SENSATIONALIST HEADLINE ALERT FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Yes if the big games can have sensationalist headlines… then I really should to, no?
It’s been a great year for gaming with some really amazing titles being left in the shadow because of just how much was in the game. THQ even went bankrupt. Some things are just so easy to predict, others not so much. These are Troublmaker’s (that’s me) predictions for 2014.
#1: Zynga Won’t Survive
It’s hard to imagine that a year ago Zynga was looking really good. A stock value starting at $10 is now falling under $4. Zynga has roughly 20 games with their top game Farmville recently being ousted by Candy Crush and their big money makers all gambling…. I imagine Zynga will be doomed.
If Zynga is to survive it will survive almost entirely as a form of online Poker. With gift cards being a replacement for pre-paid Master Cards, gambling on Zynga’s various gambling games is overwhelmingly easier than other methods.
But Zynga will fall for other reasons. The biggest one is that they still haven’t been able to break from Facebook. Zynga’s success was based almost entirely on the growth of Facebook. But the competition on Facebook is intense.
They have Words with Friends on Android and iPhone… but not much else. Their main game Farmville isn’t working on either of these devices and without being able to translate their most populat game into a unifying platform… they’re in trouble.
A unifying platform means either having one platform that works really well, or have all platforms work together. If Zynga can’t find more attractive ways to get people to play together… and get them to pay. They are most certainly doomed.
2014 can just as easily be the year where they cease to exist.
Certain formats just die out. I can say with some sort of certainty that Flash games are pretty well dead. The new in browser based games are Unity based games.
They blew up and took over the browser based market.
But Unity is also the big reason why browser based games will stagnate. It is too intuitive, too easy to use, and far too capable. It has allowed really small studios to make some really
Simply put, the market for browser based games is full and will not allow for newer ones to flourish.
Expect to see many browser based game companies up and close their servers.
This is similar to last year’s Apps-apocalypse which saw the complete bankruptcy of many apps based programs who severely struggled in a challenging market.
#2: Video Games and Addiction Will Become a Big Deal
South Australia (the province) has already begun a multi-million dollar campaign against video games. The thing is… their information isn’t actually bad… nor is their goal.
They are targeting games that have gambling implications that are readily available to young people. There are some REALLY obvious ones. Lucky Slots on Facebook is directly a gambling game.
But the big goal of this campaign is to get rid of the nickle and diming games. The ones that claim to be free but then you play them so often and you get a note to pay them money to continue. You know… like arcade games used to work?
Evidence shows there’s a strong link between gambling addiction and arcade machines. Arcades were huge up until the 1990s. By no coincidence this is exactly the same time when the gambling industry modernized and brought in VLTs.
With the growth of the online video game it would be eventual before they would go online and use the same mechanics to lure in gamers.
Of course the campaign can’t actually change anything. This is after all only from the South Australian government. However when one government invests so much into a campaign it won’t take long for others to notice.
2013 was definitely the year of the fake gay bashing stories. I think people are sick of victim stories…. and the replacement just might be video game and gambling addiction.
#3: MOBA Development Will Cease
Last year there was a lot of room in the market for more MOBAs.
At the end of last year Destructoid announced that League of Legends had 32 million active players and over 70 million accounts.
With that news most people who were making real time strategy games to compete with Starcraft 2 started using their assets to try and make a MOBA. There were dozens of really bad MOBA releases this year. Lord of the Rings had one come out before it was ready. Trion Worlds was building a MOBA in End of Nations which for the second time has seen stalled development.
With the full release of DOTA 2, with Smite, Infinite Crisis, and Dawngate all being things there is tones of saturation in this market.
The other major problem is that this market is unlikely to grow. The biggest hub of MOBAs is China. China loves free games. Riot Games was acquired by a Chinese company and and its massive growth was in part because of just how many Chinese are playing League of Legends.
More than likely these big game MOBAs will all fight for the same pot. Whereas small indie MOBAs like Smashmuck Champions will just die off.
