Category Archives: Commentary
Specialization is Key
I was reading Syl’s Monday post on GW2 when a particular section leaped off the page:
Some people still doubt that GW2 will manage without any holy trinity, but I actually do – and if there’s ever going to be more “dedicated” healing or tanking going on in a specific encounter, it will probably be a situation in which everyone must take turns or decides on a random player.
If you have attempted group content in WoW at any point in the last two years, you probably recoiled in horror as I did at the thought of looking forward to shared group responsibility. We have a term for that now – The Dance – and every indication that it was the principle cause of the nearly 2 million subscriber exodus.
After all, by making every player vital to the group’s success (e.g. everyone must Dance correctly), the strength of the group is reduced to that of its weakest member. And if we follow the “down with the holy trinity!” argument to its inevitable conclusion, we end up in Dance Dance Central.
When I asked whether Syl really wanted shared responsibility, the response was:
You mean, would I rather have groups share the responsibility of control or be flexible about it, rather than putting the entire responsibility and blame on just one person? of course I would. I think this is one big reason why WoW pugs were so horrible.
The sentiment is interesting to me, because I approach it from the 100% opposite direction.
There are some responsibilities that I do not trust other people to accomplish. I was the guy in school/college that would do all of the heavy lifting in the group project – picking the topic, doing the research, writing the paper – while you sailed to an easy A by reading two (of 10) paragraphs in front of the class.
Actually, “trust” is not even the operating word I am looking for, as that implies an uncertainty of contribution. It wasn’t a question of whether you would perform, or even how. It was a matter of your capacity for performance, and whether the final outcome would be better or worse with said contribution.
Is that arrogant? No.¹ Ability brooks no morality. Being better at the “game of school” did not/does not make me a better person, or someone else worse for their lack. The unilateral determination of the value of the contribution might be construed as arrogant, but the final grade was always a true arbiter. Just as the death of the boss is an arbiter of a raid strategy.
Which segues me back to raiding and the following claim: specialization is better for group-based activities.
People are NOT experts at everything, nor should they have to be. If the content requires precise movement at specified times, who do you want in that position? Probably a person meeting the following criteria: A) best internet connection, B) the most experience, and C) someone who wants the responsibility. Maybe you’re thinking long-term and want to get another guy trained and battle-tested. Maybe someone wants to branch out and test the tanking waters. That’s fine! Do what works for your team.
What no one wants is for the person chosen to randomly be the easily excitable, newbie friend raiding on WiFi. It’s not fun for him, it’s not fun for you, it’s not fun for anyone. It creates friction in group scenarios, even when you are raiding with good friends.
This brings me to Guild Wars 2, and two conditional claims/predictions.
1) Trinity specialization will be required to succeed at endgame content; or
2) Endgame content will be mostly trivial.
The “everyone can pitch in” group content philosophy is simply zerging. The “trinity should die” desire is the desire for Dance 2.0.
Syl goes on to mention:
combat that revolves around tanking and aggro, is different from combat that revolves about shared control and therefore needs less dedicated healing, too. tactically speaking it’s an interesting approach you can already find in many FPS online games where every player is carrying some type of rifle and team strategy, self-sufficiency, quick reactions and improvisation are where it’s at. okay, you can distrust the average MMO players currently out there to be any use at this type of cooperative game – a fair point, but not exactly a good argument against improving combat design. to ME the current combat is boring.
Putting aside the question of the actual value of teammates in CoD/BF/TF2 games (and the fact that a lot of FPSs are in fact class/role-based), I want to talk about improvisation. The ability to change strategies, to adapt to changing conditions, to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat… that was actually my favorite part of raiding in WoW. The Mimiron kill video was one of the most epic experiences in the game for me. Same with our first Yogg-Saron kill.
The rub is that improvisation requires room to screw up and not fail. In other words, improvisation requires a lower difficulty. It requires mistakes to not matter as much. I am not at all a fan of pass/fail mechanics, so I actually DO hope there is room for improvisation in GW2. But if a group of 5 Necromancers can clear all the content, chain rezzing each other, swapping weapons to “be the tank” when they are randomly the target of the boss, requiring no specialization at all (or worse, requiring everyone to “specialize” in everything)… well, have fun with that.
A certain continuum exists between the two extremes, but it is not as wide as many believe. The only way to reliably hit that mark, IMO, is to require specialization in tasks – specifically being able to choose the 1-2 people around which an encounter pivots – and extend the margins of victory for everyone else. Think the ooze-kiter in the Rotface encounter, or the two portal healers in Dreamwalker.
