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Just hinting at it happening leads me to believe that the wheels are already in motion. The gaming print industry has been hurting for a long time now, and it seems like things are only getting worse. I still think a game magazine could survive and actually do well, but they would have to radically alter what they provide and how they provide it.

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Despite a horrid economy that has cast a black cloud over many different industries, GameStop seems to be doing fine. The company recently announced their fiscal results for the third quarter of this year, which ended Nov. 1, and GameStop’s sales increased 5.2 percent to 1.695 billion.

It wasn’t all good though as the company’s net earnings saw a drop from $52 million to $46.7 million. The negatives didn’t stop there as GameStop store sales were also down. But that wasn’t enough to burst the company’s bubble as they looked forward to a continuation of strong sales for the rest of the fiscal year.

Daniel DeMatteo, Chief Executive Officer had this to say, “Despite the dramatic decline of the global economy and its severe impact on the entire retail industry, GameStop had a strong quarter.” And he wasn’t the only one within the company who felt good about the sales, as other executives seemed pleased with the numbers as well.

Looking towards the future GameStop cautioned that earnings would be “tempered slightly by the weakness in consumer spending.” With the holiday season coming up, and the slew of new purchases, as well trade-ins coming in, one has to figure GameStop will be just fine.

One of Nintendo’s major reasons for not supporting HD and keeping the Wii’s specifications conservative was to make it a viable platform for original IPs. The argument was that developing games on machines with multi-core processors and complex architectures was increasing development costs to such a degree, that the appetite for risk was rapidly diminishing within the industry resulting in endless sequels and me-too titles. Two years have passed since the Wii was released and it has since gained many original IPs that allow us to see if Nintendo’s decision has borne fruit, or whether it was just an excuse to limit R&D expenses.

Red Steel

VGChartz estimated worldwide sales:1,006,000

As of April ‘07, Ubisoft reported that Red Steel had sold 950,000 copies, and VGChartz has current sales of the game at just over a million; likely well short of the true number. The success of Red Steel cannot be in doubt - a game that was hyped to be sure, but one that also ended as being a pretty mediocre shooter made enjoyable because of the Wii Remote. The question of why Ubisoft has not tried to replicate its success with other Wii FPS games can be explained with other successful Ubisoft games from the Petz/Imagine series. The latter required smaller teams and shorter development cycles, so that even minor sales resulted in strong profits. Nintendo’s own strategy seems to have backfired in this case, as Ubisoft has since become reluctant to release anything other than mini-game compilations, albeit quality ones in the form of Rayman Raving Rabbids, and expanded audience games on the Wii. Motion Plus seems to have provided Ubisoft the impetus to make the sequel that so many expected this year: Red Steel 2 should see a release in the ‘09 holiday season.

Boom Blox

VGChartz estimated worldwide sales:560,000

Initially deemed a failure at retail, Boom Blox sold a paltry 60,000 copies in its first week. Many worried that gamers would simply see a glorified version of Jenga and balk at the $50 price tag. Though, like many Wii games, despite not having the front loaded sales so typical of games on the 360, it’s shown real legs due to a solid advertising campaign and strong word-of-mouth buzz. EA stated that the game had sold 450,000 copies in their first fiscal quarter, so VGChartz current estimate of 560,000 copies sold is likely well short of the actual number. It’s tough to determine just how much cash EA plowed into Boom Blox; Steven Spielberg’s influence and the superb level design can’t have come cheap, but ultimately it didn’t feature the lavish visuals and presentation that are known to really elevate development costs. If its sales approach 750,000 worldwide, it will surely represent a very good return for EA who are also strongly rumored to be preparing a sequel.

Zack & Wiki

VGChartz estimated worldwide sales:450,000

Capcom clearly lavished a lot of time and money on Zack & Wiki - the game’s art direction, level design and sheer length show that the company also invested a lot of its top talent on the project. In February ‘08, 4 months after its release, Capcom announced that it had sold 300,000 copies of the game in the U.S and Japan. A surprising figure as it had sold a mere 35,000 in its first week on sale in the U.S. VGChartz has current sales for the game at 450,000, but once again this seems a conservative estimate, and shows the site’s general inability to properly track sales figures for games that fall out of the top 20 yet still maintain consistent sales. Despite this, Capcom has not seemed eager to announce a sequel. The success of both Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition and Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles seems to be at the heart of this. Both games have sold over a million copies each despite one being a direct port and the other reusing art assets from earlier games. This is further proven by Capcom’s decision to port the 360 title Dead Rising to the console. Compared to Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition’s sales and development cost/time, Zack & Wiki appears to be an apparent failure. Judged on its own however; with its niche point and click adventure gameplay, high difficulty and kid friendly sound and visuals, its sales begin to look a lot more impressive.

