole movie analogy is misleading people into looking at the industry the wrong way. You aren’t making something to sell to people once or twice for a couple hours experience each. You’re looking to provide a service that people will want to experience just about every day, and be willing to pay for month after month. That requires content, which requires money.

Is this bad for the industry? Yes and no. The little guys will certainly get squeezed, and the big projects will be (mostly) limited to conservative stuff that has a higher % chance of success. That still leaves all sorts of room about the margins for the little guys to stumble upon a new formulation that results in money hats. It just means that the expectations of that happening are now scaled to something a little more realistic.

The key point is it’s NOT amateur hour anymore. As Lum said, AoC cut corners, and is suffering for it. Funcom tried to be too many things for too many people, had expectations of going up against the reigning A class champion, but did so with a B class budget. You KNOW something has to give in that situation! The really sad thing is that they showed that they knew how to make a good game with AoC’s 1-20 experience, they just ran out of steam/money/time to provide that experience through the end game. They would have been much better served had they narrowed their focus down to something that they could deliver as a complete and polished noob to end-game experience at launch, then used the time and revenues gained post-launch to widen out the experience.

There is a downside to this, tho. Now that you can download games off the net, you can also download patches which means that you’ll probably see more and more console games needing patches to work (GTA IV needed one for the PS3).