I don't kick puppies. It lowers the resale value.

Although I’d tracked City of Heroes / Villains’ financial performance for a while now, I’d gotten bored of the trend – there’s only so many ways you can say “Worst quarterly revenue in the game’s history” without looking like you are kicking a puppy. But the conversion of CoH/V to a free-to-play (F2P) title has made it interesting again. A lot of MMO studios that convert to F2P are able to make vague comments about the impact of the new revenue model – up 500%! up 1000%! – but haven’t been open about the actual dollars they were at before and after.

Unless NCsoft changes their earnings release policy, CoH/V won’t be hiding behind such things; hard financial data on the before and after of F2P will be available.

The Quarter Leading Into F2P

CoH/V launched its F2P conversion on 27 September 2011, so that the Q4 2011 results will include 2 full months of F2P revenue. These results should be available in about 2 weeks time, but we can see where CoH/V was directly before the move to F2P.

… which was, again, on the worst quarterly performance in CoH/V history (*punt*). At first glance the revenue of 2 812 M Won looks like an improvement because it is actually an increase in Won over the previous quarter, but a conversion to US$ shows that increase is due to the the Won weakening against the US dollar. Instead, it’s closer to a 4% decline in revenue from the previous quarter, with CoH/V earning about US$2.4m in the Q3 2011 period.

Click to enlarge it, because your eyesight isn't THAT good.

Using the rough formula of dividing that revenue by $45 (3 x $15 a month in subs this quarter) then increasing it of about 10% (because all those long-term players are paying less than $45 a quarter to play CoH/V) then we end up with CoH/V currently having somewhere between 55k and 60k players.

It’s all rough because there are a lot of factors at play that the financials don’t show; for instance, in those estimates I’m assuming that $0 came from the Booster Packs that CoH/V sells, whereas I know from other sources that they sell very well (or sold well, given that they were removed for sale in that form when the F2P transition happened). So revenue from such sources could actually be inflating the player number estimates shown here.

How Will CoH/V Do In Going Hybrid F2P?

Better than they were under a pure subscription model, that’s for sure. (This would have sounded better if I’d published this blog entry before Paragon Studios had announced they were “blown away” by how well the move to F2P has gone for their player numbers and revenue, but sometimes you sit on a blog entry for just a day too long…)

It's extremely unlikely that I'll be able to use the phase "worst quarterly revenue in the game's history" in conjunction with CoH/V for a while to come.

Regardless, the initial shift to a hybrid F2P model is likely a boon to any MMO title. Existing subscribers are unlikely to cancel, given that they’ve paid this long and the MMO is probably offering a bunch of reasons to stay subscribed (and some are probably locked into their discount payment period). So that revenue base is relatively solid.

Then a whole heap of new players come in and even if only 10% buy something, it’s a big source of new revenue. It could only mean an average of $1 or $2 per paying user (Average Revenue Per User, or ARPU) per month, but when that paying user base goes from 55k to (say) 200k, it makes a big difference.

Keeping those players in the longer term is a different story, however. And again, Paragon Studios still has all its eggs in one basket until they launch their next title. Which we’re still waiting for.

The LA Times has indicated that SWOR’s development cost sits at US$200m, while analyst Doug Creutz of Cowen & Co. suggested that EA’s “total all-in investment in ‘Star Wars’ is probably approaching half a billion dollars”.

It isn’t conclusive by any stretch, but it certainly looks like SWOR could be the most expensive video game launched to date. EA probably doesn’t want that particular record in the Guinness Book of Records though.

There are very few video game companies who can compete with those kind of budgets (even at the lower end). RIFT cost over US$50m to develop, as did DC Universe Online. If you want to build a subscription-based MMO title, apparently you need at least an 8-or-9 figure development budget lined up.

Dispatched

• Bayonetta (X360): Finished this on Normal difficulty, started again on the next harder difficulty and have shelved the game after running into a roadblock at a particular Alfheim Portal. Might come back to it.
• 

  You know what would have made Alan Wake better? If someone had written an ending.

  Alan Wake (plus The Signal and The Writer DLC) (X360):  Completed this with 3 achievements outstanding, but 2 of those are “Complete the DLC without dying” and I’m not sure I’m in the mood to try for that. Particularly with the instant death jumping puzzles.

