AOC has a lot of potential. But they released it before it was finished.  This caused them to lose  90% of their subscribers.

It can't make sense financially to lose 90% of your subscribers. So why do they do it?

link to that 90% loss please

responding to the title:

its for money, plain and simple.

Because in almost every case, the patience of the investors runs out, and they demand the developers release something, anything, to get the product earning a return on the investment.

Of course, history has proven what a bad tactic this is, but then again, perhaps the developer are really to blame since they can't put together a decent plan and deliver a quality game within the budget they are given.

If the run out of funding, the alternative is to release the game before it is finished or to go out of business and not release the game at all. 

Originally posted by Quizzical

If the run out of funding, the alternative is to release the game before it is finished or to go out of business and not release the game at all. 

They should be able to get more loans to finish they game. People know how much money WOW makes. Banks should be willing to give more money to these companies.

Agree with the funding issue but no MMO is ready so sooner or later you just have to take the plunge.  Plus you can never really run a game in a live environment before launch. 

Companies that have succeeded have done the following:

* Not promised the best game in the world and have kept it modest.

* Released hot fixes quickly that really make a difference

* Communication on a regular basis and giving timelines

* Great customer support and active DM's

* Solid engine.

So basically if a player sees an engine that they think would work long term and see support coming from the company they would stick it out for around 3 months.  I quit a few games in the first month because I just hated the engine so no matter what they did I would never like it. 

Originally posted by ghoul31

Originally posted by Quizzical

If the run out of funding, the alternative is to release the game before it is finished or to go out of business and not release the game at all. 

 

They should be able to get more loans to finish they game. People know how much money WOW makes. Banks should be willing to give more money to these companies.

 

Only WoW got this success in terms of subscribers and consequently in terms of profits. There are few games around being real profitable business. Banks and other investors know it very well. I'm sure its not easy to get investments or loans for a small newcomer in the market. Banks and investors don't know that much about quality, innovation, potential in MMORPGS market.

Some games just aren't destined for greatness.  If there's nothing special or interesting about them, there is no point delaying them because no amount of polish will fix uninspired design.   Better to recoup money from the hype sales and milk the product for as long as possible before it's put out to pasture.

I'm looking at you Warhammer Online :p

I think they just learned the same way from Microsoft to rips money from everyone such as the worst ever OS Windows ME etc. And then they have another version released. While they used the first version database to build up second version and still make money on their research and development.

When there is competition then they give it for FREE. Intent Explorer is juts like a F2P on the market.

All software maker have nearly the same policy, release first, patch next

Originally posted by ghoul31

Originally posted by Quizzical

If the run out of funding, the alternative is to release the game before it is finished or to go out of business and not release the game at all.  

They should be able to get more loans to finish they game. People know how much money WOW makes. Banks should be willing to give more money to these companies

Banks generally want collateral if they're going to make loans, and that's something that game companies don't have much of.  Banks want to be pretty sure that the loans will be repaid (whith the collateral can ensure) before they'll make the loans in the first place.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by ghoul31

Originally posted by Quizzical

If the run out of funding, the alternative is to release the game before it is finished or to go out of business and not release the game at all.  

They should be able to get more loans to finish they game. People know how much money WOW makes. Banks should be willing to give more money to these companies

 

Banks generally want collateral if they're going to make loans, and that's something that game companies don't have much of.  Banks want to be pretty sure that the loans will be repaid (whith the collateral can ensure) before they'll make the loans in the first place.

But it's easy to see how much money AOC would have made, had it been finished. The Banks should have been able to see that.

Originally posted by ghoul31

But it's easy to see how much money AOC would have made, had it been finished. The Banks should have been able to see that. 

That's an easy statement to make, but it's fundamentally wrong.

The MMO market is incredibly volatile; it's impossible to accurately forecast how well an MMO would have done given an additional 6 months of polish.

And back to the OP's original question; it's the developers fault.

They spend too much time/effort/money on unnecessary things like perfecting the refraction of light through raindrops, and neglect the vital aspects such as basic gameplay and design. Then they run out of cash and are pressured into an early release by skittish investors.

What they -should- do is get the basics right as soon as possible, then spend their remaining budget on tweaking the fluff stuff.

Originally posted by Ilvaldyr

Originally posted by ghoul31

But it's easy to see how much money AOC would have made, had it been finished. The Banks should have been able to see that. 

That's an easy statement to make, but it's fundamentally wrong.

The MMO market is incredibly volatile; it's impossible to accurately forecast how well an MMO would have done given an additional 6 months of polish.

Furthermore, it's impossible to accurately forecast what an MMO would have consisted of with an additional 6 months of polish.

