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Do MMORPG's Cause People to Buy Fewer Games at Retail?
Grimwell writes NPD reports that the video games industry isn't doing so hot in 2006. Information on a report found at GameSpot indicates that consoles are down, but PC titles are up, led by MMORPG sales. From the article:
"Do MMORPG's benefit the industry by bringing in more actively involved gamers? Or do they bleed money away from other companies in the industry as MMORPG players spend their money on subscriptions and skip out on trying other games that hit the shelf because they already have something to go home to?"
Do MMORPG's Cause People to Buy Fewer Games at Retail?
Yes? How hard is it to realize that paying $15/mo for (similar) entertainment is a better option than shelling out $50 every few weeks?
well , its less distributed... but I mean they spend 10-15 USD a month on these games... it's just voting with dollars. the Industry should respond acordingly
The article assumes that, whatever is causing the current doldrums, will clear up by "the holidays".
It seems to me that these mythical "holidays", with the expense of buying a PS3 or Wii or 360, will merely exacerbate the problem. Not only are consumers not buying Madden 2016 or OMG Total Warfighters VII *now* on current-gen hardware, they are likely to be even less inclined having forked out $600 on which to see Teh New Shiny.
Also, if the XBOX 360 is riding a wave of indifference already, it must be extremely worrying to MS about what will happen when they square off against Wii and a newly-confident Nintendo.
Its not just MMORPG's that are going to bruise retail sales, its digital delivery.
People may not be talking about it so much yet, but the idea of selling digital
information 'burned into plastic' is already as archaic for GameStop as it is for
a record store.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
If they were buying 3-4 video games a month, the video game industry might have more of a problem than MMORPGs taking money. If games are so short and unreplayable that people have to buy games that often, then something seriously needs to be rethought.
:)
In the meantime, I'll just stick with Nethack and Battle for Wesnoth
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
MMORPGs are essentially a black hole for the gaming industry.
WoW, for example, is an endless, time- and money-sink. In that respect it's very similar to gambling for some people. They are so involved with the game that they don't want to play anything else. They can't show off their e-peens in an FPS! And if they were to play another MMORPG, they would have to start over which not many are willing to do.
This is why I don't think Blizzard will make a Starcraft or Diablo MMORPG. Nobody would leave WoW to start over.
That's my $.02.
There simply isn't enough time to be actively involved in MMOs and play other games at more than a less than casual level. A lot of people who play WoW and are in raiding guilds easily spend 20-40 hours a week if not more playing WoW!
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
If games are so short and unreplayable that people have to buy games that often, then something seriously needs to be rethought.
Huh? From the perspective of the publisher, that sounds like an ideal situation. Maybe a starry-eyed idealist programmer would agree with you, but to the bean counters, expensive frequently purchased trinkets is exactly what should be done.
So how do you make phone calls? What about your internet service? Cable TV? What do you do for haricuts? All of those are services. You pay for it, you get your service, then after some finite amount of time, the service you paid for is gone and you have to pay again to keep it.
MMORPGs are more of a service than a commodity.
But if you would rather think of it like a commodity item, think of it like this: you pay for it once and have it, it only lasts for a month though. Just like a haircut.
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Just say no to irreversible processes!
I agree. It's purely a matter of free-time. MMORPG reward you for spending LOTS of time.
You buy Quake 17, you spend 40 hours of play time beating it, and then you go back to your MMORPG.
a) you are "wasting" your subscription payment by not spending time on your MMORPG
b) all your friends have now advanced by 40 hours, but you haven't moved. depending on the game, this can make it hard to group with your friends, until you can catch up.
Because the MMORPG lasts for years, any other game is viewed as "temporary". Why spend a month playing Quake 17, when you could play your MMORPG and grind out another level?
The game industry should HATE MMORPGs, since they suck up all available free time, leaving the gamer with no time to play 5 new games each month (or even 1). Only the MMORPGs benefit.
I mean, seriously, I don't know about the US releases, but looking on amazon.de is just disheartening. There are surprisingly a couple of games that are scheduled for the end of june, which is more than last summer had, but you can also see stuff released in February that's _still_ on their short "New Releases" list. It's just bloody sad.
