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PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

EA's Sims Online Is A Flop And Other MMORPG Musings 70

Posted by CowboyNeal from the fun-games-and-unfun-shames dept.
Ignorant Aardvark writes "Wired has an article out about the upcoming Multiplayer Games Summit at E3. Some of the interesting parts of the article: 'The Sims Online has sold 125,000 copies retail, has been discounted from $50 to as low as $20 on Amazon and has 97,000 active subscribers.' Compare that to EverQuest, with 470,000 subscriptions. Investment analyst Michael Pachter says of TSO: 'They took a very popular franchise that's a single-player game in which you play with dolls, and when you play with dolls, they follow rules and behave in predictable ways. With The Sims Online, you're playing real people, and real people don't behave the way you'd expect them to.' And here's the gem of the article: 'Consumers might not be responding well to paying individual subscriptions for single online games, but might react better to cable TV-like pricing in which they get access to a number of offerings for a flat fee.' Does anyone see this pricing system as being more successful?"
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EA's Sims Online Is A Flop And Other MMORPG Musings More

EA's Sims Online Is A Flop And Other MMORPG Musings

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  • quite a good idea

    I expect you'll see this as the MMORPG portfolios start to saturate.

    It'll take a few years.
    Easy to charge per game when you've only got 3 titles.

    The strive for customers brings innovation and then multiplication.

    We have to wait for the supply / demand curves to cross.

    Or maybe they'll die a death.

    so : catch the wave or wait for a bigger one

  • don't insult role-playing. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Joe the Lesser ( 533425 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @09:43AM (#5944682) Homepage Journal
    The company also has a follow-on to its hugely successful medieval role-playing game EverQuest.

    Correction: It's hugely successful medieval chat room game EverQuest.
    • Psssssssst... Your prejudice is showing...
    • As a former EverQuest player and an avid RPGer (AD&D and ShadowRun mostly), I have to take issue with your comment. EverQuest is not a "chat room." It's unfortunate that some people treat it as such, but the game itself is designed with the RPGer in mind. Role playing is encouraged, and I think I'm not alone in saying that the people the remain "in character" while playing have the most fun.
    • I think they're missing the point... the people who spend hours online playing everquest are undeinably hardcore gamers. The people who play the sims are people like my little sister, who enjoy a half hour bash at it, but dont take it anywhere nearly as seriously as some people do an RPG or FPS.
    • Correction: 'Its'

      Haha, that one was just too easy. Wayyy to easy.

  • Could be.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by lanej0 ( 118070 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @09:47AM (#5944714) Homepage
    Used to be I would go shell out $50 for a game and I could play it single player. I could play it multiplayer on the LAN or over the Net. Now companies want a subscription rate on top of it all?


    Maybe people have had enough paying for every aspect of the experience. I pay for the hardware, software and bandwidth. O/S the server and let people run them themselves....

    • Re:Could be.... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by eggstasy ( 458692 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @10:02AM (#5944850) Journal
      lanej0 said:
      "Maybe people have had enough paying for every aspect of the experience. I pay for the hardware, software and bandwidth. O/S the server and let people run them themselves...."

      Exactly. We really need to tell the powers that be that distributed computing is the future. In a world where end-user resources are rapidly becoming superfluous, someone's bound to come along that will notice that the client-server model is obsolete, for the usual centralized view of client-server interaction assumes that the clients have far less resources than the server, which just isn't true anymore.

      Anyone can run a server. Most people don't use any of their bandwidth, because all they do on their multi-megabit internet connection is download email off a POP server and browse the web.
      Turn the usual protocols into P2P already!
      Why should I have to rely on my crappy ISP's slow email server and faulty DNSs when I could just do the same job myself?
      Why can't we just have everyone run a server?
      Bundle the damn things, activated by default, make them invisible with automatic updates and the millions of end-lusers will never even know that they're running a mini-ISP.

