vryxnr
Well-known member
Heck, in the last year I've seen a few teenagers join my guild on g-land! Yay new blood!
SSG is a gaming studio?
- Thread starter Jummby
- Start date
What do you consider pedestrian numbers at launch? While I admit I dropped New World after 7 months, I'd like to hear those launch numbers.
Br4d
Well-known member
Neither of those are MMO's. Destiny 2 is a looter-shooter that happens to have multi-player incorporated and Lost Ark is an ARPG that happens to have multi-player incorporated.
BTW, Lost Ark went from 1.3M concurrent players at launch to 40K concurrent players now. Destiny 2 is also at the 40K concurrent player mark.
They are shining examples of games that launched and then quickly lost popularity.
There is 1 game that has a million plus concurrent players in 2024.
Care to guess which one?
They are as much MMOs as DDO, maybe even more so.
You could say that DDO is just an ARPG with social hubs to meet up with other players and go into instanced quests... so basically what Diablo does, or Path of Exile.
Now, THOSE aren´t MMOs (apart from Lost Ark and New World)
Xaxx
Well-known member
So the mmo height would have been in the late oughts, and early teens.... general say 2005-20013. Take a look at the amount of games put out by major publishers in that era versus post that era. Take rockstar for example, they put out several games a year, since then.. they put out a couple games a decade.
Console change over in the early teens lead to larger, more expensive, and more dev time consuming games. Take that with the what constitutes the casual mmo player base getting their "fix" from more easily available, less time consuming mobile games.
So something that already had a long development time compared to alot of other games (early 2000s ddo development time versus average ps2 game.....) So major publishers turn away from making alot of games to a more focused "money" making amount at the time when an overpopulated genre is on a down turn due to..... overpopulation... and mobile competition for its dopamine hit.
I wonder why the mmo market variety crashed.
So today you have hardly mmos release, and even so for nearly the last decade. Most of the few that due are Korean. Yet if you look around at the major publishers (dont get into nintendo) its still the same story, only a few releases a year. We're drowning in game choices became of things like steam and the rise of the indy and "double A" gaming studios to the point where the biggest game of this year will probably be Helldivers 2.
That is coming pretty far from the "big non AAA games"' being stuff like single/low person indy projects (stardew valley, under tale, bastion... etc) Yet mmo isnt something your gonna see many indy/AA take on just because even in the height of them they were years long projects when average game dev time was 8/18/28 months... the stuff like swtor was half a decade. This isnt a project most smaller companies can sink their teeth into in this day and age.
The few that have have flamed out in a few years or released in general very VERY (ddo levels) of niche projects. As of this, I think theres only one AA actual mmo still being worked on that might be good, but its original release date was... like 4 years ago, and has been in production for a decade now with no end in sight, so probably will never see the light of day.
That being said, due to a recent released graph and previous statements, Bellular over on youtube who is a wow content creator posted some extrapolated numbers for wow's population. So while wow at one point had over 12 million subs is the big tag line, and wow has "died since''..... It looks like wows lowest sub count was somewhere around 4 million, and in the past decade has risen to more than double that at around 8.5 million.
Since wow has been the number 2 mmo for quite a while according to the industry, that would put final fantasy sub count somewhere around that or higher... so if you just generally put those two games together and say a soft estimate fo 10 million subs a month.... thats 2 games generating around 120-150 million bucks a month between em....
I mean due to info dumped a couple years ago for ddo, you can take the per user engagement number, and the general estimation of ddo pop and figure out what ddos monetary number was, and it wasnt horrible a few years ago.... I wouldnt count on that being anywhere near the same number today not after the last two years of worsening lag, month long server roll back, general bleh of their releases....
So is there money in mmos... sure still a good bit of it today, wont change dev time, investment, and risk. When something like Palworld has a 30+ million dev cost over i think 3 years....
To take something like that and turn it into a actual mmo not a "survival multiplayer" or ark or some other survival mmorpg into an actual mmorpg would probably triple that cost and double the dev time.....
the "riot mmo" thats been discussed for 5 years now, its latest news was that they were changing things and we wouldnt hear from them again for a few years, so till 26 or 27 prob... so that puts a project that was announced I think pre covid release date out to the 28-30 time frame.....
So mmos dead.... nah still billions out there to be made....is mmo development basically dead... oh yeah
All that said, that doesnt mean just because certain "devs" plop out updates that are so useless and undercooked even a sushi chef would be embarrassed that people should just say YEAH and dig in
If your dog or cat takes a dump on the floor and looks at you basically showing how proud they are, if you pat them on the head and call them a good boy, then whose at fault the next time they do it?????
