Dragon Empires Cancelled

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Posted by michael on Friday September 3, 2004 @04:33AM from the everyone-knows-dragons-aren't-real dept.

Darniaq writes "Today, Codemasters announced they are discontinuing development of their massive online game Dragon Empires. They had this to say about it: 'The decision to close Dragon Empires' development does not impact on Codemasters' long-term ambitions in the massively multiplayer online gaming market and the company remains very active in evaluating future opportunities.' It appears yet another studio has realized a persistent virtual world requires more time and effort than they wish to expend. Regardless of the true reason, I applaud the move. The massive online gaming genre does not need more games from companies unwilling to focus themselves on them."

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Hardly surprising by Tuvai · 2004-09-03 04:40 · Score: 0

The MMORPG market reached saturation point a long LONG time ago, yet the market is still being flooded by those companies who haven't heard the penny drop.
Hopefully a few more drownings such as this will teach them the error of their ways.
1. Re:Hardly surprising by moronga · 2004-09-03 05:24 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  The MMORPG market reached saturation point a long LONG time ago, yet the market is still being flooded by those companies who haven't heard the penny drop.
  
  Parent is a troll (check out the url) but I've seen the same thing repeated by others on Slashdot. I don't see the numbers to back up this claim.
  
  FFXI was released in 2002 with a North American release in 2003. It has around 500,000 subscribers now. Star Wars Galaxies was released in 2003 and has 300,000 subscribers. (Lower than they were expecting, I think, but hardly a failure.) City of Heroes, which was released this year now has about 200,000 subscribers.
  
  Numbers here: http://pw1.netcom.com/~sirbruce/Subscriptions.html
  
  Everquest II and Worlds of Warcraft are due out in two months and there's a lot of advance excitement around them.
  
  A few failures doesn't indicate saturation. Look at non-MMORPG videogames. What percentage of them do you suppose are successful?
2. Re:Hardly surprising by Sheetrock · 2004-09-03 05:32 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  There is, I think, still room in the genre for companies that push the creative envelope. I forget the name of the one in which you design things on your own "real estate" and can charge people game money to use your creations -- that seemed innovative, and a nice change of pace for someone who isn't interested in the fiftieth dungeon crawl. Then there's A Tale In The Desert, which is similarly focused on community rather than having it be coincidental to the online adventure. Or Planetside which isn't even a RPG but a more-or-less persistent multiplayer Doom-type game.
  The problem is the companies that want to just churn out yet another superficial multiplayer first-person Diablo clone. It's like the Reality-TV situation -- you get a hit then you get a bunch of clones.
  It's a real waste of resources when everybody plays follow-the-leader, but they do it because they think it's smarter to get burned on something that was once a good idea than on something that hasn't been market tested, and this is only going to get worse with the consolidation in the game industry.
  
  --
  
  Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
  -- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
3. Re:Hardly surprising by dr_leviathan · 2004-09-03 07:02 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  The one where you "own your own real estate" is called Second Life.
  
  http://www.secondlife.com
  
  They just updated to version 1.5.
  
  --
  Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
4. Re:Hardly surprising by Carnildo · 2004-09-03 10:11 · Score: 1
  
  They just updated to version 1.5.
  
  In short, don't sign up for a week or two. 1.5 hasn't stabilized yet, and you'll probably be frustrated if you try to start right now.
  
  --
  "They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
5. Re:Hardly surprising by slashdotjunker · 2004-09-04 06:34 · Score: 1
  
  There are two sides to a market, supply and demand. As you have conclusively pointed out demand for MMO games is still rising. However, supply is rising also. Unfortunately there are no hard numbers on supply since game development is so secretive. However, I think most industry insiders would agree that the supply of MMO games is growing much faster than it should be. This discrepancy between growth of supply and growth of demand is causing the observed market saturation despite rising consumer interest in MMO games.
6. Re:Hardly surprising by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-04 12:41 · Score: 0
  
  Everquest 2 will suck life out of everquest 1
  WoW is going to suck live out everquest 1, DAoC and a few others.
  
