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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?"
but I found a quote several years back that went something like this...
A late game is only late until the moment it launches
A bad game is bad forever.
Games like Anarchy Online that ended up being decent games, suffered drastically at launch and word got around that the game had issues, wasn't worth trying, etc. and they no doubt lost a lot of potential customers over this.
Get the game right and then launch. You're always going to have isssues with someone who is using a 4 MB video card or only 64 MB of RAM on their mobo, or some other issue - that's going to happen - don't let the people who bothered to read the minimum requirements and have met them suffer because you wanted to get the game out first.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
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)
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.
A year from now no one will remember that it was a year late.
A year from now they will remember that it was completely useless - and never buy from you again.
This was business software so it had a slightly longer lifetime - but the principle still applies - if you have a reputation for bad software - it will follow you forever.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
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.
along with the other tens of thousands of folks that are in beta.
it seems that the consensus among the beta testers is that the game is ready. there are no major known bugs that i've ever come across, and there are very few glitches to speak of. there are a few lag issues in key zones, but they've taken care of that in a way that i'm happy with.
the bad rep that SOE got was from SWG, and it was deserved in that case. that game still isn't ready for production, mainly because they're still altering the game design on a monthly basis. if they would just stop changing things they'd be doing okay.
Everquest 2 is a very good game, imho. I never played Everquest but I know that I like and enjoy EQ2 a lot.
in my opinion it is ready now. in 10 days when it is released, it will even be more ready. they're literally working 24/7 to get everything fixed before the release that they can, and i'm certain that you can expect a not-insignificant patch the first time you launch the client.
this is my honest opinion. I play it every day and I enjoy it every day. There are no showstopping bugs that I've come across and very few that I know about. Those are higher-level things and they'll have those fixed by the time anyone gets up to that level i'm sure.
so yeah i'm cool with the game as it is now.
and fyi, the game is huuuge. the lands are huge. the vocally active (read: speaking, as in you hear them) NPCs really add a lot more than I thought they would. the scenery is grand. on my pc (which is kinda wimpy -athlon 3000 @ 2.1ghz, 1.5gb ram, ati radeon 9800 pro 128mb) it runs at about 30fps, at 1600x1200, running at the setting just above "balanced." I forget what that setting is called now, but that's where I'm running. I have also turned on a few things like specular highlighting that aren't turned on in that performance profile.
the heroic opportunities are fun, and there are somewhat subtle visual clues, telling you what you need to do to continue the chain. the end of the chain is usually a "devastating blow" to your opponent, or sometimes it is a buff or a heal to yourself. so its not just a "double-click the enemy and wait until one of you dies" which is how I find a lot of mmorpg games. Meaning that if you want to fight anything above your own level you have to think about what you're doing before you even begin to engage the enemy. that's a kind of challenge that i enjoy in a game like this.
Everquest 2 is fun. I'll be buying it on release day and I'll be playing it that night. And I'll have a lot of fun doing it.
YOUR mileage may vary.
Unfortunately for SOE, the market for fantasy-based MMOGs is all but saturated currently. The companies making these games are squabbling over each others' former customers to a large degree. Because of the significant cash outlay associated with these games, most players don't maintain more than one or two accounts total (and frequently, those accounts are for the same game, and are used to multibox).
What's more is that MMOGs are unplayable if you don't pay, and the result is that the $50 initial payment for the box game seems like wasted cash if the player decides the game isn't worth it. In this case, the better the beta experience, the better the sales, and from the various reports I've heard, Blizzard has that contest won hands-down.
WoW open beta will also likely begin before EQ2 goes live, and "free" will most definitely distract people from rushing out and buying SOE's latest offering, right up to the point where WoW goes live. An ingenious marketing tactic on Blizzard's part, if they don't drop the ball.
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.