      • Re:Could be.... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Bokonon ( 21534 )
        Distributed computing isn't a satisfactory answer for most of these types of games. You need a single arbiter to decide what happens when player A swings his sword at player B, and vice versa, but player A has much more net lag... Does player B slow down, player A not swing, or do you assume player A is going to repeat their last action. Not to mention, if you distribute the judging rules, then that means each copy of the game has the judging rules built in, which makes it orders of magnitude easier to hac
        • Don't be so quick to dismiss an idea just because it's a rough draft that purposely ignores future implementation details... There's always more than one way to skin a cat.
          Just assign a given region to each server... that's how Second Life works.
          When you have a lot of servers, you can just make regions smaller. Dealing with edges is not an issue since the adjacent servers could very well decide among themselves that when two players on different servers begin to interact they are automatically put on only o

      • Wouldn't work.... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by DarkFencer ( 260473 )
        You talk about scrapping the whole client-server model all together. There are a LOT of problems with that.

        Do you want to trust 'joe user' to have an SMTP/POP server installed, configured correctly, and patched? The average person doesn't/can't patch their system as is, even when they aren't running a server. Activating things by default as you propose is what gets systems hacked.

        Also, most people do not leave their computers on all the time. Where would their e-mail go then when the computer is off?
        • FUD, FUD, FUD... why are people always worrying about nonexistent problems?
          For god's sake, do you use TCP/IP? I'll just assume you do ;)
          At the router level, IP is exactly like a P2P application. Works, doesnt it?
          Of course, it doesnt guarantee reliability and stuff like that, but who cares? You have TCP on top of that to take care of the retransmissions that guarantee reliability.
          You seem to not have read my post. I said, it would be invisible to the user, and self-updating. If there was only one person on e

  • Juggling between games with a flat fee? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mivok ( 621790 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @09:54AM (#5944771) Homepage
    I can only see the cable method of pricing (multiple games, one price) hurting gameplay. Theres a lot of people who are dedicated so much to a single game partially because they pay for it (and of course the fact that the game is addictive). Having multiple games would make each player less enthusiastic about each individual game, and consequently the community wouldnt be anywhere near as thriving.
    As an example, imagine trying to play everquest, ultima online, sims online, a tale in the desert, and a few others all at once. (neglecting the fact that it is different companies and a flat fee wouldnt work too well).
    • Sony/Verant has made noises that there might be a discount for EQ players that also subscribe to the new Star Wars MMORPG.

      I'd much prefer a flat cable fee scheme, and they'd make more money from me at least that way. I'm a current EQ player, but can't justify to myself (or the wife!) more than one $10/month time and money sink. When SW:G or EQ2 or whatever else comes out, under the current pricing I'd have to switch completely (and they'd still be getting $10/month from me). With a cable scheme they might
      • I dunno about anyone else, but with the way I play*ed* EQ, I'd have to stop eating and sleeping altogether to get another game in, ESPECIALLY if it's even close to as large as EQ is. When you can play [at a sane rate] for 6 mos. and not have maxed out your levels, or even reached the half-way point, can many people really afford to do this with multiple games, while still enjoying themselves? Aside from this, part of EQs success is the game's content, namely very similar to a classic fantasy RPG, one which
    • mivok writes:
      "Having multiple games would make each player less enthusiastic about each individual game, and consequently the community wouldnt be anywhere near as thriving."

      I don't think this would happen. People tend to find a game or two that they like most and then play that. This is because of two factors; there are only so many hours in a day and the games are goal oriented. Me, personally, I'm going to concentrate on Planetside (and drop Army Operations) because I'd rather have a really good char
    • I think the cable pricing scheme also doesn't adapt well to gaming due to advertising. I currently pay around USD$75/month for my Dish Network service, including a few pay channel packages. I question how much of this charge goes to individual channel operators. Excluding companies like Showtime, HBO, et al, most channels make their money on advertising between shows and programming breaks. There are some games where that may adapt, such as a military MMORPG where the various armed forces around the world p
    • These subscription services need to take the old advertising/drug dealer maxim to heart: The first one is free. Sell me the game cheap, for $5, and give me a month of free play. By then I'm hooked and I'll stay.