Allowing those 1-2 people to be anyone (tanks/healer/DPS) would be an amazing innovation, but I’m not entirely convinced that is what will be going on in GW2.
¹ Although it’s probably arrogant saying it.
Post-Interview, and Diablo 3
The interview went… more or less okay.
For the curious, my interview in Chicago was for the JET Program; basically applying to teach English in Japan for a year (or more). I spent a semester in Japan during college, I want to go back, and we will all have to wait to see how it shakes out because results aren’t announced until April. If selected, I’d be in Japan by August. If not, it will be business as usual. In fact, considering this blog (and commenting on other blogs) is my only outlet for gaming discussion, it’d be business as usual anyway.
…okay, maybe business as usual. Let’s jump off that bridge when we come to it.
In other news, in catching up on Diablo 3 blue posts, I wanted to highlight two things:
In the near future, we’ll be implementing several changes to the posting limits and fees related to the beta version of the Diablo III auction house. Here’s a quick summary of what’s in store:
- Listing fee is being removed.
- Transaction fee is being increased to 1.25 Beta Bucks.
- Minimum listing price is being raised to 1.50 Beta Bucks.
- You will be limited to 10 active auctions per auction house.
With the removal of the listing fee, players will no longer need to worry about whether they’re going to run out of free listings for the week. In addition, introducing a limit on the number of active auctions means players won’t feel as though they should be trying to sell everything they find, potentially flooding the auction house with unwanted items. Under this new system, players will only pay an auction house fee if and when an item actually sells. This has the main advantage of allowing players to try to sell their items risk-free. In addition, because the transaction fee is already baked into the price when an item is listed (as part of the minimum listing price), it’s no longer possible to be in a situation where you don’t have enough Battle.net Balance to list an item, forcing you to have to charge up your Balance just to attempt a sale. We think this will be a much cleaner process for selling items and will ultimately lead to a better experience when using the currency-based auction house. (source)
What I am finding curious is A) such fairly radical RMAH changes are being iterated on so late in development, and B) how there is now an effective floor price of (presumably) $1.50 for any given item, and C) holy shit, an 83% Blizzard cut of the profits on said floor prices. Even if you sell things at $5 or $10 a pop, that’s still 25% and 12.5% respectively.
I am beginning to wonder if these margins won’t start creating a space for the gray markets to move in – if you broker a “10 items for $10” outside the game, the customer saves $5 and the seller gets $7.50 more than they would have. Perhaps Blizzard doesn’t feel like people would bother with small sales? Easy typically trumps cheap, so who knows.
The other bit was this… unfortunate analogy by Cashiok Bashiok:
On a more serious note, I too worry that we won’t be able to meet the expectations people have built up for themselves. Part of my job is managing people’s expectations, so… eh… stop it. Stop thinking about how awesome this game could be. Just imagine it’s a new M. Night Shyamalan movie. Sure Sixth Sense was amazing and Unbreakable had it’s moments, but this right here is the sequel to The Village … or The Happening … or Signs … or any of the movies besides the two I first mentioned. So just like, lower those expectations, but still definitely buy the game please, and everything will be just fine. K? (source)
Now, there is certainly a tongue-in-cheek context to the quote and the thread it was responding to. Is Blizzard seriously trying to lower expectations as they scramble with radical 11th hour changes? I guess we will know for sure when it releases.
What is unfortunate is that I use Sixth Sense as a go-to example of why developer/director/artist worship is a bad idea. You see, Sixth Sense was a brilliant, brilliant film. It was also, based on the movies that proceeded it, a complete fluke. There simply is no reason to believe that a beloved whatever will continue creating quality content. I read bloggers casually throwing out “We will have to wait on Titan to move the genre forward” and arch an eyebrow. What makes you think Blizzard even knows why WoW was so popular? There isn’t some secret formula for quality gaming, and even if there were, what worked in 2004 doesn’t work the same in 2012.
Just ask Nintendo and the company that sold me Chess on my flip-phone for $5.99 how mobile gaming is treating them these days. Oh how things change.
Bold and Spectacular… Server Merges?
