EA Blames Casuals For Falling Old Republic Subscriber Numbers

[1337mokro]

When you make a product that under performs in a highly competitive market. Always blame someone else for your failing.

Only god knows what could happen if a company ever decided to say. We did something wrong. Let's look at it and fix it. Maybe if we take a break between snorting cocaine and fucking prostitutes inside our golden money palaces and actually analyse the feedback and data we have gathered we might release a good product next time or can update the current one to a version that people will want to pay for.

Yeah right! Just blame it on someone else not our fucking problem. We already got the money! Woo Party!


Then people go and scratch their head asking themselves why publishers seem about as intelligent as a chimpanzee flinging it's poop around.

PS: My apologies to any chimpanzees offended by my statement. It's simply a saying and we all know you are twice as intelligent as any publisher out there.

 

[Fearzone]

I never played it at all. I refuse to pay monthly fees to almost any game, and MMO's are usually not worth that money. Food is. So is rent. Health insurance. Dwarf Fortress.

Health insurance isn't, if you are healthy. Maybe catastrophic insurance, but that's it, then everything else out of pocket, then have a ton of money left over to play multiple MMOs and buy better food.

 

[geizr]

So...it can't possibly be that the game is just not as good as people had hoped it would be? We've seen this exact same cycle with many other MMOs. New game launches, and there is a flood of new subscriptions. At first glance, it looks like the game is a stellar hit and a potential WoW-killer. After about 3 months, a few people leave (usually due to boredom), but, otherwise, the game holds steady. It's not until the 6th month mark that people really begin to understand the game and its quirks, and that's about when the frustration with various issues begins to set in. After about 1-1.5 years, if something doesn't change to hold the interests of players or significantly address the most significant issues in the game's design and implementation, you see a final mass exodus, leaving the game in a perpetuation niche of a few die-hard fans (this is what happened to Warhammer and Aion).

Casuals are an approximately steady-state flow. They come and go at about the same rate. There's nothing you can do to hold a casual for very long because they are always going to get bored quickly, have to leave the game due to external demands on their time or person, or just have a complete shift in interests that doesn't overlap with the game (casuals are usually very time limited, so they have to choose where their interests carefully). But there is such a large reservoir of them that, barring bad press, reviews, or word-of-mouth, you are reasonably guaranteed a steady influx to replace those that leave. Some may even return, from time-to-time. (I would not be surprised that one could write an equilibrium equation, using statistical mechanics (a more precise conceptualization of thermodynamics), describing the steady-state of casual gamer flux into and out of the game volume through the surface of that volume. The trick would be determining the temperature inside the volume versus outside, the permeability of the gaming surface, and definition of entropy for a population of gamers enclosed in a particular volume of game-space).

As for comparisons to WoW, WoW continues its dominance from pure inertia and the fact that it has had a chance to be constantly refined over a period of 7 years (it's virtually impossible for any new game to match that, starting out). It is an exceptionally mature product at this point. However, WoW has definitely passed its prime days, which, in my opinion, occurred during the era of Burning Crusade, just before the Sunwell update (others may peg early WotLK as more the prime). Even so, in my opinion, game companies need to forget about trying to create the next WoW-killer, because it's not possible. As far as I can see, only two things can kill WoW, Blizzard-Activision and time (and it looks like WoW's current trickling decline is really a mixture of both).

 

[w00tage]

The casuals are leaving? The remaining people not as many as you had hoped? Maybe you shouldn't have tried to ape a game that people are already tired of, then. People have been saying for a while now, but if you make a game that can be described as "like World of Warcraft, but," then you are not going to be able to hold many subscribers beyond the first couple of months, after which a lot of people are just going to go back to the game they've already invested years into.

Hell, even a proper space combat game would have been enough to keep me on board. Instead we got a substandard Starfox clone.

That is a succinct summation of the reason new MMOs fail left and right. They don't get the fact that pretty much ANYONE would play an MMO for the experience of sharing games long-distance. (side note - I believe that's why the console networks powered their sales this far - people who play or even watch a game over someone's house are far more likely to buy it specifically to play it with their friend.).

However, "MMO mechanics" are specifically created to make people play for as many hours as possible, and that narrows the market segment for those games to people who will commit that level of time. If you copy that model, then you are competing for that narrow market segment instead of for the rest of the prospective market.

