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CBS News Fields SWG Hatemail
Back in December of last year, the CBS News site did a feature printing some of the frustrated and confused emails sent by Star Wars Galaxies players. These individuals were all upset by the 'NGE', or New Game Enhancements, patched into the game by publisher Sony Online Entertainment. Evidently the feature was so popular they've gone back into the well, printing up a whole new batch of SWG-related frustrations. When CBS and the Washington Post are covering something like this, it tells me two things. First, MMOGs are definitely mainstream now. Second, Sony made a mistake. Warcry has some information that may reveal how big a mistake. They claim that a packet sniffer built into the SWG client made population numbers for the servers available to players. On a Friday night, at peak time, post-NGE Galaxies is apparently only drawing 10,400 players across all galaxy servers. This is basically 'some guy on a website' talk, so take this with a big grain of salt. It's sobering news, though, if true.
10K is peanuts next to World of Warcraft or the original Everquest, but it's still quite a few. 10,000x$15=$150,000 a month in income, not counting income from boxed copies. Assuming Lucasarts is willing to let SOE continue running the game, they could continue running the game indefinitely by cutting the development team down to a skeleton crew and consolidating most of the servers. Of course, it's far more likely Lucasarts will see the game severely sagging and pull the plug entirely rather than let the brand get diluted by a bad player experience. Star Wars games usually aren't very good, but they're generally better than the SWG experience and don't charge monthly fees.
Because maintaining two separate codebases is a lot more expensive than maintaining one.
Sony had the right idea, they had to revamp the game. But they took the wrong approach and instead has hastened SWG's death. No one is going to go play a game when all the current players are leaving and ranting how much it sucks. That is repelling all the potential players that Sony is expecting to replace all the players leaving. SWG has been such a disaster and it's fate is now sealed. The developers seem to actually be going in the right direction now but it is much to late and the plug will be pulled soon.
"... Lucasarts will ...pull the plug entirely rather than let the brand get diluted by a bad player experience."
Have you seen Episode I? Yeah, he made TWO more! There is no concept of "pull the plug" to avoid a bad user experience.
No sig for you!!
is that Sony forgot to treat its game revamping as an optional expansion, but instead forced players to switch to new rules. Bad, bad, bad idea.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
To put things into perspective, EA considered TSO a _flop_ when it stabilized at 100,000 subscribers. So 10,000 active subscribers is just dead. There were a couple of MUDs in the 90s which could boast more players than that.
Even if it were 150,000 USD at month, that just doesn't pay for the server costs, admin salaries, GM salaries (someone still has to make sure those 10,000 don't rampantly cheat), patching (if they do cheat, someone has to fix the bugs), QA (ideally a patch would be tested before release), and further development. We're talking a major commercial game, not someone's web-based exercise where making any money in a month is still great.
But I'm guessing they don't even make 150,000 USD a month. Two words: "station pass". If you're already paying for a Sony game, you can get access to all others for half the price of a game. If you already play two EQ games (e.g., Planetside and EQ/EQ2), you get SWG for free. Heck, Sony even offers in-game advantages for for getting a station pass even for a single game, such as getting extra moves (directly or via bundled mini-expansions), or extra character slots or whatever. So you could really play just one Sony game and incidentally get the others for free.
I know that first hand. The periods when I went back to SWG, only to find it a bigger mess and buggier to boot, were just that: I already had a station pass, SWG didn't cost anything extra (other than the download times for the patches) to try, so wth... sure, I'll give it another try.
So the question is how many of those 10,000 are just dropping by between rounds of their main SOE game (e.g., when their guildies aren't online in EQ), but don't actually pay a single buck to Sony for the privilege. It could be none, or it could be that SWG isn't actually making Sony _any_ income, or more probably somewhere in between.
Either way you want to slice it and look at it, it's a major fuck-up. Only 10k subscribers is MMO death anyway, but for a game based on the biggest franchise in history... there are no words to properly describe how big a fuck-up that is.
