Tag: MMO

Com2Us Posts $106.7 Million In Sales


Com2Us this week posted its third quarter revenue for 2018 and the results are positive.

Third quarter sales amounted to $106.7 million USD with $33.8 million in profits, beating out the previous record of $26.5 million. Overseas sales accounted for 83% of revenue with North America and Europe accounting for 50% of those sales.

For the future, Com2US is looking to expand its popular Summoners War title from the mobile gaming scene and into cartoons, comics, and other merchandise. They have also opened up pre-registration for Skylanders Ring of Heroes on mobile devices.

(Source; Com2Us press release)

MMO Rant: Blade of Queen Is A Lie Built On Fraud


I have to assume that there is a template for Facebook games on the same level as those stock Unity games that get released on Steam by the dozens. These games populate Facebook, they advertise using fraudulent means, and they disappear as fast as they showed up. Their developers/publishers are all based in Hong Kong, most of them have no physical address, and I can only assume that they’re being pumped out with something resembling sweatshop labor given their speed, frequency, and obviously mass-produced quality.

Blade of Queen, one of two “games” spawned by budding shovelware developer/publisher CarolGames is an embarrassment, its publisher is so embarrassed by what it has to convince people to play that instead of using Queen of Blade screenshots in its Facebook advertising, they went ahead and used a snapshot from Suikoden 2.

Blade of Queen is a game in the sense that there are graphics and animations of figures fighting on screen. It’s not a game in the sense that you have no control over your characters and the only influence you have is spending silver to boost your stats so that they can automatically fight and win their match by simple virtue that your combat rating is higher than their combat rating. The combat is punctuated by poorly translated Engrish dialogue, about some nonsense that most people won’t care about enough to try and read.

I can’t remember the last time I lost a battle in the story mode, nor can I remember the last match that did not end with a SSS rating. Giving ratings at the end of each combat match is pointless because the player didn’t do anything. There is no strategy, nothing to congratulate. There’s a game that Nexon published whose name escapes me, but it supplements the fact that the combat plays out automatically by giving the player varying types of troops, forcing you to plan out a strategy with your characters.

As if to further the idea that this game is a hastily compiled mess, combat sounds work about 5% of the time.

I’m rank 69 and I haven’t even fought a battle. Nobody is playing this. What am I doing with my life? You know, that rank 1 player looks oddly familiar. Where have I seen that name before?

I’ve found the game’s major financier, folks.

Here’s the thing about these games: They’re cobbled together in Hong Kong sweatshops for sweatshop budgets, get translated to English for about a dollar, and ultimately nobody ends up playing them because they see the game in the Facebook ad and have either been conditioned to immediately recognize the scam, or they click on the link and immediately see that the game looks nothing like what was advertised.

Sure, you’ll get maybe a half dozen, dozen players who spend more than the game deserves, but ultimately it’ll be shut down within a few months and nobody will notice because by that point it will have been replaced by several dozen more clones, all of which will similarly shut down several months later.

On the other hand, the game has boobs and booty for miles, it doesn’t take a genius to know that someone said “let’s throw some jigglin tiddies in here, that’ll make people overlook the rest of the game being worthless.”

Other than that, I have no opinion on the matter.

Impressions: Torn on Android


I live in a detached house somewhere in the city. My clothes consist of a pair of trainers I found in the dump, some leather clothes I bought at the local clothing store, and a crowbar and Glock 17 that I carry around for personal safety. My job as a bag boy at the local grocery store helps pay for my modest accommodations, but I mostly get my income through gambling at the casino and finding various items at the dump and selling them at the pawn shop for cash. I found two personal computers thrown out by some guy, they work so I sold one and kept the other for when I’m smart enough to use it for its intended purpose: Writing viruses and selling them on the open market.

I may have also waited for a dude to get out of the hospital, only to mug him and put him back in the hospital. With my crowbar.

Such is life in Torn, a game that by its own admission is meant to be played for the long term. Torn has been running on PC for a long time, it has thousands of people online and living their lives in the city at any given time, with tens of thousands online over any 24 hour period. It is a completely text based game and it just launched an app for Android devices that I was invited to take a look at. Over a week later, I’m hooked.

Torn is something of a life simulator, not in the sense that you’ll need to click the button to eat your morning bowl of pizza before heading off to work at exactly 7:30am or you’ll be fired and screw you if you think you’re going to have a real life and play this game, but in the meaning that you’ll be doing life things like going to the gym, betting money on League of Legends games, beating up a random stranger and sending him to the hospital, and then losing the money you stole from him playing craps at the casino.

