Tag: Subscriptions

[Column] The Death Of Out-Of-Genre Subscriptions


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I casually refer to the 2009 – 2010 time span as the Suicidal Subscription Pact, where business logic in gaming decreed that subscription fees must be tacked on to genres that had previously been available for just the cost of the game. The time marks one of the last eras of businesses unsuccessfully copying functions from World of Warcraft without even the most basic understanding of why they worked, in this case taking the subscription fee with no idea on why World of Warcraft justified a continuing payment.

Now MMOs are no stranger to subscription fees, even if only a small minority manage to hold on without going free to play or shutting down, but the years I’m referring to point toward a number of developers who decided to branch out the concept of monthly tithes into other genres, and were rewarded with deep financial ruin and often bankruptcy as a result. And while any business must take risks in order to innovate, it doesn’t take a marketing genius to know that these games never had a prayer of succeeding, sadly with little relation to the actual game quality.

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Monte Cristo is actually the first business I contacted as a junior MMO reporter, to voice my concerns that their plan to include a subscription fee in Cities XL would be a disastrous idea. The idea behind the subscription was to fund the servers, naturally, but the company also believed that the lack of competition would allow them the space to do as they please. With SimCity still four years away, the number of AAA city building games with online components could essentially be counted on a single, finger-less hand, with the only alternative being the wealth of Farmville-style free-to-play browser titles that gamers were increasingly growing sick of.

As I predicted, Cities XL released and consumers responded to the mandatory subscription for online play with a definitive “nah.” Even with the market cornered, Monte Cristo couldn’t get players on board and shut the service down less than a year later due to a lack of subscribers. Given the option of Cities XL or nothing, the market chose nothing, and Monte Cristo went bankrupt a couple of months later.

apb

All Points Bulletin, Global Agenda, and Hellgate: London mark three attempts to bring the subscription fee into the shooter realm, with all three failing miserably but only two of the three companies going under because of it.

With All Points Bulletin, Realtime Worlds had the idea to sell an online shooter at full price and then charge hourly for access (with the option of unlimited monthly subscriptions). While functionally different from its competition, APB essentially started the race at a disadvantage, having to convince gamers that an online shooter would be worth not just a subscription fee in a genre where it didn’t exist, but an hourly subscription fee.

It didn’t matter that Realtime Worlds was offering an unlimited play time option, it didn’t change the fact that they thought APB was deserving of an hourly fee, for a premium priced game in a genre that hadn’t yet been touched by cash shops in the west. Perception is a big deal, and in many minds the simple presence of an hourly subscription (that really only existed to make the unlimited version seem more enticing) showed a bravado that they weren’t willing to do business with.

And it didn’t help that APB was an underwhelming game, from the numerous bugs and gameplay issues to a lack of diverse content, the fact that it was a driving/shooting game that failed to deliver on either the driving or shooting, the kerfuffle over Realtime Worlds attempting to embargo reviews. Perhaps as a sign of how poorly managed the game was, players didn’t even get the luxury of knowing when the servers were turning off until the day of.

To add insult to insult and top complaints of unnecessary monetization, the company even introduced advertisements into its voice chat service that could be removed with, you guessed it, another subscription.

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For all of its gloating and taunting the competition, Global Agenda was not a success, in fact it’s a case study I’ve used when talking about market failures.

Like Cities XL and APB, Hi-Rez Studios offered gamers something that they couldn’t specifically get anywhere else, the ability to fight for territory control in a hub-based first person shooter. And like the other titles on this list, consumers opted out when presented with a subscription fee. While Global Agenda is still running on free to play, updates came to a halt years ago.

It’s important to note how crucial player perception was in the inevitable marketing failures that were the games on this list. Essentially the developers were pushing the game to two types of consumers, neither of whom really wanted anything to do with them. MMO gamers had the free to play revolution around that time offering them far more content heavy games for free, and for subscription, while shooter fans already had the entire genre to play without paying monthly.

hellgates

And finally we have Hellgate: London, the game that coined the phrase “flagshipped.” While billing itself as a first person shooter on a level with Diablo, Hellgate: London also demanded a $10 monthly subscription to access subscriber-only loot, hardcore mode, special pvp arenas, more storage space, the ability to create guilds, and access to customer service.

While a novel idea, Hellgate once again found itself competing in an arena where similar games (dungeon crawlers) were already offering their games for no additional charge. None of them were first person shooters, mind you, but as we’ve learned from this list, you can’t slap on a few changes to the base and demand more money.