  Take Sir Bruce's graph and get the customer base for north america from there. Add that a single person is likely to play not more than 1.1 MMORPG due to cash and time restrictions. The number of customers in that market segment you get is already small, and they are bound in existing games - yes there are new players, but they join games that appeal to them and that's games that are different from the already established ones
  
  (i.e. City of Heroes which gets more new players because it does not a huge time investement)
  
  All in all it's
  
  Demand Supply and market
  
  Take into account that the MMORPGs you see today have started design 3+ years back and thus are not too likely to radically change existing gameplay mechanics (i.e. threadmill) in order to attract new customers. Hell, even WoW is banking on the Everquest mechanic, if they get new customers they get them because of Warcraft and Blizzard or Polished Gameplay, not for innovation, and thus they'll have prove that they can keep these new customers.
No surprises here by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-03 04:48 · Score: 0

What they showed at E3 was about 5% quality of the screenshots the game was theoretically able to produce, and it didn't seem any fun or innovative either. Better to stop sinking money in there.
it not only requires up-front work by gl4ss · 2004-09-03 04:57 · Score: 1

but continuing work and expenses as well, the catch of course is that if subscription based then they would get "endless amounts of cash" which must be why these are 'hot' as well.

but if you don't hit it big it can be a drain.

--
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
What's stopping them by geeveees · 2004-09-03 05:07 · Score: 1

What's stopping them from releasing everything they got so far under the GPL and Creative Commons?

Any legal obstacles?

--
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
1. Re:What's stopping them by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-03 05:24 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  Are you kidding? It's probably all garbage inside there. Once you got hold of the code you'd probably realize it would be easier to start from scratch.
  
  Now, if they had a product that had been out for a while, was stable and had the kinks worked out, then yeah it might be worth the effort to keep the product going as open-source. Otherwise you will just be looking at the unwieldy alpha stage source-code of a large project.
2. Re:What's stopping them by WWWWolf · 2004-09-05 21:20 · Score: 1
  
  Still, it'd be interesting to get the design docs and specifications. A company that had plans to roll out a huge MMORPG system probably did some research on how to pull that off, research that is pretty tricky to do by little guys... even if a) it's impossible to follow them to letter if you're doing your own game and b) they were probably Subject to Change and require Expertise anyway, they might have proved to be valuable lessons anyway.
  
  Also the actual game code might be crap, but there's got to be some artwork assets - those might be interesting to people like Worldforge project...
3. Re:What's stopping them by tjlsmith · 2004-09-09 11:13 · Score: 1
  
  I'd be more interested in the models and textures - but you have to remember that the people running these things are selfish opportunistic pricks who don't give a rats ass about anything but lining ther pockets with This Weeks Gimmick. They just shit canned the art and moved on to the next scam.
  
  --
  Mumia Abu-Jamal is *laughably guilty*. Check the evidence.
Kind of a shame by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-03 05:14 · Score: 0

This was looking promising. Ah well, I guess I am not too dissapointed, since I was planning on spending my time with an MMORPG that is actually trying to innovate the genre (GuildWars)
Subscriptions - what would you pay? by spineboy · 2004-09-03 05:23 · Score: 1, Redundant

I know there are plenty of great MMORPG out there that are FREE. I would like to play some of the others (City of Heroes,etc.) but am not willing to pay the $15 per month. I'm sure that the companies have looked at the inverse ratio of cost to # of players.

What would you be willing to pay as a subscription per month - I'd pay up to $5.

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..........FULL STOP.
1. Re:Subscriptions - what would you pay? by Etone · 2004-09-03 05:47 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Great free MMORPG's? I guess it depends on your definitions of "free" and "great".
  
  There are some passable free ones out there, but content costs. It costs money to create, test, and develop new content for MMORPGs, which is what keeps players interested in them.
  
  Furthermore, there are clearly a lot of people out there who DO understand this and ARE willing to pay for it -- see the subscriber numbers for EQ, AC, DAoC, UO, SWG, and AO if you don't believe it.
  
  -E-
2. Re:Subscriptions - what would you pay? by Lightwarrior · 2004-09-03 06:00 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Let's have some names. Running a MMOG costs huge amounts of cash for hardware and bandwidth alone. I'm willing to bet that the so-called "Free MMORPGs" are in no way massively multiplayer or persistant.
  
  ---
  
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3. Re:Subscriptions - what would you pay? by databank · 2004-09-03 06:15 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  You're upset about paying $15 a month for COH? How much do you pay for Cable?
  
  Personally, I dropped cable tv 2 years ago. Instead of spending $50 a month watching reality tv shows with 20 minutes of advertisements per hour, I find the amount of time spent playing COH much more worthwhile and cost effective at $15 a month.
  
  Admittedly though, more then $20 a month is pushing it for me.
4. Re:Subscriptions - what would you pay? by Carnildo · 2004-09-03 10:15 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Runescape was strictly free for the first year or so, and still has large amounts of content available for free. Paying a monthly subscription, at the lowest rate in the industry, gives you access to the full map and all expansion content -- no box to buy, no expansion packs to buy.
  