      The flat rate system would get people into more games. I don't want to have to pay $50 up front and $9 a month to find out if EverQuest is full of camping teenagers who have nothing to do but spend 40 hours a week leveling up. But you're right, under that system people could leave more easily too.

  • Of course that will be better (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jvmatthe ( 116058 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @09:56AM (#5944785) Homepage
    And here's the gem of the article: 'Consumers might not be responding well to paying individual subscriptions for single online games, but might react better to cable TV-like pricing in which they get access to a number of offerings for a flat fee.' Does anyone see this pricing system as being more successful?
    Of course that will be more successful, and that's exactly what Microsoft understands and is trying to promote with their Xbox Live service. Charge people by the month ($6/month) or by the year ($4.17/month) and give people access to a range of online products with no added fees. The question, naturally, is how much more successful and is it the most successful model?

    I can see one big "gotcha" with this plan. Cable sells access to the stations but then (most stations) run advertisements in with their programming. So you still pay, by watching commercials, and the individual stations can still make money from ad revenue. It isn't clear how online gaming, as an ongoing revenue stream, pays off for the developers. We don't know how much, if any, of the Xbox Live fees go back to individual developers; my guess is that none of it gets back to them. So that means they make money off the initial sale of the game, and that's it. This doesn't seem to work as well for games as for cable.

    They may be able to layer premium games (like MMOGs) on top of the ho-hum online games (like shooters or Tetris) and charge extra for those, as cable companies do with HBO, but it isn't clear that they've got a strong enough user base to support such a move. After all, they're already in uncharted territory trying to charge regular fees for online gaming. Maybe in a year or two, but by then we're looking at a second generation of hardware waiting in the wings, which could keep people from jumping.

    Also, Xbox Live will, for the short term, have to compete with the choose-your-own-adventure world of Sony's PS2. Sony's haphazard approach has made it a platform on which anyone can make a game and charge whatever they want. This seems good for the developer, if they have a hit game that pulls in regular subscribers, but then they also have to bear the brunt of the infrastructure costs. It's like network television where you don't put much into it and you don't expect a lot out of it either, but you also don't have to pay monthly for it if you don't want to.

    • I can see one big "gotcha" with this plan. Cable sells access to the stations but then (most stations) run advertisements in with their programming. So you still pay, by watching commercials, and the individual stations can still make money from ad revenue. It isn't clear how online gaming, as an ongoing revenue stream, pays off for the developers

      However, Cable channells need to pay to keep their station up and running. They need to always be producing or purchasing new content. An online interactive game

      • Microsoft is pushing for add-ons and patches, things that will cost a developer money in the long run. Splinter Cell, Mech Assault (to name two) have already had such add-on content and Unreal Tournament has also had patches. There may be others.

        I'd be cautious before I said that online service could be added at no cost to them, since Microsoft seems to be pushing for additional work after a game's release.
        • Point well taken, I guess I am thinking from the point of view of the PC gaming industry. Patches have been supplied for free in the PC Gaming industry for years, and developers still seemed to be able to turn a profit. Add-on content shouldn't be free, and traditionally hasn't been (all the blizard game expansions come to mind).

          There is no doubt that online services will cost extra for the developer (just the development costs alone are substantial) but I guess I feel that online play is a feature that wi

  • 28,000 people that haven't even opened the box yet?

    Can you even play Sims Online in single-player mode?

    Also, I'm not sure if this has anything to do with game quality or the fee structure; maybe people are all Sim-ed out after the seemingly endless number of expansions? I mean how many times can you trap your Sim in a doorless room and watch him pee himself, before it gets tired?
    • 28,000 people that haven't even opened the box yet?

      More like 28,000 that played for about a month and realized what a terrible game it was. No time-altering means if your sim has to read a book to learn something, and that book takes 5 minutes to read, expect to twiddle LOTS of thumbs while trying to up their skills in a particular area.

      Can you even play Sims Online in single-player mode?