Flagship Studios later went bankrupt, providing up to fifteen months of “lifetime membership” to the people who ponied up the $150, also cementing the eternal grudge that some gamers will bear against Bill Roper.

As far as trends go, the implementation of subscription fees into pseudo-MMOs was one that the gaming community soundly rejected and a major pitfall that, in my personal opinion, should have been obvious from the start. The games I mentioned above aren’t the only ones to fall into this trap, but they are the most notable.

What’s interesting is that every game on this list, with the exception of Global Agenda, was eventually picked up and run under a different studio with Cities XL seeing successful sequels rather than a straight free to play spinoff, in a way proving that the issue lay heavily with the monetization strategy and the subsequent perception of the company as greedy and selling a not-so-premium product for premium prices.

TOR Subscribers Will Decline To 1.25 Million In March 2013


Cowen and Company, market analysts, are suggesting that The Old Republic peaked shortly after launch and has begun its decline. The analyst group suggests that Bioware’s announcement of 1.7 million subscribers marks the MMO’s peak, and that by the end of the current fiscal year, The Old Republic will boast 1.25 million subscribers. The current fiscal year ends in March 2013.

A 450,000 subscriber loss over the course of a year? That doesn’t sound too bad. At the very least, the issue Cowen and Company attributes the subscriber loss to sounds simple enough to rectify before the year is out:

“While the game got off to a good start, the relatively light amount of end-game content does appear to be taking a toll.”

Despite this prediction, Cowen and Company goes on to predict that EA will outperform the market by 20% year over year, thanks to The Old Republic and a number of other titles.

(Source: Gamasutra)

Rift: South Korea, and Let’s Talk China


Before I begin, I wanted to talk about Rift and China, namely the statement flying around that Rift will never have a snowball’s chance at matching Blizzard’s subscriber numbers unless they release in China. The above statement is, of course, completely true. The issue this raises, however, is Rift’s odds at releasing in China, which don’t seem all that likely in the near future, or really ever. The main problem Rift faces is the concept of the undead, especially since the game already carried the River of Souls event, that based its entire concept around the idea of souls being plucked from the river of souls (where everyone goes at death) to serve as an undead army.

China and the undead don’t got along well, and World of Warcraft’s expansions were delayed for multiple years, following extensive censorship, before the games could be released. Skeletons are replaced by sacks of flour and scarecrows, blood is green, even undead insignia are replaced or removed outright.

Anyway, Rift is releasing in South Korea! Running through CJ E&M Games, Rift will makes it break into the east. According to Trion’s Lars Buttler:

 “We take the Korean market very seriously as it is driven by innovation and growth in the online gaming space. By working with CJ E&M we are able to bring deep, immersive online gaming experiences to the east, and continue delivering quality games to gamers worldwide.”

Well hopefully Rift will take the Korean community better than some Korean companies take the western community. Rift was the top selling PC retail game in North American in March, according to NPD. We’ll see if this success can transition over to Korea.

Rift: South Korea, and Let's Talk China


Before I begin, I wanted to talk about Rift and China, namely the statement flying around that Rift will never have a snowball’s chance at matching Blizzard’s subscriber numbers unless they release in China. The above statement is, of course, completely true. The issue this raises, however, is Rift’s odds at releasing in China, which don’t seem all that likely in the near future, or really ever. The main problem Rift faces is the concept of the undead, especially since the game already carried the River of Souls event, that based its entire concept around the idea of souls being plucked from the river of souls (where everyone goes at death) to serve as an undead army.

China and the undead don’t got along well, and World of Warcraft’s expansions were delayed for multiple years, following extensive censorship, before the games could be released. Skeletons are replaced by sacks of flour and scarecrows, blood is green, even undead insignia are replaced or removed outright.

Anyway, Rift is releasing in South Korea! Running through CJ E&M Games, Rift will makes it break into the east. According to Trion’s Lars Buttler:

 “We take the Korean market very seriously as it is driven by innovation and growth in the online gaming space. By working with CJ E&M we are able to bring deep, immersive online gaming experiences to the east, and continue delivering quality games to gamers worldwide.”

Well hopefully Rift will take the Korean community better than some Korean companies take the western community. Rift was the top selling PC retail game in North American in March, according to NPD. We’ll see if this success can transition over to Korea.