And a few that didn’t make it

Perhaps the best game to have completely flopped on the Wii is We Love Golf. Capcom acknowledged in a press release that its performance was ’sluggish’ and VGChartz has its current sales at 40,000, though this does not include Europe. Quite why it sold so badly is a bit of a mystery - Camelot, the game’s developer, has been responsible for numerous golf games that have been successful for both Nintendo and Sony in the past. Konami’s overly cute Dewy’s Adventure and Leftfield’s poorly designed Nitrobike are other notable failures of original IPs.

In part 2 of TVGB’s look at how original IPs perform on the Wii; De Blob and Okami will be covered, as well as a look at whether the high sales of ports and spin-offs could be shaping developers’ release lists a little too strongly.

SCI FI and Trion hire ex-Blizzard talent for MMO/TV show project originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading EVE's Council of Stellar Management elections end tomorrow

EVE's Council of Stellar Management elections end tomorrow originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Back in May I asked whether or not WoW was an unstoppable train. To sum it up briefly and simply, I didn’t think so. With today’s news of Blizzard selling 2.8M copies of WotLK and breaking their previous first day sales record of 2.4M with the launch of TBC, I am starting to rethink things a bit. That is 400k more copies, which can be represented as a 14% increase.

I was basing my earlier theory on a bit of expert opinion by none other than MMO Chart‘ s SirBruce. This guy has been analyzing the MMO scene for a long time here and he had put together a presentation with the following:

• The MMOG subscription market continues to grow; 16M+ now, 20M+ in 2009 (pred. 2006), 30M+ in 2012
• World of Warcraft to peak at 11M – 12M by 2010
• Most retail-launched MMOGs have an initial growth phase during the first year, followed by 1 – 3 years of a more stable, “mature” subscription base, and then a noticeably and often sharp decline.
• New markets grow subscriptions, but expansions packs mostly cover churn and provide a retail presence.

I don’t know about the overall subscription market, but I’m going to assume it is growing. Also, Blizzard recently announced that they now have over 11M accounts (however you slice ‘em up), which is pretty much on par with his second bullet. We’re on the brink of finding out what will happen with the third bullet as WoW celebrates its fourth birthday. Will it ring in the next 12 months with a “sharp decline?”

I’m most interested in the fourth bullet. According to Sir Bruce, MMO expansions cover churn, aka, player loss. Well, since the release of TBC, WoW’s population has shot up from 8M to 11M, an increase of roughly 3M players. Obviously, you release expansions to keep your customers in new and exciting content, but are they also serving the purpose of helping World of Warcraft grow? Without TBC, I don’t think we’d see the current numbers at 11M…

Let’s talk a bit more about player retention here. My WAR guild is made up entirely of ex-WoW players. We were a WoW guild that moved to WAR (even though I had quit WoW a long time before WAR was even in the picture). At one point we had 69 members in our guild. We now have about 20 “active” members (active yet ultra casual). Where do you think the other ones went? Back to WoW for the most part. The most I have seen online at prime time these past couple weeks has been 8 players. Most of the time it is 3 to 4.

This isn’t an isolated occurrence either. Last night I did a quick server check and found about 70% of them to be low/low, 30% of them to be med/med (or some variation of med/low or low/med), and none of them was showing a “high” value anywhere in the entire list. During WAR’s first free month it wasn’t uncommon to see dozens of “high” and “full” values.

Having spoken with another blogger who shall remain nameless (protect the innocent!), he went from having a guild of 150 to about 20 actives as well. Even one of his best friends and a family member quit - though I don’t think those two in particular went back to WoW. Most of the rest? You guessed it.