This news is technically more than a week old, but there was a blue post made by Zarhym that really struck me as… well, read for yourself:
Having said all that, yesterday we discussed low-population and faction-imbalanced realms with our developers. They have some pretty bold and spectacular plans for addressing this in anticipation of implementing some of the features we plan to in Mists. I just don’t have a lot of information to share with you at this stage of programming and development.
My first reaction is in the title: bold and spectacular… server mergers? Assuming that is not what they are doing, well, what are they doing? What could they be doing?
I believe it was in a recent episode of The Instance that the hosts were talking about the concept of moving towards a server-less solution, or perhaps more accurately a “dynamic server” solution. We can imagine that instead of always logging onto Auchindoun or Earthen Ring or wherever, you simply log into a server. Once that server starts to fill towards capacity, people will start logging into a new server. This essentially eliminates low-pop and/or faction imbalanced servers entirely, aside from very last server booted up.
There are several obvious downsides to such a method. First, everything will be like LFD for servers; the likelihood of you making friends “in the wild” is severely diminished since you probably won’t ever see them again. A possible counter-measure would be to weight the system so that you are nearly guaranteed to be placed in the same “server” as people on your Friends List. Think that DK was a pretty cool guy when you were doing dailies? Add him to Friends, maybe see him again. What happens, though, if your Friends List network splits off to different servers based on their Friends Lists? Even if you make it possible to change servers through the UI or whatever, other issues crop up. For example, how will the AH be handled? One mega-AH, ruled by botters?
Aside from the dynamic server idea, I had the thought about simply moving towards LFR-ifying everything – not with queues, but with phasing. Imagine the following: you’re on a low-pop ghost town (i.e. Auchindoun), and you walk into Westfall for some alt questing. Instead of the place simply being dead, it is fairly vibrant… with people from other low-pop servers. Instead of an empty Auchindoun Westfall and an empty Dragonmaw Westfall, there is a kind of meta-Westfall that both servers share. Their AHs would remain separate, their Stormwinds would remain separate, their Tol Barads would remain separate, but any kind of dead zone would be shared. If a bunch of people congregated in Westfall for some reason, the servers could simply phase out the other side.
Or maybe “bold and spectacular plans” is simply LFD scenarios, or LFR Tol Barads.
All I know is that low-pop and/or imbalanced realms is a huge, systemic problem in two-faction games. In my four years, I never played on anything other than low-pop realms; any time I heard excitement over Sunwell-esque unlocking of vendors or world raid bosses or WG/TB-based PvP objectives, I always rolled my eyes. Those things do not work on Auchindoun, nor on many other servers. Fundamentally, you and I may as well be playing entirely different games.
If Mists is really focused on getting people out of cities and back into the world, Blizzard is going to have a big problem in low-pop realms when everyone is outside and they still can’t see each other.
Closer Look: Blizzard’s Q4 2011
When we last left our intrepid heroes in Q3 2011, WoW had lost 800,000 subscriptions and the following four salient points were made in the earnings call:
- Majority of the sub loss is occurring in the East.
- Implicitly, the difficulty of Cataclysm content was the cause of sub losses.
- Expect some (more) “aggressive” World of Warcraft marketing.
- Patches are more about recapturing the recently churned.
I suppose the holiday box sale and Annual Pass count as aggressive marketing, but let me not get ahead of myself. If you want to read along from home, Seeking Alpha will hook you up.
1. Is Bungie not working on Titan?
Eric Hirshberg from Activision Publishing buried this gem 25 paragraphs into vapid gushing of COD and Skylanders:
Looking further out, we continue to lay the foundation for our new universe from Bungie, one of the world’s best developers. Bungie continues to make incredible progress on what we expect to be a genre-defining new IP that will provide us with tremendous new opportunities and which remains one of our key strategic growth pillars for the future.
This may or may not seem a non sequitur, but I have always entertained the notion that the Bungie acquisition might have had something to do with Blizzard’s Titan development. Why?
Let’s look at the entrails. First, both Joe Staten and Rob Pardo have been playing it coy as recently as 2 years ago about Bungie working with Blizzard. But we also know that Bungie’s secret project “Destiny,” is slated as a sci-fi MMOFPS that is, quote, “WoW in space.” If you have a tinfoil hat handy, things can get even more bizarre when you consider that Ensemble Studios was working on a Halo MMO to directly compete with Blizzard… that was code-named Titan. And when Ensemble Studios was disbanded, several ex-members joined Blizzard. And now Bungie is here with a 10-year contract, making a brand new MMOFPS IP to be a “strategic growth pillar” for Activision Blizzard at the same time Blizzard is making a “casual” new-IP MMO that isn’t supposed to compete with WoW… that is code-named Titan.