• Batman: Arkham City (X360): Completed and also finished a lot of the extra challenges, but completing the campaigns is beyond my patience levels. Plus I don’t think there is enough in the Robin or Nightwing DLCs to justify their purchase, since that would just provide more challenges and campaigns.

Unwrapped

• Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood: On loan.
• Duke Nukem Forever: Bought on the cheap during the sales. Some things are worth experiencing first hand, even if you know they are bad.
• Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Playing it now. This may be sacrilegious, but I don’t get all the love for this game. It’s pretty and there’s lots of stuff to do but ultimately feels hollow to me. I’ll finish it and then consider how I feel about it.
• LA Noire: Bought on the cheap during the sales.

Unplayed

• Dark Souls
• Dead Space 2
• The Witcher 2
• Deus Ex 3
• Gears of War 3 (for the sake of completeness, really)
• Catherine
• From Dust
• Shadows of the Damned
• Portal 2
• Psychonauts (because I’ve never played it but am intrigued)
• Alice: Madness Returns
• To The Moon
• The Binding of Isaac

No, but the saccharine-induced nausea from that statement will see me vomit on your shoes.

That Statesman is apparently dying in part 5 of what I believe to be a 7 part story arc raises my Eyebrow of Cynicism +3 – killing the main hero before the end of the storyline leaves plenty of time for him to pop back up, all refreshed from his dirt nap, just before the ending credits. Or there is time for another twist, so that Statesman is the fake-out death and it is actually Positron or Synapse that end up with their own personalised tombstone.

(An interesting twist would be Positron being the “real” death within the story arc, then CoH/V’s Lead Developer Matt Miller who plays the role of Positron announces he’s stepping down from CoH/V and onto something else. Purely hypothetical, but Miller’s been with CoH/V for 8 years or more, which is a long time on one project in the video game world. Plus you could remove Positron from the game without nearly as much work.)

Whether Statesman’s death is ‘real’ within the story or just a PR stunt, it still strikes me as a bit obvious, a bit desperate, for Paragon Studios to pull this as a move. It’s like DC killing off Superman – you know it isn’t going to stick because the character is too front-and-centre to stay dead. Don’t believe me? Let’s look at City of Heroes / Villains (CoH/V) website:

I count Statesman appearing on the website 5 times on the front page. He's very visible for a soon-to-be-dead man.

He also pops up 4 times on NCsofts’s CoH/V page as well.

I believe I saw a quote saying that Statesman isn’t coming off any of the marketing materials but can’t find it; what I can see is that Statesman removal in-game “will come at a later date” because of all the effort required. And he isn’t coming out of the tutorial because that happens before the events of “Who Will Die?” and “the timeline still works”.

Temporal Fun

CoH/V’s game lore suffers from two forms of time passing: real world time, that means the game launched in 2004 and it is now 2012; and level-based time, where characters experience the world progressing as they level up through story arcs. Whether it takes 10 minutes or 2 years to move from level 5 to level 15, the non-player character treats that time difference as exactly the same. It is the story arc that counts.

... and CoH/V's timeline is this way without even mentioning the time travel aspects.

A good example of this is the whole Rikti Invasion. Unless it has changed, the news that that SPOILER the Rikti aren’t really aliens at all but genetically altered humans from another dimension and are planning another invasion that you can foil END SPOILER is still meant to be shocking news to characters, despite the invasion first coming to light in July 2007. The Invasion has been gearing up for a while then, obviously having suffered setbacks from all those interfering heroes.

So it remains very possible that Statesman could end up in a state of quantum death – both dead and not-dead in the game game depending on what character level you are and possibly if you’ve played through the story arc or not. Paragon Studios can have its cake and eat it too if they want.

So yes, the timeline still works, but the timeline is held together by a mix of smoke, mirrors, duct tape and unicorn dreams.

Unpopularity Contest

The death of Statesman is certainly popular among some segments of the CoH/V community, both due to dislike of the character and his previous role as forum name for previous CoH/V lead developer Jack Emmert. I’ve never got the hate for Emmert, especially the line of thought that CoH/V succeeded in spite of him, thus robbing him of any credit for the title he led but simultaneously shouldering him with all blame for any of its problems.

Besides, I think the only popular MMO lead developer is one who isn’t currently working on a title – if they are currently in the position of running a game, you can guarantee there will be a lot of players who disagree with them about what they are doing. Regardless, given that Emmert hasn’t been involved in CoH/V for about 5 of its 8 years of operation (excluding pre-launch periods) he still casts a long shadow that some players want scrubbed off.

