Why Did Age of Empires Online Fail?

Age of Empires Online was the first of its kind.  It was the very first RPG MMO hybrid.  The goal was to create a game in which you would level up and do co-op missions with friends, while still having the great multiplayer that Age of Empires has had across the three former games.

It was a hopeless mess…. and killed the Age of Empires series.

#1 Beginnings

The studio that first started the game was Ensemble Studios, these were the guys who made the previous games.  They had created a new company called Robot Entertainment (Orcs Must Die) and for whatever reason… they were replaced.  Gas Powered Games were the guys who made Age of Empires 3 Imperial expansion, while Ensemble was working on this title.

Gas Powered Games took over development and from there on out it was just chaos.

When Microsoft first sold the game they were going to sell it as a stand alone title just like their previous Age of Empires games.  So they tried to sell it for $60… people just were not biting.  It was also pretty poor timing that Age of Empires 3 Complete package would be released only a few months after Age of Empires Online.  Eventually they would release it as a free to play title with premium civilization purchases that would give you access to multiplayer.

Age of Empires 3 Complete for all intensive purposes was a better game that was more figured out and far less bug free.  Generally speaking when you’re trying to move a community from one game to the other, you make the new game amazing and make the old game mostly unplayable.

Instead Microsoft always left their games in pretty good condition and so the community for Age of Empires really split up along the way.  By the time Age of Empires Online released… Age of Empires 2 had a far larger community.  Age of Empires 3 community was more likely to move back to play Age of Empires 2, than move forward and play Age of Empires Online.

#2. The Game Design

Age of Empires Online was designed around a casual RTS player… not the hardcore player base that they actually had a huge share of.

In the first it had a really tedious leveling system.  You had to do the story to unlock the units that you would need to use in multiplayer.

So if you were a Level 10 you would be able to build villagers and a couple of barracks units.  Level 20 you could build barracks units, early stables, and early archers.  Hit Level 30 and you can do everything but your super units… which you’d get at Level 40.

The matchmaking system was designed that you would try and face people close to your level… but that just wasn’t always the case.  The hardcore players might have played a few multiplayer matches… but quickly they’d realize they have to level… and grind.

This is really something your typical arcade RTS player wants to do.  Your typical arcade RTS player wants to jump into the action.  They don’t want to feel like they have to earn equality with someone, they want that equality and if they’re good enough beat them.

But the game’s start was very imbalanced and slowed people down.  The hardcores were turned away by how long it would take to be able to functionally play the game and the casuals were turned away by how imbalanced the actual RTS part of the game was.

A part of the grind was developing specialized weapons, armored, and costumes for your units.  At the beginning of the game you would craft and slowly upgrade things.  It just meant that the more you played the further you got ahead… and the newer you were… the less likely you were to catch up.

It meant that newer players would be pushed away from the game and only the early obtainers or people who would grind would stay with it.

#3: The Steam Launch

The game launched on Steam to disaster.  Age of Empires 3 Complete was a pretty big hit and seen as a huge value.  The game was constantly going through Steam sales and it was felt that this would be a nice transition into Age of Empires Online.

But with very few good reviews, people were simply not willing to make the leap from AOE3 to AOEO.

Gas Powered Games however kept at it and continued to add premium civilizations in hopes that people would buy them.  But GPG had a huge problem, they quality of content they were creating was not profitable.  Creating a full 30-40 hour campaign for an individual civilization took 4-5 months a piece… and they simply were not getting sales.

Basically with a free to play title you do a certain calculation.

You assume that 5-6% of your player base will make one purchase a year ($30).  In the free to play market they refer to anyone who will spend up to $200 a year as a “whale.”  Less than a hundredth of a percent of players are whales.

The development cost of the content your are creating has to be less than amount of money you are expecting to get from that.

Age of Empires Online’s player base was shrinking and every single civilization was becoming less and less profitable until the final three premium civilizations were all counted as losses.

With games like these there is a hope that adding new content will bring in more players.  Generally in an RTS game as you introduced expansions and reduced the price of the original game you would get a larger player base.

That simply was not happening, and on top of that after they made the change to being able to earn currency, people weren’t buying this content… they were earning it.

This kind of model works really well when new players are showing up and those existing players earning their purchases are keeping the game popular… but that simply was not happening.

Gas Powered Games officially announced they were dropping support for the game, they would not develop new content for the game and would do no further work on the game, including balancing.  There was a hope by not developing any new content they could recoup their costs by simply collecting on all the premium civilizations they had created.

