And when you discover that your product is actually a *golden goose*, what you're supposed to do is take care of the thing so that it keeps giving you golden eggs. What you DON'T do is cut it's food in half over and over and slowly starve it to death.
I know how business works. I do actually have a business degree. I know that money came from different sources, (including all the players that bought into the empty promises of Landmark) but I also know that EQ is pretty much the ONLY game that has consistently made them money. Most of the games on that list never even hit ROI much less made a *profit.* EQ passed ROI many years ago and continually turns a profit. None of us have actual numbers, but it's not difficult to see that the reinvestment into EQ isn't nearly as much as the investment into something else. As already stated by other people, even a (relatively) small amount of that money would make a HUGE impact on EQ. Hiring another 10 devs @100k/y (I'm making up numbers here) each would allow them to nearly double the amount of content and/or make significant improvements to the core systems. Again, without numbers I can't be certain of anything, but I'd be willing to bet that even that modest investment would make up for itself. *Where* the money came from is less of the issue than how *effectively* it was spent. Pissing off tens of millions of dollars on EQN without even coming close to releasing the game + pissing off tens of millions of dollars on various other games over the years that never hit ROI, vs reinvesting even a small portion of that into a game that's actively turning a profit. Hrm, I wonder which one would be the better choice? Point of order here: I'm NOT against them making new games. The world needs new games, even if those games are ultimately unsuccessful. What I am criticizing is the decision to focus almost exclusively on making new games while leaving your existing ones to slowly wither and die from lack of reinvestment. They've continually done those things, though. The inventory system being limited to 8 bags of 10 slots was DEEPLY embedded into the core of the game. It took them years to change something so fundamental to the game, but in the end they succeeded. EQ has done a LOT with the limited support they've been given. It's a credit to the talent working on the game to do so much with so little. What could they accomplish if they actually had even a fraction of the bankroll that's been squandered elsewhere? We'll probably never know. I'll give you SWG because that one was mainly a licencing issue. SOE didn't have much control over that one. As for the rest of them, get real. 989 = Verant = SOE = DBG. Hell, there are even a few acronyms missing but those are the ones people know. The first three were ALL Sony owned for over 16 years of EQ's 19 years of existence. Even if I were to grant you that DBG is somehow a fundamentally different company than it was in prior incarnations due to the lack of Sony/Smed, the fact DBG has made the SAME CHOICES as the others negates that. They STILL pissed away tons of money on EQN, H1Z1, and likely this next game that's too little too late.* (They've been better about cutting their losses rather than falling into the sunk cost fallacy, but that's still after the fact). *Note that I'm not *hoping* it fails, just that I have serious reservations about it doing well enough to challenge the current leaders of the genre.
EQ1 had not peaked, before WoW released. It peaked after WoW released after having recovered from the debacle that was the release of GoD. EQ2 originally came out as a much harder game, but after WoW was released it was tweaked in ways to more mirror WoW. You'd be surprised how many of us are not surprised that EQ is still here.
Per SOE announcements: SOE December 10th 2001 ... Currently, EverQuest boasts more than 400,000 active subscribers Sony Online Entertainment - 07/30/2002 ... EverQuest currently has more than 430,000 active subscribers with new fans logging on daily Sony Online Entertainment - 03/05/2003 ... With more than 430,000 active subscribers, EverQuest, developed and published by Sony Online Entertainment Inc. Sony Online Entertainment - 03/15/2004 ... with a global player base of more than 420,000 people, EverQuest So by the only official numbers we have (not the press releases that give 400-600k Subscribers to ALL SoE games. The game peaked in 2003, before the release of WoW and EQII. WoW also came out as a much harder game. If your definition of harder is slower and having to read quest text and figure out where to go. I played both at launch and both seemed “easier” than EQ1 but really it was just the ability to progress solo vs grouped. I was actually caught up with raid progression at the time, the difficulty was getting bodies and coordinating people. I could CHeal rotate on a main tank all day while watching movies, getting 50 something people to actually log on, now that was hard.
What Beimeth said. Problem of adding, say, 40% employee cost to an income stream, is the missing 40% extra income, that will only materialize slowly as organic growth. It has to translate to 4.500+ new “full” customers (1 account 12 months plus basic expansion) to break even, and that will take years. What we need the added resources to do is to pay back tech debt, modernize the code base, kill internet trolls, sell the game to the new generations, and add a late spring DLC to the yearly cycle. The code has a million+ lines (guessing based on studying social media), written a hundred years ago (1 human year = 7 programmer years), so maybe the engineering task is too big. This is a very interesting question for me. Is 30 man-years (+10 people x 3 years) too little to refactor the code and upgade to a new gfx engine? Can the task be split, so that new zones run on a new gfx engine, old zones on the existing, but keeping a single gameplay? Everquest has a huge potential, but it needs its own strategy, it cannot win Go if the company execs are playing Chess (long term territorial victory vs quick kingslaying victory), it needs volumes of cash, and it needs time.
100% sure the cheapest thing would be to take classic EQ and rebuild it with modern tools and methods. But you would have a new game, further split the playerbase and then have to ask yourself the question: In 2018, online gaming no longer being new or novel. How many players are willing to play a recreation of classic EQ? Blizzard has finally decided it’s worth finding out how many people are willing to play a non upgraded version of their original game. But for EQ that peaked around 400k, could that subscription level be obtained or justify the cost? Personally I would buy it and play some, but I wouldn’t expect huge success in today’s marketplace.