"You call that a costume? Kids these days, no respect and think they know everything. In my day, we wore outfits that were classy, tasteful and practical - nowadays the men dress like 'confirmed bachelors' and the women dress like strippers. And a dollar would buy a jar of boiled candies as big as my head! And another thing..."

Statesman the character hasn’t been too popular in some circles either, seen as being too arrogant and overbearing, but personally I thought it an interesting (and more human) twist on the Superman trope. He’s the premier hero in the world because of his powers and drive, not because he’s kind to children and small animals! He’s seen a lot of people, good and bad, die so he’s not necessarily the friendliest of people, but he makes sure he gets the job done. That said, in most ways he is only a foot note for most CoH/V players – you can certainly play through CoH/V entirely and spend less than 30 seconds interacting with him in-game.

All in all, it’s questionable if the death of Statesman is a good move. He’s the only character that has any recognition outside of the CoH/V community, even if he is “that superhero guy from CoH/V”. So killing him off seems more for shock value than something meaningful.

It’s also the largest shot in the barrel that Paragon Studios really has to fire. If step 1 / signature arc 1 is “Kill Statesman”, then step 2 / signature arc 2 is going to have to be a real doozy to get people’s attention again. Kill Lord Recluse? He’s the evil parallel of Statesman (well, one of them) and less well known, so it’s a step down. Kill Tyrant? He’s only just got that new white suit. Blow up the Rogue Isles? That’s where the villains mostly are, plus it is a lot of content to remove from players.

Announce CoH/V 2.0? Perhaps… but Paragon Studios has been very, very quiet on that one for a while now.

All in all, it’s just easier to announce Statesman as dying, kill him off for a bit, ride a small PR wave then bring him out of the Olympian retirement home whenever is convenient.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 34,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 13 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

So, here we go again:

Faster Dire Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

"Sorry chaps, but a man down the road says I need to kill 15 of you and then he'll give me a slightly better axe."

Kill quests are the cornerstone of any mainstream RPG. As an adventurer, your unwritten instruction is to murder a significant proportion (if not all) of what crosses your path, be they humanoid, animal or something from the depths of imagination. In short: if they aren’t you, you should think about killing them because they could have something you can loot. There’s probably some social commentary to be made about this aspect of RPGs, western society, our aggressive expansionist mindset / history and current issues with environmental sustainability, but that’s a whole different topic.

1. Kill X of Y: You have to defeat a certain number of the same opponent. This starts out as Kill Ten Rats and ends up at Kill 250 Elder Rat Gods. This is sometimes subverted as a “kill X until you recover enough of Z” or “kill X until you recover the Lost Artifact of Z” , but usually the developer has a number of opponents in mind that they want you to kill before you can complete the quest.
2. Kill [Named] Y: Some mob has gotten tough enough to earn itself a name. You are to assassinate it for rising above its station.
3. Destroy: A kill quest, but with the target(s) being inanimate e.g. shrines, weapons, jewellery.

There can be additional conditions put on these kind of quests, such as kill without being seen or kill within a set time limit as well.

Save Me! Save Me From Myself!

The Princess will be available for saving between the hours of 8am and 5pm PST during the normal work week, and 10am to 3pm every second Saturday. Saving availability outside of these times can be negotiated by prior arrangement.

The flipside to the Kill Quest is the Save Quest – the player is tasked with protecting someone or something that others are trying to kidnap or kill. Given that the natural instinct of the RPG player is to murder all before it, being tasked with not murdering someone specifically goes against their natural instinct. However, the quest be accepted because the player knows that in order to protect this person / item a lot of assassins / thieves will die and will conveniently come to the player instead of the player having to find them.

1. Save X of Y: This requires the player to save a number of people / items of the same type. It usually involves the player running around finding their targets and murdering the people / animals / fantasy creatures they find near those targets just to be on the safe side.
2. Save [Named] Y: A single important person / item has been stolen and the player needs to find them. The target will inevitably be located in the last room of a complex that the player will fill with the corpses of its prior occupants.
3. Escort: The player starts out with the target (usually a humanoid) and needs to ensure they get to their desired destination (which is typically 5 minutes or less away). This is possibly the most hated of RPG questing, since the kind of people who require escorting have the self-preservation instinct of a marshmallow going to a flamethrower contest.
4. Protect: The player is asked to stop too much damage occurring to a person / item / location. A developer thinks the fun from this quest arises from the player overcoming the odds and succeeding; the player knows the frustration that comes from almost getting to the end of the quest but failing it because the assassins / thieves piled on the target in the final wave.