There is always something to do in Torn, some new feature popping up as you level up, some new goal that comes your way, some new activity to take part in. Upon hitting level three, I gained the ability to visit the bookie at the casino where I found out that players who I believe are employed by the casino (in the video game sense) are able to set up betting pools on actual events. I bet $100 that Fnatic would be Flash Wolves in an actual League of Legends match and came out with the winning bet. There are also bets on real life sports games, in fact I threw down a grand on the 6/4 odds that Manchester United will beat Chelsea in an FA Cup match later this week.

Otherwise I like the fact that everything in this game is going toward an overall goal. Having a job doesn’t just provide a daily income, it boosts your various skills and grants points that over time allow you to do things like steal out of the till and get some cash. Education not only unlocks new things but grants boosts to various stats like intelligence which in turn allows you to get promoted at work faster, upping your daily income even further. Running low level crimes like searching for cash or selling bootleg DVDs gives experience that can lead you to bigger crimes, but getting caught will reduce that experience.

I’m looking forward to continuing to play Torn and will continue to document my experiences as they come about. I apologize to anyone for whom the formatting of this page is absolutely borked because of the mobile screenshots.

Online Text RPG Torn Coming To Android In May


You just don’t hear about large-scale text based games these days, but Torn has been rather quietly seeing massive success on desktop PCs. Launched 14 years ago, Torn bills itself as the game that Mafia Wars was built on. It lets players build a life in the city as a business owner, mob boss, or somewhere in between. You can take part in robberies, invest in the stock market, race cars, manage properties, the sky is the limit.

Continuing its success on PC, which has seen more than 2 million players worldwide and 20 thousand daily active users, Torn will be coming to Android devices on May 8. Alternately you can play right now by visiting the link down below.

MMO Fallout should be running some preview coverage of the mobile version at some point in the future.

(Source: Torn)

US To Consider DMCA Exemptions For Offline MMOs


Here’s a head scratcher: Should shuttered online games be exempted from Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims if the product is abandoned by its owners? The answer is yes, at least sort of. Under current US law, there are exemptions made for circumventing a game’s copyright protection if said servers have been abandoned by the owner and the game has a single player component. It does not protect against changes made to bring multiplayer games back online. It also does not protect people who alter their consoles to circumvent shuttered server authentication.

Well all of that may change, as the US Copyright Office is taking comments in regards to potentially adding exemptions for online services. This could pave the way for explicitly legal MMO servers for shuttered games, so if you have an opinion on the matter then now is the time to give it. The Copyright Office is taking comments until mid-December.

(Source: Gamasutra)

Beta Perspective: Wild West Online Is Hot Trash A La Mode (Hold the Ice Cream)


An empty wilderness, terrible sound quality, cheap animations, and unfinished assets everywhere with nothing to do but die and see your character irreversibly bricked. It may be in alpha, but Wild West Online is easily a fast contender for worst game of 2017, what is looking to be a shoddy title with questionable connections to one of the most incompetent developers in the gaming industry. Read this preview and stay far, far away.

One thing I’d like to ask about developer 612 Games: Who are they? Do they have a website? No. Does WWO Partners have a website? No. According to the Wild West Online website, the name is trademarked under the US Trademark system by WWO Partners and others. So I decided to do some digging and found exactly what I was looking for:

DJ2 Entertainment Inc. DBA WWO Partners

DJ2 Entertainment doing business as WWO Partners, or in layman’s terms WWO Partners isn’t a real company. Imagine DJ2 Entertainment is Adam Sandler in the Jack & Jill movie and WWO Partners is when he puts on a wig and pretends to be his own sister.

The announcement that Wild West Online is following the model of The War Z, another low effort shovelware title pushed out in connection with Sergey Titov, immediately red flagged this game in my book. Impressively, War Z also had such a refund. It wasn’t until after the refund period that OP Productions (or Hammerhead or whatever they’ve changed their name to these days) stopped pretending that it would live up to certain promises and started coming down hard on the invasive microtransactions. Let me also remind you that War Z was one of the first games to be involuntarily pulled from Steam over fraudulent advertising.

But this game has nothing to do with The War Z or Free Reign Entertainment, the company just by coincidence uses the same engine, had similar website/forum structure, utilizes the same payment processor, and creative director Stephan Bugaj happens to be friends with Sergey Titov on Facebook. DJ2 Entertainment just happened to have worked on Romero’s Aftermath, the equally low quality War Z clone pushed out after the original was abandoned, and was similarly abandoned in short time. Wild West Online’s PR is being handled by Vim Global who, you guessed it, also worked on Shattered Skies. And finally Wild West Online’s trademark was filed by Steven A. Bercu of Lime LLC, also responsible for filing trademarks for all of Titov’s other shell corporations under a slightly different forming of his name.

