At first when i read this article by EA Louse, on why Warhammer Online failed, I was incensed at another critical person saying a game that I loved had failed: yes, they had a million subs at launch and it has dwindled down below 300k; but last time I checked, thats not too bad, 300k times 15$ is 4.5 million dollars a month.. not too shabby. And due to the loss of expected revenue, there has been job losses in the company. Thing is, content is being created albeit maybe slowly. Bugs are being fixed, server speed is increase/becoming more stable. People love the game still.
This photo has no significance to this article, just something I took over the weekend ;)
I believe in the possibility that Mythic had/have incompetent people who were yes-men which made their employees and loyal customers suffer.
My argument: why are there so many yes-men employed in Mythic? Does no one have an operating brain there? Yes, upper management doesn't have the courage to speak up, but that is not a legitimate excuse for the lower ranks to duck their heads into the sand and pretend it'll go away. You deserve to live in constant fear, lose your job and be unhappy.
People use the word "failed" so casually that it has lost meaning; I see two ways in which it has legitimately failed:
1. They do not have the subscription numbers that they did on launch
2. They don't have the same revenue FROM subscriptions as launch.
As you see, they're linked. Its only natural to let people go/fire people if you're making less money. It only makes sense: you budget a headcount of people you need to support a game for a certain number of subscriptions. How often are people's forecasts perfectly accurate? So it wasn't accurate; the game wasn't perfect; and maybe rushed.
Something was unaccounted for. People aren't patient, especially when they're paying good money each month for 'slow' changes. I say 'slow' b/c its not actually slow but probably an acceptable time frame as programming isn't easy, especially if it was rushed originally. People are impatient, rage quit, subscriptions go down. Word of mouth gets out about the flaws, friends tell friends they aren't playing and thats enough to convince them to quit too. Subscriptions continue to decrease. A new game comes out and tourists leave. Subs drop. The game gets old/stale.. people dont' want to wait for expansion content, they quit too. Subs get below 300k, people panic and quit too.
If thats all an mmo is about, whether original launch subscription numbers are retained if not increased, then yes it failed b/c its less than what it was originally. Last time I checked most mmo's numbers decrease over time. And if anything these subscriptions fluxuate. Huh.
Case in point: Mythic brought in the endless trial; it increased subscriptions and enticed new players into the game. More subs, more money. Failed still? I think thats a win. Not back to 1million but still not bad as it got me back and playing for about 5 months.
Is less than 300k in sub numbers something to scoff at? Not really; they make money each month. Firing excess people is a fact of life; sorry for the loss of jobs, but thats business. If they need more people, who are they going to get, a person off the street or something partially trained by the company?
The game failed b/c the game is broken; what game is perfect? What is perfect in one person's eyes is different in another. WoW isn't perfect; its just really popular. BUT not everyone plays it; just because its the most highly subbed game doesn't make it perfect; it just may be the most polished and caters to most people's needs.
I haven't checked the last numbers on the amount of players on Warhammer these days, but there ARE people that play the game who love it. And to me, thats what important. True failure is when a company *cough APB* needs to close their servers forever. No subscriptions. Nothing
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