A few months later Gas Powered Games announced that they were cancelling their next game and another one was put “On Hold.”  it was clear Gas Powered Games could not afford the losses they took from developing age of Empires Online’s premium content.

#4. Games for Windows Closes

The game might have been fine in a vegetated state if not for one big decision from Microsoft corporate, they were closing down Games for Windows.

Xbox Live was a huge hit.  It is to date Microsoft’s only cool brand.  Investors, speculators, analysts and big whigs were all recommending the same thing, change Xbox Live into the single platform for all of Microsoft’s games.  Make it so that their only cool brand would link up the Windows operating system to their very popular Xbox experience.

By melding these two together they could pave the way for a lot more cross-platform (PC and Xbox) games in which players could play with each other, and it also meant they would gain more centralized information from people through a single Xbox service.

In order to do this they would have to close down Games for Windows.

So we have a problem, there is no one to encode Age of Empires Online to remove Games for Windows which is a DRM protocol required to run the game.  So the game had a timeline.

In December the community organizer announced that it would be in June that the game would be shut down.  They would not sell any new nations and all existing players would gain one free nation.

Some developers came forward to try and fix the game but they simply were not taking help, they wanted the game to die.

All the while Age of Empires 2 re-released as a HD version and saw rampant commercial success.  It was so successful that they developed an expansion for it, the first expansion is almost a decade.  The game still remains as one of the top games on Steam and has a giant growing community with ridiculous numbers of cash tournaments.

Why did Wrath of Heroes Fail?

Had you asked me a year ago if Wrath of Heroes would have closed today…. I might have believed you.

The game was doomed to fail.  In this article you will find out how.

Origins

It all began with a studio called Mythic.  Mythic successfully created a game called Dark Ages of Camelot.  DAOC was successful in attracting 1M gamers to its ranks and was one of the few early MMOs actually able to compete with Everquest and Lineage.  It was a masterpiece.  The game was so great (for it’s time) that people would be talking about it as the prime example of great PvP for a full decade of development.

For years people would release MMOs talking about how they have former developers of Dark Age of Camelot.  Even today, Elder Scrolls Online, declares that it has developers from this monumental game.

So when DAOC studio Mythic was purchased by Electronic Arts people started throwing doubts into the future of this former independent studio.  Warhammer Online was announced as the first post-EA title.  The game was hyped up to no end.  A large part of the success of the hype was how into the game developers were.  When asked to describe MMO players the lead developer stated “people want games that are addictive, in which you beat your chest run at your opponent and kill or be killed.”

It was this sort of attitude that saw the game get 1M on launch sales… but that’s all.

Warhammer Online fell apart relatively quickly and was never really able to develop as a game.  Support for the game was dropped very quickly and some or all of the staff was re-assigned to a new MMO studio “Bioware Austin.”  To this day Warhammer Online still runs with the infinite trial which unlike most games which have this… it’s had no positive improvements on entry into the game.  SWTOR went free to play, Warhammer Online still remains a subscription based game.

The Warhammer franchise was still felt to be worth exploiting.  THQ was still having relative success with their Warhammer 40K series and it was felt they just needed to make the right Warhammer game for the giant Warhammer tabletop community.

The end result was they created a multi-online battle arena (MOBA) based around Warhammer Online’s end game multiplayer.

Fail #1: Market Mis-Conception

At the time of Wrath of Heroes there were really only two types of MOBA games available, your typical shooter types and your League of Legends types.

The shooter types were more popular as their gross sum of players was by and large the largest percentage of the market.  Although League of Legends had a large player base, other games of its type (and there were many) had no chance of success.

So it was openly presumed that League of Legends was a bit of a fluke and copying it’s format was a bad idea.

League of Legends had a lot of problems with its game.  The first was that it wasn’t all that welcoming to new players.  The amount of stuff you would have to learn was tremendous considering HOW many unit and unit types there were exactly.  One top of that it wasn’t all that obvious what items you ought to buy, the values of different things for different classes, and the end game for this game.

The League of Legends format was seemingly not worth copying because it fit into a large niche similar to that of World of Warcraft.  In the past Mythic (now Bioware-Mythic) tried to snake users away from Activision-Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and failed.  So obviously taking on the industry giant was not going to be their goal.

