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The Saga Of Star Wars Galaxies Recounted
Thanks to GameSpy for its three-part article discussing the 'long and storied history' of PC-based MMO Star Wars Galaxies, noting: "Regarded as one of the most ambitious MMOGs ever launched and greeted with hype spawned from decades of movies, no other game has had a more difficult road than Galaxies." The piece goes on to argue: "The most conservative estimates of Galaxies' stable player base estimates approximately 100,000 active players", although Sony Online's chief creative officer Raph Koster disagrees with that figure on Waterthread.org, countering: "GameSpy is way off. We get more uniques in a day than that, much less subscribers." The article concludes: "Star Wars: Galaxies attracted many, many people to MMOGs who had never tried one before. Many were put off by the initial lack of content. Despite the oft-stated fantasy of 'living in the Star Wars galaxy,' what many players truly want is to have a Star Wars adventure." Update: 03/16 16:49 GMT by S : John Smedley, President of Sony Online Entertainment, has mailed us with official comment: "Star Wars Galaxies has much more than double the number of subscribers quoted on GameSpy. For the record, the title is doing very, very well and is the second largest MMO in the North American market."
It's the same with most games. People keep saying "This game sucks worse than anything else I have ever played! I should know, I play it 24/7!". One can only speculate as to why people keep playing games they allegedly hate so much...
The same reason people complain about tons of other things that they still use every day: They're problems, but not deal breakers. For instance, DirecTV does a lot of things that annoy me. They force well over one hundred pay-per-view advertisement channels onto my service, they send me "mail" that causes the green mail light to light up, but the mail is never anything more than pay-per-view advertisements, and they leave channels that are inaccessible in my channel list just so I'll see their little advertisement that tells me that I could have the channel if I paid more. All of it is very annoying and I've definitely griped about it a couple of times. But am I going back to cable? Hell no. It's still WAY better than cable, and even though those little problems are annoying, the rest of the service is still excellent.
That's probably the same way it works with Star Wars Galaxies. Most of the people that complain about the way Jedis are implemented are probably still enjoying the other fighting classes a whole lot. That enjoyment is enough to keep them playing, even though they wish the game were a little more polished.
As the blurb recounts: Despite the oft-stated fantasy of 'living in the Star Wars galaxy,' what many players truly want is to have a Star Wars adventure.
Well duh. No one wants to take virtual dumps. Just like no one wants to see Luke on the space-crapper in the movies, or really long fart jokes for that matter. No one wants to be a faceless extra in a digital crowd scene in the on-line version. Quite the epiphany, perhaps if he'd payed any attention to story telling over the last 5000 years or so (how old is Gilgamesh anyway) he might have saved himself and everyone else the trouble.
Tedium and challenge are not the same thing. There should be tedious tasks. They should be the window dressing on the world, things that can be picked up and left off without consequence that hint at a bigger world. A world the heros are too busy to live in but not so busy they can't visit. The challenges, the real obsticals to ends shouldn't be tedious. They should be challenging, and engage people with more than mindless repetition. The social element of MMO's can alleviate some of that, allowing people to step back and trade some of the tedium in for the challenge of teamwork. But if every MMO just wants to be the last 2 levels of the original Ninja Gaiden without the cinematic sequences, they've missed the whole point.
If anything the continued patronage of their customers is a testiment to the durability of the brand, and their connection with it. It's said that a person can learn to tolerate almost anything. And just because they'll accept extreme mediocrity over the short term in now way implies that it is a worthy end to be aspired to.
DarkZero is eloquent. Most gamers are inchorent. The difference is one of expression, not necessarily emotion.
Gamespy's article on how jedi work (or for the most part, don't work) in SW:G is indicative of SOE's horrid production/design philosophy when it comes to games. Essentially they offload all the cost of gameplay decisions and testing to the players - lumping out outrageous monthly fees and then using gamer ideas and quality assurance data to slowly improve the games in the hope of keeping them around.
This is clearly true in SW:G, where being a Jedi makes no sense and yet SOE declares it "meets their design goals" but they'll change it in the future to gamer demand.
In other words - they didn't really spend much forethought into how jedis should work in the game, they just slapped it in there and let the gamers sort it out - at cost.
PlanetSide has the exact same issues - it's gameplay has changed significantly twice since I left that game.
I'm all for developers listening to gamer feedback - but it's way different when the developers seem incapable of getting it done right without that feedback.
So, according to this, it's doing better than FFXI, which just cleared 1 million users, right? I'm sure that they are including all of their european users on US servers. I'm just kinda curious as to how he can make that claim when even DAoC is doing better than SWG, or it was the last time I checked.
I have no regrets, this is the only path.
My whole life has been "UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS"
"Star Wars Galaxies has much more than double the number of subscribers quoted [...] and is the second largest MMO in the North American market."
Well, then i would like to see the hard number of subscribers if this is such a marketing issue that this person feels the need to actualyl email about this.
As for the part about being the second largest in the N American market - where does it rate in the asian market. If you want a hungry mad mob of people wanting to play MMOGs - you would be focusing hard on the asian market. The asian market is nuts for all things online....
For example Ragnarok is an extrodinarily successful game there - and with a *free* *small* client - it has found a perfect market entry point. They still charge a monthly fee which the people are happy to pay.
Here in the US - the market is very fickle when it comes to the games we will play online from a loyalty standpoint. We have the luxury of higher income and more accessible broadband to our homes - but the asian market is different in the way they play the games because 95% of the games are played from internet cafes. Many of the internet cafes have slow access, and because of this many games are played locally.
This is not true of South Korea however, where high speed internet access is available at many internet cafes and homes - but the community of playing the games at the internet cafe is still there.