  Planeshift is an open-source MMORPG. It's still in the early alpha stages, and development is slow, but it's free.
  
  --
  "They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
5. Re:Subscriptions - what would you pay? by Doctor+Cat · 2004-09-03 20:01 · Score: 1
  
  Furcadia is free, has been since 1996 and always will be. We have about 50,000 regular players, and peak at around 3,200 logged on at once (all in the same game world, we don't do "shards"). The elements of the game that persist are somewhat limited, but we're gradually increasing that over time. I know there are a lot of people that play on unofficial Ragnarok Online and Ultima Online servers for free too. Not really the same thing as an officially released and supported by the original game developer kinda server, though.
  
  --
  Furcadia - A free online game with user created content, DragonSpeak scripting, & more.
Finite Pool by BartulaPrime · 2004-09-03 05:51 · Score: 5, Insightful

Unless you are breaking out into new territory (City of Heroes), I find that there are too many similar MMORPGs in the market. I believe CoH to be the only MMORPG since the original EQ that has been able to draw new players into the market.
It may just be me, but most of the people I know that play MMORPGs are the same ones who play the new games when they arrive. So, you have a nomadic tribe of people moving from EQ, to DAoC, then to Horizons, and most likely to EQ2. I've stopped playing them altogether due to the time committment of work and a new baby, however, I still only played one at a time.
So, until companies figure out how to maintain a user base and keep the game fresh, I think most MMORPGs will eventually tank due to people leaving to other games, which takes away the income necessary to making patches, updates, new content, etc.
1. Re:Finite Pool by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-03 06:24 · Score: 0
  
  I believe CoH to be the only MMORPG since the original EQ that has been able to draw new players into the market.
  
  toontown.com
2. Re:Finite Pool by Darniaq · 2004-09-03 08:27 · Score: 1
  
  I feel SWG had a similar ability to pull in new players, but I emphasize "had". Nowadays it's just another MMORPG in a sea of them. That will change with the Jump to Lightspeed expansion, but we won't know whether it'll change that much until January.
3. Re:Finite Pool by pat_trick · 2004-09-03 09:02 · Score: 1, Redundant
  
  I wouldn't discount Planetside, which has pulled quite a few FPS players into the fray.
4. Re:Finite Pool by BartulaPrime · 2004-09-03 09:12 · Score: 1
  
  If anything, I would say that SWG possibly drove people away from the genre. I avoided this game since my co-worker, who shares most of my views on MMORPGs, warned me far away from this one due to the odd mechanics and general lack of "fun".
Wow, Codemasters is still around? by Pluvius · 2004-09-03 13:58 · Score: 1

They were the ones who made the Dizzy games for assorted systems (I think they were most popular on the Spectrum), as well as the classic Micro Machines games for the NES and Genesis. Nice to see them making games after all of these years (though obviously this one isn't going to be made).

Rob
Technical Issues by crashdavis · 2004-09-03 19:38 · Score: 2, Interesting

In the press release, there is this quote:

However, technical issues have resulted in the project's discontinuation.
Anyone know what this means exactly?

Possible explanations I can think of are:

1) Servers weren't scalable enough and had insurmountable lag problems.
2) Games like EQ2 have insanely cool gfx and models, especially on high-end hardware, and DE would have had to redo their engine AND all their models to compete, given their release date.
3) It was purely financial and blaming "technology" is just a way to save face and retreat.

--
"The difference between theory and practice is small in theory and large in practice..."
1. Re:Technical Issues by Shadow99_1 · 2004-09-04 03:30 · Score: 1
  
  If I still had contact with some of my beta tester friends who got in the DE beta back when Eve: Second Genesis was coming out (I'd wondered where this went, since that was over a year ago) I could tell you which of those was the most liekly...
  
  Though combining 1 & 2 together sounds reasonable. Compared to Lineage 2 and EQ2 the graphics I remember in beta pics of DE were pretty bad, though they remind me a bit of World of Warcraft... I remember stress testing was a big part of the phase of testign they were in back then, which if it's been delayed a year in that phase may be a big reason for it as well...
  
  --
  we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
The real reason for the cancellation by radimvice · 2004-09-04 12:05 · Score: 1

Word has it that Codemasters, creators of the Game Genie devices, simply failed to develop effective measures to prevent rampant cheating in their virtual world.