In case all of the companies I’m listing is confusing you, don’t worry. Sergey Titov and his Free Reign Entertainment crew go through LLCs like they’re candy, each new reboot of War Z was created by a completely new developer with absolutely no online corporate presence, that seems to exist in name only just like WWO Partners.

This weekend’s alpha test is supposed to sell you on Wild West Online, this much is obvious to everyone but the community manager and its tiny cabal of fans. It’s one of two alpha tests before the refund policy ends and you’re up poop creek without a paddle (unless you know how to dispute a transaction via Paypal or issue a chargeback), so rather than treat this like a stress test with minimal features, I’m going to preview Wild West Online like it’s already trying to show off for my money. Which it is.

Everything I need to know about Wild West Online, I learned in the first half hour. A wild west shooter, the game starts you out with a six shooter and no money in a safe zone town somewhere on the open world map. I went to the shop to find that I couldn’t buy anything, watched players run around town, and ran off toward adventure. About three minutes out of town, another player ran up and started a shootout. I lost. Upon respawning, I found that my gun, my medicine, and my ammunition were gone. My character was effectively dead and couldn’t even be deleted it seemed.

And that’s pretty much it. The graphics are nowhere near what we saw in earlier videos, the towns are barren of bystanders, and the world doesn’t have any NPCs roaming around. Your character doesn’t make any footstep sounds when running around, there are hundreds and hundreds of unfinished assets lying around, and the developers don’t seem to understand how skin tone works.

This is what black people looked like in the wild west.

I am hoping that Wild West Online isn’t being developed by the guys who made The War Z, and I say this only because it would mean that the team has become even less competent. While War Z’s alpha may have been a two-bit hack job, it at least masqueraded as what could potentially become a competent product. Wild West Online shows up to work with yesterday’s clothes and a half-empty bottle of whiskey, still drunk because it never stopped from the night before.

Wild West Online is an embarrassment, both in the idea that it is a paid alpha and that WWO Partners expects players to use this to judge whether or not they want to refund their purchase. And they can complain to unhappy customers all they want that this weekend was clearly a “technical test” and was deliberately gutted of content, it doesn’t change the fact that players have two weekends to decide whether or not the game is worth keeping their money in, and WWO has clearly squandered its first of two impressions.

Shot Online Hits Beta On May 31


(Update: We have received word from Webzen that the closed beta date has been changed to extend the signup period. More information to come.)

A golf MMO? You bet your sweet bippy, Webzen announced today that mobile golf game Shot Online Golf: World Championship will be heading into closed beta on Android and iOS  on May 31 (next Wednesday for those keeping track). Hopeful players can sign up at the official website for more information before the servers officially go live.

Shot Online is a mobile adaptation of the PC MMO retooled for mobile devices.

(Source: Webzen press release)

Play Wild Terra Free This Weekend


If you haven’t had a chance to check out the open world MMO Wild Terra, your chance to do so has arrived. From today until May 21, you can play the game for free. Check it out on Steam, and if you like what you see you can pick up the full game for just $12.74. Wild Terra is an open world MMORPG currently in early access on Steam. For a sneak peek at gameplay, take a gander at the trailer below.

(Source: Wild Terra)

TERA Sees Huge Number Spikes Thanks To Steam


As surprising as it may sound, releasing on Steam can do wonders for a game’s community, as European publisher Gameforge and developer Bluehole Studios found out following the successful rollout of TERA on the digital distribution service. Since its launch, TERA has remained in the top 30 list of free to play games. According to Steam Charts, TERA enjoys on average more than three thousand concurrent players on Steam alone.

Olaf Bernhard, CMO of Gameforge, says: “Our strategy of bringing not only new releases to Steam but also re-releasing our most successful games, proves very successful: With every game we manage to bring new fans in and reactive former players.”

Support for TERA is still going with a new class set to release in April, the Valkyrie, which players will be able to reserve their names for shortly.

(Source: TERA press release)

How The Exiled Handles Server Activity


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The Exiled is an upcoming game that promises to blend MOBA combat in a sandbox MMO, and the developer has detailed the final alpha test for 2016. Sandbox MMOs, as well as the rest of the genre, pretty much live and die based on server population, so what do you do when the population gets too low? It is nearly 2017, so if you haven’t automated the process, you’re going to be left behind.

In The Exiled, the latest alpha release notes point that servers will shut down if the population reaches a low enough level that players can’t fight off attacks.

Game worlds now require an active player base to defend against daily attacks on the valley. If players on one game world do not manage to donate enough resources to the defense, this world dies and all players on it will migrate as refugees to a different, more active game world.

You can check out more on The Exiled at the official website. MMO Fallout will be covering the game further.