-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
World of Darkness MMO Cancelled
- Thread starter Lucifon
- Start date
The Smoking Bun
Banned
And now the Vampire license will waste away in the hands of CCP
What a disgrace! Oh well, we'll always have generic fantasy to keep us company!
What a disgrace! Oh well, we'll always have generic fantasy to keep us company!
Seventy_X_Seven
Member
Having the entire integration be tracking win data is pretty boring. I know at EVE Vegas last October they were talking about letting the War Barges be ships that EVE players pilot and then Dust players have to contract the EVE players to move them around or just move their assets around and then of course risk getting intercepted by other players along the way and stuff. And then EVE players could contract Dust players to capture districts on planets so they could mine new resources and such. Stuff like that I find much more interesting.
Also I'm not so sure about the userbase on PS3 being too limiting. Dust has maintained a really stable player base for months now and it's been proving profitable, so I don't think CCP is in a huge rush to get it onto PS4, though it has to happen eventually. Highly doubt EVE and Dust would ever be integrated as the same game though as you then have to merge two separate characters and retcon the lore stating how EVE capsuleers can't use the same tech as Dust immortals and such. I mean perhaps you could have it where you switch off between characters, but that's not really integrating the games together as much as it is Dust available on PC (which could very well happen).
Seventy_X_Seven
Member
Not Spaceghost
Spaceghost
I totally forgot about this...now I guess everyone else will ;_;
I believe you, but what am I looking for here? I see the have Dust listed under cost of sales, but that seems to be write downs/incurred expenses?
EDIT: Man they better not have another year like 2013. 21 million loss after tax.
EDIT2: Yeah I can not see anything here that shows Dust is profitable? Cost of sales is just that, a cost incurred through sales.
Seventy_X_Seven
Member
Some more info straight from CCP,
https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=155562
For anyone who worried that CCP is going to cut back on Dust 514 and Valkyrie as well,
For those worried about more people losing their jobs,
For the guy wishing CCP just kickstarted WOD,
For those who fear CCP will sit on the IP and not do anything,
https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=155562
For anyone who worried that CCP is going to cut back on Dust 514 and Valkyrie as well,
CCP Saberwing said:
For those worried about more people losing their jobs,
CCP Saberwing said:
For the guy wishing CCP just kickstarted WOD,
CCP Saberwing said:
For those who fear CCP will sit on the IP and not do anything,
CCP Saberwing said:
Seventy_X_Seven
Member
Yes 21 million loss, but look at why. CCP invested heavily into research and development, which will net any company a loss. They are betting on the future, but when you look at everything else Dust has been profitable. Of course, if they lose their bet on the future then it doesn't mean anything.
That is just supposition, you have no way of being able to discern if Dust lost money or not and if that hypothetical loss was (would most likely be in this scenario) covered by EVE profits.
And weren't we seeing a fairly gradual and noticeable decline of active players during peak hours before they merged the online activity count with EVE? I mean I am willing to accept the idea that it makes a meager amount of money, given the relatively small team and all, but we have no proof of profitability here. There are virtually never any recorded rankings for DUST sales off the PS store and unless I am mistaken. Not that the majority ever ranks to begin with but if you assume that a relatively stable percentage of those who do buy things from the story also rank...
And weren't we seeing a fairly gradual and noticeable decline of active players during peak hours before they merged the online activity count with EVE? I mean I am willing to accept the idea that it makes a meager amount of money, given the relatively small team and all, but we have no proof of profitability here. There are virtually never any recorded rankings for DUST sales off the PS store and unless I am mistaken. Not that the majority ever ranks to begin with but if you assume that a relatively stable percentage of those who do buy things from the story also rank...
Black Door
Banned
Centering your business strategy around a MMO is suicide for a vidya company nowadays unless you're like Tencent or something and have fingers in several projects and ventures at once, or you knock it out of the park with one title like ARR or Blade and Soul (which few companies can do unless they've got infinite dosh)
Seventy_X_Seven
Member
Probably because they did that around the time they "released" the game (as if a game like this ever even gets released). So it's just them not retaining all players from the player spike of releasing, no game does. Since then the amount of players online at any given time has been pretty stable.
http://eve-offline.net/?server=dust
Ah nice to see, still, peak is kind of low for a F2P game. They better have some insane whales. If they really are serious about investing I think they should get serious about a PS4 port.
