Nasdaq's RIM shot: BlackBerry maker ejected from top 100 A US index of top performing non-financial companies has booted out RIM, Netflix and Electronic Arts after the trio's fortunes fell too far. The Nasdaq-100 is updated every year and is broadly based on market capitalisation with some weighting. The disappointing share performance of the former tech darlings led to their …
SWTOR was probably the most disappointing game I've bought in the last five years (with strong competition from Rage and Diablo 3), and I totally bought into the per-launch hype sold by EA and Bioware. I know it's generally not nice to be happy for someone else's failure, but in this case I'm genuinely glad it tanked, and also that they've managed to fuck up the free to play transition almost beyond belief. This game will be shut down within 2 years.
I'm really sorry you bought into the hype. I considered myself interested but pre-release information and especially the Beta test confirmed clearly that EA/BioWare had fallen into the WoW trap.
I'll explain since I don't want anyone else to buy the hype of the next WoW-trap game, and the one after, and the one after that.
If you build a new game using the mechanics presented in World of Warcraft, those mechanics are 11 years old. The new game must by definition contain less content than the eleven year old game (which has been updated and expanded numerous times). The audience you are trying to attract is an audience that likes those mechanics, and therefore almost certainly already plays WoW. Your game has less content and is therefore by definition "worse".
Players will soon realize that gimmicks added to the core mechanics (voice acting, storyline quests) are finite and rapidly exhausted, leaving them with the WoW "grind for gear" system. But their WoW characters already did the tedious grind and so did those of all their gaming friends so they're unlikely to stay in your game beyond three payment cycles.
That core market will inevitably go back to WoW which leaves your game with no players. The one thing MMOs offer is other players to do stuff with, and your game no longer has those. Therefore, it cannot keep anyone who hasn't gone back to WoW (Star Wars fanbois, people who didn't already play WoW).
You simply can't make money by remaking WoW, regardless of how good your gimmick is.
A very good point, the MMO market is just waiting for something properly new to come along. There's far too many failed WoW-clones, but why do they keep making them? WoW was relatively new and fresh when it was released (and at the right time, Everquest > Everquest 2 fiasco) while WoW has got stale (the basic model of questing, pvp, and combat hasn't truly changed over the years) they have built around it.
Not only do they have all that experience, and money, they also excel at "bringing" the best bits of new MMOs to WoW. I think WoW was somewhat unique in its development too, that it used a relatively large number of pro-everquest player during WoWs design, such as Jeff Kaplan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Kaplan_(game_designer))
There's a reason, while slowly but surely, EvEs subscriber base has been increasing year to year (http://mmodata.net/ - not perfect, but better than nothing for comparing subs between MMOs).
EA/Bioware also failed at something Blizzard does very very well, customer support.
EA has had a solid history of doing the wrong thing even though they have had many megahits over the years. Crysis, Battlefield, SimCity, etc. Bioware is an EA company and Mass Effect 3 ticked off almost everyone with their series end-game. Not to mention the DRM complaints. At one point EA held 16% of the games market in their pocket, and they buggered it up through over-expension, acquisitions and the usual corporate malaise that seems to infect companies over a certain size.
I stopped buying EA games a while back because of the idiocy. They need to start treating their customers with respect and allow legal game owners to actually play the games instead of forcing social networks and DRM for their own very tiny walled garden.
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