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To the makers of Alganon, consider this:
Release the game Free-to-Play, and keep it forever Free-to-Play, for those zones and races you release at the launch. Add a subscription/upgrade option that will eventually give players the higher level content and additional races as you make them available. You get lots of folks trying it, and people who are reticent to pay for an admittedly 1/4-baked game will feel better about it.
It may require higher numbers of servers, but you'll get a millions of folks playing and talking about the game. If this model can make the developers of a crap game like Runescape $60 million+ per year, there's no reason it won't work for a game that has similair production values to the dreaded MMO whose name we dare not speak.
Free Realms hit 5 million registered users in a few months because it launched for free, and DDO seems to be experiencing an uptick in buzz since announcing players will be able to try it for free and play part of it free forever.
More players = more buzz = more youtube videos = more interest.
If your game is as good as you believe it will be, it will translate into subscribers. |
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I'm intrigued enough to try a demo. I'm not a WoW hater, but I am a casual player and the sheer size of WoW is daunting. I would rather start playing a game just as it launches - see the community grow and have a role in helping it take shape. Originally posted by Rabenwolf That can be true if you do not include the investors as part of the equation. The money invested in the project doesnt come from no where, investors get on board. All investors want the best return possible with their investments. A development company equally will be limited by the success of a game. Take WoW for example. Prior to WoW Blizzard had a much smaller number of staff, a smaller building...ect With WoW's huge success, the greater numbers and profit, allowed for Blizzard to beef up their staff significantly, hire the best of the best, and actually have their own building built, which is now Blizzard HQ. All this requires millions of dollars, none of it would have been possible if their product was just scraping by. Furthermore, no doubt the goal of this games developers as well as investors, is to reap as much rewards as possible, which in turn go into building upon the title as well as the company and even worth of the developers themselves.
But different investors have different definitions of "best." Some go for highest return, others go for secured return. Each has benefits and drawbacks. To get a high return, you usually have to face a high risk of loss. If you're going for a more guaranteed return, it likely won't be as high as something that involved more risk. Pick a service or consumer-goods industry and you'll see a variety of business sizes and models. For all the Starbucks and Krispy Kremes out there, there's also a bunch of smaller independent coffee shops and donut shops that are doing just fine by their owners' standards. Or clothing - how about you try being innovative with a shirt. There's something to be said for doing one thing and doing it well. Just a few examples. It may not be your ideal business model, but that doesn't make it any less valid. ------------- |
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Originally posted by williwaw87
I'm not that familiar with Maplestory, but how did the fame system impact the game? Was there any sort of reward based on your fame? From the brief description that Dana provides, it looks the impact of Kudos will be minimal. Seems like it'll only be useful for PUG-ing. If (when) players start exploiting it, won't people just start ignoring it? ------------- |
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Originally posted by PhelimReagh Horrible advice. F2P games have a negative aura immediately attached to them. That is the last thing they need. I wish them luck. |
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Originally posted by Ozmodan Horrible advice. F2P games have a negative aura immediately attached to them. That is the last thing they need. I wish them luck. F2P games only have a negative reaction to hard-core gamers. Normal folks and casual gamers are willing to give a game a shot, and are certainly more likely to try it if the barrier to entry is just a download.
This game is going to have a stigma at the start as being a "WoW Clone". The likelihood folks will stop paying WoW $15/ month to pay Alganon $15/ month, even after a 14 day trial period, is low. The only conceivable way to avoid this is to allow people to get into the content and invest some time in it, a personally be able to dispel any "WoW Clone" talk for themselves.
Especially since this game is based on their own proprietary technology. The beginning is going to be brutal with all sorts of bugs, you can't avoid it. People, en masse, are not very likely to shell out money for an unfinished product. If they're not paying for the game, they're less likely to just walk away while you work out the inevitable kinks of a new technology going live.
Bad communities develop not soley because a game is F2P. It's far more complex than that. F2P games get a huge number of people who sample the game, but the bad eggs end up staying with games where it's easiest to exploit, cheat and abuse. The problem with many F2P games is that they do not consider that it game design.