      *Notes the "Online" in the title, as opposed to the lack of such in "The Sims"

      • Valid question. (Score:4, Informative)

        by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @02:06PM (#5947729) Homepage
        ] Can you even play Sims Online in single-player mode?

        *Notes the "Online" in the title, as opposed to the lack of such in "The Sims"

        It's a valid question. Phantasy Star Online has an offline, single-player mode (as well as an offline, multi-player mode).

        On the Dreamcast, Next Tetris Online Edition worked fine offline as well (it had online features to suplement it, though).

        Just because something has online in the title, doesn't make it an exclusively online game. Which is why that question is valid, and should be replied to seriously.
    • The 97,000 active subscribers means how many are currently paying the monthly fee. The 28,000 others could have bought the game, used the free month then canceled because they didn't like it.

  • Bad Comparison (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TexVex ( 669445 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @10:10AM (#5944930)

    The Sims Online has sold 125,000 copies retail, has been discounted from $50 to as low as $20 on Amazon and has 97,000 active subscribers.' Compare that to EverQuest, with 470,000 subscriptions.
    EverQuest has been around for several years; The Sims Online has been around for several months. EverQuest didn't just jump up to 400K+ subscriptions right after launch. No game of that genre has. If a MMO game gets 100K+ subscribers on launch, it's doing great. At $10 a pop, that's a cool million in gross revenues per month. So long as there's a decent profit margin in there, that's not an amount to sneeze at. But what is important here is the growth curve, not the subscriber numbers at any given time.

    The retail price for the box is also not really relevant either. That is a one-time sale. The monthly subscription is recurring revenue.

    • Re:Bad Comparison (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Cheeko ( 165493 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @01:55PM (#5947579) Homepage Journal
      Actually EQ has been losing users for the last year or two, from its peak of over 500k. Generally they see a spike with each new expansion. It is true that EQ took time to build to that 500,000+ users, but its initial sales, before its first expansion gave it well over 200k users, and that was in about a year. The problem with EQ these days is that its getting a little bit dated, and hence the planned release of EQ2. IMO the 97k users for the Sim's online is a GIANT dissappointment, both because those ARE weak numbers for an online game (though not terrible), and are compounded by the phenominal success of the single player version, which lead to the assumption that this interest would carry over to the multiplayer version. Of course I'm too lazy to get links to any of this, but a simple google search should turn up a fair amount of the info.
      • Too true.. I've been flirting around with the second string mmos lately and there seems to be this impression that EQ is an evil unstoppable behemoth. Not true, EQ has been declining in popularity and quality (this part being mho) since the last 3 or 4 expansions (well, loss of quality came first, then lack of pop.. just around the time of PoP ;) Walking around the old world, even the old expansions, the world is just empty. At primetime expect to see three people in your fav newbie zone... and as the abov

  • Forgive my ignorance (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Loosewire ( 628916 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @10:15AM (#5944981) Homepage Journal
    But why would i want to pay $50 or even $20 for a game which i then have to pay more per month to play? it would have to be a damn good game. - Give the game away free with a months free sub (You have to give your credit card details so you cant just keep getting freebies) so theyre hoooked and you now have $10 per month off em :-)

  • Double pay? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BigNumber ( 457893 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @10:21AM (#5945053)
    I'm sure I'm not the only person who sees problems with a system where you first pay for a game and then pay to play it. It would make more sense if there were single player versions included with the game but for the online-only stuff the games should be free to download if they are going to charge to play.

    What other product sells you something that is absolutely useless without paying a subscription fee? Tivo comes to mind but at least you're getting hardware with your initial purchase that can concievably be used for other purposes. I can't think of another example of this type of system where you don't get something for your up front money. Anyone?

    • Re:Double pay? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A satellite dish, a telephone(both landline and cellular), (usually) a modem.

      There's lots of stuff where you buy the "equipment" or software or distributable and still have to pay another (recurring) fee, just to use it. These things are (mostly) useless without the "access" subscription.