There were _millions_ of SW nerds who waited for SWG like it was the second coming of Obi Wa... err... the messiah. There were people who grew up with SW. People who put "Jedi" as their religion on census forms and _meant_ it. As Scott Kurtz aptly put it in a comic strip, there were people who said goodbye to their friends and family and never expected to leave the SW universe again. It was a franchise that made Warcraft or The Sims look like peanuts. (When was the last time you've heard someone debate Warcraft as passionately as "Han shot first"?)
And yet they fucked up. They were handed over the franchise and the fans on a silver platter, and they fucked up. There's no other way to put it.
Of course, I suspect that won't stop Raph Koster from giving even more interviews about how great a game designer he is, and spout various stuff like "a MMO doesn't have to be a good game, it's just a social framework" (then how come SWG never was much of either?) or "the biggest MMO success ever isn't WoW, it's Habbo Hotel." (Never mind that Habbo Hotel is a free game _and_ it still doesn't have the number of active subscribers that WoW has. We'll just redefine that as the new metric of success.) But I digress.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This story, and the dozens like it, tell me two things as well. First, that people are running like crazy from reality into the warm, waiting arms of entertainment. And Second, that times must be getting pretty rough if this is the case.
-FL
Because they don't actually give a flying fuck about the customer. They decided that the customer was going to play simplified SWG period.
Notice that they managed to:
Why would they maintain 2 code branches when they don't even maintain one in the first place?
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
A "classic" server was introduced (quite a while subsequently, mind you), on which the expansion and its changes and additions were not present. It (Gareth) has maintained a sizable userbase throughout its existence so far and the experiment is for all intents and purposes a success. It maintains a separate ruleset and different game dynamic.
Karma: Chameleon (comes and goes)
Following this reasoning, they shouldn't ever release WoW, Matrix Online etc. They are all separate codebases. Furthermore, there should be only one MMORPG ever made, by anyone.
:P This was a good opportunity for codebase split, creating two separate codebases, at least one profitable. Instead they killed one profitable codebase and created one which was pulled rapidly down by the death of the previous one.
Would it sprout into 100 different codebases, as long as each of them has userbase making given branch profitable, it's fine and should stay that way. If any branch is getting dry, either try to fix it, or cut it. But don't cut live branches.
Sony failed to understand that profitablity of games is strongly influenced by variety: I won't buy 15 boxes of Half-Life 2. I will buy one, and 14 other games. And someone else won't buy Half-Life 2 at all, but some will buy other games by Valve. Now what if I wanted to buy Half-Life 2, preordered it, and Valve would say they cancelled it, but here's Counter-Strike, have it and enjoy it. Now I don't feel appealed to the idea of battling terrorists in tiny areas, I want an immersive, dark single-user game. I don't care if Counter-Strike is good or bad, it's not what I asked for!
Sure I might buy both. Or I might not, but my neighbor would buy CS while never touching HL2. This or that way, profit from selling two boxes, not one goes to Valve. But now I'm pissed off and I discourage everyone I know from doing any business with Valve. For me it's crap.
Real quality of both games aside, the changes were way too big to call it "upgrade". It was total replacement of what the players paid for with something they didn't ask for. Would the new version draw a new user base or not, we won't know. But Sony killed a milk cow to make steaks without regard that the users were vegetarians.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
But the so called unbalanced proffesions problem is impossible to fix. Why?
Because nobody can agree on what it should be like instead.
Believe it or not but some players actually like the NGE. They hate the fact it is bugged but they like the basic idea. How can Sony possibly hope to satisfy these players while also keeping the fans of the old system happy. Let alone satisfying those players that want a different system all together?
SWG biggest failure is that it never really dared to say, we are X take it or leave it. Imagine if you tried to make a FPS sim and tried to satisfy all at once both the hardcore Operation Flashpoint players and say the Unreal Tournament players. Could it be done? No.
SWG was a 'complex' game. Well to some, personally I think that any person that considered SWG complex is the kind of person who needs a tutorial on lightswitches but that is just me. SWG was a game that might require you to read. Yeah, shocking isn't it?
Now apparently it is 'simpler'. The reason seems simple, they hope to appeal to that mythical gaming group called the casual player. The problem is that this group does not actually exist outside focus groups. Oh, NGE was tested ONLY on focus groups, with no existing players involved.