And as Scars pointed out, the people you attract from that market segment have a known, familiar alternative in which they have built-up assets, not to mention a lot of friends. I'll point out that of the non-gamers you attract, the ones who can't or won't commit that time will find that fact out for themselves pretty quickly and then leave the game, and maybe even shy away from gaming.

 

[carpathic]

Curious how every problem that Bioware encounters lately is somehow the players' fault. Very curious indeed.

Wonder when that will change? Will it take chapter 11?

 

[zefiris]

Health insurance isn't, if you are healthy.

Enjoy your crippling debt when you get randomly infected by a disease (sorry buddy, being healthy doesn't make you immune) or when you have an accident.

You can be perfectly healthy for years, while inside you, something builds up. And then when it gets past the tipping point and you realize, you're screwed, since you've got to shell out five grand. Just like that. You're a kid, so you don't understand that it can happen any day, any time, without any warning whatsoever, but...it's still a stupid attitude, even if it is understandable to have when you're young and clueless about how the body works.

 

[tehroc]

It's no surprise. Casuals tend to be suckers for some flashy marketing. They are constantly looking towards the horizon to the next big thing. The only people left are the hardcore fans (not exactly hardcore players, but fans of the IP).

SWTOR is far too easy for casuals to blast their way through.

SWTOR has as much content as a WOW expansion and the players have treated it as such. Hence the burnout in just three months.

 

[4173]

He didn't cite casual gamers, just casual customers. A whole bunch of casual viewers saw The Avengers this weekend, they won't all be running off to buy comic books. There's tons of casual fans of [local pro-sports team] that don't buy season tickets.

Of course you want to convince as many of those casuals to become regulars, but that is a separate issue. This is discussing the products current status.


They were talking to investors, they don't give a fuck about game specifics. All they said was say "some bad news is not Armageddon" and "we think we offer something different (and more appealing) than some soon to be released games" and "we have a plan."


Again it was a fucking INVESTORS MEETING.

 

[Mikeyfell]

Are you sure it's not just people lashing out at Bioware for their dwindling quality of late?

Could this be the first successful gaming boycott?

Or maybe it's just what I said before Old Republic was even released. I believe it went a little something like: "You can't compete with WOW and you're stupid for trying"

Either way I'm glad to see Bioware suffering.

 

[Detective Prince]

I finished it in a month. XD It just wasn't good enough for me to hang around. I have other online games I've spent over 500 hours on (Not WoW) does that make me casual? XD

 

[TheRookie8]

Who gave this guy a microphone?! Dammit, man! Say something a business professional would say! Say something that shows you value all the games under your company logo!

Disrespectful!

 

[TheRookie8]

Are you sure it's not just people lashing out at Bioware for their dwindling quality of late?

Could this be the first successful gaming boycott?

Or maybe it's just what I said before Old Republic was even released. I believe it went a little something like: "You can't compete with WOW and you're stupid for trying"

Either way I'm glad to see Bioware suffering.

I hope you're glad to see them "suffering" as a reminder to retain the qualities which made their previous games successful. If you enjoy them suffering for the sake of suffering, I find that unhealthy.

 

[4173]

Oh, and love the Fox News headline. Good stuff.


(yes, I realize the headline is from the source, comment still applies)



captcha: trust me (even it knows)

 

[viranimus]

-snip-

Just for my own perspective, how many hours per day / week did you average playing the game? Be honest please I want to better understand how one can determine that an MMO is too easy.

I myself average 8-12 hours per week gaming in general (which is a major reason why I don't play MMOs anymore - no time to dedicate).

Well honestly and again I am a natural soloist so I would invariably need more time than what people could do in a group, my figure varied. When I played heavily It was likely around 15-20 hours a week, But as school started up I had to withdrawl on that time to about 5-10 hours a week, I bumped up again in febuary to about 20 hours a week, then I basically played nothing (not ToR, anything) from mid march till about 3 days ago.

I currently sit at 42 and I have roughly 70 hours invested into my main and about 30 into alts. That figure stands very similar to my single player affairs. My Dark Souls main is at 82 hours and is at level 52

And again, I played ToR incredibly casually because honestly I do not like star wars, I do not like the WoW gameplay mechanics, and the ONLY reason I played was to have a chance to play with a friend I met back in EQ, and played FFXI with and we hadnt played an MMO together in quite a while. Had it not been for that, my play hours would have likely been zero because I am after playing 100+ MMOs burnt out on the formula.

But again, I know had I had the ambition, I could have still played casually (IE averaging 10-20 hours a week) and made it from 1-50 in about a month and a half to two months easily.