You can blame some of this on the fact that these people weren’t enjoying WAR enough to stick around regardless and that many of them may not have run back to WoW, but you’d be a complete fool to say that WotLK hasn’t had a huge impact on WAR’s retention rate…

WotLK is definitely addressing WoW’s churn issues.

I think the next 12-months will be exciting for both WoW and WAR and we’ll start being able to see where the chips are falling. A couple of the original bullets are a bit conflicting on second glance: First he says that WoW will grow to 11-12M by 2010 but then he says that most MMOs see a sharp decline in their fifth year. Will WoW be able to break the industry norms by actually continuing to grow into their fifth year (2010) and beyond? Could the expansions help this to happen rather than simply addressing churn?

If I had to make a prediction, it would be this:

WoW will do extremely well for the next 6-12 months and may even reach that 12M peak, but without another expansion on the horizon for an additional 6-12 months beyond then, they will start to see that sharp decline SirBruce talks about. No MMO launch since 2004 has yet managed to make a permanent dent in WoW’s subscription figures, including both Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. There’s still a chance for these MMOs to gobble up the players getting bored of WoW in the next year, but I don’t think it will be too substantial (maybe a total loss of 1-2M, which is still pretty good). They’ll also have to share those fleeing subscribers with a number of other MMOs, including those joining the scene.

Both WAR and AoC are in a subscription slump compared to the momentary peaks they attained in their first months of launch, however, the numbers are bound to rise back up again as people experience all or at least most of what WotLK has to offer. And as I said, I believe this will happen within the next 6-12 months, but it could happen even sooner.

I’ve personally been so up and down with WAR lately because I have no other MMO to run back to. I’ll never touch WoW again and I don’t feel the slightest inclination to start up a new MMO. The game has immense potential and I know it will be 10x the game it is today within the next few months. The trouble is that WAR is highly population-based as an RvR game and right now the servers are feeling dead to me. Ostermark was a destination server for many of the recent transfer pushes and yet we’re still maxing out at Med/Med. Even at that number, oRvR seems dead most of the times I log on and I usually spend 10-20 minutes in the scenario queue before anything pops. The PvE is sub-par at my current-rank and until I can get into Bastion Stair, it’s just painful to do.

I know it’s a difficult thing for Mythic to do, but they truly need to merge servers ASAP. Mark shot off his mouth about the state of your game being not-so-hot if you have to resort to server merges rather than adding new servers shortly after launch, but he should take the blow to his ego and help out his players.

Waiting 4-12 months for the slow trickle of WoW-quitters to fill these servers back up again isn’t a smart move. Listen to the people playing your game. Listen to your paying customers, man… Otherwise you’ll see a slow trickle the other way - people getting fed up and quitting WAR for something else or nothing at all.

If you aren’t having fun - why are you paying/playing, right? Here’s a quote from my May WoW-Train article:

I’m not trying to pick on World of Warcraft specifically with this post, but it’s a proven fact that time has been the dark red line creeping slowly towards the heart of every MMORPG to date. Time allows for competitive growth. Time leads to player complacency and boredom. Time is what makes the present become the past.

I think the same can be said about not responding to big game issues quick enough.

I should also mention this little anecdote: When I quit DAOC for WoW, it didn’t take the first time. I spent about 3 months in WoW then went crawling back to DAOC for several more months. DAOC eventually lost its charm and I went back to WoW, where I spent almost 2 years. I would imagine the same thing is happening with a lot of people who are leaving WoW for other games: their first or second attempts may not work, but eventually they’ll break the habit.

Related posts:

1. Is WoW an unstoppable train? Right now? Perhaps, though I haven’t really been a part...
2. Upping the 30-day free trial to 90-days? Here’s an interesting idea: I firmly believe companies like Mythic...
3. Playing the “WHAT IF” Game… Syp asks some interesting WHAT IF questions, so I decided...

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Based on your and Majesco's good-natured responses to PETA's game, I think you understand that although we made you into a demonic, knife-wielding maniac in Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals, we still love you. While we had a good time roasting you, the real purpose of our game, of course, was to bring to light some of the horrific practices of the turkey industry. And we mean the animals who are actually mistreated not the virtual ones you cook up in your digital kitchen.

• "I would never put rat in my Ratatouille" - Cooking Mama responds to PETA
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Star Wars: The Old Republic interview with Community Manager Sean Dahlberg originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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