Dragon Empires Cancelled

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."

Comments

Re:Hardly surprising

[moronga]

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?

Re:Hardly surprising

[Sheetrock]

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.

Re:Subscriptions - what would you pay?

[Etone]

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-

Finite Pool

[BartulaPrime]

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.

Re:Subscriptions - what would you pay?

[Lightwarrior]

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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Re:Subscriptions - what would you pay?

[databank]

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.

Re:Hardly surprising

[dr_leviathan]

The one where you "own your own real estate" is called Second Life.

http://www.secondlife.com

They just updated to version 1.5.

Re:Subscriptions - what would you pay?

[Carnildo]

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.

Technical Issues

[crashdavis]

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.