Author: Admin

Star Vault Q3 Financial Reports


Star Vault today released their third quarterly report for 2011, and the results are rather similar to last quarter. For the first time, Star Vault has reported a loss in subscribers, even though sales of the game client itself are up. In the usual manner, I’ve included the fun facts for you all to enjoy. Do bear in mind that there may be some inconsistencies and poor grammar, as my source is the poor translation of Google from a Swedish document.

  • Star Vault’s Q3 net sales amounted to 706,404 SEK, but the company’s net earnings remains in the red (-720,790 SEK)
  • Subscriber numbers declined in the third quarter, which Star Vault attributes to the delay of Territory Control.
  • Sales of the game itself increased in Q3 over Q2.
  • Territory Control hopes to bring in more players who “really take gaming seriously.” (their words, not mine)
  • Star Vault is still working with OnLegends to bring Mortal Online to a wider audience.
  • Star Vault’s gross profit for the first nine months was 4.3 million SEK ($622 thousand USD).
  • Administrative Expenses ran up 1.3 million while research and development gobbled up 2.1 million.

And because you were waiting for this part of the quarterly update:

Program to reduce our costs are developing well and we expect and that the outcome of this will reflected fully in January 2012. With our current cost structure, we consider that further approximately 500 players to achieve break-even, a goal that we are due to the delay of further expansion expected to achieve first quarter of 2012.

And an interesting note on why Star Vault has been in the red:

In June 2011 signed an agreement with Star Vault LeKool (Chinese publisher) when the fast-growing gaming market for English-language games in China is one such market that the company could not reach before. Along with LeKool open this opportunity up and Mortal Online expands thus into this interesting market. The business model means that the cost of operation increases to a much lower rate than revenues, when number of players increases. Star Vault will continually monitor price developments in the industry to offer players market prices. In the longer term, the Star Vault to develop and sell new games.

Just Kidding: Lineage II Becomes Free To Play Today


Omali you cheeky person, you say while you flick through the calendar here on MMO Fallout and see that yes, indeed, the free to play switch was announced for November 30th. You would be half correct: The Goddess of Destruction patch goes live on the 30th. Today, however, NCsoft has taken down the Lineage 2 servers at approximately 8am eastern for an estimated ten hours for maintenance. The patch notes are as follows:

  • The Vesper Dreams event continues.
  • The European server, Naia, will be moved to the United States. Moving forward it will be in the same physical location as Chronos. The Naia server time in-game will remain European: the next Castle Siege and Territory Wars on Naia will occur this weekend (November 26 and 27) as originally planned.
  • All Lineage II game accounts become Truly Free.
  • All characters’ vitality will be refilled. A vitality refill will happen with every regular weekly maintenance.

For now, the NCsoft account management is down for maintenance. You can find the announcement here, in case you still don’t believe me. You’re going to need an eleven gigabyte download for the client, so get to work!

Update: The NCsoft website is back up and accounts should be displayed as “playable” with an NCcoin amount listed.

Steam November MMO Sales: 23-27


Oh glorious Steam overlords, what sales do you bring us on this, the week of Black Friday?

Check out the rest of Steam’s catalog to see what else is on sale. We here at MMO Fallout wish to extend our sincere apologies to everyone’s wallet this coming Black Friday.

Earth Eternal Shuts Down, Again.


Greetings fellow Earth Eternal fans,

It’s been a blast observing the Earth Eternal community participate in the Beta program and your feedback has been invaluable

Unfortunately, Earth Eternal will be saying goodbye on Thursday November 24th 2011 at 9:00 pm EST

We are still determining future plans for Earth Eternal but those have not been finalized and we hope to share them with you as soon as we can

We hope you had an awesome time because we certainly did

The Earth Eternal team

Stay calm, Omali, remember what your therapist told you. I’d be remiss to try and convince any of you that I didn’t know this was coming, especially after my rather scathing remarks about the title a few weeks ago,  but today marks the official announcement that Earth Eternal will be shutting down and similarly to Sparkplay’s announcement, this time around gives even less warning. When the servers come down at 9pm tomorrow night, they will stay off for good (or at least until future plans are determined).

I think I can inject some wisdom into the Earth Eternal team for their next go around: If I have more fingers on one hand than you do developers working on the game, you aren’t investing enough resources and should have seen the performance that Earth Eternal received. But now that the game has shut down a second time, and the community will experience a second character wipe, I should say not to be surprised when, if you do decide to attempt a third launch, your community is not as willing to support you.

How fitting is it that MMO Fallout’s 1,000th article would be about an MMO shutting down for the second time? No I did not plan that out.

Happy 1,000 posts MMO Fallout.