Not to mention that a lot of stuff is just a clone of a clone of a clone of a clone. Yet another FPS coming up, yet another RTS coming up, and (now that's a big surprise;) yet another sports team manager game coming up. Whop-de-fucking-do. That's soo worth my money. I always wanted to play yet another BF clone, except this one is based on the old Unreal engine and themed around WW2. Oh, wait, the original BF1942 was WW2 themed too. And I sooo always wanted to play yet another Dune 2 clone, except this one has different unit sprites. Not.
Seriously, the games industry just needs to realize that selling last year's game with better graphics is becoming less and less of an incentive to buy new games. Getting the same FPS with 1000 polygons/char instead of 300 was a bloody huge step in visual quality. Getting it with 3000 instead of 1000 becomes a smaller step. Getting it with 10,000 instead of 3000 becomes just a tweak already. There are already games sporting 30,000 polygon characters. E.g., The Singles. Am I that excited of the next step to 100,000 polygons per char. Well, no, not really. It already looks good enough.
Ok, it's not yet _perfect_. There's room for graphics improvements, but what I'm saying is: last year's games aren't visually offensive either. It's less and less an incentive to think, "man, last year's game looks like shit. I must get the newest one with the absolute highest polygon count." (Not that it ever was that huge an incentive, since I prefer gameplay and plot anyway, but just saying.) We're at the point where getting a 2 year old game from the bargain bin is quite a viable choice, not just on account of often having the same (or even better) gameplay, but also on account of not even looking that much worse.
At any rate, to sum it up: there's just not much stuff to buy, and even less stuff that tempts me. It's not the MMOs. The MMOs are just some filler to pass the time while waiting for the next good game. I've been known to take a break from MMOs to play, say, Heroes Of Might And Magic 5, though even that proved to be just a verbatim rehash of HOMM 1 to 4 with a nice 3D engine, and just as repetitive as those. But, seriously, there just isn't much to tempt me away from MMOs, much as I'm available and willing to be tempted.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Console games are $60 USD while their PC counterparts are 25% or better less. I am playing Oblivion on the Xbox360 and I am glad the game takes massive amounts of hours to complete becasue I am in no hurry to spend another $60 on what is basically a slightly better version of the game that they could easily put out on the original Xbox.
I still like the 360 but I have over 60 games for my Xbox, I dont think I will be getting close to that number with 360 games unless they get Much, Much better to justify the price tag and I really dont want to hear about how much money they are spending making these 'Next Gen games' Movies are still $8 and the special effects have increased 100 fold.
Not to dispute some of your claim but look at it this way:
10 hours of Half Life 2: 50 usd
10 hours of WOW (if that's how much you play a week) : 4-5 usd
I don't know what the real average time is per player/per week for WOW or the other assorted MMORPGs but frankly it's your best entertainment value at this point unless you got a serious Freecell addiction going on.
Seriously, how many times can you replay a game and still find it entertaining when there is no social interaction and the game play is pretty much a formula of triggered events. I remember when I was playing a lot of Medal Of Honor online I would buy the expansion packs to get more maps/weapons choices. Normally I would only play about half way through the actual single player missions before it would become tedious to me and I'd go back to playing the multiplayer instead.
If you're one of the MMORPG players that only farms or grinds it's going to get old quick but if you really go out and scout around these worlds are very entertaining and if you have people you know who play you get the addition of competition and socialization. I think a lot of gamers like that kind of gaming.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Some people may get bored with a game pretty quickly. I cannot play the same strategy game for more than a month (even if I'm playing in multiplayer). My sister *still* plays Warcraft III since it was published. The main problem with strategies/RPGs is that your gaming experience stays pretty much the same. They don't have very good storylines (except for perhaps Starcraft) and in strategies you end up building units until the 5-minute final battle where you either lose your army and have or completely defeat your enemy. RPGs usually end up collecting stuff and increasing experience and level.
FPSs last less than strategies but they present you a good story (compared to strategies), interesting maps where you take advantage of the map itself etc. Compared to FPSs, RPGs have a "smoother" experience - they have simpler maps, simpler storylines and so they keep you interested by offering new weapons/units/upgraded.