Then they looked to the other genre, shooters.  Shooters are open to anyone to join.  They actually have no learning curve whatsoever.  Anyone can jump in and play instantly.  Shooters didn’t revolve around an existing evolving game like LoL and didn’t have complicated in-game decisions to be made.  Shooters were games you could jump into and jump out of, no long commitments and no long term investment, other than the initial purchase.

Call of Duty’s model in particular was of great interest.  It allowed people to make open customizations in between games to weapon types in between matches based on how much you leveled that particular weapon.  It was felt this could be adopted to heroes and as you would level your heroes you could create advantages or traits.

This ended up being a fairly large mis-interpretation of the existing market place.  As it turned out the reason why people were so accepting of Call of Duty style play was because it was really the only popular option.  Tribes Ascend was able to show with it’s hyper popular space shooter that you can have complicated progressive play in a MOBA and be very successful.

The end result was a product that felt very bland and didn’t seem to go anywhere.

They very significantly missed the marker on their market.  The thing that people liked about Call of Duty games was that your kills rewarded you with a “in a row” based system in which you could deploy some sort of trick against the enemy.  Had the Call of Duty franchise been expanded into larger roles it’d probably do even better.

There was no evolutionary system in WoH.  It was simply a game in which three teams spammed their abilities against each other in hopes of landing final blows until the time was up.

Fail #2: Tri-Faction

One of the crowning ideas from Dark Age of Camelot was the idea that it was easier to balance a game around three factions than one.  The idea worked like this.  If two teams are fighting each other the two teams had to be identical otherwise they would have advantages over each other.  With a third faction added in it meant in three way battles there needed to be far more co-ordination to team up with the other team and take down the person who was in the lead… and then backstab your former friend who is now in the lead.

If this doesn’t make sense to you… you’re not alone.

But you can’t convince fans of the original franchise of the inherent wrongitudeness of this argument.

Let’s say for example you are one such person who accepts this argument.

The fault in the argument is that there is some sort of balance in a constant 2v1 type of scenario, in which the king of the mountain is always the one.

As a matter of fact the levels of tactics in this gets minimized from removing key players or isolation type strategies simply to two teams zerging whomever happens to be the top.  Of course you can’t zerg only the guy who is on the top because you want to also crush the person on the bottom from time to time so that when you get to the top they have further to grow.

The end result is that whomever is in third place will always almost be in third place forever… and it goes back to be a 1v1 with an extra non-important party involved.

This failed tri-faction format has plagued MMOs for quite some time, when introduced into a MOBA it just showed very little hope.

By adding in third third faction it meant that you could not plot traps because any second you are not engaged in combat you are missing an opportunity to score some of those deadly kills.

If you are losing in a MOBA like DOTA2 your best bet is to play defensive and spring traps on lesser numbers of opponents.  If you are losing in a MOBA like Wrath of Heroes you run out and do the exact same failing tactic you were doing before.

The problem ends up being killing blows.  In a simple 1v1 scenario it’s very easy to track who earns a kill.  But in 1v1v1 if I was to do 80% of the damage but you were to get the final 20%…. you got the kill.  That just doesn’t seem right… and that fact just didn’t set well with the community as a whole.  The fact that the game favored classes that had high nuking power over all others proved to be a massive downfall in this 1v1v1 format.  People were choosing heroes specifically so that could run in and steal killing blows in team battles.

The tri-faction also limited what sort of game modes they could release.  Of course there is elimination.  Then there is elimination.  There’s a hold a point mode.  There was a somewhat of a capture the flag game.  The capture the flag game ended up just being another elimination mode.  The hold a point mode simply ended up being a run in circles mode.  The tri-faction modes simply could not be fun.

Had they simply removed the tri-faction mode they could have created game modes that were strategic and fun.  Instead it just always ended up being the largest spam possible.

Unfortunately though they could not remove it, all because of the third point.

Fail #3: Games Workshop

An intellectual property contains the right to an idea.  So Games Workshop owns the rights to all content regarding the licensing of Warhammer and Warhammer 40K.  So at the end of the day all final say will go to Games Workshop on all things.

When you’re dealing with some IPs they’re very flexible.  There are nearly 100 different incarnations of Superman and Batman with extremes being allowed by artists.  When you look at Batman games in fact you find very few common elements as everyone seems to have their own unique take on Batman.

Having a very flexible intellectual property is important because gameplay elements have to be fun and the story has to be great second.

A MOBA has a very simple design.  But when designed within a very stringent world it becomes difficult to create something worthwhile.

