Comments on: MMO Box Sales And Defining Success

By: Randomessa

Randomessa — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 19:20:55 +0000

Hey, just posting to note that ANet has been pretty clear that their low server expenditure has nothing to do with GW1 being instanced:

“Interestingly many people believe that the completely instantiated world was the reason for Guild Wars 1 to not need monthly fees. This is completely wrong! The existence or lack of a persistent world is totally unrelated to the running expenses which are needed to maintain an online roleplaying game.”
(source: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2:_The_Status_Quo, interview with Jeff Strain)

That said, I expect GW2’s revenue will come from a similar expansion-release + items like appearance-to-armor-linking items (transmutation stones) and convenience perks such as the aforementioned extra storage space and costume slots.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 21:41:14 +0000

I think it goes to show that if you stick at the something long enough eventually you can find your audience. EVE has had a lot of great viral marketing over the past three years to really help it take off. All of their stories about backstabbing and banks getting robbed has attracted a lot of curious players.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 21:40:03 +0000

Big bags of cash I know it’s cynical to say but Blizzard sold out (I don’t blame them). The owners and shareholders took a lot of cash and essentially Activision got a nice money spinner on their hands. It’s life and business so I don’t hold any malice towards anyone over it.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 21:37:45 +0000

Yeah, you’re probably right. I wonder how GW2 will fair?

By: Gordon

Gordon — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 21:36:25 +0000

No doubt the Chinese government takes a healthy chunk of the profits too I’m pretty sure the low margins is why SOE cancelled the Asian launch of EQ2. I don’t think it’s worth effort unless you know you can appeal to millions of players.

By: numtini

numtini — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:54:52 +0000

As with so many things, Eve is an oddity here. It was originally distributed by the standard retail box and was a complete flop. After six months Simon and Schuster Interactive sold the rights back to CCP (my guess is at a substantial loss), who then went through the electronic distribution method. It was another year after that before the game cracked even 50k subs and far longer before anyone paid it much attention. It’s probably the only game I can think of that had that bad a launch and didn’t just disappear or end up on life support.

By: Mister Meh

Mister Meh — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:43:05 +0000

Oh yeah. Blizzard (pre-activision) is also another case of owning the IP and being able to only answer to themselves, instead of investors.

I wonder what the Activision relationship brings to the new wrold of investments for them.

By: numtini

numtini — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:30:53 +0000

Guild Wars 1 has an item shop. They sell costumes, expanded storage, new character slots, and just introduced a deal where for ten bucks each you can turn one of your characters into an NPC hero for your other characters to use.

The original model was to do continuous expansions, but charge for them by the box. If you look at the game design, it was kept low resource and it’s not an MMO, when you leave the town, it’s entirely instanced, so I’m guessing day to day costs are low.

By: UnSub

UnSub — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 09:21:52 +0000

@Gordon and @Matt

I see this as one of the reasons that F2P is booming – cheap production, shorter development time and ability to remain profitable on a much smaller player base. Then that studio goes on to develop another title that helps flesh out their gaming portfolio and draw in another type of customer.

The alternative is (as Gordon states) “we need to be the second biggest MMO in the West to even look at being profitable”, which is insane.. ly optimistic.

@Matt – Cryptic follow this model – they keep a team working on their toolset and produce games that use the same (but constantly updated) engine. It saves them a lot of development time and money, but obviously they’ve been criticised for deficiencies in game content.

I’m very curious about Neverwinter, and seeing if Cryptic have learned the hard lessons of their ChampO (which I still play from time to time) or their STO (fun, but not enough to pay for) launches.

By: Samus

Samus — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 23:26:43 +0000

Yeah, I can’t find numbers on how much less, but it is definitely way less. If you simply took $15 times 11 million subscribers for 12 months, you would have gotten just under $2 billion in subscriptions alone. However, in 2010 Blizzard pulled in just over $1.1 total revenue, from all sales in all games. Clearly, those players in Asia aren’t pulling their weight!