After continuing losses, Atari is selling off Cryptic Studios, the makers of Champions Online & Star Trek Online. For 2010/2011, Cryptic had losses of $7.5 million; better than the $17 million losses of the previous year but bad enough for Atari to look at dumping them. Atari says it will continue supporting the games until Cryptic is sold.
I wonder if this will serve as a reality check to those who feel that a F2P model is the ultimate panacea to a failing MMORPG. Listening to people recite developer statements such as “But so-and-so says revenues are up 200%!” without knowing what those numbers actually were was getting a bit old.
Well, I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that anyone thinks moving to free-to-play will save a terrible MMO or any terrible game. I also don’t really see how your free-to-play bash even flows from the news of Atari selling the companies. The switch to free-to-play for those games didn’t occur in the year you’re quoting numbers from.
Hell, maybe Atari is selling them 'cause they’re finally profitable and Atari needs to money now to remain solvent.
Various conversations I’ve had with people where they quote some random snippet a developer or PR rep gave some gaming blog, saying that revenue was up X% after switching to F2P (but not saying what revenue was previously).
CO went F2P in January. Second semester reports (Oct 2010-March 2011) were a loss for Cryptic of $4.7 million. I’m not against F2P as a concept, just the unrealistic view some people have of it.
Atari’s statement is that they want to concentrate on a smaller number of profitable games.
Just for reference, here’s an example of the quotes I mentioned:
That was the sort of thing quoted to “prove” what a huge success F2P was for games forced to shift gears from a subscription model to a F2P model. Again, I’m not against F2P but I was tired of people who felt it meant an instant turn-around for a failing game. F2P can work but that doesn’t mean it will work. Maybe that opinion hadn’t made its way onto this board and so I apologize for any confusion or if anyone feels I was putting words in their mouth.
I have to agree with that. I so much wanted to like Champions, which was my favorite pen-and-paper RPG. I played in the beta, but IMO it wasn’t nearly as good as City of Heroes, so I didn’t buy. Then it went F2P and I re-downloaded the game, hoping that improvements would make the game more fun. Just the opposite. It sucked even more. Definitely proof that the lead behind City of Heroes was not responsible for it’s success (and explains why he left/was pushed out).
Oh, god, that’s a funny press release. Yes, let’s crow about our success after less than a month of the new model.
Of course there’s going to be a brief spike in revenue and logins, numbnuts. You generated some hype and got people to come check out the game for a bit who otherwise wouldn’t want to pay a sub. But A, 1000% is much less impressive than it sounds; you opened your game for free and only managed to attract a 10x spike, and B, why don’t you wait to find out if it’s sustainable first?
Turbine, who runs both DDO and LOTRO, has a pretty good F2P model. They’ve been running solid for at least a year now, and doing better than they did under the subscription model. But Turbine also understood that you have to give the free player a full, complete game from the start. You can reach max level in DDO with free content, and there’s tons of stuff accessible to you without ever having to pay a red cent. The things they do lock behind payments are really neat, but are also clearly optional; a player has to want to buy stuff without feeling like they have to.
On the flip side, Champions went from free-form power selection as part of the core game to locking everyone into archetypes more rigid than City of Heroes offers. You have to pay to unlock free selection. Other than a few diehards trying to defend the company at any cost, just about anyone looking at that is going to tell you it’s bullshit. They made the mistake of locking part of their established core game behind payments, and making people feel like they had to shell out. That engenders ill will and makes it more likely the player will drift to a different game.
On a personal note, I don’t have any regard for or against F2P per se. I like MMOs and I like seeing how the genre evolves. FWIW, though, every game I’ve played on ever since F2P became A Thing has been subscription (EVE Online, WoW, City of Heroes, Rift).
I’m wondring why he (or possibly she) thinks anyone else in the world would care. Cryptic has become a byword for incompetent planning, low design ambitions, and poor execution. I shrug at Perfect World, but what do they think is going to be different? Their jobs weren’t exactly safe before the sale.
City of Heroes is considered, at least by its playerbase, to be a happy accident. Cryptic managed to get enough of the right pieces in place to create a flawed but genuinely fun game. There was metaphorical dancing in the streets when Cryptic left and NCSoft took over.
Also, most of the people working on CoX at the time stayed with City. And plenty of people have commented since then on all the improvements made since then that Statesman/Emmert had opposed.
Well, as I recall it, it was a sort of combination of “Thank goodness Emmert is gone” and “Thank God it isn’t SOE”. There was a lot of worry about how well NCSoft would support the game; fortunately the answer turned out to be “quite well”.
Hmmm. It’s been quite a while, but one I remember was real numbers; letting players see the actual numbers for powers so they can figure out how good they are. These days you can even have a little real time monitor running if you like. Also, he had this idea that one character was supposed to be a match for IIRC about a few minions, 2-3 Lts, or 1 boss (you can still see that in the genre minion/Lt/Boss descriptions); as opposed to being able to crank things up to where you fight whole rooms full of enemies.
But he’d largely withdrawn before I started playing, or at least started paying attention to the forums, I wasn’t really there for the Great Statesman Hate Fest.