Seventy_X_Seven
Member
Over the past month peaking at over 5000 players online at the same time, just this week peaking over 4400, what are you expecting from a under-the-radar free-to-play game on a last gen console? For what it is they are doing great in my opinion. Don't believe they need to rush it out to current gen at all, but of course they should definitely start thinking about it and planning for it which I'm sure they already have.
CCP's FanFest is in two-and-a-half weeks, so maybe they'll surprise us with something there?
Seventy_X_Seven
Member
It would of been a sandbox MMO with very minimal story telling by the developers and instead relying on the players to create the stories in the world with all the politics and espionage and back-stabbing we see in EVE.
Pretty much what most people first hoped of when they got into the MMO genre, only to realize everything is a carefully scripted theme park. Really sad to see this get cancelled but can't say it wasn't expected.
The Smoking Bun
Banned
Bethesda save us!!
Incoming butt-hurt. Or perhaps inXile could have a go
MehsterChief
Member
I hope that something good comes from this, meaning a new singleplayer rpg in the world of darkness. There's a developer out there who recently had some success with kickstarter. I don't know maybe they need another project once pillars if eternity is finished.. ?
Teknopathetic
Member
I can't say I'm surprised, but it still sucks. The setting is perfect for making an MMO that actually makes use of being "Massively-Multiplayer." The fact that they've been constantly laying off people from that studio over the years was telling. It also felt like the whole reason they even merged/acquired White Wolf was to do this, so it seems particularly shitty for the White Wolf side.
El Phenicks
Neo Member
This game was in Dev Hell for like 2 years, no surprise there...
I really love WoD but I dunno if the world is prepared for a real Vampire MMO, real hard getting that P&P feel when some NPC tells you to kill 10 ghouls for one cellphone...
So ... I'm not sad
I really love WoD but I dunno if the world is prepared for a real Vampire MMO, real hard getting that P&P feel when some NPC tells you to kill 10 ghouls for one cellphone...
So ... I'm not sad
ComputerMKII
Banned
Fuck. I thought Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines was very interesting.
jackissocool
Member
No need to be a huge dick, you huge dick.
Principate
Saint Titanfall
Thing is there are hunderds of mmo type games, so clearly they don't have to be large expensive long dev time games, it's just that a lot of companies either work in a scope they're entirely financially unsuitable for or invest too much for fool hardy returns.
Well that is extremely disappointing.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines was an amazing RPG, perhaps one of the best 3D ones ever. As for the MMO space, I feel it is a very disappointing time at the moment. We're just now coming out of the time where MMOs began their development cycle 5+ years ago and were copying the most successful MMO at the time, World of Warcraft.
EVE: Online has always interested me because of the player-driven nature of the entire game. One of the reasons I was excited for WoD was because of that, and I feel MMOs should begin to embrace those elements, permanent death and consequence of choice included.
Honesty, with the exception of EverQuest Next, I can't say I'm excited about any upcoming MMO (I'm speaking about traditional MMOs, I'm not including games such as DayZ for example).
I hope they sell the IP or allow another developer to use it. Obsidian could be a great fit, but I can't expect one developer to do everything.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines was an amazing RPG, perhaps one of the best 3D ones ever. As for the MMO space, I feel it is a very disappointing time at the moment. We're just now coming out of the time where MMOs began their development cycle 5+ years ago and were copying the most successful MMO at the time, World of Warcraft.
EVE: Online has always interested me because of the player-driven nature of the entire game. One of the reasons I was excited for WoD was because of that, and I feel MMOs should begin to embrace those elements, permanent death and consequence of choice included.
Honesty, with the exception of EverQuest Next, I can't say I'm excited about any upcoming MMO (I'm speaking about traditional MMOs, I'm not including games such as DayZ for example).