See Blue's News (direct link to Blizzard's forum thread). Don't trust anyone's words on release dates except Blizzard's.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Releases should be timed by the percent completion and bug status, not any fixed date. The date is a target for measuring your development processes and budgets. For example: Black and White was released late, but it had some bugs that actually made it impossible to beat the game! DOH! It should have been released even later rather than make it borderline unplayable.
No software is ever released with an empty list of bugs. There are always bugs. But will they affect major portions of the software? If no, then ship it. If so, then don't ship it. The hard part is determining what bugs are important and what bugs are not.
It seems like Cryptic looked at the previous MMORPGs and learned from other's mistakes, as CoH has been a pretty solid product since day one. Despite a few bugs here and there (and some major complaints from users about game difficulty after Issue 2 went live), the play experience is consistently pleasurable.
All this is to say that, if an upstart like Cryptic can release a quality product, then why not Blizzard and SoE, both of which have experience with this sort of thing? Maybe Cryptic had beginner's luck, or maybe I'm giving them more credit than they deserve.
What is the cost of an early release?
The respect of your girlfriend?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
$200 at the local massage parlor, plus tip.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I alpha (pre-beta) tested both eq2 and wow
Without a doubt wow is the more polished game, however it is not really ready. More explicitly, class balance, PVP, class talents, racial abilities, and more are incomplete.
While many people will say "MMOs are never complete" those of us playing WOW every day know that the game feels like it needs 1-2 more months and then it truly would be done.
Releasing Nov 22nd is a business decision, and it's probably the right one, but WOW isn't truly done.
I think both Everquest 2 and WOW have a great chance at success. The reason is that while EQ2 is far far far less polished than WOW, EQ2 gameplay appeals more to hard core gamers, the kind who obsessed over Everquest 1 and played the game for 3+ years.
Currently there is a lot of debate over WOW's ability to retain players for more than one year. The game is very easy, and the basic concern is that because it's so easy the player base won't be able to handle difficult challenges, Blizzard's content production team won't be able to keep up, and people will become bored and move on to other games.
People talk extensively about how much they hate the grind of EQ2, but it may be the case that grind is the secret ingredient to EQ2's long term success. After all, Sony doesn't need to be popular, they just need to get $15/month from as many people as possible.
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I support spreading santorum
there are a few lag issues in key zones, but they've taken care of that in a way that i'm happy with.
In a beta, if YOU the beta tester experience a 'few' lag issues, upon release the THOUSANDS of users will take lag issues like a bulldozer to a sand castle. Less than 20 people? Pfft, try 2000 people suddenly entering the area to see whats new.
i'm certain that you can expect a not-insignificant patch the first time you launch the client.
See, now thats a BAD thing. Betas are supposed to fix these things BEFORE the game gets released.
Those are higher-level things and they'll have those fixed by the time anyone gets up to that level i'm sure.
Most beta testers are generally hardcore gamers who will push and shove their way through a game in order to find every bug and balance issue. If you're still considered to be low level this late in the beta, chances are you haven't seenen much.
on my pc (which is kinda wimpy -athlon 3000 @ 2.1ghz, 1.5gb ram, ati radeon 9800 pro 128mb) it runs at about 30fps, at 1600x1200, running at the setting just above "balanced." I forget what that setting is called now, but that's where I'm running. I have also turned on a few things like specular highlighting that aren't turned on in that performance profile.
So its the Doom 3 of MMORPGs? I skipped Doom 3 due to its system requirements, sounds like I skipping this game too. (30 FPS with that kind of rig is horrible, especially since you're not dealing with the thousands of users who will join when the game is released.)
This is a pretty bad report from a beta tester. You've basicly said what 1 hardcore gamer could find out about a game in 1 week. You've found little/no bugs (its a MMORPG beta I doubt that), you don't seem to have seenen much in the world, and you don't seem to consider your framerate from the perspective of your gaming rig. (Athlon 3000 ~= $100. 1 gig stick of RAM ~= $150. Radeon 9800 Pro ~= $150. Total = $400, not including motherboard, hard drive, or monitor which would come out to about $600-800 not including anything non-essential.)
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).