Variants of the above typically involve save for a set time limit, which developers sometimes use to hide the nastier variant of save for a set time limit but if the target dies after the time limit has expired you still fail the quest because if we told you that up front you’d never learn from the experience.

You There! Errand Boy!

Did you know that when you Google "delivery" for images, you get up-close vaginal shots of babies being born? I do now!

People in RPGs have lots of packages and letters that need delivering and no-one has ever thought of setting up a formal organisation that could do this task. Good thing, or else a lot of adventurers would have to plan  out their own journeys instead of just grabbing a letter and heading in the direction of the address.

1. Delivery (aka Fedex): The quest giver wants something delivered to someone else. In a time of magic or ultra-tech science, the best way of getting it there is to give it to some wandering adventurer they’ve never seen before and have them deliver it in person.
2. Collect X of Y: A character is tasked with finding a certain number of objects of a certain type to continue the quest. This starts out as Collect 10 Rat Droppings and ends up at Collect 100 Elder Rat God Droppings. Sometimes it involves collecting the organs of creatures you kill e.g. collect 10 Rat Noses – please note that not every Rat will have a nose to collect.
3. Find [Named]: Find a particular character, location and / or item, usually by running up to them and clicking on them. This type of quest could be called Next Quest Chain Starts Here, but Find [Named] is so much shorter.
4. Find [Named] And Deliver: Someone or something has been lost and it is up to the player to find it again and deliver it somewhere. It is different from the Collect X of Y quest in that this quest usually has the [Named] placed behind a wall of opponents who need murdering, while Collect usually occurs out in the open. This is a quest type that easily stacks, so players end up with Find and Collect and Find and Deliver (and so on) variations.

Occasionally the above conditions such as find / deliver within a set time frame, but most NPCs don’t care how long it takes to deliver a package provided it gets there within the next century.

Knitting Odd Socks

"Before the Great Arch Mage Mandigold left this world, he hid the Key of Destiny behind a series of increasingly intricate puzzles that must all be completed in the correct sequence or everyone in the castle will die. He was kind of a dick like that."

Every now and again RPG developers remember that they have more than just combat and movement systems within their title and work on a quest that goes outside of those realms. But not often, because that would be weird.

1. Activate!: A switch needs to be flicked, a lighthouse needs to be lit, a desk needs to be searched, an engine needs to be fixed. Basically the player has to find a particular object and get it working. There are Activate X of Y, Activate X With Y and Activate [Named] variants, but all possess the same basic requirement of clicking on something in-game.
2. Puzzle Solving: The super-advanced version of Activate!, the player is required to solve a puzzle before they can continue – the switches need to be flicked in the right order, the engine parts need to be fit together like a jigsaw, the pipes need to be connected so that the water can flow. Players and RPG developers aren’t hugely fond of Puzzle Solving since it doesn’t involve straightforward violence and the answers are looked up on the internet anyway, but now and again some developers want to look clever and throw some in.
3. Craftskills: In order to complete the quest something needs to be crafted by the player (or developed by some kind of craftskill). There can be a lot of variation here – the player can be crafting weapons, armour, jewellery or something quest specific, but these quests require the player to convert raw in-game materials into something else.
4. Reach Achievement X: The quest is to reach a certain achievement, such as a particular level or craftskill rank or even earn a particular achievement before you can continue. Usually this is used as a gating mechanism – the contact won’t even talk to you before you reach this particular achievement – but sometimes the quest itself states what achievement you have to get to before continuing.
5. 

   It's all about choosing the correct dialogue option.

   Convince [Named]: A few quests exist that ask the player to convince an NPC of a certain position, usually through the selection of the correct dialogue options on a preset wheel. The three normal flavours of Convince are persuade (“Hey, how about you call off your army? Please?”), bribe (“I’ll give you the riches of A’ter’tzia if you call off your army!”) and threaten (“CALL OFF YOUR ARMY NOW BEFORE I DECIDE TO WEAR YOU LIKE A PARTICULARLY UGLY BOOT!”), with the occasional inform option (“You’ll call off your army once I tell you what I read in the previously lost Prophecy of T’cha’mand’cardia…”) thrown in. Again, the internet exists to ensure the player says the right thing the first time.

