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

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the fun-games-and-unfun-shames dept.

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?"

3 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Could be.... by lanej0 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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....

  2. Bad Comparison by TexVex · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    --
    Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
  3. I don't have a problem with by Tarindel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.