So, about the MMOs, here's my take on it.

[Akira]

In this game, the cost of mainteance goes up extremely fast, way too fast if you ask me, in 3 years time the cost of running my MMO was up to almost a billion dollars a month and the change from being profitable to being not profitable happened over the course of about 4 months and before I even had the time to sigh I was bankrupt due to how ridiculously fast the price went up.

Now I am not saying maintenance is not a thing, but the cost of keeping an already developed MMO up and running does not increase dramatically over time, if anything, the cost of running the MMO tends to go down unless something happens that causes the prices to go up. This is why ancient MMOs like Final Fantasy 11 can still stay up and running and make a profit despite only having about 10k active users at the moment.

This is also why things like server mergers tend to happen, if a game had 100 000 players at launch and each server can handle 10 000 active players, it makes sense to have 10-20 active servers, but as the player base drops to 50 000, it makes more sense to have 5-10 active servers.

In fact, last I heard, FF11 still brings in more profit than FF14, this is due to the fact that FF11 has a skeleton crew of about 15 people right now last I heard, and while it still gets updates, it's just minor tweaks here and there and maybe some new recipes etc.. so the cost of running the servers are fairly low, in comparison, FF14 still gets big updates, expansions etc... so the cost of running it is still fairly high and as a result their actual profits for the game end up being lower than FF11, or at least last I heard, this may have changed since then, but I kind of doubt it.

Another issue with the game I have is that you can't begin making games for a system before the system is already out, normally games for new systems start being made several years before the system is out, this is so that a system doesn't launch with zero titles.

Oh yeah, it also doesn't make sense that expansions for an MMO can't mix things up, game expansions having a different side theme than the original installment is a thing that happens in games after all.

As an example, my MMO was a "Mythical" MMO, but if I wanted to make a "Pirate" expansion, it would still be the main theme of Mythical, but it would have the sub-genre of Pirate.

Any way, that's my two cents.

[BLIP]

Agreed

[Izex]

yeah I was really sad at how poorly implemented the MMO genre was in this game.

[Akira]

Yeah, it's pretty bad...

[Jon]

ALL OF THIS. I hope the devs read this. They've made a great game, there's just a few tiny problems and these are the 2 more important ones.

[Jehane]

Originally posted by Jahn:

Another issue with the game I have is that you can't begin making games for a system before the system is already out, normally games for new systems start being made several years before the system is out, this is so that a system doesn't launch with zero titles.

This. I let my guys develop a second console, then launched it and then just forgot about the thing. Still, it sold well - with no games available o_O

I'd like to have sub-genres, too. Mixing stuff would make the game even greater fun. And I agree on the costs of MMOs. I turned mine off when the maintaining costs reached about 4 million a month which I thought was ridiculous. Also, the game didn't sell very well so I decided to take it down.

[Eagle's Eye]

Originally posted by Jehane:

Originally posted by Jahn:

Another issue with the game I have is that you can't begin making games for a system before the system is already out, normally games for new systems start being made several years before the system is out, this is so that a system doesn't launch with zero titles.

This. I let my guys develop a second console, then launched it and then just forgot about the thing. Still, it sold well - with no games available o_O

I'd like to have sub-genres, too. Mixing stuff would make the game even greater fun. And I agree on the costs of MMOs. I turned mine off when the maintaining costs reached about 4 million a month which I thought was ridiculous. Also, the game didn't sell very well so I decided to take it down.

well, maybe other game developers made games for the console you build, or something.

[Effixel]

Originally posted by Eagle's Eye:

Originally posted by Jehane:

This. I let my guys develop a second console, then launched it and then just forgot about the thing. Still, it sold well - with no games available o_O

I'd like to have sub-genres, too. Mixing stuff would make the game even greater fun. And I agree on the costs of MMOs. I turned mine off when the maintaining costs reached about 4 million a month which I thought was ridiculous. Also, the game didn't sell very well so I decided to take it down.

well, maybe other game developers made games for the console you build, or something.

