EA's Sims Online Is A Flop And Other MMORPG Musings

Ignorant Aardvark writes "Wired has an article out about the upcoming Multiplayer Games Summit at E3. Some of the interesting parts of the article: 'The Sims Online has sold 125,000 copies retail, has been discounted from $50 to as low as $20 on Amazon and has 97,000 active subscribers.' Compare that to EverQuest, with 470,000 subscriptions. Investment analyst Michael Pachter says of TSO: 'They took a very popular franchise that's a single-player game in which you play with dolls, and when you play with dolls, they follow rules and behave in predictable ways. With The Sims Online, you're playing real people, and real people don't behave the way you'd expect them to.' And here's the gem of the article: 'Consumers might not be responding well to paying individual subscriptions for single online games, but might react better to cable TV-like pricing in which they get access to a number of offerings for a flat fee.' Does anyone see this pricing system as being more successful?"

Comments

don't insult role-playing.

[Joe the Lesser]

The company also has a follow-on to its hugely successful medieval role-playing game EverQuest.

Correction: It's hugely successful medieval chat room game EverQuest.

Re:don't insult role-playing.

[Fembot]

I think they're missing the point... the people who spend hours online playing everquest are undeinably hardcore gamers. The people who play the sims are people like my little sister, who enjoy a half hour bash at it, but dont take it anywhere nearly as seriously as some people do an RPG or FPS.

Could be....

[lanej0]

Used to be I would go shell out $50 for a game and I could play it single player. I could play it multiplayer on the LAN or over the Net. Now companies want a subscription rate on top of it all?

Maybe people have had enough paying for every aspect of the experience. I pay for the hardware, software and bandwidth. O/S the server and let people run them themselves....

Re:Could be....

[Bokonon]

Distributed computing isn't a satisfactory answer for most of these types of games. You need a single arbiter to decide what happens when player A swings his sword at player B, and vice versa, but player A has much more net lag... Does player B slow down, player A not swing, or do you assume player A is going to repeat their last action. Not to mention, if you distribute the judging rules, then that means each copy of the game has the judging rules built in, which makes it orders of magnitude easier to hack and tweak to your advantage.

Juggling between games with a flat fee?

[mivok]

I can only see the cable method of pricing (multiple games, one price) hurting gameplay. Theres a lot of people who are dedicated so much to a single game partially because they pay for it (and of course the fact that the game is addictive). Having multiple games would make each player less enthusiastic about each individual game, and consequently the community wouldnt be anywhere near as thriving.
As an example, imagine trying to play everquest, ultima online, sims online, a tale in the desert, and a few others all at once. (neglecting the fact that it is different companies and a flat fee wouldnt work too well).

Re:Juggling between games with a flat fee?

[Murrow]

Sony/Verant has made noises that there might be a discount for EQ players that also subscribe to the new Star Wars MMORPG.

I'd much prefer a flat cable fee scheme, and they'd make more money from me at least that way. I'm a current EQ player, but can't justify to myself (or the wife!) more than one $10/month time and money sink. When SW:G or EQ2 or whatever else comes out, under the current pricing I'd have to switch completely (and they'd still be getting $10/month from me). With a cable scheme they might get, say, $15/month from me with no additional load on their servers (I still would have the same number of available play hours as before).

Bad Comparison

[TexVex]

The Sims Online has sold 125,000 copies retail, has been discounted from $50 to as low as $20 on Amazon and has 97,000 active subscribers.' Compare that to EverQuest, with 470,000 subscriptions.

EverQuest has been around for several years; The Sims Online has been around for several months. EverQuest didn't just jump up to 400K+ subscriptions right after launch. No game of that genre has. If a MMO game gets 100K+ subscribers on launch, it's doing great. At $10 a pop, that's a cool million in gross revenues per month. So long as there's a decent profit margin in there, that's not an amount to sneeze at. But what is important here is the growth curve, not the subscriber numbers at any given time.

The retail price for the box is also not really relevant either. That is a one-time sale. The monthly subscription is recurring revenue.