      Note I say "mostly" useless. You can still use a modem as an answering machine(if you have the software) and the extremely DIY-ish can find something to do with a sat.dish. But generally, without the subscription fee, you

    • Re:Double pay? (Score:2, Informative)

      by nvrrobx ( 71970 )
      Sirius Satellite Radio. XM Satellite Radio.

      DirecTV. Dish Network.

      AT&T Wireless. Cingular. Sprint PCS. Nextel. (insert your carrier here).

      Enough said.

      Now, on the other hand, I do agree with the fact that I don't want to pay $50 for the game, then $10 a month. How about $15 for the game, then $10 a month? I'd be okay with that. Hell, make me pay $50 for the game, and include like three free months of service with it. That's okay with me.

      EverQuest turned me off at the idea of $50 per expansio

      • Sirius Satellite Radio. XM Satellite Radio.

        DirecTV. Dish Network.

        AT&T Wireless. Cingular. Sprint PCS. Nextel. (insert your carrier here).

        Enough said.

        For all these products, you recieve a physical device; the games one could download it for free over the Internet and get the same product, sans manual and other in-the-box goodies. I'm suprised that Everquest, Earth and Beyond, and others don't carpet-bomb the world with their CDs like AOL; the profits from additional users "hooked" on the game woul

  • The Star Wars MMORPG will be very successful. Count on it.

    It's just silly that some people are claiming that only sword and scorcery style games can be popular as MMOGs. That this has been the case is an accident of history. Someone could have said the same thing (and probably did) about SF themed RTS games until Warcraft came along.

    • Re:Star Wars (Score:2, Insightful)

      by binaryslave ( 560472 )
      Star Wars will be a sword and scorcery style game. Look at Anarchy Online and WWII online. Both have had very hard times.

    • Re:Star Wars (Score:4, Insightful)

      by InfoVore ( 98438 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:35PM (#5950582) Homepage
      The Star Wars MMORPG will be very successful. Count on it. It's just silly that some people are claiming that only sword and scorcery style games can be popular as MMOGs.

      Yes Star Wars Galaxies(SWG) will be very successful right out of the gate (once they get past The-Never-Ending Beta). However, it won't be successful IN SPITE of being a Sword & Sorcery game. SWG IS a sword (lightsaber) and sorcery (The Force) game. If anything, its success will build on that sword and sorcery foundation.

      Star Wars is very much in the Science Fantasy genre, with heavy emphasis on the Fantasy side. (Most 'space opera' stories are...) Change the starships to sailing ships and you could set it in any pre-industrial epoch.

      Regardless, it will be fun to run around dodging Bounty Hunters, fixing droids, and so on when SWG comes out.

      Cheers,
      I.V.
  • I don't know that a subscriber base 20% the size of the market leader's necessarily a flop. If an installed base of, say, 20% that of microsoft windows a flop?

    P.S. It's certainly better than Sega's old online model - charge $30-$50 for game with free online play, then make some games fee-based and shut down the servers for others altogether (anybody interested in starting a class action thingy?)

    Alien Front Online was online less than ten months, although according to the company the problem was that the s
    • I agree. The accessment that it is a flop I think is offbase. They are basically saying for a game not to be a flop it has to get subscriber numbers in the first 6 months that are close to that of a 4 year old franchise with 5 expansions/extensions???

      I don't even buy into a MMOG until its been out 6mo or more. Gives them time to fix it and hopefully add some content.

      Here, I don't like Sims Online, I was in the beta and the game is not for me. But I have to admit it isn't a flop. In 6 months, less tha

  • Dialog with the Sims Online (Score:5, Funny)

    by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @11:59AM (#5946169) Homepage
    Sims Online: Hi! I have a great licence! I'm a game you can play while going to get a sandwich. My creator appologized for me, but we promise I will get better! Wanna play? I'm only $10 per month.

    Consumer: Umm... So I sit around and click on a book for six hours until my character gets reading +3? No thanks.

    Sims Online: No really, I will be a great game someday. You will be able to pick your character's color while clicking. Yay! Doesn't that sound like fun? Hey, where are you going? Awww....