Arc Welding

Building a story arc from the above is pretty easy – you simply add the components you want together either before or after you’ve worked out the narrative. So you can have an Escort followed by a Kill X of Y then Collect X of Y then Kill [Named] then Delivery. But that’s just the mechanics of it – it is how that the quest chain / story arc is presented to players that is memorable. The Lord of the Rings saga can be mechanically described as a very long Delivery and Escort quest with a Destroy end goal, but that severely understates the narrative that encapsulates the quest.

It is how you arrange the individual building blocks that gives shape to the greater whole.

It’s in the area of quest presentation that MMOs are starting to move. Although developers still lazily put “Kill 10 Street Thugs / Troopers / Mushroom Men et al” in the mission goal box, the attempt is made to make individual quests fit within a larger narrative frame and thus make the player feel the illusion of being important.

The narrative can also be used to hide the true quest goal. For instance, the quest could actually be Kill X of Y, but the player is told to clear out a local bandit camp / space bandit fortress. Either way 30 bandits / space bandits die, but the player feels better about achieving a wider goal – clearing out a problem – than just watching a counter wind down.

Feedback

Let me know if you think I’ve missed anything in terms of quest types and I’ll add it into a future update.

I'm guessing this was done by a customer rather than the store, but then you never can tell.

80% of people SHOULD have walked out on this film, and I should have been one of them.

This article prompted me to consider the point of completing games in more detail – it states that only between about 10% – 20% of players actually complete the games they start. If true, that’s appalling. I can’t imagine the movie industry considering itself successful if 80% of its viewing audience walked out before the credits rolled and it really scuttles the “players want story” if the strong majority don’t hang around to the end.

There’s also a side argument from players who feel “ripped off” if they buy a game at full price that takes them less than 8 hours to complete, so I’m interested to know if that is a meaningful argument – after all, shorter games should see higher completion rates.

So, how to find out for myself?

The Methodology

This is pretty simple – look to publicly available information to determine how what proportion of players have unlocked the “complete the main storyline / beat the main game” achievement for various titles. (Some games allow you to keep playing once the main storyline has been completed, or award achievements for completing the game multiple times / on different difficulty levels, but its the end of the story the first time that I’m interested in.) Thanks to Steam Achievements (given that Steam is believed to control up to 70% of the rapidly growing PC game downloads market, it should serve as a pretty reliable guide) and Raptr achievement tracking (a games tracking service covering PC and console titles with over 11m users) this kind of information is out there.

Some of these measures will be inexact, but they are the best free information sources that I'm aware of.

Both Raptr and Steam information will be included for comparative points of reference – they engage different (but possibly overlapping, particularly in the PC sphere) audiences. Steam doesn’t have as many game achievement lists as Raptr though, so some games will only have one completion rate mentioned. Also, I’m adding in figure sourced from BioWare about the completion rate for Mass Effect 2. You could question how representative these sites are, but I’m going to ignore that for now (because this intro is already long enough and I’m just interested, not writing for an academic journal).

In order to measure game length, I’m using the average Main Story (Required) Completion time available on HowLongToBeat.com as a source, rounding times to the nearest half hour for the reason of making it simpler for myself. These times may not be fully representative of an ‘average’ gamer’s behaviour (especially if only 10% – 20% of gamers actually finish their game) and sample sizes are small, but I’m including it as interesting information.

Regarding the games, I’m using popular, award-winning and / or mainstream titles such as those nominated by Gamespot as the best of the year (2009, 2010 and 2011) so that the impact of game quality on completion rates shouldn’t be a big factor. After all, these are the ‘best of’ games – if players aren’t completing them, they aren’t completing the rest either.

In order to find out the “game completion” achievement, I’m using sources like GameFAQs.com and Xbox360Achievements.org. This is actually the hard, time consuming part because actually a lot of devs get cute about naming the “You’ve Completed The Game!” achievement and I have to search for it.

Games I’ve Had To Exclude

The Dalish Elf story had the highest completion rate at 31%. Only 13% played through to get all possible endings.

