Holy , they have PS2 and they make another Planetside game splitting the playerbase even more AND its a battle royal game. Hell they even have a MOBILE game in the works. Better sell that krono off before the company goes bankrupt in 2019.
This is highly accurate for large scale creative projects and is especially common in the video game industry. Ramp up and ramp down development as needed...it's very rough for surplus staff such as junior artists.
lol so they wanted to replace greatest game created with EQ2? . they might of gotten a way with it but too many other games came out that peeps could move to if EQ every went a away.
I know this all to well. I work for a property management company. When we buy new apartments we always hire 3-5 additional guys to get everything caught up and on time for deadlines the investors / owners create. After like 75% of the work is done, those extra guys are always let go. I wouldn't feel so bad if the people hiring were up front about it only being temporarily, but they kind of give the illusion that if they work good / hard they can be transferred to another property. Most of them never get that chance as I always try to keep up with people who I meet in life. I love seeing people do good.
tell your company to use temp. agencies then. dont mind people who have families looking for a stable job.
Needless to say this was a flop. Had a great opportunity to announce an EQ re-release for the 20th. MMO market is thin...battle royale is heavily saturated.. so lets go the saturated route
I hate to break this to you but DB and SOE are corporations, you know, to make profit. What you think they should do is invest all EQ monies back into EQ. That there is a bad business model and SOE/DB would already be out of business had they followed it or atleast in big trouble. This shouldn't be a surprise but it is natural for corporations to divest their money and invest in various other projects rather than roll it all into one product and hang that entire division of such a large company on one game. As far as upgrading EQ that's not as easy as one might think and it would definitely be cost prohibitive, this is assuming you are referring to porting EQ to a newer engine.
1) No one said they should invest ALL money back into EQ, just more than they have been. 2) They'll be out of business anyway if they keep pissing away all the money EQ makes trying (and failing) to make the next big thing. How much money did they lose working on EQNext for like 8 years and then cancelling the project before they really even got started? A few tens of millions of dollars? How much better could they have made EQ with all that money? Or even just a portion of it? Just look at this list and you can see how many games have come and gone since EQ, and EQ bankrolled most of that. 3) We know upgrading EQ isn't easy. No one thinks it is. Neither is it impossible. They've continually improved the game over the last 2 decades and if the money was there they could improve it that much more.
/sigh You make it sound like they took money straight from EQ and put it to landmark. Landmark at best was aggressive and without the technology to support its development. Not to mention the fact that EQNext wasn't a guaranteed blockbuster the way say Battlefield anything would be, ment that Next wouldn't get the investors the traditional route further hampering its development. Sorry but EQ needs more than a few tens of millions of dollars to be upgraded. Aside from the fact that those millions of dollars lost on the project that was Everquest Next didn't even come close to all coming from Everquest. It came fro SOE the corporation, not any one game, not even close. EQ next failing has nothing to do with EQ. Each project had its own budget and team. No upgrading EQ isn't impossible. But it wont happen because it would probably cost as much as making a new game. They will do small improvements, but the old graphics engine and database system are antiquated, the costs to modernize would be large. Edit: Oh and I looked at your list of games by DB and how many are shut down, as soon as I saw star wars galaxies on the list I new that list was at least partially garbage and weighted biasly against DB. SWG shut down long time, like years before DB bought SOE. DB never had anything to do with SWG.
You are sorely mistaken about the cash cow that is EQ. The point of how much money was funneled off this game elsewhere is spot on. Pretty sure the even admitting how awful it was making competing games within their own company using money from the first. But obviously still haven't learned. If the higher ups had given enough funds for 2 more devs so that spells and AA could have been filled out like they should have and it would have drastically paid dividends for TBL.
Now imagine for a moment if $med went all-in EQ. By Velious we would have had a revamped combat system, new animations, revamped engine, and modular code design. Then continue to iterate on the engine and graphics, being able to offer increased graphics performance and increased storytelling and features. Rather than making EQ2 a separate game, those feature sets are implemented into EQ1. I know, hindsight is always 20/20. What I fail to understand is why EQ is STILL viewed as the red-headed stepchild. It's the little freaking engine that could. It boggles my mind.
In business, "Cash cows" are products that are not growing market share, but still bring in significant revenue. Business wants to grow, so they take money from the cash cow to invest in products they hope will grow and thus increase overall revenue. You don't over invest in a product which will not expand. You milk it (it is a cow) with minimal expense until it dies while creating the new cash cows.
Correct, but when the cow is still paying out 15 years after you realized it was a cash cow you have to realize throwing some more, not that means a lot or all, profit back than they had is good thing and can pay back. TBL would have sold much much better had there been more well tuned spells and a lot more AA lines for each class. The same could be said for lot of expansions or content. Like 1 or 2 more devs and you're cooking with fire.
Think more of completely re-making the game. A new game that is the same. Same game play, but new code/graphics. Same dungeons, lore, etc, but cut scenes and a more intuitive/interactive storyline. Same AA system instead of the cookie cutter nonsense. A simple and traditional re-make. So much can be improved with QOL stuff, leveling, quest mechanics and what content to include at launch vs. expansions. The hard part is the story/lore/concepts/dungeons/raids/loot content. The easy part is actually building the game for a developer. Creative genius is what is hard to come by and it already exists.