    Analyist 1: Hmm. The Sims Online is a terrible failure, only raking in one million dollars per month. I wonder what it could be?

    Analyist 2: They have a great licence. They're positioned well to get the elusive 20 to 40 year old female market. We spent 20% of the budget on advertising. Yet we aren't seeing the return expected.

    Consumer [knocking on window]: Dude, your game sucks!

    Analyist 1: The market must not be ready to support online gaming. Everquest, Asheron's Call, and all of Korea must be a fluke.

    Consumer [knocking on window]: Dude, take this crappy thing back!

    Analyist 2: People just aren't prepared to pay monthly fees. Perhaps if we abandoned the service-provider model and moved to a cable TV model we could see synergies dwarfing those of AOL Time Warner.

    Analyist 1: A 50 dollar a month fee to play a catalog of online titles... That just might fly. We just need to hire a college intern to program an emulator in Java and we will have all of the content we need!

    Consumer: Dude, this Sims thing is worse than Clippy. Get it off me!

    Sims Online: No, just give me one more chance! I swear I can change!

    Analyist 1: Yes, the industry is headed for dark times indeed. How's your golden parachute looking?

    • the quote's modded funny, but it's pretty insightful, too. people will do what it takes to get a game, if it's fun. people will make mods, hacks and ports to get their hands on it and play it on their favorite system. but if it's not fun, no one's gonna play it. it's a really simple concept, but some people just don't get it.

  • I don't have a problem with (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tarindel ( 107177 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @12:43PM (#5946687)
    paying for an online subscription when the game requires persistant servers, as most MMORPGS do. It takes money to buy the servers, and there's a significant cost to maintain them. Not to mention bandwidth costs.

    What I find interesting is the recent emerging trend of games charging for online-play that require only minimal hardware company-side. For example, the forthcoming Settlers of Catan PS2 is rumored to use such a pricing scheme (http://ps2.ign.com/articles/391/391005p1.html [ign.com]). In that case, you're basically paying for someone to match you up with another human player, as all the games are transitory, and the PS2's can do all the requisite processing themselves. Somehow, that doesn't seem as compelling a reason for me to be spending $7 a month or more per month to play.

    But I suspect we'll see more and more of that -- it's obvious consumers will be more willing to try a game that they can get for free and pay a small monthly fee if they like it as opposed to paying a large up-front cost and then getting the online-time for free. And companies will like it too, as it means potentially wider exposure for a game, and a more steady revenue flow. Not to mention they still get their money when used copies of the game trade hands over eBay or people figure out how to copy it.
  • Sega Channel had at least 20 great games playable at all times. The games would change each month with a few of the best kept over. Beta versions, unreleased titles, etc would appear in a special section that only Sega Channel members would ever see. The download speed for a game was minimal (a minute maybe) and all play was infinite and unrestricted for a cheap monthly fee ($15 USD).

    Here's an old article about the service. [emulationzone.org]

    P.S. It of course failed in the end even though it gave a lot for very little
  • Is already alive and kicking. Forgive me for being a TFC fan, but Valve came out with Steam, which was a server browser for essentially all of the "in-house" mods of HL (CS, TFC, OpFor, Ricochet, DMC, etc) yet faster and leaner than GameSpy (Also: No ads!). Given, this is only for HL and its mods, and only mods under the auspices of Valve (or Sierra? I'm not clear on that) yet the ability for a company to offer one server browser/launcher for all their games, as well as updating capability is there. I got S
  • Sony are in a good position to move to a combined pricing scheme - they have EQ and its various franchises, Planetside and Star Wars Galaxies. It would make some sense to have a subscription across all, after all you want your customers locked into your content. Older games, such as Ultima Online, Everquest maybe, have already payed for their hardware and development. Ever dollar income now is just gravy in the corporate profits.