I’ve had to exclude titles that don’t really have a “game end” achievement (e.g. The Sims 3, Forza Motorsport 3), titles that I can’t figure out which achievement to use (e.g. Dark Souls), games with multiple-yet-equally-valid ending achievements (e.g. Dragon Age: Origins, Bastion) and and any games that aren’t tracked on the sites I’m using or don’t have achievements (e.g. Super Mario Galaxy 2).

And Jamming Everything Into One Chart…

The following chart is very cluttered, but it provides an overview on 25 games – their title, the achievement (let me know if I’ve picked the wrong one) I’m using to determine their completion rates from Raptr / Steam / BioWare, the percentage who completed the game and (in the grey bar the bottom) the average playing time to complete the main story on normal difficulty for the first time.

You'll need to click to enlarge the image to make it legible.

So what do we see?

The average completion rate for these selected titles – supposedly the best, or most recognised in recent memory – is 35%, requiring an average of 11 hours to complete. The most completed game, with 7 out of 10 players who started it finishing it, was Heavy Rain, a very narrative-heavy title.

Well, Mass Effect 2 is a cover shooter of sorts...

Not too far behind Heavy Rain is the cover shooter favourite Gears of War 3, which arguably has less of a narrative drive and more a series of notepad sketches that string sequences of assault rifle fire and grenade throwing together. A higher proportion of players finished Gears of War 3′s main campaign than finished Mass Effect 2 – I’ll leave it to you to make your own judgement on that one.

At the bottom end of completion appears to be Red Dead Redemption – supposedly a narrative driven and popular title, but one that 9 out of 10 players didn’t make all the way through – and Super Meat Boy, a reputedly very hard platformer.

At least one very interesting gap appears in the data – look at LA Noire’s completion rate among Raptr users versus Steam users. Raptr, which includes more console owners in its user base, says that 2 out of 5 players who started LA Noire finished it, but Steam and its PC players indicate that only 1 in 10 made it all the way through. Also, roughly double the number of Raptr users completed Braid (45%) versus Steam users (at 27%).

In contrast, more Steam users played Batman: Arkham City all the way through to the end (32% versus 16% among Raptr users).

So, What Does This Tell Us?

My initial take-out was that game completion rates aren’t necessarily as dire as the original article indicates, but they still aren’t good. It could be considered a sad indictment on gamers that only a third of players who started the short and evocative platformer Limbo actually played it to the end.

... or maybe those Limbo players got up to the spider chase bit and were too creeped out to continue.

There’s also an argument to be made that even in titles seen to be heavily multiplayer oriented, at least 1 in 2 gamers still complete the campaigns at least once to see what goes down. In fact, these titles have a higher ‘main story’ completion rate than games that are meant to be narratively driven!

It’s also apparent that games with reputations for being hard – Super Meat Boy, Bayonetta, Dark Souls – aren’t completed by a significant proportion of players who buy them. It’s evidence that backs up expectations.

I’m open to criticism on the methodology, so let me know if you think I’ve missed something or got something wrong. I’m going to look at this data again and examine time taken to complete versus completion rates, but that will be in a later post.

So, this year I’m still doing the review (starting from about page 300 of Massively.com’s article list), just not writing it up point-by-point. Instead, here are just the key stories and predictions (in my view) for 2012:

The Old Republic Is New Again

The most popular Star Wars game at the moment doesn't involve this guy or his family at all.

Let’s start with the obvious: EA BioWare launched Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWOR), the biggest MMO launch in a long time. I’ve already covered this topic a lot, so I won’t rehash those issues again. In short: I think SWOR will have trouble retaining players, or at least 7 figures worth of players (which is really the target: to get and keep 1m+ players).

Prediction: SWOR will have some big launch numbers announced – 1.5m to 2m launch copies sold within the first 10 weeks – and the success of SWOR launching in new regions (Brazil, India and Asia have a lot of potential players) will be trumpeted, but the next twelve months will see significant chunks of SWOR’s launch base move on. Why? It’s too much “more of the same” at its core, no matter how pretty the outer packaging.

Prediction: Oh, and SWOR will get a cash shop / real money transaction (RMT) system in 2012. There will be much wailing and nashing of forum teeth, but EA won’t be able to hear it over the ching! ching! ching! sound of their cash registers.

The End of NetDevil

This was just a touch premature in terms of dates, but it is still very accurate.