One of my friends was a former employee of THQ and he spoke of how hard it was working with Games Workshop.  It would seem that as they had great ideas for Warhammer 40K titles they kept getting shot down because it was outside of the character and lore of the people they were portraying.  In fact there was a book called Space Marine which Game’s Workshop sued because they felt they owned the term “space marine.”

The same basically happened for this game.  The developers might have had all sorts of great ideas for the game… and they all got shot down by Game’s Workshop.  All characters, abilities, game modes, and settings had to be run by Game’s Workshop before they could make it live.  It kind of hurts when your hands get tied by intellectual property owners.

Fail #4: No Hooks

At the end of the day Wrath of Heroes did not have any “hooks” for consumers.  A strong MOBA developer will offer a carrot to a gamer.  Then the MOBA developer will slowly string that carrot away until the player is so far deep into the game that he gets upset about there being no carrot… and then he finally gets the carrot… and another trap is presented to the player.

This is the profit making gameplay of nearly every MOBA and every single MMO.  The goal is to reward your players as little as possible but make it seem like they are making possible.

World of Tanks does this by rewarding two currencies that can be invested in different ways strategically.

Call of Duty does this by making it so your weapons level on every single use so that as you are leveling to unlock new weapons and perks you are also leveling to unlock new gadgets.

DOTA2 does this by offering you randomized rewards and set rewards.

A good hook for one of these games is one in which you are following that carrot for your reward and some intermittent reinforcement is presented so that you continue playing.

DOTA2’s model was lottery based, and there was no intermittent reinforcement.

Basically after achieving certain objectives in a match you would receive a lottery spin based on each win you get.  You gained gold based on what combinations of things you can get.

There was no second tier keeping you there.  If all of your gambling rolls were bad you were less interested in grinding.  If all of them were good you would just think this is normal and still not care.

The gambling mechanic itself doesn’t represent a good hook.

A good gambling mechanic involves risking something to gain something.  This mechanic has no risk, it’s just a randomized reward.  If your reward happens to suck you feel cheated and unrewarded.  If it’s amazing you feel lucky… and still unrewarded.

Instead the game ought to have scaled rewards in such a way that you gain large rewards for great success but you can risk it for even greater rewards… and then choose what your risk level is.

Without an effective hook however Wrath of Heroes was unable to keep people playing.  Instead people would play for a while, make no progress and then just quit.  The brain responds best to almost getting something and feeling like they could have had that.  Without scaling rewards you cannot create an effective hook.

In the end the design team at Mythic-Bioware were trying to create a game that was fun to play instead of a game that was addictive.  Games that are fun people will have people play it once and be done with it.  Think of any single player game out there that you enjoyed… but uninstalled after you played it once.  That’s what Wrath of Heroes was, an online game without an addictive hook.

Why Steambox Will Fail

About a year ago Valve started hinting at the idea that they were going to be getting into the console market.  They began hiring specialists dealing specifically with consoles to help them in building something.

At CES it was announced exactly what a Steambox would be.

Nicknamed ‘Piston” the Steambox would be a very small PC with controller slots.

The Steam “Big Game Mode” would launch on this console and a person would gain access to the Steam library.

Steam of course is the largest distribution service for games in the world with over 10,000 games in their library.

So when Valve announced they were making a console people fell in love with Valve all over again.

I should note this is because Valve is currently the “can do no wrong” people.  Even when they do wrong their fans portray it as a win.  The Free to Play transition of Team Fortress 2 should have come across as a huge spite to the people who paid for the game.  However it was not, people praised it.  When the same move happened to Gotham City Heroes people cried foul.

So here it is, why I believe the Steambox will inevitably fail.

It Exists

When we were introduced to the Steambox some people said, omg that’s amazing.  I however did not.

The Piston was a mini-PC with a mini-motherboard and interchangeable easily replaceable components.  Want a new video card?  You can add it, and it literally takes seconds.  As they show you simply slide the old one out and install the new one.

They of course do not talk about the complicated component balancing of PCs.  In order for you to upgrade your video card often you have to upgrade your power supply unit.  Then once you have your PSU in you might need a new motherboard to actually plug all this stuff in to.  On top of that these new higher line games might need more RAM.

All of these components of course would be more expensive in a micro format.

But here’s the thing, the Steambox already exists.  In fact, I own one… and you probably own one to.  It’s called a “PC.”  Now these “PCs” have been playing games for years and because of this the Steambox doesn’t exactly represent anything special.

