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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."
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