Console change over in the early teens lead to larger, more expensive, and more dev time consuming games. Take that with the what constitutes the casual mmo player base getting their "fix" from more easily available, less time consuming mobile games.
So something that already had a long development time compared to alot of other games (early 2000s ddo development time versus average ps2 game.....) So major publishers turn away from making alot of games to a more focused "money" making amount at the time when an overpopulated genre is on a down turn due to..... overpopulation... and mobile competition for its dopamine hit.
I wonder why the mmo market variety crashed.
So today you have hardly mmos release, and even so for nearly the last decade. Most of the few that due are Korean. Yet if you look around at the major publishers (dont get into nintendo) its still the same story, only a few releases a year. We're drowning in game choices became of things like steam and the rise of the indy and "double A" gaming studios to the point where the biggest game of this year will probably be Helldivers 2.
That is coming pretty far from the "big non AAA games"' being stuff like single/low person indy projects (stardew valley, under tale, bastion... etc) Yet mmo isnt something your gonna see many indy/AA take on just because even in the height of them they were years long projects when average game dev time was 8/18/28 months... the stuff like swtor was half a decade. This isnt a project most smaller companies can sink their teeth into in this day and age.
The few that have have flamed out in a few years or released in general very VERY (ddo levels) of niche projects. As of this, I think theres only one AA actual mmo still being worked on that might be good, but its original release date was... like 4 years ago, and has been in production for a decade now with no end in sight, so probably will never see the light of day.
That being said, due to a recent released graph and previous statements, Bellular over on youtube who is a wow content creator posted some extrapolated numbers for wow's population. So while wow at one point had over 12 million subs is the big tag line, and wow has "died since''..... It looks like wows lowest sub count was somewhere around 4 million, and in the past decade has risen to more than double that at around 8.5 million.
Since wow has been the number 2 mmo for quite a while according to the industry, that would put final fantasy sub count somewhere around that or higher... so if you just generally put those two games together and say a soft estimate fo 10 million subs a month.... thats 2 games generating around 120-150 million bucks a month between em....
I mean due to info dumped a couple years ago for ddo, you can take the per user engagement number, and the general estimation of ddo pop and figure out what ddos monetary number was, and it wasnt horrible a few years ago.... I wouldnt count on that being anywhere near the same number today not after the last two years of worsening lag, month long server roll back, general bleh of their releases....
So is there money in mmos... sure still a good bit of it today, wont change dev time, investment, and risk. When something like Palworld has a 30+ million dev cost over i think 3 years....
To take something like that and turn it into a actual mmo not a "survival multiplayer" or ark or some other survival mmorpg into an actual mmorpg would probably triple that cost and double the dev time.....
the "riot mmo" thats been discussed for 5 years now, its latest news was that they were changing things and we wouldnt hear from them again for a few years, so till 26 or 27 prob... so that puts a project that was announced I think pre covid release date out to the 28-30 time frame.....
So mmos dead.... nah still billions out there to be made....is mmo development basically dead... oh yeah
All that said, that doesnt mean just because certain "devs" plop out updates that are so useless and undercooked even a sushi chef would be embarrassed that people should just say YEAH and dig in
If your dog or cat takes a dump on the floor and looks at you basically showing how proud they are, if you pat them on the head and call them a good boy, then whose at fault the next time they do it?????
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PurpleSerpent
Monster Hunter of Moderate Renown
Which of DDO or LOTRO would you prefer them to shut down so they can allocate some of the team to making a new game? That's sort of what it comes down to.
Br4d
Well-known member
Again, we know what a smash hit MMO looks like. It attracts people to the genre and expands our concept of what success looks like. It has a vibe that is undeniable and you hear about it in the mainstream press because it's success is newsworthy.
Nothing like that since WoW. Nothing likely to come out at this point that does that.
The only in-development MMO that is likely to get a lot of press is Ashes of Creation and it will get that press for all the wrong reasons.
vryxnr
Well-known member
...and?
That is a serious question, as none of that counters my point. It is information we can both agree is true, but it is being presented like some sort of gotcha moment where you're proving me wrong on something, but I'm not seeing it. All it's doing in this form is showing that my initial impression of this (the potential viewpoint/reasoning behind the doomsaying) is actually true:
...which (the notion of "it must be a huge smash hit or it is dead") is not a mindset that I ascribe to.
Not having a very large market does not mean there is no market.
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