First all the fanboys bought it just because "it is the new console from [Company Name]!" Then when no game was released it became a collector object because of this anomaly, and more people wanted to have it to show off their "console without games".

[ghebz69]

The devs have been perfectly informed about it YEARS ago, yet they didn't bother fixing MMOs or any other stuff that really needed re-balancing. They just don't care anymore.

Back in 2013, MMOs were broken in a way that allowed you to get way too much money and fans if you abused it, so the developers decided to nerf MMOs so badly, that it's literally IMPOSSIBLE to make them profitable long-term.

Here's my experience on the newest version of the game, 1.6.13 or something like that.

I had 500mil saved up around year 20, with a very advanced custom console released. Up to this point, i kept releasing games that were all around 9.5-10 review scores, that's how I got that much money by year 20.

At that time, I made a "Large" MMO that got 9.75 review scores. Before you ask "why didn't you make it AAA" - because if I did, every expansion pack would take a year to release, and that's way too long and just makes the MMO lose money even faster than it does when it's released as a Large game.

I hit all the sweet points, like genre/topic, genre/audience, console/topic, console/audience were all the best possible combos. I released the MMO on 3 of the best consoles, including my custom console that had over 20% market share at that point. The MMO was marketed super well, with 800 hype. I kept releasing expansion packs that were also perfect (9.5-10.25 review scores) every 40-45 weeks. You get a penalty if you release an expansion earlier than 40 weeks after the previous one, so you have to wait.

Despite my perfect gameplay, after 5 years I only had 300mil in the bank from the initial 500mil I had before starting the MMO. I just kept losing money faster and faster. I kept it going for another couple years, and I found myself bancrupt. This is just stupid game design, and just shows how INCOMPETENT the game developers were when creating the MMO feature.

The MMO didn't even bring me that many fans. I only got a little over 1.5 million fans during almost 10 years when the MMO was out on the market, just before I bancrupted. If I kept releasing just normal games instead of keeping this MMO, I would have gotten about 2 million fans (not even kidding, test it out for yourself) and had a couple billion dollars saved up in the bank.

Making the MMO a "Medium" game instead of "Large" won't make any difference either, because you can't release expansion packs sooner than 40 weeks after the previous one, otherwise your review scores will be much lower, which will make the expansion pack sell very poorly, which means you'll be losing even more money on the MMO.

When I made the same complaints about MMOs on Greenheart forums, this is what I got as response from one of the developers of the game:

>"There are plenty of real life examples of MMOs closing down because the player base is >shrinking. If maintenance costs would be linearly tied to players and decrease with the
>players, why do they all close?

>I fully admit the MMO mechanic isn’t’ as fleshed out as it could be but what we wanted is to >make MMO’s late game achievements. Fact is that creating a MMO is a huge gamble and
>most real life MMOs fail miserably. We wanted to reflect this risk/reward."

So yeah. In their minds, it's fine for maintenance costs to increase linearly despite playerbase shrinking. They fail to understand that less players = less need for expensive servers. At the very least, if the playerbase isn't growing anymore, the maintenance costs should stop growing at some point. It makes literally no sense for maintenance costs to keep rising infinitely, regardless of how many servers are needed to be kept alive.

Their second point "MMO is a big gamble, we wanted to reflect this risk/reward" also makes no sense, since you're always destined to lose with MMO. Such a thing as "risk/reward" doesn't exist, when the risk is 100% failure even with the perfect conditions. This, again, just shows they didn't even test their game properly. If they did, they'd soon realize that MMOs are broken beyond ever being profitable for the player.

[Akira]

that is pretty terrible

[the_derped_offender_12]

Maybe MMOs wll be fixed in GDT 2.

[chris05478]

maybe someone can make a mod to change up how MMOs work. I made a Werewolf-Action/RPG Late game, and it was a hit, it was one of the best games I ever made, and quickly the cost of upkeeping the game was just way to much, and then I got sad when I had to shut it down...

[nathaniel b]

just take the mmo off the market before it becomes unprofitable