NetDevil has an odd legacy in that it seems to come close to success, only to end up face-first in failure. To recap:

• Jumpgate has its fans, but was never really able to take off following the collapse of its publisher 3DO. It is still (barely) active.
• Auto Assault was NCsoft West’s most embarrassing failure until Tabula Rasa launched.
• NetDevil was bought by Gazillion Entertainment. A lot of key staff have left since.
• LEGO Universe tried to bolt on MMO mechanics and payment systems onto a child-oriented LEGO task set, which just didn’t work. This title was sold back (along with the development team) to the LEGO Group in a face-saving exercise before being cancelled.
• Jumpgate: Evolution ran into feature creep and is now unlikely to launch at all (given that its European publisher has sued for its money back and the head of Gazillion “can’t talk about” the title’s status).

The only remaining title it had was Fortune Online, a generic Diablo-esque isometric dungeon crawler, and even that doesn’t carry the NetDevil logo anymore. Trying to go directly to the www.netdevil.com site auto-forwards you to the Gazillion site.

In short, 2011 saw the end of NetDevil. The bleeding started in 2010, but with the failure of LEGO Universe so goes NetDevil’s chance of resuscitation.

Prediction: NetDevil aren’t coming back. The lights will go out on Jumpgate and Jumpgate: Evolution in 2012 when someone at Gazillion gets a bill to renew the domain (and the lawsuit with Codemasters is settled).

Hacked to the Bone

A number of serious security events happened at MMO and video game companies in 2011, with Sony Online Entertainment, Valve, Codemasters, Order & Chaos Online, Nexon, Square Enix, Trion, (among others) seeing hack attacks of varying severity.

Prediction: There will be more of these kind of attacks since they are a data goldmine for fraud. Failure to prevent these attacks will start to erode gamer confidence in the ability of these studios to protect their details. MMO companies will need to get serious with data protection or see a lot of players leave.

System Overload! Error Code: F2P

I’ve mentioned before that the subscription payment model is on the decline for MMOs, with it being replaced by real money / micro-transaction (RMT) payment schemes. This is for a number of reasons, but a very big one is that most MMO players only pay for one subscription at a time, so if you are using a subscription payment model (plus box cost) you have to have the best game in market to attract enough players to keep the servers going. Free-to-play (F2P) titles require no direct payments to start, however, so players can have as many of them going at one time as they want.

There's only a limited amount of time that people have to play games, whether they are free or paid for.

Which has seen sub-based titles such as Lord of the Rings Online, Star Trek Online and EverQuest II convert to F2P. They still have their subscription option – and they want players to use it – but they have a larger user base precisely because they dropped the barrier to entry of buying the box and then paying on a monthly basis.

A lot of MMO titles are now F2P, or have a F2P option. This used to work well (or well enough that the game didn’t get shut down immediately after going F2P), but I think that 2012 is the point where going F2P hits saturation point. There are just too many F2P titles out now and coming out for the market to remain stable.

Prediction: A number of F2P titles (especially converted F2P titles) and developers are going to announce their closure / sell-off this year. If they do sell-off the title, it will likely be to an Eastern (read: China or South Korea) F2P aggregator / publisher.

Prediction: Post-SWOR’s launch, there won’t be any AAA MMO that launches using a subscription-only payment model. RMT / hybrid payment models for all!

SOE Continues To Miss The Boat

Sony Online Entertainment had a 2011 they’d prefer to forget. DC Universe Online was their first big MMO launch in a while and it flopped, requiring a free to play transition 9 months post-launch. The long-highlighted The Agency was cancelled with corresponding layoffs. Star Wars: Galaxies was shut down.

The MMO industry that SOE helped build seems poised to leave SOE far behind.

On top of this, SOE’s MMO future appears to be oriented towards F2P titles – either new ones they launch or older titles they convert. This F2P transition hasn’t always been the smoothest either, which has hurt SOE’s reputation in this area.

SOE will be hoping that 2012 is brighter – after all, it looks like PlanetSide Next will launch and more work on Everquest Next can be hyped up. Things can’t be as bad as in 2011, right?

Prediction: SOE will continue to be the big MMO development group costing on past glories. PlanetSide Next isn’t going to set the world on fire – MMOFPSs being less attractive to players than MMORPGs – while players leave existing SOE titles to play white-hot competitor titles.

Prediction: DC Universe Online, being the only AAA F2P MMO on the PS3, will continue to do very well for itself on the console, exceeding DCUO’s PC-oriented performance.