Technically a lot of this is old news, and the earnings call did not reveal anything new either way. But in reading that paragraph under the Activision Publisher heading, it occurs to me that it is entirely possible that we could see two new, separate MMO properties out of Activision Blizzard even with WoW still sucking most of the oxygen out of the MMO room. In some respects, that outcome is crazier than Titan turning out to be a Blizzard-Bungie joint MMO.
2. Around 1 million Annual Passes sold… in the West.
Another initiative that has been very successful is the World of Warcraft Annual Pass. This program was announced at BlizzCon this past year. Under its terms, players who commit to being a World of Warcraft subscriber for 1 year will get a free copy of Diablo III, unique digital items in World of Warcraft, and other benefits. To date, we have signed up more than 1 million players in the West for the World of Warcraft Annual Pass.
The more I think about that number, the crazier it ends up being. While the Annual Pass appears to be non-binding (your access to D3 will simply go away), can you otherwise imagine another MMO who can count on 1,000,000 Western subscription accounts being locked in for 12 months? That would make SWTOR automatically profitable for an entire year.
3. Mists of Pandaria information out on March 19.
Some of you may have seen recent news about the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria. Last week, we began inviting global press to visit our office to get a hands-on look at the game. The press visit will take place next month, and our players will be able to read the latest news on the game on March 19. We’re looking forward to showcasing the game to our community and collecting more feedback as we prepare for the upcoming beta for Mists of Pandaria.
By the way, that means there is an automatic 1 million beta-testers for Mists, yeah?
4. Chuck Norris was super effective!
Neil A. Doshi – Citigroup Inc, Research Division
Mike, I was wondering if you could provide us a little more detail around the subs for World of Warcraft. What was the impact from some of your marketing efforts? And then how many subs did you add from Brazil? And if you have any comments on trend that you could share with us, that would be great.
Michael Morhaime
Okay. So we were very pleased with the results of the marketing initiatives in Q4. The Chuck Norris spot was very effective. We’ve got over 29 million views of the spot on YouTube. And I think, just looking at how well the subscribership held up during our most competitive quarter ever, we’re very happy with that. Engagement of the player base is very strong. We do not break down regional. We do not provide regional breakdown of subs, but we’re off to a good start in Brazil. And I don’t have any detail on churn.
Nothing to add to that.
As reported everywhere, WoW did implicitly lose another 100,000 subs in the quarter. There have been a lot of “See? Not dying!” posts over in the MMO-Champ and WoW Insider comments, but it’s worth pointing out that A) if someone unsubbed for SWTOR, then they won’t count as “missing” until January, e.g. Q1, and B) WoW launched in Brazil this quarter, as noted above. There are several more high-profile MMO launches coming this year, and let’s not forget that everyone is stuck with Dragon Soul until Mists actually launches… which could be six months from now, or more.
In any event, sub numbers really only matter to me in the context of having objective data by which we can interpret future design philosophy, and MMO player desires by extension. If Blizzard’s reaction to losing 1.8 million subs is to make the game easier, then we can assume that they believe a hard game is why people left.
It’s crude, it’s imperfect, but it is all we really have as armchair game designers.
Quote of the Decade
Today, Kotaku reposted an earlier article from Rock, Paper, Shotgun entitled “Do We Own Our Steam Games?” which was the inspiration for yesterday’s post. The example scenario that makes up half the article is not exactly the most flattering, as it involves a Russian gamer who, quote, “[…] openly admits that he’s gifted games to people in exchange for money, to help them get them cheaper.”
In other words, some Steam games are cheaper in Russia, so you could call this guy up, have him buy LIMBO for the equivalent of $0.50 instead of $9.99, have him gift the game to you, and then you give him $3 or buy him a beer or whatever in exchange. Of course, regional price differences sometimes work the other way too. For example, Deus Ex: Human Revolution costs $29.99 in the US, but €49.99 in Europe… the equivalent of $66.36, or an increase of 121.27%.
That sort of thing will get you banned, of course.
It was around this time in the comments that someone named “iteyoidar” dropped this gem:
Funny how when it comes to globalization, when it’s games devs and publishers dodging domestic laws and getting cheap shit in other countries, it’s just business, but when it’s the consumer using the same thing to their advantage to buy cheap media, it’s “fraud” and “cheating” and they’re all scum.
