R.I.P Ultima Online ?

petrus4 writes "Terra Nova has posted my article about the possible impending death of Ultima Online. In it, I talk about why I think UO is in serious long-term trouble, and what can be done to possibly reverse the trend and rescue the game." From the article: "Admittedly when something is very large, its demise often takes a considerable period of time...The Titanic took something like four hours to sink after initially striking the iceberg. But there are a couple of reasons why I believe that from a long term market share perspective, the game could be in trouble."

Comments

Why is it now difficult to own games?

[Richie1984]

EA's switching to credit card payments strikes me as somewhat reminiscent of the Steam system for authorising Half Life 2 every time you play. It just makes it harder and more awkward for gamers to play the games that they want to, and goes some way to preventing people from being able to play the game. Even if U.O is a few years old, it is still reasonably popular and still in demand. I can't see why the company would want to shoot themself in the foot by preventing consumers from easily purchasing their product.

Re:Why is it now difficult to own games?

[iocat]

I recall Brian Moriarty speaking at a conference about Mpath (an early subscription online gaming service). He said that something like 30% of their payments were by mail via money order. His point was that as professionals, most game creators (and marketing people at EA) can't even conceive of the daily lives of some of their customer base, for whom having and using a credit card is a big deal.

What if it does?

[Quarters]

UO's been running close to a quarter million subscribers since the day it was released. It's paid for itself many many many times over. From a business perspective it can go away now and still be a huge success.

UO still has a quarter million subscribers, the latest expansion was in the top 20 for PC games sales last month, and the players of UO have shown, historically, that no matter how inept the developer and support staff can be they will continue to pay and play the game.

To counter some of your points directly:
a) Anyone involved with the games "inception" (aka "creation") left, or was told to leave long ago. There's no reason why that should affect the game in the present, as UO has been running without the oversite of the people who designed and implemented it for a long time.

b) EA's tried to push UO in different directions quite a number of times: The failed 3D client, the Steampunk expansion made with unused UO2 assets, this new Japanese themed expansion. None of those ideas destroyed the game and they all tried to push UO in a direction different than its original design. Even if the relics are making it a "Diablo clone", why can the only conclusion be that such a change will be bad for the game? Maybe the players want a different combat system.

c)Since you didn't like the promotion last year the game is dying.....ok.

d) The game had a peak of 240K and is now running around 170k. Nice statistics. What you either don't know, or didn't include, is what number of subs are required to be above a break-even point for the hardware maintenance and salaries of the live team. It's reasonable to assume, based on the age and relative popularity of the game, that it has been in the black for quite some time. The number of players needed to continue to make a profit from the game is quite probably far far less than 165K. It wouldn't be unreasonable to think that a game such as UI could survive on as few as 20K-40K users. There are long running MMOs that have never had player bases that have grown beyond 40K, yet those games are still running.

e)Compared to the subscribers from North America and Europe I can't fathom that Australian subscribers represent a very large percentage of the UO playerbase. As far as I know, from my frequent perusal of the game's section in Best Buy, the only UO disc on the shelves these days is Samurai Empires. Which, as I stated above, is selling amazingly well. Are you implying that SE isn't going to be released in AU, or that it hasn't been released yet?

None of your points, either singly or all taken together, gives any overwhelming evidence that UO is doing anything other than what it's done for years....just existed.