I hope they sell the IP or allow another developer to use it. Obsidian could be a great fit, but I can't expect one developer to do everything.
cj_iwakura
Member
The only thing new I'd like to see is a Sabbat campaign, ideally during the Atlanta Offensive when they took over most of the East Coast.
Dre_G_Writer
Member
I dont like hearing about games being cancelled.
Wiktor
Member
Nah. Not every MMO needs to cost hundred millions to develop. Companies can easily center their strategy around MMO as long as they built it in such way that it won't require million subscribers to be profitable.
EatinOlives
Member
How would this even be done reasonably? The MMO genre is extremely hard to develop for. It's one of the very few genres where most of its fanbase complains that they can "only" play "bad game X" for "a couple hundred hours". The base standard is being able to play it pretty much forever. And they're not generally like multiplayer FPSs where the fun is purely in the interaction between players and the developers only had to make one rigid set of small maps/scenarios.
MMOs, by default, are supposed to have the biggest in-game worlds in the industry, are supposed to last the longest, and are meant to be the most numerically complex. They're supposed to be persistent in enormous servers that can handle the interactions of thousands at once, need to store every aspect of every player's statistics and inventory on their servers, and need to have enough content on them to last hundreds, if not thousands of hours.
That was the whole reason why MMOs started off as subscription based games when no other genre did it, because they were the biggest of games and by far the most expensive to develop for.
Sadly they would have to license it our or sell it because they bought the rights. This could end up sucking far worse than just no MMO they could end up sitting on the rights
Wiktor
Member
By crating a sandbox. The biggest reason why MMOs are so insanely expensive to make is content creation. Theme parks are filled with AAA-like singleplayer content and the requirement is to produce it forever. That's what's costing this much. Plus you can never create content fast enough and when they finish they get bored and leave.
Meanwhile sandboxes generally are smaller world-size and most of the content is player driven. Players create their own fun, all you have to do is provide the systems for it and then users do the rest of the work for you. This type of fun also doesn't end, so there's nowhere near as big pressure to create new content. Plus the userbase is also a lot less demanding when it comes to quality of graphics.
There's quite a lot smaller sandbox MMOs that are doing just fine these days, not just EVE, but also Perpetuum or Dark Fall. And the upcoming titles of this type, like Camelot Unchained or Pathfinder, also aren't exactly aiming for hundred million dollars budget.
D
Deleted member 10571
Unconfirmed Member
While I was kinda hoping for this to make it, I never actually believed it since the first day it got "delayed" due to CCP taking off staff for that Eve console flop.
Well this thread just reminded me that it has been a long time since I heard about this game. So I guess it isn't surprising that it has been canceled now.
On a side note I am still hoping that someday someone will get the license and give us another fantastic RPG like Bloodlines.
On a side note I am still hoping that someday someone will get the license and give us another fantastic RPG like Bloodlines.
Well yeah, but that is kind of my point as far as the whole profitability is concerned.
I do agree that they really have turned the ship around now, but they could have had far higher numbers than this by simply delaying the game for 6-8 months for polish and expanded to have started working on a PS4 version. They lost so much potential revenue with how they rolled this game out. There was a time when DUST 514 inspired hype, not ridicule.
I am sure we will see some news on it at fanfest, here is hoping for a PS4 version (maybe even PC) with further expansion of scope and integration into EVE proper.
Wow, that chart is wild. I've never played a MOBA but as far as I know, you get the full game for free and essentially only spend money on cosmetic changes, right? MMOs thinking they can still get away with charging $15 a month are just insane.
No wonder.
Wiktor
Member
MOBAs are dirt cheap to make though. THeir model wouldn't really work in MMOs. But generally yes, you either are WoW or you need to be hardcore sandbox to have people willing to pay subs. WoW justifies it with the quanity and quality of content, while sandboxes would get destroyed by F2P model, so people prefer to pay sub.
cj_iwakura
Member
Antilurker77
Member
Yikes. Looks like CCP really wasn't behind the game in the first place.
They need to be roughed up too. Its bs how they handled WOD. Shameful. All to please the ridiculous eve crowd.