Yeah. Yeah. Is there a particularly good reason why we tolerate price discrimination on identical, digital goods? Other than, of course, that companies wouldn’t like it?
I get that standards of living are different, that you can’t ask for $15/month in China when the average person makes $20.27 a day, and so on. But as a consumer, why should I care? Spare me the “holistic” crap of feeding game devs and races to the bottom, because obviously that shit only works one-way when it comes to outsourcing jobs. Why is it okay to presume a business has a right to profit, but a consumer lacks the equivalent? Because that hurts businesses?
Oh. Oh, I see.
The people that can pay more should pay more, eh? Where have I heard that before?
“Judged According to Its Aspirations”
In a Ten Ton Hammer interview with CCP’s incoming Chief of Marketing Operations, David Reid says (emphasis added):
Q: CCP is clearly excited about launching DUST 514 in 2012. Help us understand why those of us in the PC gaming market (and specifically the MMO crowd) should be excited about a PlayStation 3-exclusive online shooter.
Hilmar Pétursson: The thing that many people have raised with us is that they love everything about EVE Online, apart from playing it. It’s such an interesting world, there are so many exciting things going on, but it takes a lot of commitment to get into.
David Reid: The opportunity with DUST is tremendous – it’s an opportunity to bring this universe that plenty of people in the MMO side of the market have enjoyed – the persistent universe, the world’s most vibrant and “real” virtual economy. But not everybody is a fan of flying in space.
We want to bring this experience to people who may not know EVE Online or CCP to the 60 million or so people connected on the PlayStation Network, the bulk of whom know what it’s like to play a shooter and can imagine the opportunity presented by interacting inside of this mature EVE universe.
Beyond that, we also have the phenomenon that EVE Online has been all of these years. Eight years running, EVE Online is the only game in the West that has shown consecutive growth year after year, in light of the tumble World of Warcraft saw last year.
With DUST 514 shipping this year, with bringing in the tens of millions of people that play shooters on PSN into the New Eden universe, EVE could be the biggest game in the world at the end of 2012. To end the year on that upswing, it just blows my mind the opportunities we have here to keep building on this awesome universe.
Alright, David Reid… ~10 million Dust 514 players by the end of 2012. Consider it duly noted.
In trying to find out whether Dust 514 was still going to be selling for $20 or if it was F2P with microtransactions, I came across this other Q&A with Dust514.org. This exchange happened:
Eve Online is an MMO notorious for its stories of spying and backstabs. With the ease of creating alternate accounts in the PSN, how will Dust 514 discourage the inevitable creation of large amounts of alternate accounts for griefing and other skullduggery?
We don’t necessarily want to discourage spying and backstabbing 
. There are a lot of mechanisms in game to ensure battles are managed well, while not cutting into the freedoms that the EVE Universe provides.
Will Dust players be able to kick team killers at will? Hoping for a positive answer on this one.
We understand that friendly fire is not so friendly and that intentionally killing teammates can be very annoying. To keep this from getting out of control we will allow players control of their team’s composition.
As I mentioned before, I actually liked the concept of Dust 514. All the gameplay videos looked like a sci-fi Battlefield 2, which is a game I played with an MMO-level of engagement for three years straight. But PS3 exclusive? Really? It boggles my mind. And considering that the PS3 is at the end of its lifecycle – may not hear about a PS4 until 2013, but still – it seems bizarre to come out with an exclusive pseudo-MMO on a platform not guaranteed to be backwards compatible with its successor.
The SWTOR Figures Thus Far
You have probably already heard about the 1.7 million subscription number, 2 million boxes sold, and so on surrounding SWTOR’s launch. What I am finding a bit more interesting are some of the investor call break-downs as gathered by Darth Hater. For example:
Q: What are your plans at expanding the global market?
A: We are looking at the Asian market. Expanding into Australian market on March 1st. We’re looking specifically at opportunities to expand in the Asian market.
Q: How long will it take to get into the Asian market?
A: Australia/New Zealand is the low-hanging fruit. Think in months rather than weeks. Individual Asian markets will be announced in the future, we’re bound by confidentiality agreements. When WoW was introduced in 2004, they were in Korea shortly after, and 9 months after in China. It was easier in those days – server outages were considered par for the course, that is not the case today. We hope to execute as well in Asia as we did in the NA/Europe launch.
