(05-14-2014, 11:23 PM)synaesthetic Wrote: How many subscription games are left? WoW, FFXIV, FFXI and EVE.
How many F2P games are there? THOUSANDS.
How is that not "dominance?"
I'd ask how that is "dominance"? Â If there are thousands of F2P games and none of them are anywhere near being the quality cash cows of WoW, XIV, EVE, and so on, then are they really dominating? Â It just seems like there are less subscription-based MMORPGs because it's a really hard model to keep up. Â People might buy a bunch of F2P games (if they even need to) play them for a month, and then stop. Â Those games don't even have a reliable metric for showing active players and accounts.
As far as the numbers I've seen, the full sales populations of most games don't even scrape the 500,000 dollar bottom of EVE's subscriptions, and EVE is a comparatively small subscription MMORPG compared to FFXIV (1.8 million) and everyone pales in comparison to WoW (last I heard, their lowest subs in almost a decade at 7.8 million). Â There are just a few F2P games with more sales than some of those subscription games, but how many people are actively playing them?
I'd say that, with as many F2P games as there are, it's because their development cycle favors quantity over quality. Â They don't guide or dominate the discussion because their model for making money is either based on straight-up sales (so they release a ton of expansions and make you pay for development directly) or based on microtransactions (the dreaded P2W). Â Taken as a small and exclusive group, EVE, WoW, and Final Fantasy are very different games.
Actually, beta testing Wildstar, I'm suddenly struck by how different Wildstar and XIV are from WoW. Â Maybe it's just become a catch phrase so people call everything a WoW-clone, but the only things they really have in common are that they are MMORPGs and have elements like getting quests, an action bar, a health pool, factions, things of that nature. Â EVE Online has all of those things; nobody would call EVE a WoW clone, but the only things it doesn't have in common with those games is a WASD control scheme, which predates even MMORPGs.
Other than that, the four major subscription games have wildly different settings, focuses, paces, combat styles, loot, focus, development, graphics. Â I guess, having read about how these games are WoW-clones, I kind of took it for granted. Â They are really wildly different. Â Now, there are games out there that are clones of these titles and they certainly ripped ideas off of other, less successful games (WoW is ironic as everyone thinks the industry is cloning WoW, when WoW seems to just as often absorb all the good ideas bouncing around in the MMORPG stratosphere), but really those four games are wildly different except matters of genre. Â Really, deviations from those genre staples haven't necessarily been good ideas.
It just hit me how different the games are, with WoW's almost instantaneous statistical approach, Wildstar's almost chaotic melee of elements, XIV's careful and ponderous play, and EVE's ambiguity and long-range planning, the subscription games are, for their part, very different from each other. Â I think, of all subscription games that are in the pipeline and have come before, Wildstar will probably have the best chance to carve out a spot in the sun because it does kind of carve out a niche that people weren't paying for monthly already.
That's probably why the previous generation of subscription MMORPGs that preceded XIV and Wildstar but came after WoW and EVE went F2P. Â They were trying to re-make WoW too closely and trying to replicate that success too minutely, especially when a subscription model favors the original developer. Â I think the new generation of subscription games, XIV, Wildstar, et al., are doing their best not to just take WoW and improve on it, but to differentiate themselves in tone, mechanics, and structure.
It makes me a little more hopeful. Â I should say I may be biting on Wildstar too soon, but playing the beta, I'm really impressed by the game. Â A LOT more impressed than I thought I'd be.