Why oh why might a person want to buy a Steambox for $1000 when they can just go out and buy an equal value PC for $800.  On top of that for $800 the can also plug their computer into the TV and play video games with multiple controllers like on a console.

They are in fact not offering anything new here.  They are not bridging any gap that wasn’t already bridged.

Inconvenience

When the king of PC himself, Bill Gates, stepped into the console market it was kind of a shocker.  This was a guy who was developing support tools and advanced operating systems specifically for the PC.  He then went on to throw that all away and instead work with this new “Xbox” of his.

Bill Gates outlined a few things a modern console would need.  First was price.  He realized he would be making money off of games, so the price of the console would have to be quite low.  He even suggested that it would be necessary for Xbox to lose money every time someone buys them in hopes that the sales of games would make up for that cost.

He also outlined that this console would have to be competitive with the next generation of consoles.  In fact he indicated that it would have to be the best piece of hardware on the market, period.

Finally Bill Gates stated that this console (if to be successful) would have to be very convenient.  When he looked at existing consoles he found a lot of really weird operating system choices and inconveniences.  The most noticeable inconvenience at the time was how television screens were getting bigger, sofas were further away, but the cord length on a controller was still only long enough so that you’d have to be face to face with the TV.

So the Steambox will probably sell at least at cost.  It might sell a little above cost.  But it will be affordable in regards to the current generation of consoles.

The Steambox will probably also have the hardware similar to what the PS4 and The Next Xbox will have.

Where the Steambox fails on is convenience.  Steambox isn’t really beating these existing franchises on being convenient.

Both Sony and Microsoft have announced acquisition of cloud services and for streaming services for purchasing games.  Both developers have talked about how hard copies are a thing of the past.

This change means that console games will also be cheaper.  It could also potentially mean that all the games from older consoles might all become available… every single one of them.  This means that the gaming libraries for Xbox, PS4, and Nintendo are going to be huge.

But wait, Steambox is easily upgradeable!

This is really the convenience based thing that Valve has to sell… but it’s not really an important part of it.

Since the launch of Playstation video game developers have made console developers the leaders in video game development.  There are very few developers who actually make games better for PC than they might for console.

It’s really even inconvenient to worry about the hardware.  If console gamers really were to want this, they’d get a PC.

When you talk about the Steambox the people who are really excited about this are PC gamers who are used to swapping stuff out of their PCs.

If replaceable parts is to become a real thing Valve would need to market all the parts themselves to make sure they work.  This has an insanely high cost that just might not be worthwhile to them.

Remember that Valve only has a hand full of products.  They made Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Portal, Steam, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike…. and DOTA 2.  Those are a lot of big titles.

Compare that to Sony which is the largest distributor of home entertainment systems pre-Playstation and Microsoft whose CEO is the second wealthiest man in the world.

Valve will not be able to afford all of these parts.  It means that they will need a lot of partners to really make this work.

Valve Doesn’t Make Games

This is going to be the oddest thing I will ever say, but let’s put a little context to it.

Valve, doesn’t make games.  In fact Valve makes a game, period.  They rarely ever have more than one title launch a year.

Now keep in mind, their games are all big releases.  There has never been a Valve game that fails.  The Steam platform launched based on the PC launch exclusively of Half Life 2.

But, you cannot launch a console with the hopes of playing one game.  Xbox and Playstation both launch with about 5-6 exclusive titles that they really want to push to be their own.

Since this is supposed to integrate with Steam it means they cannot slap on a Steambox exclusive sticker.  It means that it will be available to anyone with a PC and available through any platform.

The only thing they CAN do is make it Steam exclusive.  But making it a Steam exclusive does not mean sales of Steamboxes.  It just means there’s an even better reason to own a PC…. that you’re not buying from Valve.

Valve is going to have a hard time trying to convince developers to not only develop games exclusively for the PC, but also releasing them only to Steam.

Bandwidth is cheap on the Internet and selling games on your website has proven to be highly profitable from indie developers.

All of the openness of this also breathes in another problem… whose to say someone else won’t do it for cheaper?  Imagine if you will a person begins selling black market steamboxes.  These contain similar software to the Steambox and link up to Steam… but Valve doesn’t own them.  Worst yet these blackmarket steamboxes can also link up to Origin.

The fact that anyone can already make a Steambox kind of proves that there is no market demand for one.

Why did Star Wars: The Old Republic Fail?