I don’t believe in new Everqusts, it is the continuity that matters. Diablo 3 is not Diablo. Adding a mobile game to attract people back, sure, but the MMO has to give the perception of being the same, even if it means having several engines in one. I do not at all believe you can remake it from scratch and keep the continuum. It has to be through refactoring and incremental launches.
No way in a million years would you ever convince an executive to spend money to "modernize" EQ. Any significant amount of investment would pay off much better utilizing the IP to develop a new game or developing a new IP.
No one funding it cares about what it did in the past. What can you do for me tomorrow? Arguing that the game made you 1000% ROI 10 years ago doesn't mean investing any money today will equal any type of return. Look at those numbers you are suggesting though. 10devs at that price would be over $1.5m investment. You would need to at over 8000 subscribers for a full year to even break even. No idea what there avg revenue per month per account is. So I am sure that number would increase and turn them some profit. But do you really think 10 dev's would net 8000 new people? I'm willing to bet that would be close to doubling the subscriber base today.
I have zero interest in this new DBG game. I'm just not in to those kinds of games. Considering there is no true EQ-clone out there, I'm starting to think my next MMORPG will be an eq I setup myself and play around with. I can't for the life of me figure out why DBG wont take the concept of EQemu, and build it in to EverQuest where you could run your own server with your own rules. Then they could make money off of the community. I mean really there is no alternative for anybody that wants to play an EverQuest-like game on the market anymore. Vanguard was the closest, and it's gone. Everything else is a WoW-clone. So, the only way you can play an EverQuest-like game is to play on an EQemu server. Surely DBG can see the potential there for profit.
If this is in relation to my post.... This is not investing money modernizing an existing game. This is investing creating a new game based on an existing IP. Very different things.
Agree that it is a hard sell. Disagree that it will be better to make new games. “New games” is red ocean, everyone is there, most are failing. Nobody else can build a new game that is as convoluted and dificult to learn as Everquest, this is EQs domain and barrier-to-entry. The tech debt is curiously enough also linked to part of the differentiating advantage. The story of being Everquest, the continuity in a gaming world that is forever less persistent, the culture embedded, the name recognition... the fact that it is not a cheap remake, it is THE ACTUAL GAME still running, albeit much improved, is unique. This is the competitive edge, this is the reason to play Go, not Chess... I am not a romantic in this, I do believe it to be a potentially better long term business opportunity, over doing what everyone else is trying to do as well. I believe only business geniuses can execute on these types of businesses, private equity companies are too formulaic; that is why the new investor is so interresting to follow.
Is it even a new game? Or did they take Planetside 2 engine and make a new game type, like CoD Zombies?
I don’t think it would have to be a “cheap remake”, just think it would be more feasible than to take every assist and zone in EQ and completely rebuild it using modern tools and then put all players in that new client. As opposed to continually adding system designed for Windows 95/98. My bigger problem is I don’t think doing so would be worth the money. EQ in 99 had lots of advantages. Now it would be a 20 year old game fully restored in a better engine, but still a 20 year old game that never reached to popularity of many games that followed (not just WoW).
No, you would not have a new game. What to do is basically reverse engineer EQ. Look at the current client, what inputs it gets, what it sends out, and what it does with that. Then create a new one with modern graphics and full 64 bit support, etc. I would prefer backward hardware compatibility for those who can't afford new computers, at the same time providing modern stuff for those who have computers that can handle it. Doing the same thing server side would be much harder. Still, that is the idea. EQ currently running off ancient database? Create a conversion program to copy the data to a new database type. Easy? No. Not at all. There is a huge risk of the new database data getting corrupted. Still, if you make several copies of the old database you can play with it until you get it right. Then shut down the severs for the hours it is running. Maybe think of a way to split the data, with migrating over one or several tables at a time. Meanwhile, the new server code queries the new database for the migrated tables while still using the old one for the ones not yet moved. And, of course, always keeping the older database around until you know everything is good. Is it possible? I don't know for sure but I think it could be done. In all cases, the goal is to be modular to the maximum extent, so you can replace parts when you want to upgrade and change things.
Wait, EQ has a database? Last code I saw it did not and all the data was built into the scripts themselves. Look at how they explained how boss loot works. It's all apart of a script not reference to a DB.
Why would you reverse engineer a game you own all the source code of? P99 has to reverse engineer it sure and the data is stored in SQL for that, not exactly ancient, no clue what live does. The problem is you need an entirely new engine and have to redesign all mechanics (that have changed plenty of times), all artwork, character models, etc. Your not just grabbing some output and inserting it into “new graphics”, they already have access to all the math used for stat calculations, mob fighting, whatever. But there is nothing you can take from the old game and shove it in a new version without a team of artist to rebuild it all. At the level of effort who are you going to convince to do it for 25 expansions worth of content with a population base that long peaked. Makes more sense to invest in a new IP or EQNext. (Though Smedley has been trolling on Twitter recently saying he still thinks EQ3 will get made)
Keyword in all of those releases, more than, and you ignore the releases after those games came out which put it considerably higher than the numbers in them.