Q: You’ve previously said you need about a half million subscribers to be profitable, is that still the case?
A: At 500,000 subscribers, we’d break even. At a million, we’d be making a profit but nothing worth writing home about. As it scales up from there, we’re talking about a nice profit. At this point with the successful launch, we can take the worst case scenarios off the table.
The ability for SWTOR to launch in Asian markets was one of the biggest concerns I had with the game from a success standpoint, as you may recall. Indeed, if/when the game is released in China, that will be the moment beyond which we will be unable to talk about its subscription numbers with any sort of coherency – not because it will necessarily be super-popular over there, but because, just like with WoW, millions of Eastern subs obfuscates armchair analysis. Remember Nils saying “[…] I would now say that EA could be happy if they had 500k subscribers one year after launch”? Would it “count” if there was some Western mass-exodus down to 250k but 2 million Chinese subs?
In any event, there are still legitimate questions about how the game will perform 3 to 6 months down the road, when there is less ambiguity surrounding whether 1.7 million was as-of December 31st or as-of the investor call (and what “most” means in the context of “Most of those 1.7m are paying at this point”). Then we have Frank Gibeau who says:
In the next phase, our goal is to grow the number of subscribers with frequent releases of content that make the game even more exciting. […] We plan on delivering another major update, even larger than the first, in March.
It is kind of interesting, on several levels. Can Bioware keep such a pace for any length of time, or will there be a drought soon after March wherein the reserve content drys up? Do frequent patches even drive subscription growth to begin with? Blizzard’s Mike Morhaime said back in November that patches were mainly about reducing churn, not growth. Maybe it’s different for games below market saturation? And speaking of games and markets, let’s not forget at least a half dozen high(ish) profile MMOs will also be dropping this year, including the mythical Guild Wars 2 and Mists of Pandaria. No doubt there will be some impact, eh?
Time will tell, but so far so good.
P.S. If you had bought EA stock after it dropped 3% in mid-January, when people were laughing about SWTOR’s “disastrous launch” based on that one analyst, you’d be sitting on a 10.22% return on your investment a little more than two weeks later. Or, hell, a 6.1% return between yesterday and today.
P.P.S. Christ. BRB opening eTrade account.
SWTOR Will (Probably) Be Fine
With the 1-month honeymoon coming to its end, and a series of “amateur-hour” missteps combined with other bad news, the general feeling seems to be coalescing around SWTOR’s present or future inevitable “failure.” While everyone is entitled to their own insipid pessimism, the sorts of reasoning being provided are a little weak.
1) Absurdly High Standards
There are two main flavors of absurdity under this umbrella. The first is simply ridiculous, the sort that sees WoW going from 12 million to 10 million as a failure, a sign of collapse, of crushing moral defeat. Or, going from 32 to 26.667 times the size of EVE, the MMO yardstick whose robustness is the de facto definition of success. I agree that WoW deserves the subscription loss, that it is directly linked to Cataclysm, and further that WoW may never recover those subs and/or continue a sub decline for the foreseeable future.
However, let’s be honest here: if that is the sort of yardstick we are using, the entire MMO market is an abysmal failure.
The second, lesser form of absurdity is identifiable in this quote from Nils:
[…] I would now say that EA could be happy if they had 500k subscribers one year after launch.
In other words, SW:TOR failed. And it failed for EXACTLY the reasons we, the blogosphere, had predicted for at least 2 years prior to launch. We should be proud – and sad.
For comparison, EVE is the second largest Western MMO on the market at, by last count, 375,000 subs. Between 25% and 62.5% larger than 2nd place is a failure? Really?
You know what, though? I think it is important to have a discussion about what “success” really means – just like with “casual” and other loaded terms, having some kind of idea where people actually stand would reduce the effects of talking past one another.
2) Vague Definitions of Success
“Success” is largely arbitrary, and depends on the goals one sets for oneself. If you set out to run an 8-minute mile and can only get to down to a 9-minute mile, you have “failed.” That you improved from a 15-minute mile to 9-minutes is irrelevant in an objective sense.
Success in a market sense, is a little less arbitrary – you are either making money or you are not. According to the information we have available (circa last May), SWTOR needs a minimum of 375k subscriptions to break even, and ~500k to be reasonably profitable. So in the Nils quote, SWTOR would be a success at 500k.