Looking back at MMOs it is easy to say they fail and it is easy to say they did not.  The problem might be definitive.  How does a game fail?  Out of this series only two of the games I have covered have fully closed up shop, these being Prius Online Anima Redux and Faxion Online.  In a sense those articles might give more meaning to the word fail because these are MMOs that failed and did not have the financial backing to try and revitalize them.

An MMO like DC Universe Online failed after a month of downtime.  Currently it is one of the most popular free to play MMOs out there.  The same can be said for Age of Conan which went from 1,000,000 subs to 100,000 subs in a month, now it sit at over 2,000,000 players as a free game.

I will say that just because a game is still around does not mean it did not fail.  Fail in an extreme approach means that a thing stops functioning.  In this sense there can be no failures.  Even The Failship which has ran into a bridge wouldn’t have failed under this definition because the ship is still in tact.

No before considering this remember that failing can refer to intense mistakes, failing to meet objectives, not meeting demands, or closing down.

With SWTOR I am looking at this from the perspective of the corporation as they did not meet the objectives they set out.

SWTOR in a Nutshell (A Big Nutshell)

In 2002 Star Wars Galaxies released and was a massive…. flop.  This was nothing new for LucasArts head George Lucas as most of his games although commercial successes were also miserably terrible.  Lucas was forced into a 10-year licensing deal with Sony Online Entertainment in which SOE would get exclusive rights to the Star Wars MMO license.

In the mean time Lucas saturated every single sub-market of gaming with a Star Wars game.  Included was the very popular Knights of the Old Republic RPG series.  This series established a new Universe for Star Wars, a world before the one we know.  Because of this Lucas was able to grant a license for the Star Wars exteneded universe while maintaining the exclusive license for the Star Wars normal universe.

Bioware had gained such a great name for making quality games in the industry that Electronic Arts bought them out and started transforming all of their own studios into Bioware studios.  Bioware-Austin was created specifically for making MMORPGs.  Some of the EA-Mythic team (now called Bioware-Mythic) was shifted over to this studio to begin work on Star Wars: The Old Republic.

The game started development in 2006 based around the earliest form of The Hero Engine, an engine designed specifically for production of MMOs.  Bioware tweeked around with it a lot.  $200M in development later the most expensive video game ever made was released.

The world would launch with three full raid encounters, three PvP modes, four high tier 5-man dungeons and interesting jumping game hunting quest series called “Datacrons.”

It was shaping up to be a big deal, but alas there was trouble in paradise.

#1: Shaky Launch

I will say that I don’t think the launch has much at all to do with the failure of the game in total.  But I will bring it up for the sake of mood setting.

Pre-ordering was something people did in the past in order to get a copy of a hot game.  It was presumed when a game was really really popular that if you did not pre-order the game, you would not get it.  This was true of so many different games.  I can remember waiting a week to get World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade because there was no outlet for pre-ordering in my small town.

As well pre-ordered games were more often cheaper.  Because of this people who pre-ordered were getting some value-added product.

Star Wars: The Old Republic pre-order actually cost $5 more than the regular non-pre ordered game.  That’s odd, right?  In the promise of pre-ordering was an early start bonus.  It was stated in the 1000 page contract that you would get early access depending on server availability and the time of your pre-order.

So a person who pre-ordered a year in advance would get first dibs on early start while a person who pre-ordered two weeks before game launch might not.

Well it all worked out pretty terribly.  Some people who paid extra only got a one day head start.  Some people who paid extra got a one hour head start.

Next on the list of problems had to do with texture packages.  The game in beta had higher resolution textures than the game that went live.  That’s just a little odd.  The argument Bioware stated was that your computer would explode if it used the high res textures.

This however did not stop the folks at Bioware from using high res texture screenshots in all of the publicity information.

A third controversy unfolded when people who were reporting bugs, complaining about the game, or just trolling on the Bioware forums had their accounts banned and were ejected from the game.  People who swore in text as well were ejected from the game.

A fourth controversy unfolded when people realized that if you typed /getdown you could never be hit by any shots.  This allowed people to take down very powerful out door raid bosses with very small groups.  It also got a little silly in PvP when people would type /getdown and no one would kill anyone.  Anyone caught typing /getdown was ejected from the game for knowingly exploiting the game.

#2: Content Locusts

Locusts are swarms of miserable inserts that devour plants in seconds.  Unlike a pride of lions the locust hunts itself into extinction.  Instead of slowly and gradually hunting, the locust feast or famine.  Their cycles involve mass reproduction when there is a lot of food and mass death when there is none.