All of this in light of Blizzard releasing their own MOBA soon called “Blizzard All Stars.”
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.
A latest study shows that 85% of people who start playing a social game will quit it after 24 hours.
The 75% often play a tonne all at once and then quit.
The same study shows that 15% of people playing social games become addicted and play often.
What are we calling social games? Some people also call them viral games. These are generally browser based games designed in such a way to reward people for working together.
The classic example of this is Farmville. By the way if someone wants to adopt my cow click on this link!
The model for these games was a plaguing cry from help from friends to help them in games. One friend of mine would chew out his friends for not helping him get more.
The friend would play with his friend for a while but over time would see no incentive to continue playing.
Social games can take a lesson from MMORPGs which have mastered early game orientation. The idea is simple, make it so that there is always something to do. Social games became popular for the exact opposite reason, people saw a need to recruit their friends because they ran out of things to do. The model made it so that if you didn’t recruit people to the game you’d have nothing to do.
This once believed successful model is finally showing its weaknesses to the world.
In ultra exciting news SWTOR is going to the free to play model.
Now how is this different, we should ask, from say DC Universe Online.
First I’d like to address the newly released The Secret World. Now five months ago (before launch) they announced a Life Time Subscription for the game. And of course in typical Troublmaker style I threw out a controversial video in which I coach people to not get the life time subscription because it is a scam. It is a scam because at the time it was clear to me The Secret World would go free to play as Funcom’s other two titles (Anarchy Online and Age of Conan) had both adopted free to play. It was then my opinion that dishing out $200 (that would pay itself off after a year) was not worthwhile because you would be getting the game unlimited for free sooner rather than later anyway.
I however did not say do not purchase nor did I not say do not play The Secret World. The game is released today and of course in traditional Funcom numbers it is posting average review numbers.
I’d like to differentiate the Funcom transition to free to play from this first time Electronic Arts transition into free to play. Funcom moved to free to play because they stopped making money with a subscription model. SWTOR is moving to free to play because it is a better business model. This can be evidenced by the fact that Warhammer Online… in its 5 year glory is still yet to go to free to play despite being dead for quite some time.
SWTOR going free to play addresses the primary problem people had with getting the game in the first place, that is they wanted a single player experience but did not want to pay a subscription. SWTOR, unlike other games, is not dying so quickly. To compare Rift went from 500,000 to 150,000 in under a month, Age of Conan went from 1,000,000 to 100,000 in a month, DC Universe Online went from 1,200,000 to 100,000 in a month, Warhammer Online went from 750,000 to 5,000 in a month.
SWTOR went from 1.7M to 1.3M over a period of 4 months and only recently dropped under a million. They’re not waiting to die off to make the switch.
It’s time for developers to face it, World of Warcraft was a commercial oddity that no one will ever hit ever again. Blizzard successfully created a social club with a monthly entry fee.
The new Bioware model will be very similar to the Sony Online Entertainment model. You will be able to do the quests to Level 50 for free. If you want more character slots you have to buy them (or delete your character), if you want to PvP you have to pay for that, if you want access to PvE dungeons you have to buy a dungeon pass.
The odd part of this is that unlike Sony Online Entertainment games…. the leveling content is what people want to do. Honestly, no one cares about leveling in Lord of the Rings Online. In fact I’d argue that the leveling is the most painful part of that game as if you don’t purchase bonus zones it becomes tedious and almost impossible. The same is true of Dungeons and Dragons Online and DC Universe Online. Leveling sucked in these games, you WANTED to do the dungeon and end game content.
The problem for SWTOR so far comes in with that there is no reason to make the jump from arguably the best and funnest part of the game (solo leveling) to their group end game content. SOE created guest passes whereas if you purchased dungeon access you could (as leader) bring your group into the dungeon. The content is largely
What Bioware does with their free to play model will in the end decide whether or not the game will succeed or fail. By having questing up to Level 50 free I have no doubt that the game will have capacity servers on free to play launch, but I don’t know how they will do on the money side of things.
TheGameGuru.Me 