I could start a long rant about the idiocy of focus groups (first off, what kind of losers possibly have time to be in one?) but lets not. Lets just say that focus groups never ever work.
They didn't work for NGE. By trying to appeal to a gaming group that does exist SOE only managed to split the existing user group in to two camps. The first want the old system back and are upset to be forced onto a bugged system they don't want. The second group kinda likes the new system but is upset about the huge number of bugs.
Halfing your audience (making the totally wild speculation that it is a 50/50 distribution) is not a good move.
SWG NGE is currently a desperate move to copy WoW's success without actually doing any real development. The current system is just ewh. It reminds me of those over ambitious mods that try to take an existing engine were it was never meant to go.
The combat now tries to be a FPS but lacks collision detection and you can only shoot when you have the mouse over the target. Yeah, unlike EVERY FPS out there where you can shoot when you want. This makes melee totally unfun. If you think it is like Jedi Academy think again.
The proffesions now take a bit after Everquests rigid role model but with crafting being a seperate job. So is entertainer. Before you could mix match those jobs with other roles. Now your an entertainer/crafter and that is it. Nothing to do but dance dance dance baby. Oh yeah. In fact both proffesions are now next to useless.
SOE seems determined to take its games into the direction of the simple slash and hack korean games but getting it completly wrong. EQ2 too has had simplifications that ruin it. No more spirit shard and your character running insanely fast ruined it for me.
Personally I am on the look out for a MMORPG like game that dares to be complex. That dares the most daring of all moves and not try to be another FPS shooter because those sell so well.
I am 35, I got money to burn but I no longer like being in twitch games that require me to constantly be twirling around trying to keep a polygon under my mouse cursor.
DDO was a nasty shock. It feels more like playing some console fighter then playing D&D. Just having a die on the screen does not make it D&D.
Oh well, that is what you get for being a minority gamer.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Look at Blizzard games, WoW included. It has been pointed out before that Blizzard hasn't really innovated much. Diablo was just a scrolling arcade game (a la Contra or Gauntlet), Warcraft was a Dune 2 rip-off, and WoW has borrowed most of its elements from other games before it (e.g., the PvP theme had already been made mainstream by the likes of Dark Age Of Camelot and Anarchy Online). So what was Blizzard's secret mojo? Quality (including not just the lack of bugs, but also a good interface, smooth learning curve, and great balance) and generally giving customers what they wanted.
Last I've heard some numbers WoW was at about 10 times the number of subscribers of the original EQ at its peak, even farther ahead of EQ2, and it had outgunned some other games by as much as 50 to 60 times.
So maybe, just maybe, making the customer happy pays off, you know? No, that doesn't mean bending over backwards each time someone whines that his level 1 priest should get the mages' level 50 spell. But it means that those "idiots" are entitled to have some fun, and decisions should be at least partially based on "well, what do most customers want?" Turns out that most of us are happy just with quality and balance.
Or let's talk about how EQ itself took the crown and stole most customers from UO, i.e., from those who invented the genre. In fact, "EQ" became _the_ name in the MMO arena, stealing the spotlight completely from the genre's creators. It's no mean feat. It's like stealing the 3D FPS spotlight completely from Id. _That_ big a feat. Not to mention from the ones with the big franchise. "Ultima" was a major franchise for every gamer, while "Everquest" originally meant nothing to anyone.
What was EQ's secret mojo? Giving the customers a lot of the stuff they wanted, and which Origin refused to give them. (E.g., the fact that Origin finally grudgingly gave its players a gank-free facet was only to stop the exodus to games, like EQ or AC, which gave non-PK'ers just that: a place where you won't be ganked on sight and repeatedly as soon as you step outside the town. That was just one of the many little things that people wanted, and EQ delivered, while Origin was blatantly ignoring its customers.)
So maybe, just maybe, quality does matter. Maybe, just maybe, even "in a country full of idiots", those "idiots" can still cancel their accounts and go to another game they find more fun. And maybe, just maybe, 2x the investment in quality can get you 10x more revenue. Just something for this industry to ponder.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.