But what of the analyst who sent EA stocks tumbling 3% based on “disappointing sales” and churn rates? Since we don’t have access to his data or methodology, it is difficult to appraise his conclusions. However, the very next day EA stocks went back up 2% after three separate brokers said SWTOR is “performing in line with expectations.” One of them went on to say:
Evan Wilson of Pacific Crest wrote Friday that he has raised his sales estimate for “Star Wars” to 2.2 million units from 1.5 million units for the quarter, and said he remains “comfortable” with his 800,000 subscriber target when the company’s fiscal year ends in late March.
“Admittedly, we set our expectations as if Star Wars was to be a good, not great, MMO,” he wrote. “Fortunately, we think the company did too.”
Hardly a ringing endorsement, but there it is. There is a line between the soft bigotry of low expectations and aggressive schadenfreude – the challenge is finding it. “Good, not great, MMO” might be a bit too low for even my standards, especially given write-ups like these in the LA Times (turns out SWTOR officially cost $200m). We will know more about the numbers in February when EA’s financial statements become available, but I am inclined to say that if SWTOR can achieve/maintain 500k-800k subscriptions for the year it will undeniably be a success.
3) Endgame Concerns
About a week ago, Tobold was discussing Richard Bartle’s feelings towards the SWTOR endgame (which are rather interesting, by the way). Down in the comment section, Tobold said something I wanted to highlight:
In short, I know why I prefer leveling in SWTOR to leveling in WoW. I don’t know why I would prefer raiding in SWTOR to raiding in WoW. Do you?
It is an interesting question because by all accounts, we have no idea what the average WoW player is doing. Looking at Cataclysm, only approximately 17.28% of the Western audience killed 1 raid boss in T11 content, and ~12.69% killed 1 raid boss in T12. Even if my methodology¹ is flawed, it is likely we are looking at a game in which over two-thirds of players do not participant in raiding, i.e. the “accepted” endgame. So… what are they doing? Heroics? Battlegrounds? Goldshire RP? Everyone seems to agree that the WoW leveling game has been irreparably destroyed, and yet there seems to be no other explanation as for what the vast, vast majority of the playerbase seems to be doing.
In this respect, SWTOR’s raiding endgame seems as likely as not to be irrelevant. Perhaps the social mechanisms of organized raiding trickle down to the masses, perhaps raiding increases player engagement, perhaps you need hardcore gamers to bind a community together long enough for a population’s sheer gravity to take over. These are open questions. Until we get some usage statistics from Blizzard though, I feel comfortable enough suggesting that the depth of SWTOR’s endgame is not particularly important to its overall success/failure; it clearly is not in WoW.
Retention is a function of social ties, which inevitably take place primarily in the endgame, but they are not about the endgame per se. As long as Bioware steps up its guild infrastructure plans and its Show & Tell aspects, as I said before I see no particular problem with retention at whatever sub level they achieve.
Flowers, Sunshine Aside…
The real challenges SWTOR faces are more systemic in nature.
Nearly everyone has expressed concerns when it comes to the full voice acting, for example, but I am much more concerned about the related problem of localization. According to that LA Times article I linked earlier, SWTOR is only localized in two languages (German and French). In contrast, WoW has been localized into eight: German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Korean, and both Traditional and Simplified Chinese. While SWTOR catches somewhat of a break when it comes to the aliens speaking gibberish that can be Cut & Paste, just imagine the ridiculousness that is recording all other voice work in three separate languages (plus male/female differences!), let alone additional languages in the future.
This is relevant because, quite honestly, WoW could shut down all US/EU servers and still probably maintain 5+ million Asian subscriptions into perpetuity (Aion inexplicably has 4 million after all). Meanwhile, SWTOR does not have access to the Asian MMO market and thus has much shorter reach. Assuming, of course, that Star Wars is even a hot commodity over there to begin with.
The other systemic issue is the gravity of the game itself. While I believe SWTOR will probably be fine in maintaining at least ~500k subs (and be successful as a result), needing at least 375k subs to be worth the $200 million endeavor is somewhat worrisome. All MMOs probably have some kind of break-even point, well-publicized or not, but generally speaking a game company grows in relation to the success of the game. The question arises as to how long EA would tolerate sub-375k performance before more drastic measures were enacted. Given EA’s rather public rivalry with Activisn-Blizzard when it comes to Call of Duty vs Battlefield 3, I am inclined to believe they will go to heroic lengths to keep SWTOR in the fight should it fall, but it may well go the other way too.