Re:Bad Comparison

[Cheeko]

Actually EQ has been losing users for the last year or two, from its peak of over 500k. Generally they see a spike with each new expansion. It is true that EQ took time to build to that 500,000+ users, but its initial sales, before its first expansion gave it well over 200k users, and that was in about a year. The problem with EQ these days is that its getting a little bit dated, and hence the planned release of EQ2. IMO the 97k users for the Sim's online is a GIANT dissappointment, both because those ARE weak numbers for an online game (though not terrible), and are compounded by the phenominal success of the single player version, which lead to the assumption that this interest would carry over to the multiplayer version. Of course I'm too lazy to get links to any of this, but a simple google search should turn up a fair amount of the info.

Re:Double pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

A satellite dish, a telephone(both landline and cellular), (usually) a modem.

There's lots of stuff where you buy the "equipment" or software or distributable and still have to pay another (recurring) fee, just to use it. These things are (mostly) useless without the "access" subscription.

Note I say "mostly" useless. You can still use a modem as an answering machine(if you have the software) and the extremely DIY-ish can find something to do with a sat.dish. But generally, without the subscription fee, you're high and dry. You're being charged for both the access mechanism(phone, sat.dish, software) and the access. It's a good scam, really.

And on the note that when you pay for the game on MMOGs you are paying for media distro - that's a load of BS. Media distro for a software CD is nothing near $50. How much can you buy one of those old shareware CDs for at CompUSA/MicroCenter/Fry's/BestBuy? Less than $10.

Games charge $50 because that's what the market will bear. less than 10% of that is "media distribution" costs.

I don't have a problem with

[Tarindel]

paying for an online subscription when the game requires persistant servers, as most MMORPGS do. It takes money to buy the servers, and there's a significant cost to maintain them. Not to mention bandwidth costs.

What I find interesting is the recent emerging trend of games charging for online-play that require only minimal hardware company-side. For example, the forthcoming Settlers of Catan PS2 is rumored to use such a pricing scheme (http://ps2.ign.com/articles/391/391005p1.html). In that case, you're basically paying for someone to match you up with another human player, as all the games are transitory, and the PS2's can do all the requisite processing themselves. Somehow, that doesn't seem as compelling a reason for me to be spending $7 a month or more per month to play.

But I suspect we'll see more and more of that -- it's obvious consumers will be more willing to try a game that they can get for free and pay a small monthly fee if they like it as opposed to paying a large up-front cost and then getting the online-time for free. And companies will like it too, as it means potentially wider exposure for a game, and a more steady revenue flow. Not to mention they still get their money when used copies of the game trade hands over eBay or people figure out how to copy it.

Re:Star Wars

[binaryslave]

Star Wars will be a sword and scorcery style game. Look at Anarchy Online and WWII online. Both have had very hard times.

Re:Star Wars

[InfoVore]

The Star Wars MMORPG will be very successful. Count on it. It's just silly that some people are claiming that only sword and scorcery style games can be popular as MMOGs.

Yes Star Wars Galaxies(SWG) will be very successful right out of the gate (once they get past The-Never-Ending Beta). However, it won't be successful IN SPITE of being a Sword & Sorcery game. SWG IS a sword (lightsaber) and sorcery (The Force) game. If anything, its success will build on that sword and sorcery foundation.

Star Wars is very much in the Science Fantasy genre, with heavy emphasis on the Fantasy side. (Most 'space opera' stories are...) Change the starships to sailing ships and you could set it in any pre-industrial epoch.

Regardless, it will be fun to run around dodging Bounty Hunters, fixing droids, and so on when SWG comes out.

Cheers,
I.V.

Simple Math

[AvantLegion]

There is a finite number of people willing to spend monthly fees to play online games.

Very few people are willing to pay monthly fees for multiple games. Most choose their favorite and become dedicated to that game.

Every online game released since UO and EverQuest has struggled, to some degree, to gain an audience. New games have to either succeed at pulling gamers away from other games, or by bringing its own separate audience. Warbirds can succeed because the hardcore flight-sim audience has very little crossover with the online RPG audience. A game like Star Wars Galaxies will succeed on both fronts: pulling RPGers away from other titles AND bringing in a new audience that had no interest in Rat Hunter 3D but would love nothing better than to play in the Star Wars universe.

At first glance, you would think The Sims would bring its own audience. But take note that the average Sims player is not a Sims junkie. Out of the bajillions of copies sold, only a small percentage are owned by the kind of junkies that might be interested in paying for an online game.

THEN take into account the various problems with the online game. Pushing a shoddy product onto a smaller-than-estimated audience is a good formula for, well, exactly what's happened.