I'd say that you can play an RPS for longer than an FPS but its replay ability is lower.
But playing a single game for months isn't much fun, no matter how good it is. You'll still be fighting Night Elves, Orcs and others - and after half a year they'll look all the same. It's like visiting only one website - Slashdot, MSDN, OSNews etc.
The question of whether the online game is responsible for losses in the industry is stupid. If there were 15 incredible titles a year, sales would be just fine. If on the other hand there are 13 mediocre titles and 2 great ones (if even), well now, I'd say it's not that some online *cough*WoW*cough* game is so unbelievably amazing, but rather than it's an economical alternative amidst a field of mediocrity.
I've got it for you - playing FPS and a lot of MMORG games are just so much easier with your keyboard and mouse. Ever tried to play one with a standard game controller?
Playing games with the keyboard and mouse increase your degree of acuracy, speed, and control exponentially over controller-based games. Maybe the consoles need to start coming with keyboard/mouse controllers... more games like WoW would translate over a lot easier.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
Meanwhile FPS games are generally very limited. They generally few enough maps to count on your hand, and similarly few weapons.
I agree with all your post but this statement, or rather it could be right if you said most FPS games. The thing that balances out the limited maps and weapons is the human factor, people learn and so no two games are going to be the same. This is why people are still playing Counter Strike.
My drug, Natural Selection, is why I don't buy games. I would rather play Natural Selection than any other game on the market because the human interaction and competition is unbeatable by any other game I've seen. I've had just a repeat game because there are so many stradegies people can use in it. Hell, one match I played lasted 7 hours before we won! Now that was fun!
In the late 80's and early 90's, PC games were in the $30-40 range, most in the $30 range. They'd drop to $19.99 after a year and then on to the CompUSA bargain bin. Now you see games going for $60-70, and dropping down to about $30. Good games seem stay at $30 for a few years... Half-Life 1 was $24.99 at Target a few months ago!
That's alot of money... at that price point, video games are going either going to turn into a niche market or you'll have a 1984 scenario again where everything crashes.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Yes, that is what the bean counters want. But that's not what the players want. So people realize they aren't getting good value for their money and buy less games. And the bean counters lose money. Give people more for their money & they just might buy more games.
With a FPS though, the game is constantly changing (assuming you are playing w/ other real people online) because no bot can be like a human. Heck, I still play the original Quake.. sure, some of the maps are the same, but its the challenge the opponent(s) give you that makes it for me.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Word to that. It is less than a product, more like a biz model. Ask your cellphone provider how much your phone cost them from the manufacturer.
The bean counters need to worry solely about the quality of the game, and not the overall frequency of purchase for gamers in general.... If you build it (and it's good) they will come.
This is a lovely picture of how the world ought to be, but it is not an accurate one. As in pretty much every other area in the world, a high quality product is neither necessary nor sufficient to generate profit.
Quality costs money, and people are willing to sacrifice quality to save money. This is true in the game industry, just as it is true in all other aspects of life.
By that logic, movies would be better if they were 24 hours long, and novels should be 100,000 pages.
I love movies, and books, and games. That means I actually want to experience many of them, not buy one book and spend the next 5 months reading it, or reading it over and over again.
If I get 10-20 hours of *good* play out of a game then I'm perfectly happy with that. This is mostly with story-driven-type games though, which I tend to gravitate to. When I hear that some RPG has "100 hours of gameplay" I usually suspect that's bullshit and is padded out with half-assed reasons to replay the game. (Start over from the beginning, but *this* time as a *dark* elf! The story is pretty much the same, but we have different text at the ending! And a couple of the NPCs will be rude to you!)
"a high quality product is neither necessary nor sufficient to generate profit."
At least some quality product is, however necessary for the games industry to even exist in ther first place, otherwise people would shy away from buying the gear necessary to get into gaming, or loose interest after they've been stung with a few expensive stinkers.
Also, it's a generally accepted fact in the industry that most games loose money> Those games that are successful in turning the profit are not those that make up the long fecal tail. They're the gems.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Apparently, you don't follow Wall Street much.
