Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
I'm not stressed. I'm just terribly, terribly alert.
Would be nice if they sold the system before closing it.
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.
A) Most people who has been there since the beginning has left.
I joined years after the beginning, yet my account is 74 months old. It would be quite a surprise if a considerable number of people had stayed for seven years playing the same game.
B) The developers have made changes I don't approve of (paraphrased).
*Shrugs* Hardly proof positive that the game is dying. The fact that people are paying loads of real money for items in the game is not a proof that people are loosing faith in it, quite the contrary.
E) They only accept credit cards!
Wrong. There are four options avaible. However, the poster's local shop have stopped selling game time coupons. He claims that's the main reason why he doesn't play the game any longer.
His solutions doesn't seem like ways to resuscitate a dying game. He suggests that a vast amount of new land is added, for housing. UO has a 1 house per account rule, so he's actually complaining of overcrowding.
His other arguments are either vague ( There is some evidence to suggest that the game's current programmers are frustrated with the age/possible obsolescence in some respects of the game's codebase.) or about minor things ( EA's "Return to Britannia," campaign last year did not instill confidence in me).
First off, lemme make a lil' disclaimer: I'm one of the Core developers at http://www.runuo.com/, the largest Ultima Online emulator around, so I may be a bit biased :)
Anyways, the article seems to have been written by someone who hasn't kept up on the latest UO news. In the past month, EA/OSI released a new expansion with a large landmass, the "samurai empire" expansion. Also, just in the past week infact, They opened up a brand NEW shard, compeltely clean with no players on it. If UO was dying,it wouldn't make economic sense to invest money and time in putting up another server.
In the article, it also lists as a 'reason' for UO's demise as the lack of stores in which to purchase The latest expansions or Gamecodes without the use of a Credit Card. A little searching shows this page listing EB-Games austrailia as a place t' buy 'em.
Another thing that the author didn't take into account is the popularity of free shards. RunUO, in addition to providing highly customizable software, also sponsors 3 shards, all from differing time periods. Combined, they have over 50,000 accounts. And these are active accounts. we purge unused accounts every 90 some days.
Hybrid, Our biggest shard with about 37000 accounts, is based in the Pre-AoS era, with peaks ov over 2000 online at any one time.
Our other shards, Rebirth and Demise, are a super old school shard from the Pre-T2A area, and a Shard from the current era of ultima online, AoS/SE respectively.
Those are just 3 shards. There are MANY more out there which help keep UO alive.
Long live Ultima Online!
Since the article uses my numbers, here are my comments:
Firstly, just to clarify the numbers, while it did have its initial peak of 240K around April 2001, my chart clearly shows that UO actually rebounded in 2003 at reached a new peak of some 250K or more from March to June 2003, and this was confirmed by UO's producer himself ( http://www.uo.com/sept2003nl.html ). So while it's tempting to say the UO has been in decline for over 3 years now, it really has only been in decline for about 18 months.
Secondly, I think the current figure is probably closer to 170,000, not 165,000, and that's what my chart reflects.
Thirdly, I'm not sure where the figure of "the
game's population level has fallen by 32.25% in the last 28 months" comes from. April 2001 to September 2004 (the last data I have) would be 27.1% over 41 months. June 2003 to September 2004 would be 32.0% over 15 months, and May 2002 to September 2004 24.4% over 28 months.
Fourthly, before anyone old school fanboi tries to claim that it was Trammel (UO:R) that began the fall of UO, it was not. People who were working on UO at the time will tell you that they were rapidly losing many subscribers due to the unrestricted PvP, and that UO:R is what actually saved UO and allowed it to continue to grow. UO continued to do well until a confluence of events: the release of UO:3D (largely panned), the cancellation of the UO sequel OWO:O, and the beta test and subsequent release of Dark Age of Camelot.
Fifthly, it should be pointed out that something like half of UO's playerbase is now in Japan, so it is not surprising the the gameplay is changing to accomodate their play styles.
Finally, it's my personal opinion that there isn't much that can "save" UO at this point. The game was starting to look obsolete when they cancelled the first 3D sequel, and EA's short-sighted cancellation of the second 3D sequel (UXO) has only served to hurt the Ultima brand even further. Even a full-up 3D conversion of the game would not help it; the data shows that MMOGs, like most every other product in a capitalist market, has a limited life cycle. You can increase growth by expanding into new markets, but once a title is mature and consumers are familiar with it, there is very little you can do to get people to preferentially pick up a copy of UO off the shelf when you're up against a dozen other MMOG titles on that same shelf.
Bruce
http://www.mmogchart.com