Originally posted by Death1942

link to that 90% loss please

 

Hmmm lets think...over 1 million copies sold... www.gamingnexus.com/FullNews/Age-of-Conan-hits-1-million-copies-sold-in-under-three-weeks/Item8885.aspx and a guess that many seem to agree on the 100k-200k subs. So perhaps not 90%, more like 80%...is that so much better sounding?

Back to the OP...greedy companies that can't wait to get those big bucks rolling in.  It's the people controlling the money that push for release, not the guys who make the games. So the guys with the money, who have no idea about the game they are funding, only know that they want to see some return on their investment.

Originally posted by ghoul31

So why do they do it? 

Because the genre has a lot of developers with a lot creativity and vision, too few project managers with (hard reality) experience to stand up to them, and investors with too little experience to recognise this situation until it's too late.

A seemingly good balance in those areas is why I think BioWare will do well on SW:TOR.

AoC was nothing new, it's EQ2 with the bells removed, one hundred months later it would still lack any innovation.

This early release thing is becoming too much of a scapegoat. MMO's are released on-time, to schedule, with more bugs and performance issues than people would like. The amount of criticism on mmo's has not changed their behaviour, just brough their behaviour to lite. WoW was under the same pressure to deliver a product on-time, to cost and to spec. If you spec out an amazing MMO, find solid funding for its entirity and set a feasible date then there is no problem. None of the major releases have a sufficient spec to draw more than a niche audience.

The whole computer game industry is moving towards a release while still bugged and patch if ever a few months later mentality. They are doing this because we still buy the games even knowing games are increasingly unstable at launch.

Also the internet has had a hand in this. Time was if a games company released a duff version of their latest title they would find it very hard to distribute a patch to customers, this forced them to get it right first time. When the internet became more or less standard among gamers we initially bought a game with the security that if their was anything wrong with it we would get a patch soon. Then we had a period of several years when games were released too early but a patch followed quickly, within a month. Now days you know something is going to be wrong with the game on release, you may get a patch a few months down the line if you are lucky but it won’t solve everyone’s problems.

If you continue to shell out on the basis of previews and not wait for reviews, they will keep releasing betas at launch.

I'd argue that if you wanted them to released the entirely "finished" game, you'd have to wait for the equivalent work involved in all the expansion packs to be developed, all the huuuuge patches that are released over the games lifetime and and bugfixes. Which, after a game is in a "releasable" state could be many, many more months if not years. And they want your money, NOW.

Plus, the fact that you're paying $/£xx a month for them to keep making it better, balancing it, etc.. would be a bit silly if it was already perfect. I'd feel that my money was just paying for the server upkeep then, and that would feel like extortion!

Originally posted by Global_Infer

I'd argue that if you wanted them to released the entirely "finished" game, you'd have to wait for the equivalent work involved in all the expansion packs to be developed, all the huuuuge patches that are released over the games lifetime and and bugfixes. Which, after a game is in a "releasable" state could be many, many more months if not years. And they want your money, NOW.

Plus, the fact that you're paying $/£xx a month for them to keep making it better, balancing it, etc.. would be a bit silly if it was already perfect. I'd feel that my money was just paying for the server upkeep then, and that would feel like extortion!

I'd argue that the sub-fee is to pay for development on additional content, not for bug-fixes, balancing and generic "improvement" to vital elements that should ideally have been polished prior to launch.

In a perfect world, an MMO would launch with a perfect infrastructure and "vanilla" content, so that the developers can then spend the next few months working on adding extra content to be incorporated into the existing infrastructure, then release it as a paid expansion pack.

Naturally, we don't live in a perfect world and we've all grown accustomed to accepting the occasional bug and glitch, but when an MMO is launched with an infrastructure that is not only buggy as hell, but is also incomplete then that's what it crosses the line into unnacceptability.

Originally posted by Ilvaldyr

Originally posted by Global_Infer

I'd argue that if you wanted them to released the entirely "finished" game, you'd have to wait for the equivalent work involved in all the expansion packs to be developed, all the huuuuge patches that are released over the games lifetime and and bugfixes. Which, after a game is in a "releasable" state could be many, many more months if not years. And they want your money, NOW.

Plus, the fact that you're paying $/£xx a month for them to keep making it better, balancing it, etc.. would be a bit silly if it was already perfect. I'd feel that my money was just paying for the server upkeep then, and that would feel like extortion!

I'd argue that the sub-fee is to pay for development on additional content, not for bug-fixes, balancing and generic "improvement" to vital elements that should ideally have been polished prior to launch.

In a perfect world, an MMO would launch with a perfect infrastructure and "vanilla" content, so that the developers can then spend the next few months working on adding extra content to be incorporated into the existing infrastructure, then release it as a paid expansion pack.

Naturally, we don't live in a perfect world and we've all grown accustomed to accepting the occasional bug and glitch, but when an MMO is launched with an infrastructure that is not only buggy as hell, but is also incomplete then that's what it crosses the line into unnacceptability.

Well said