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What is The Cost of an Early Release?
Everguide writes "Sony Online Entertainment recently announced that they would be releasing EverQuest 2 on November 8th, ahead of their main competition World of Warcraft (last predicted release date: Week of November 22). SOE is notorious for launching games with content that is not finished or buggy, and Blizzard is known for at times delaying a game just to work out minor bugs. Is it worth launching a game early, yet buggy, to grab market share from the competition? I know the Themis group thinks a poor launch can cost a company millions of dollars but will the benefit of launching early exceed the costs?"
Obviously, having a game out nets you short term cash, and long run you can eventually patch it.
However, if your company has a reputation for releaseing buggy games, gamers are going to just not buy them for a few patches (to get the bugs worked out) or not buy them at all because they have a limited budget.
I'm in favor of the wait until the game is finished approach.
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
It is more of a detriment than a benefit. The bugs invariably create word of mouth downturns for the product. Besides, this is assuming that SOE can even get people to transfer from their more established EQ1 for the harsher strictures imposed for things like dying in EQ2. I see players as more likely to transfer between worlds, as opposed to merely playing the same game with slightly better graphics.
Yes in the case of the Doom 3 vs Half-Life 2 argument. Doom 3 lacked polish when it went beyond single-player which hurt it badly (deathmatch only? fun, but lacks variety). But in anyway you look at it, Doom 3 put a dent in Half-Life 2's fanfare. Fancy graphics and physics? Doom 3 did that, so Half-Life 2 only has storyline and gameplay (arguably the two hardest things to implement in a game).
No in the case of EA Games's style of releasing buggy games. We KNOW they're pretty much the Microsoft of developing games, we KNOW they have a stranglehold on developers, we KNOW not to play a version 1.0 of any EA game now. In the case of EA Games, they need to stop putting these games out so quickly and just polish them up. We don't need a BF1942/Vietnam clone/sequel/expansion only to have it even more buggy than the previous one.
Regarding Sony, specifically, they have lost their reputation as a MMO developer over the SWG fiasco. Jump to Lightspeed is apparently causing all sorts of bugs in the looting tables for the ground game, and people's items have been randomly disappearing since they started patching the code, I hear. The word on the street is that EQ2 is not ready yet either, although not as catastrophically bad as SWG at release. Given that Sony never got the 1 million customer base they predicted for SWG, they are hurting and in need of both market share and operating cash to keep their boats afloat. Tons of players are not going to play EQ2 (which will be a decent game, for its genre), due to their experiences with their other buggy releases. This is going to be a tough holiday season for game developers. A lot of the products they are putting out are extremely well made and very time consuming, I suspect a lot of players may only be able to tackle 2-3 of them until the end of the year. A lot of people will take a "wait and see" attitude on early MMO releases, given that they have a boatload of solid single player console and PC games to keep them busy until the mess sorts itself out. Blizzard can sit on WoW as long as they want. It has massive hype, and is in better shape than any MMO I have ever played, and it is still in Beta. They have a built in base of single player and online gamers waiting for their product, and a mountain of disgruntled MMO players who can bide their time in their less than satifactory worlds, until WoW comes out. Blizzard also drips with credibility regarding their quality control process, an increasingly important asset for anyone in the MMO market.
There are a few things that I think make this decision logical (enough) for SOE.
1) Huge Everquest installed base. As a whole, they've probably been marginally following WoW, but they are naturally going to be very aware of EQ2. If WoW were to come out first and start getting acclaim and siphoning users off of EQ before EQ2 had a chance to do the same, a lot of people who are currently only kinda aware of WoW would suddenly be -very- aware. By beating WoW to market, they get all the early natural transition people.
2) Long term hook associated with MMORPGs, changes the rules a bit. Unless EQ2 is also a massively sucking game, a lot of people are simply going to get hooked as long as it's at least somewhat better then EQ. Once hooked you don't really care so much if there is a better game, because all the stuff you've built up is there, so whatever is released first is going to have a long term advantage as a result. (.. obviously a problem EQ2 is going to have against itself?? I don't know how they are dealing with that )
3) Blizzard has the weird advantage that it seems like, at least from my perspective, that every gamer knows a few WoW beta testers. They are already totally hooked and play it basically as if it were a released game. There is this huge existing sentiment that EQ2 is going to suck relative to WoW no matter what, so what difference does it make if they wait to make it better?
I'm an absolutely rabid Blizzard fan, and yes, they usually delay the hell out of games, and I like it. But this is an exception to that rule.
WoW is most definitely not going to release at a 'finished' state, at least not by the conceptions of the developers. This list of things they plan to add in patches is fairly massive, and is growing as things that they wanted to include simply get pushed back by more important things.
That said, it seems to me that they're under quite a bit of pressure from Vivendi right now...I wonder if Blizzard has a say at all. Still, from what I've heard (mostly from biased people, I freely admit) WoW is more polished than EQ2 anyway.
An early release is all about marketing and not so much about the state of the game. SOE made a choice to release their game earlier than expected in order to take sales away from Blizzard and into their pocket. SOE believes that EQ2 is in a good enough shape to have an early release.
To me the answer relies on the company's reputation. If I know a game is being released early, I will buy it on the earlier release date only if I have confidence in the software company. This all relies on previous experiences I have had with other game titles they have published. In the case of SOE, I would suggest staying away from EQ2 because of my experience with SWG. Another example is EA/DICE. They have released buggy games and up until recently, the early releases weren't a problem until Battlefield: Vietnam. After BFV, DICE's reputation dropped dramatically due to the intense game play inbalances in the game that had not been worked out. Next DICE game I buy now will not be until several months after the game release instead of the day of the release as I did with BF1942, Road To Rome, and Vietnam.
If a game, upon release, is fun to play with just a few issues, then the early release will be good for the company. If the game has just one major issue, word will get around, and the company's reputation will suffer and then consumers are much less likely to buy a game without hearing about it first (thus hurting sales). It's a big risk to have an early release, but if the company is good, it's a risk worth taking for them. It's all about management making a wise decision on how to market their product. We all know that game producers have made some pretty bad moves latetly, maybe EQ2 will be different.
I couldn't think of anything witty to say, so...you're stuck with this.
Thus, World of Warcraft will be released earlier than Blizzard prefers.
Not to worry, though - it will still be n times more polished and stable and fun than almost any other online game.
I've had the chance to play some WoW beta. I can tell you it will definitely be the first online game I'll buy, and will probably be the only one I buy for a good long while.
(Although, "City of Heroes" looks like a lot of fun, too!!)
WoW will win. If EQ2 worked well without any issues then yes, an earlier release date would greatly benefit them. However, I seriously doubt that EQ2 will be bug free while Blizzard has an impeccable reputation in that regard.
With that being said, WoW has (already) an extremely loyal following who will gladly wait a few more weeks for the game. Blizzard was also been very smart with the marketing when they ran the one week+ stress test. This allowed word of the game to propogate through all circles as over 100,000 people participated.
Also don't forget the Open Beta, which should be out soon. That will also serve to create interest for the game. If people are able to play in the Open Beta by the time EQ2 comes out, I think Blizzard will have no problem in keeping the market share.
One last thing in response to a post on City of Heroes: Character creation is AMAZING but the game does not have enough content as of yet to keep one intersted for any period of time (say, a week).