They may choose that they want to roll it out slowly, though, and start with a few thousand subscribers to help work out the kinks gradually. It seems like a waste of an opportunity to ride the excitement that comes along with a release. You can only release once, really. Excitement will never be higher than it is around release day. |
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i liked the idea, don't add too much.... keep it simple and have a bit there for everyone to do at their own pace. Don't overload them with races (everquest 2), don't overload then with grind and killer raiding (vanilla wow), don't have stupid crafting and fix it later (tabula rasa, lotro, CO). Don't promise so much then can't deliver (WAR, AoC Etc). Some nice ideas, from a wealth of different MMOs, from Eve to Everquest to WoW. I mean on here people will bitch and moan about everything, they're MMO players who probably don't shower a lot. Probably the same type of people that saw "beyond good and evil" scoffed and went 'just adult zelda, been done' and didn't buy - the type of person i hate. Prejudgements are wrong. i always try games, if i didn't i might actually believe IGN, and that's something i'll never do. they wouldn't know a decent game if it ripped their own ass out. "nothing actually matters, we're just slightly evolved monkeys clinging to a dying piece of rock hurtling through space waiting for our eventual death." - Frankie Boyle, Mock The Week |
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Originally posted by Delanor
Take a good look at what happened to the Chronicles of Spellborn. Their team was enthusiastic, dedicated and talented too. Lack of funding and poor marketing destroyed their game. Don't go that way. There is a BIG difference here. Chronicles of Spellborn had HORRIBLE art direction IMHO. 
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Originally posted by wizyy There is a BIG difference here. Chronicles of Spellborn had HORRIBLE art direction IMHO.
Well, it was certainly a different art style... But over all the graphics were pretty good. Some of the animations seemed a bit stiff, but thats a matter of taste. The main thing that stuck out in my mind was the combat system. The rotating deck was a cute idea, but one risked carpal tunnel syndrome using it. Couple that with the horrible fragmentation of the player base at launch because of that very ill considered IP ban, and you start out with two strikes against one. Then Acclaims foot dragging for the NA launch didn't help matters. Not to mention they didn't even have a credit card option for subscription until almost two months after the NA launch, and one sets the foundation for the lack luster subscriptions we witnessed. |
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WoW this game has no chance in hell to succeed. Firstly we have a small company making a cookie cutter mmo. There are plenty of mmos like this one out already. Last time a small company attracted the mass market was when Mythic made DaoC and introduced battlegrounds , a new concept. This big twist on classes ? Yeah, it's been done before by F2P games like Crowns of Power, or Runes of Magic in some way. So in the end, you are trying to compete with the likes of WoW and Aion, with crappier graphics, and undoubtadly less polish. Meanwhile you want a subscription based game while offering the same features as free2play games. Yeah this has only one way of ending.
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Originally posted by Airspell
It never ceases to amaze and amuse me, how people can write off a game before they have even played it. In the realm of functionality, does one have to re invent the wheel, every time one builds something that uses them? Round wheels are so "old fashioned!" been there, done that!... |
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I've been around for a long time and sometimes games surprise me. However this is one of those times where you see the train wreck coming from a mile away. Think Archlord and Codemasters original subscription plan. I didn't say innovation is a must, but for a small company to succeed with the big dogs in the pay to play market they need to set themselves apart somehow. Without innovation how will they do that ? They can't match the graphics, they can't match the polish, due to the fact all that takes loads of money. Blizzard spends a lot of money on postponing their products just to make sure they are ready (I am not a big fan of Blizzard mind you). Small companies can't do that. That is why most small and indie games usually come out pretty buggy at first and it is their innovation or niche appeal that keeps them alive.(EvE, Wurm etc.) What I have done is taken my experience watching games fail, the reasons for why they failed, and compared those points to this game. We have a match.
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Originally posted by Airspell Well I beg to differ. It is quite obvious you did not read the article nor the subsequents ones. They are not trying to out Wow, Wow. They are avoiding the every feature in the book syndrome and focusing on integrating the features they will have to work well together. That can't be said of many MMO's. Until we get to beta test it, we won't know if they have been successful. While it is always ok to be skeptical, you post goes way beyond that. So the only match we have is that you don't have a clue what you are talking about. |
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Kudos to Rabenwolf for the well thought out responses. I must agree with you on everything; you show great prowess of the gaming world; not to mention you are articulate, which makes reading your posts enjoyable. To Dana: Man you have a lot of typos in your post (to the point where you really seem less like a professional and more like a freshman in college)… Ever think about proofreading your blogs before you post them? Interesting read regardless. Shohen: I don’t think your “current take on our mmo market” is all that accurate. As Rabenwolf has already stated this isn’t just a team of 40 guys, its 40 guys plus investors. The investors didn’t pour their money into a team looking for minimal return. The problem with focusing on a small group is that the probability of that demographic expanding is fairly low. And let’s face it, the demographic that QOL is focusing on is no small group, but an extremely large group already dedicated to hugely successful titles (two of which are coming out with insanely new makeovers that look to add extra innovation to an already trite genre: