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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?"
Original AIDS Monkey said:
" The worst part about these games is their difficulty to pirate. Subscription? F that. Give me a free ISO and a CD crack."
Although you may be better known for your frequent trolling activities you have a very interesting point there.
I know this isn't necessarily the case in the USA, but in many many countries piracy is the standard way of getting a game and most people never bought a single box! People who buy games are actually mocked: back in 92 when I was in high school, there was this guy who always bought every game he wanted. We sort of had a love-hate relationship with him, we laughed at him for wasting so much cash on a couple of floppies plus a crappy black and white manual when he could buy a dozen floppy boxes for the exact same price, and just download the game off a BBS or get it from a friend.
Nevertheless, we loved the fact that we could get new games off of him for free, and to this day he is still the only person I ever met who actually bought most of the games he ever played.
There is no such thing as Everquest addiction around here, and I wonder if it isn't exactly because of ubiquitous, socially-condoned software piracy.
I can see one big "gotcha" with this plan. Cable sells access to the stations but then (most stations) run advertisements in with their programming. So you still pay, by watching commercials, and the individual stations can still make money from ad revenue. It isn't clear how online gaming, as an ongoing revenue stream, pays off for the developers. We don't know how much, if any, of the Xbox Live fees go back to individual developers; my guess is that none of it gets back to them. So that means they make money off the initial sale of the game, and that's it. This doesn't seem to work as well for games as for cable.
They may be able to layer premium games (like MMOGs) on top of the ho-hum online games (like shooters or Tetris) and charge extra for those, as cable companies do with HBO, but it isn't clear that they've got a strong enough user base to support such a move. After all, they're already in uncharted territory trying to charge regular fees for online gaming. Maybe in a year or two, but by then we're looking at a second generation of hardware waiting in the wings, which could keep people from jumping.
Also, Xbox Live will, for the short term, have to compete with the choose-your-own-adventure world of Sony's PS2. Sony's haphazard approach has made it a platform on which anyone can make a game and charge whatever they want. This seems good for the developer, if they have a hit game that pulls in regular subscribers, but then they also have to bear the brunt of the infrastructure costs. It's like network television where you don't put much into it and you don't expect a lot out of it either, but you also don't have to pay monthly for it if you don't want to.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
lanej0 said:
"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...."
Exactly. We really need to tell the powers that be that distributed computing is the future. In a world where end-user resources are rapidly becoming superfluous, someone's bound to come along that will notice that the client-server model is obsolete, for the usual centralized view of client-server interaction assumes that the clients have far less resources than the server, which just isn't true anymore.
Anyone can run a server. Most people don't use any of their bandwidth, because all they do on their multi-megabit internet connection is download email off a POP server and browse the web.
Turn the usual protocols into P2P already!
Why should I have to rely on my crappy ISP's slow email server and faulty DNSs when I could just do the same job myself?
Why can't we just have everyone run a server?
Bundle the damn things, activated by default, make them invisible with automatic updates and the millions of end-lusers will never even know that they're running a mini-ISP.
28,000 people that haven't even opened the box yet?
More like 28,000 that played for about a month and realized what a terrible game it was. No time-altering means if your sim has to read a book to learn something, and that book takes 5 minutes to read, expect to twiddle LOTS of thumbs while trying to up their skills in a particular area.
Can you even play Sims Online in single-player mode?
*Notes the "Online" in the title, as opposed to the lack of such in "The Sims"
But why would i want to pay $50 or even $20 for a game which i then have to pay more per month to play? it would have to be a damn good game. - Give the game away free with a months free sub (You have to give your credit card details so you cant just keep getting freebies) so theyre hoooked and you now have $10 per month off em :-)
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
I'm sure I'm not the only person who sees problems with a system where you first pay for a game and then pay to play it. It would make more sense if there were single player versions included with the game but for the online-only stuff the games should be free to download if they are going to charge to play.
What other product sells you something that is absolutely useless without paying a subscription fee? Tivo comes to mind but at least you're getting hardware with your initial purchase that can concievably be used for other purposes. I can't think of another example of this type of system where you don't get something for your up front money. Anyone?
Now, regarding MMORPGs, in Portugal, well, frankly, the level of English of the average Portuguese gamer is not good enough so they can feel confident to invest their time in the game. I have never seen any MMORPG being marketed here either, but as I don't really buy any game magazines I am reporting my own experiences from mega-stores. It is simply not mainstream in most countries.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
You talk about scrapping the whole client-server model all together. There are a LOT of problems with that.
Do you want to trust 'joe user' to have an SMTP/POP server installed, configured correctly, and patched? The average person doesn't/can't patch their system as is, even when they aren't running a server. Activating things by default as you propose is what gets systems hacked.
Also, most people do not leave their computers on all the time. Where would their e-mail go then when the computer is off?
Not to mention most people have asymmetric internet connections with much less upload then download capacities.
The client-server model will never be obsolete unless everyone can run their computers as well as a systems administrator, OR they give complete control of their computers to an outside source (Microsoft would love this option, I'm sure).
And also, if you have a crappy ISP with a slow e-mail server and faulty DNS then get a new ISP!
I NEVER have DNS problems with my ISP at home, and we almost never have DNS problems on campus at my university.