For this reason someone who is a content locust has a zero sum end game.  By this I mean that it is all or nothing for them.  If you are not constantly providing new content then you are actually producing nothing.

My second argument is thus that the problem with SWTOR wasn’t that it didn’t have enough content, but that people devoured it too fast.

This is a two fold problem.  On the one hand the people playing the game are the problem.  Much like how you would not want to give an unlimited movie pass to a guy who spends 20 hours a day watching movies, you also really do not want these kinds of people in your game.

On the other hand this is a developer problem.  The general solution to content locusts is to produce content so hard that only a select few of them will be able to do it.  This is something that I think a lot of developers miss out on.

Hard content is not a selling point to try and attract hardcore gamers.  No one at Blizzard ever claimed that content was going to be super hard.  They just made hard content and gave it to gamers.  There is a lot more respect for developers who try and make super hard content for the content locusts.

Instead Bioware tried to sell it on having hard end game content.  Much like other people who try to sell on that point it is bound to fail when it is beaten.

The truth is content locusts do not actually want hard content.  The people who want hard content are those that are challenge oriented.  A challenge oriented people will do the hardest difficulty of any game.  Skyrim is an easy test of this.  If someone cannot do a quest do they reduce the difficulty, or look for new approaches?

#3: All is Fine Drink the Wine

So often the metaphor is used in cults of a righteous leader who drinks the wine he is serving his guests.  Of course in this scenario the cultist leader who is supposed to be looking out for his follower’s is preaching to everyone the suicide that he is suggesting.

Bioware was definitely serving the wine they were feeding people.  It’s a little harder to follow people who just seem deluded.

There are some things that were honest and should be made clear.  Electronic Arts is a publicly traded company and any lies they would tell the investors is considered a capital crime punishable by prison sentence.  So there is no reason to believe that what they were telling people were lies.

Bioware probably did register 3M accounts in their first year.  They probably were hovering around 1.7M players around the four month marker.  They probably did drop down to 1.3M around the six month marker.  But it is not these claims that really upset the people who are playing the game.  Those are the claims that upset people who quit it.

MMOs are kind of weird.  It’s like a sports team.  If you feel spited by your favorite sports team you become a venomous troll out to get them.  So any news of success of that sports team hurts you so bad.

No the wine they were serving came in the form of a guild summit help in Austin, Texas (home of their studio).

The sound of the guild summit was promising.  It sounded as if the developers at Bioware were trying to take a CCP approach where they ask the community for direction.  They invited guildmasters from around the world and the 400 guild leader convention, the largest of its kind began.

The opening of the summit was a Q&A section.  This allowed guild masters to ask developers questions.  I thought this a great opportunity for Bioware to talk with guild masters and really get a strong grass roots.  The panel Q&A was a disaster.

Every single suggestion made was either ‘not on the timeline’ or was due in a year.  It was kind of pitiful.  In the least they could have tried and looked like they cared.  Instead they used the show to

People paid money to fly to this conference and all it ended up being was a fluff show.  That turned off more people than worked on creating a community.

#4: Electronic Arts

Something has to be said about the immense pressure put on a studio by big brother parent company to make sure things come out on time and are handled most cost effectively.

The goal of Bioware is to make games and keep all of their employees working.

The goal of Electronic Arts is to publish games and minimize costs.

So when Bioware was forced to lay off 50% of its MMORPG department (Bioware Austin) it was in part because Electronic Arts found a new way to make money off of SWTOR, by reducing game quality.

Yes there were many who would lose their jobs anyway.  UI artists are not exactly used to holding a job for over two years.

But yeah they let go of most of their staff so that Electronic Arts could have stronger quarterly profits.

In the end Bioware-Austin is an EA studio and they’re forced to toe the corporate line on things.  You can see when many of these developers were describing things that the passion was not there anymore.  They were getting on stage and saying things that they’re not excited about all so they could keep their jobs.

Because of these massive cuts content roll outs continued to slow down time and time again.  In an act of desperation they only recently announced their transition into free to play so that they could salvage what many people regarded as a very slowly sinking ship.

We are one day from the launch of SWTOR.  It is possible after this they will be able to turn around the game and really make something of it as Lord of the Rings Online has.

I know that as a former subscriber and as an alpha tester I’ve been rewarded some obscene total of Cartel Coins in an attempt to lure me back to the game.