WoW Cataclysms and GW2) Even though this game has several features that separates itself from WoW, at first glance (you can go to their website and look at videos) it seems like a carbon copy of WoW, with less promise since it is being brought to you by a small unheard of company. And if this company is not seeing some decent profits within its first year, they are not exactly going to be expanding in the investor department. If a game doesn’t see huge profits soon (creating the game and launch puts a lot of financial stress on a company), the rate in which they can push out new content will be brought to a devastatingly slow speed if not put it on a several month hiatus till it can build up enough revenue to pay its employees for 1 month of new content. Maybe this game has what it takes to just skim by, but who wants to be just average in one of the most successful markets in our economy? Not to mention it’s extremely dangerous to do such a thing. When an independent gaming company enters the subscription based realm of MMO’s they are throwing down with the biggest and best companies. Hell, LotRO can’t even compare to the WoW, and it’s using, quite possibly, the most monumental IP in existence: Lord of the Rings. Kainis: You bring up a fairly valid point; Aion recently said the same thing as QOL; “if it ain’t broke, then don’t fix it”. And Aion is doing quite well post-launch (I still don’t think it will be that great of a game, despite my absolute love for Guild Wars and Dungeon Runners, and as a corollary NCSoft); however something tells me that Aion’s case is slightly different than that of QOL’s… whether it be the fact that Aion is using a sweet graphics engine, that its setting is something never really seen before on the western MMO scene, that it’s being produced by a pretty big company, or that it boasts a tremendously in-depth character creation system (which despite what QOL says, it DOES indeed matter to a lot of gamers; I’ve spent my fair share of time just rotating the camera around just to gaze upon how awesome my character looks). So in short I don’t think you can really compare the two games. You say with absolute certainty that “a game like this” will rake in profits. What makes you so sure (I’m, obviously, not convinced)? Are you talking about all fantasy based games? Or just all WoW-clones? And not all WoW-clones are successful; Runes of Magic being the exception; its business model is good and it pulled off being a clone (never actually played the game, so not sure how the later was done). I just also wanted to give props to Tupodawg999, I hate your name but very solid post with great points. To Lashbane’s post #33: You make the common fallacy that people can’t make accurate predictions about a game based upon desired at-launch features, company directions, and company history. How do you think people make money off the stock market? Same logic is applied to the MMO gaming industry. A combination reply to Butterball and JonMicheal Post # 44: To Frobner: Nice post. Great points. Wish I could commit further but I am running out of time. To Marlon B’s post #36: I was planning on wrapping up my post with something similar to what you so eloquently said. Since you beat me to the punch, I’ll just quote you,
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Originally posted by Dubhlaith This is good. I really want an indie game to succeed. I want people to learn that you do not have to be Blizzard or have their subscription numbers to be a profitable venture. But, what I want to ask you, personally, as a member of the team making this game: Why would I play this game, that seems exactly like WoW, instead of playing WoW? because WoW is full of knobheads and fanboi's.
Forum signatures are stupid and annoying. I've turned mine off. |
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It's funny how you make a point that is completely contradictory to what you're actually trying to say. You're trying to say your friend dislikes the game. What you actually said is your friend likes the game enough to play it for 5+ months. Call me insane but if I don't like an MMO it won't get 5 hours out of me let alone 5 months. |
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Originally posted by Vagrant_Zero
I dunno ... could be it's just fun enough while it's free but not worth paying for? I've beta-tested TcoS since the early closed beta .... never played it live. |
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Originally posted by MarlonB
I dunno ... could be it's just fun enough while it's free but not worth paying for? I've beta-tested TcoS since the early closed beta .... never played it live.
I played Spellborn once it finally went live with Acclaim. Not a bad game all things considered, but the combat system hammered the hell out of my fingers and wrists. Its too bad the company has gone bankrupt. 5 months?? I can tell if a games worth my time in a few weeks. If it has promise, I'll give it a couple of months(launch tends to be stressful for just about any game). I'm really looking forward to Algernon as I've followed Dave Allen's work for a long time. His vision for his original game was exceptional. But being back stabbed by Bowman ruined all of that. |
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Sorry, this doesn't look interesting enough or innovative enough to be worth a monthly subscription. It's seems to be just another generic fantasy MMO. I do wish the development team well and hope they can prove me wrong.
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Look around at the vast majority of MMO's(especially the 5 ton gorilla that is WoW) and you will see that they have all stolen ideas from each other, and from other forms of entertainment before them. This fixation on "innovation" by some people is blinding them to some of the consequences. 
In reality, its how one applies existing concepts, and the attention to detail(professionalism) and the fun factor that matter. Sure "innovation" *can* be good. But *only* if it works well with existing infrastructure, Innovation for its own sake(to appease the jaded...) is not only pointless, but usually turns out to be counter productive. Personally, I don't see them attempting to compete with Aion or WoW for that matter. Aion is PvP centric(Given that its NCsoft, how could it not be? ^^) . WoW on the other hand is well... WoW. No one in their right mind would set out to compete with it at this point. I suspect Dave Allen is MUCH wiser than that. Lets give it 6 months to a year after *launch* before we start proclaiming its "doom", shall we? ^^