Speaking of Macrotransactions: Bigpoint’s $1,000 Spaceship


I hesitate to talk trash about Bigpoint games, and not just because the company could throw a million bucks my way to shut me up and it’d be like the CEO dropped a few pennies out of his pocket, but because the company has indeed found a way to monetize any aspect of their games as promised. And the players? Could not be more overjoyed, at least according to the $200 million that Bigpoint drew in in 2010.

The spaceship that you see to the left has sold two thousand copies in four days. DarkOrbit, by Bigpoint Games, has put this item up for sale for the insane price of €1,000 or approximately $1,337 USD (I see what they did there).

Bigpoint is, and really always has been, the company to come right up front and admit that they sell power, and that there are plenty of people willing to pay major sums of money for that power. I find interesting how many people are disputing that the numbers presented are fact. I dispute the claim that The Old Republic will not be profitable, but I don’t dispute sales figures put out by a company who stands to lose a lot of good faith and press if they lie.

All I know is, Bigpoint has nothing on Eve Online’s theorized $10,000 golden ship.

Speaking of Macrotransactions: Bigpoint's $1,000 Spaceship


I hesitate to talk trash about Bigpoint games, and not just because the company could throw a million bucks my way to shut me up and it’d be like the CEO dropped a few pennies out of his pocket, but because the company has indeed found a way to monetize any aspect of their games as promised. And the players? Could not be more overjoyed, at least according to the $200 million that Bigpoint drew in in 2010.

The spaceship that you see to the left has sold two thousand copies in four days. DarkOrbit, by Bigpoint Games, has put this item up for sale for the insane price of €1,000 or approximately $1,337 USD (I see what they did there).

Bigpoint is, and really always has been, the company to come right up front and admit that they sell power, and that there are plenty of people willing to pay major sums of money for that power. I find interesting how many people are disputing that the numbers presented are fact. I dispute the claim that The Old Republic will not be profitable, but I don’t dispute sales figures put out by a company who stands to lose a lot of good faith and press if they lie.

All I know is, Bigpoint has nothing on Eve Online’s theorized $10,000 golden ship.

Mythos Will Not Die: Coming Back In December


Stupid Omali, why did you delete the Mythos category? Frogster might be finished with Mythos, but that isn’t stopping Hanbitsoft from completing its collection of dead Flagship Studios projects by scooping up the title and announcing the first closed beta test of Mythos Global. Set to begin December 1st, Hanbitsoft wants you to know that this is not the same Mythos that crashed in Europe, but a better Mythos.

More information to come.

Jagex Fights Gold Farmers, Restricts Free Accounts


Nuking bots from an MMO is easy, at least in comparison with nuking actual gold farmers. After all, programs can be broken from the outside, manipulated into revealing themselves, and detected through various means. But how can you know that the person behind the account grinding dragons for five hours is any different than the player grinding dragons for five hours to sell the gold for real money? Not until he actually makes the sale, and even then proving that the sale was for real cash is incredibly difficult.

With the new website, Jagex has announced restrictions for all new free accounts going in effect today:

  • New free-to-play accounts can only give away gold coins or items, or make a trade with an imbalance in the recipient’s favour, to the value of 25000 coins per 24 hours. This limitation also applies to drop trades.
  • New free-to-play accounts can make Duel Arena bets with no greater imbalance than 25000 coins per 24 hours.
  • We have also made a change to Wilderness PvP, where noted items will only appear to the original carrier when dropped upon death; not the killer. This affects all accounts – not just ones subject to the limitations above.

“The limitations will remain in effect until the affected account purchases membership. Subscribing will remove these restrictions permanently, even if the subscription later ends and is not renewed.”

It’s disappointing to see how much rampant gold farming can affect a game for its players.

DC Universe F2P Fun Facts, And Vanguard Free To Play?


If tweets carried a physical representation, the updates by John Smedley today would look not unlike grasping critics by the hair and smearing their faces in Sony’s statistics. Earlier today, Smedley tweeted a few of DC Universe’s accomplishments since its move to free to play:

  • Over 100% pre-f2p concurrent users.
  • 6% growth daily.
  • 700% increase in revenue (47% PC / 53% PS3)
  • Over 85% of daily logins are returning players.

Additionally, a user by the name of mupchu777 tweeted to John Smedley: “how about making vanguard saga of Heroes ftp… If not just kill the game already.” Mr. Smedley tweeted a response, “stay tuned.”

Cryptic.

Video of the ____: Chuck Norris Allows World of Warcraft To Survive.


There are ten million people in World of Warcraft, because Chuck Norris allows them to live. This new ad went live during the NFL Chargers vs Bears game.