They actually look at "profit growth" when they are researching companies. If I ran a public company makes $100,000 profit, then my investors expect me to make $110,000 profit next quarter, and $120,000 the next quarter, and so on. When I worked at a large mega-company a while back, we made a profit of $37 million one quarter, and our stock tanked. Why? Becuase we had made $36 million the same quarter the year before, so people were expecting a higher profit. It's called "not meeting expectations."
It's really stupid, but it's how the world works. Companies can't afford to sit making a comfortable profit. They must keep increasing their profit to be viewed as successful. It's actually what caused some of the spectacular crashes of the early 21st century. (WorldCom, Enron, Tyco, Adelphia, etc.) Their investors wanted to see profit growth, but they had figuratively (and, in the case of Enron, literally) burned up all of their fuel. The CEO's had to create the illusion of profit growth to keep investors happy, (and earn their $300 million bonuses) which eventually caught up with them and brought down the house of cards they had constructed.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Do you for example not even include the retail box cost for WoW, while you do for HL2?
Actually, I did. The cost of WOW is actually a bit less than 4-5 dollar a week costs when you go by subscription alone (it comes in around 3.50 a week).
Also, what's saying someone purchased HL2 during these 10 hours you compare them with?
Well, seeings as where it's a cost comparison my guess is that they purchased half life 2. If you're trying to hint at piracy I guess you're right, HL2 would be infinatly cheaper. I can't contend with piracy in this case.
You don't keep purchasing HL2 while you play it, but you do keep playing fixed monthly fees for WoW as long as you play it, regardless how much you play it.
OK, let me play devils advocate for the number of games people buy, that do not require subscription but never really play for more than an hour or two. I have several on my shelf. And frankly, if you're paying for a MMORPG and not using it than you're a moron. Stupidity is something I have no justification for either. But even moreso who's to say someone gets the full 10 hours out of HL2? You see, you're playing a word game here, I'm trying to go by a law of averages and yes, most players I've spoken to have told me that they got about 10 hours out of HL2. I got less out of the game. Where as I know players of MMORPGs who have gotten over 100 hours out of their 15 or so dollar investment (50 if you want to include the box price). So I can't make an excuse for every diviation of what a player does. I'm sorry.
Half-Life 2 played during two years => $36.
OK, here's somewhere where I HAVE to draw the line. Who, pray tell, is playing HL2 for two years? Are you trying to tell me that there are people who will play HL2 over and over and over again for two years without buying another game and still find the game worth playing? You're out of your mind, again, you're playing a word game. Let's be serious about this, most FPS players I know buy a game about once a month, most of the posts here confirm that. Most MMORPG players I know buy a new MMORPG every 2-3 years... Do you care to compare the costs again?
Two years seem to me a pretty reasonable time before become bored over games better than average.
Are you seriously telling me that you won't buy another game for two years from the point you bought half life 2? That means you are NOT an average gamer.
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Let the beancounters do what they do best. The problem happens all too often when the beancounters are the other people that control the company. At that point the quote is 100% correct.
I agree that the mouse + keyboard is the superior control scheme (at the moment) for FPS, RTS and the vast majority of MMORGs.
But that's where the list ends.
Any other kind of game that I can think of is much better with a console-style controller. Racing? Yes, analog sticks. Flying, same. Action/twitchy games, much better suited for the console controller than a keyboard/mouse. Anything that involves a running 3rd-person character.
The mouse has precise aiming, and they keyboard has a lot of buttons... but dual analog sticks are fantastic for varying amounts of force in a particular (limitless) direction, and never having to look down to find a hotkey is quite advantageous as well.
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But you expect them to play the same six maps of multiplayer action for two years without losing interest instead of the expansive worlds of MMORPGs? Get real. I have and play CSS. I have several dozen maps and I still find myself hard pressed to play for more than a couple hours a week anymore.
Perhaps it's "to each their own" but I still think it's nuts to claim that the average gamer would be happy with HL2 (and all it's mods) for two solid years without buying more games. Average gamers DO NOT do this. Perhaps you're the exception. Like I said, I can't make up a scenario where every player is going to make out with a MMORPG. My experience matches many of the experiences of other posters here; MMORPGs lessened my buying of other games. Multiplayer internet games, such as CSS, did the same but to a much lesser extent.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.