What does free to play, MOBA, MMORTS, and a well known IP have in common? All three fall under what I call the line of presumed success that isn’t so much of a line as it is a painting of a hole in the wall set up by a cunning cartoon coyote to entrap businesses with zero depth perception. Now I could stand here on my podium all day and scream to budding developers about how their market researchers are dead wrong, and that the success of high profile MMOs like League of Legends, DOTA2, and even titles like SMITE will not translate into guaranteed success for them, and may even scoop up enough of the market to ensure that they never see the light of day, but I am never going to convince companies like Mythic Entertainment that the money and staff that could have been spent on Warhammer Online was being wasted on a MOBA that nobody would want to play. Would the CEO of Petroglyph had listened if I had shown up in his bedroom at 3am and, instead of stealing the sample toothpastes from the linen closet, had warned him that Battle for Graxia was a bad idea?
As League of Legends continues to rake in more income than the GDP of some of Earth’s smallest countries, we will continue our frogmarch of MOBA titles trying to piggy back on their success and crashing miserably. Where MOBA games differ from MMOs, and I do know most of you don’t want me talking about the genre, is that unlike MMOs where you can afford to be a “WoW clone” and still have enough room to make the game your own and become successful, the MOBA genre is much harder to break into, since each game is more or less exactly the same. There isn’t a whole lot of wiggle room, and you either get your name out and succeed or flop horribly. Petroglyph tried this with Rise of the Immortals, and it flopped. Then they tried it again with Battle for Graxia, and the game is now shutting down just a month out of launch.
A few players on the Battle for Graxia forums pointed out just a few of Petroglyph’s failings: Not advertising the game, pricing above the competition, poor server infrastructure, and a lack of commitment to their games and players. Battle for Graxia beat All Point Bulletin’s record for how quickly a game could shut down after launch, and this news is going to hurt Petroglyph much deeper than simply the lost potential revenue. Shutting down your game one month after launch, which in turn followed a very long beta period, sets a bad precedent and anyone who reads up about them in the future may not have enough trust to make those crucial beta purchases. And why should they?
Battle for Graxia is shutting down on June 27th, with the cryptic message that Petroglyph reserves the right to bring the game back online at any point in the future, and that they hope to do so. Whether or not the community affords them another chance is an entirely different topic.
MMO Fallout 