In any case, things are shaping up to be an interesting year.
¹ I actually think my methodology is better than the sort of Armory audits appearing on MMO-Champ as of late. The problem with Armory audits is the “white noise” of alts. Since I extrapolate based on guilds, it is much more likely that a raider’s alts are filtered out rather than included, and thus not diluting the figures. Of course, MMOData.net hasn’t been updated since WoW started hemorrhaging subscriptions, and so finding the current US/EU/KR/TW baseline is impossible, thus possibly skewing the percentages of T12 and beyond.
Grains of Salt
In the course of researching EVE’s current subscription numbers (did they in fact break 400k?), I came across the PDF detailing the minutes from the last CSM meeting. In my Crtl-F’ing down the page, I came across this passage:
CSM continued to the point of how does risk versus reward scale? “Badly” (followed by laughter) was the response from some of the people in the meeting. The CSM suggested that rebalancing prices of modules so that average cost of modules versus cost of hull would be reasonably constant. Right now looting a frigate wreck gives you a good fraction of the value of the ship (because most of the value is in the modules), vs. larger ships where this isn’t true. Right now T2 is so cheap that it’s a no brainer, if you can use T2, you use T2. Following this train of thought, the CSM said it’s hard to make money by PVP’ing, most people now grind money so they can PVP. By adjusting somehow the drops from PvP, it could be possible to make it viable to only PvP, ISK vice. PvP-ing in a frigate means that you only need to kill a few ships to break even, flying in a Vagabond means that a player needs to kill 100 (in the ballpark at least) to pay for that ship. One CSM member pointed out that that buying a ship to fight in is not an investment in making more ISK (like when a player invests in his mission running ship), it is an investment in fun. CCP asked in turn whether it wasn’t a bit depressing to have to run content in the game that a player doesn’t necessarily wants to run, in order to be able to have fun. The CSM responded that all activity added to the game, there wouldn’t be ganking of helpless miners if there was no one mining.
Consider my eyebrow raised.
Now, I have been thoroughly warned about the propaganda and lies and how “everything these reps are saying has been vetted by PR people.” But taken on face value, it interests me that designers could be “depressed” about forcing players to grind before they have fun, and then the players (or the group representing them) defending the practice.
One of the big justifications in WoW for requiring Badges of Justice for the PvP cloaks back in TBC (and requiring raiders to cap Valor with heroics since then) was exactly that sort of cross-pollination. It is a sticky design issue, for sure.
Of course, this paragraph also happened:
A side-discussion ensued about why people try EVE. CSM pointed out that the unique attraction of EVE was “you can grief people” and “it’s not a game for wusses”. It was also pointed out that the broad scope of the sandbox was both a selling-point but also a negative — it was easy to get lost.
My particular deal-breaker is arguably a reason why I should not be in MMOs anymore: EVE seems particularly hostile to single-player gameplay. Carebear guilds Corps aside, I have little desire to reenter a position of social obligation, having driven that particular nail deep enough already. If I’m logging on at 9pm, it will be because I wanted to, not because I seek to avoid awkward, passive-aggressive guild drama.
Now, if I find like-minded people later? Sure, let’s go destroy something beautiful together.
In An Age 
Enthusiasm Tax
Mar 10
Posted by Azuriel
As a general rule, I try not to get too excited by anything.
Part of this is due to the standard sort of defense mechanism against disappointment. As the saying goes, a pessimist is either right, or pleasantly surprised. Of course, that often leads to pretty dreary life experiences, so there are certain realms in which I let it all hang out.
But the main reason I strive to keep skepticism high is out of simple and repeated experience: you are always punished for your enthusiasm.
Case in point:
Never again.
If you will recall, I ended up paying ~$85 for Mass Effect 3: Digital Deluxe Edition about two days ago. Had I waited those two days, I could have spent $16 somewhere, anywhere else. I am not in a financial situation in which the $16 necessarily matters, but it matters to me that I essentially paid an Enthusiasm Tax.
The deal was via Dealzon, and I was made aware of that via Kotaku’s The Moneysaver article. It expires today (March 10), in case you are interested. Then again, I have little doubt that you could wait a month or two and get an even better deal.
Incidentally, based on my ME3 experiences thus far, it is worth waiting for the price drop.
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Tags: Deals, Enthusiasm Tax, Kotaku, Mass Effect