Prediction: Vanguard: Saga of Heroes goes F2P. Or shuts down entirely. But most likely goes F2P.

Final Fantasy XIV Goes P2P

Final Fantasy XIV is arguably MMO history’s greatest fumble. It was so bad, in fact, that despite launching under a subscription fee model, subscription fees have been waved.

… until January 6, 2012, that is. And the subscription cost only covers one character slot – it seems like other character slots are charged at $3 each.

Prediction: FFXIV starting to charge subscription fees will lead to empty FFXIV servers. The hardcore will stick around, but the damage has already been done.

Other Predictions, In Short Format

As a man, I appreciate this image. As someone who thinks women sword masters going into a fight should at least wear some leg protection, I /facepalm at the same time.

Prediction: NCsoft will remain engaged in the Western MMO market, but with revenue dropping from this region at the same time Lineage grows revenues in South Korea, they aren’t planning launching any others until Guild Wars 2 and / or Wildstar test the market for them. Operations layoffs (especially in quality assurance and billing) point to this. So Western localisations for new NCsoft titles launching in South Korea – Blade and Soul looks both oh-so-beautiful and oh-so-sexist simultaneously- seems very unlikely.

Prediction: Guild Wars 2 isn’t the MMO Gaming Saviour that a lot of vocal players say it will be. Assuming it launches in 2012, GW2 will do well for itself and for NCsoft, but it isn’t going to revolutionise anything.

Prediction: The MMOFPS will remain the poor cousin to the MMORPG, despite launches of titles like PlanestSide Next and Dust 514. MMORPGs let players win 80%+ of the time while MMOFPSs see evenly matched players win only 50% of the time and require a lot more dedication. Plus there are lots of FPSs that let you play the multiplayer element for free.

Prediction: CCP will refocus its efforts on EVE Online, but this this won’t have much of an impact on player retention because it is already too late for a lot of players – the damage has been done. Also, given that CCP has been made to look like Mittani’s bitch once, they don’t have the ability to appear as devs in charge of their own ship any more.

Prediction: This one I’m completely pulling out of my ass…umptions: Valve will announce a MMO of its own in 2012. It seems odd that Valve is such a PC-centric company and major PC-gaming enabler yet isn’t an active part of the very-heavily-PC-MMO market, so I’ll call 2012 as the year that this changes based on no evidence whatsoever.

We’ll see in December 2012 how right / wrong I’ve been.

Getting banned in Australia is an easy press release that gets players (particularly North American players) thinking about the game. Nothing is more enticing than a ban on an entertainment product to the young male market, which coincidently is exactly the same market for violent FPSs.

Mission accomplished.

EA Australia can’t resist playing to the home crowd:

“It’s regrettable that government policy in Australia is denying adults the right to play Syndicate.  The game will be not be available in Australia despite its enthusiastic response from fans. We were encouraged by the government’s recent agreement to adopt an 18+ age rating for games. However, delays continue to force an arcane censorship on games – cuts that would never be imposed on books or movies. We urge policy makers to take swift action to implement an updated policy that reflects today’s market and gives its millions of adult consumers the right to make their own content choices.”

What enthusiastic response from fans?

And obviously EA Australia remains (wilfully) uninformed that movies and books are refused classification from time to time – Human Centipede 2 was released, banned and then resubmitted with edits and will release to a larger audience thanks to the notoriety of being banned in the first place. EA Australia could probably appeal the ban and get the game released in Australia – the ACB seems to fold quickly enough, or EA could look to tone some things down – but this way is better in attracting attention for the game overseas.

And it worked – the ban is reported on sites like Kotaku, Gamespot and The Escapist (and probably more if I looked). One act in Australia can be worthy a lot of free advertising elsewhere.

I’ve been looking for EA’s actual press release on this and can’t find it, so I’ll have to copy from Gamespot’s article:

“EA Australia has released a statement saying that the company will not be appealing the decision. The software giant went on to say that any changes they made to the game to get it through would compromise the experience.”

“Yes, we can’t compromise on the artistic vision of turning an a classic isometric squad-based game into yet-another grimdark FPS, and in a year when Deus Ex 3  already came out! No-one is allowed to interfere in our Art!”

Puh-leeze. I’ll keep my eye out to see if there is an appeal on Syndicate’s classification filed some time after it releases in the US.