Much like how Age of Conan failed and rebounded there is a great chance that SWTOR can also rebound from this massive failure.

If the total subscribers they held was Rift or Eve Online or Age of Conan this would be considered a huge success.  However because this is Bioware and these guys ship 50M copies of Mass Effect in the first month something this low is considered to be a pretty big failure.

Why Did Gods and Heroes Fail?

Gods and Heroes has been pulled from Steam which unofficially officially means the game is over.  So how did we get here?

Longest Development Cycle Ever

Once upon a time there was a gaming studio called Perpetual Entertainment.  Perpetual Entertainment had acquired the rights to a Star Trek MMO.  They did this by showing off the engine for a game they were working on, Gods and Heroes.

So Perpetual Entertainment, which was by no means a big studio, was working on two big products simultaneously.

The result was disastrous.  Perpetual Entertainment was liquidating its assets.  The Star Trek Online IP went to Cryptic Studios but the Gods and Heroes IP was really not that famous.

Heatwave Interactive decidedly purchased the Gods and Heroes MMO off of Perpetual Entertainment.  Perpetual declared bankruptcy shortly afterwards.

So the game started development in 2005 and was slated for a 2011 release.  That’s a six year development cycle.  Back in 2005 Gods and Heroes was one of the most anticipated titles.  In 2011 it was mostly forgotten.

Open Beta Flop

I think the developers at Heatwave Interactive really missed the point of the open beta.

The open beta isn’t actually a beta.  Sure there are things to fix in open beta but it is more along the lines of optimization and getting an idea of what features people will want and what features people do not like.

Instead the open beta is closer to what a closed beta is in most games.  Instead of being the promotional BS that it ought to be it was instead an actual beta testing period.

The entire world was untextured.

The game had no quest tracking system.

The game was missing dialogue.

A person who was playing this “open beta” felt like they were playing a game that they had just started… and really they did.  They went into open beta very close to acquiring the unfinished game engine.

No one had anything good to say about the game.

The “industry standard” for reviewers is to review the game based on the open beta.

So when the game launched everyone gave this game a subpar score ranging from 10/100 to 50/100.

Launch – Life Time

Upon launch Gods and Heroes had an offer for a lifetime subscription-free.  Now this isn’t exactly a new concept.  A lot of games were offering this.

The problem is by this point the games that were offering this, sucked.  Not only this but they weren’t WORTH a life time.  Life time thus gets seen as a scam to try and trick players into picking up an inferior game.

Unfortunately people got conned into it.  A life time is the same as a year in any other MMO.

A lot of people will usually purchase life time to get into beta.  Others will purchase life time after liking something the developer is doing.  At this point they are purchasing a life time of the developer, not the game.

One of the things people really liked about this game that got them to purchase a life time was their pet system.

Their pet system is an early form of SWTOR’s companion system, except you could have multiple companions at once.  You could build an army that would follow you around and tank, heal and DPS for you.  You were a one man army.

So it tagged some people to get life time but unfortunately not a lot.  The life time acted as more of a telltale sign of its impending doom rather than a worthwhile deal.

No Burst

On launch day the title went on sale for $29.99 with a $14.99/month subscription fee.

After having an awful open beta experience people did not buy the game.  It is rare for a game you pay for on opening day to have low pop servers but here was a game.

It was a game whose quality could not properly make up for the price.  It was a game that realistically should have been a free to play game on launch.

Less than two weeks after launch the game went down to a $10 game.  This kind of pissed off people who two weeks earlier had spent an additional $20 for the game.

After about three months the subscription fee was dropped.  This of course angered the lifetime folks who basically were conned by this company into giving them tones of money.

This dropped a lot of loyalty for the game.  Unfortunately in an MMO you have to create loyalty for the developer, not the game.  If you can prove as a developer that you are going to make a game better, people will keep supporting you.

Instead support for the game was mostly dropped.

Heatwave Interactive was instead focused on developing an application to help indie smartphone app developers.  Heatwave Interactive made iSamual L Jackson app.  Which for whatever reason this is one of the most popular apps on the iPhone.

I think that it was a little bit dumb for people to think that a company that focused on casual fun apps could build a great MMO.

It is kind of this that was the downfall of the series, just a bunch of people who didn’t really understand what they were doing.  A lot of people look at MMOs and just see the dollar signs instead of something they could create.

Edit June 6, 2012: As of March 30th Heatwave Interactive officially announced they had pulled the development team from the game a year ago and had no intentions of developing the game any further.