  • Why Sims Failed (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kethinov ( 636034 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @05:45PM (#5949779) Homepage Journal
    I was a pretty regular UO player for a while, also an EA game, and if there's one thing I can remember more than anything it's how much we all made fun of The SIMS players. Just about everyone who played that game was considered an instant pansy and no one wanted to associate with them. It was almost like that one kid in every high school who comes to school dressed like a 50s child.

    There's nothing wrong with dressing like that, or playing the Sims online. But the game just has this bad blood; a bad reputation. Kinda like the bad reputation Everquest seems to be getting with all these anti MMORPG articles popping up.
    • "I was a pretty regular UO player for a while, also an EA game, and if there's one thing I can remember more than anything it's how much we all made fun of The SIMS players."

      I'm not sure that anyone who calls themselves a "regular UO player" is in any position to make fun of someone else, SIMS player or not. The "regular," i.e. daily, UO players that I know personally have all suffered from work-related, financial, and social difficulties due to their game-playing. We know that all people who play MMORP

      • If EQ is simply a computer game, then why is there such thing as an "EQ Widows" group?

        Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to deny the fact that there are people out there who get addicted to games, but they are quite a minority in comparison to casual players. Personally, I played UO regularly for 2 years and eventually quit because the changes no longer suited me. I remember some people who fit your stereotype, but most people didn't and that was that.

        Furthermore, there's nothing wrong with a massively mu
  • 'Consumers might not be responding well to paying individual subscriptions for single online games, but might react better to cable TV-like pricing in which they get access to a number of offerings for a flat fee.'
    What happened to NO SUBSCRIPTIONS? I'm still enjoying Tribes 2 online for only the cost of being online. I'm not sure I'll ever buy a subscription online game.
  • I noticed that Skotos www.skotos.net has 7 games now for a single montly subscription price. These games include two 3D graphic games, three 'prose' games (two are MUD-like, one is MUSH-like), a strategic space war game, and a multiplayer card game. They have also announced more on the way, including a horror game called 'Lovecraft Country'.

    The first month is free, so you can try all the games before you commit.

    -- Herder of Cats

  • Simple Math (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AvantLegion ( 595806 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @09:14PM (#5951220) Journal
    There is a finite number of people willing to spend monthly fees to play online games.

    Very few people are willing to pay monthly fees for multiple games. Most choose their favorite and become dedicated to that game.

    Every online game released since UO and EverQuest has struggled, to some degree, to gain an audience. New games have to either succeed at pulling gamers away from other games, or by bringing its own separate audience. Warbirds can succeed because the hardcore flight-sim audience has very little crossover with the online RPG audience. A game like Star Wars Galaxies will succeed on both fronts: pulling RPGers away from other titles AND bringing in a new audience that had no interest in Rat Hunter 3D but would love nothing better than to play in the Star Wars universe.

    At first glance, you would think The Sims would bring its own audience. But take note that the average Sims player is not a Sims junkie. Out of the bajillions of copies sold, only a small percentage are owned by the kind of junkies that might be interested in paying for an online game.

    THEN take into account the various problems with the online game. Pushing a shoddy product onto a smaller-than-estimated audience is a good formula for, well, exactly what's happened.

  • Why The Sims Online Failed (Score:3, Informative)

    by PepperedApple ( 645980 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @09:23PM (#5951268) Homepage
    I'm one of the 28,000 who bought the game and then canceled my subscription. I actually beta tested it for a few months before it came out.

    TSO failed because it eliminated all the things that made The Sims popular:
    1. Designing your dream house - without cheat codes designing a house was unaffordable, and earning money in the game was a boring waste of time.
    2. Designing custom material - if you search google you'll find hundreds of sites with downloadable skins, furniture, decarations and houses. People made objects with photoshop and mesh editors, and people loved them so much they would pay real life $$ to download.
    3. Playing God - in The Sims you controlled a character or family in a god-like way. Sometimes they would ignore your commands, and if you didn't tell them to do anything they would manage on their own - eating, peeing, going to work. In TSO you are your sim. If you don't tell it to do anything it'll just stand there.

    When I called up to cancel they offered me a free month, but I declined. It was an unrewarding waste of my time.

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