Massively writes:
"We just learned courtesy of an eagle-eyed forum goer at VN that as of Q3 2008, Mythic Entertainment's Warhammer Online had over 300,000 accounts. There is an EA investor's call taking place shortly where CEO John Riticiello may elaborate on this, so we'll keep you posted. We'll also post our thoughts on this news tomorrow."
Let nostalgia take you back to the lands you once roamed until they were cruelly taken offline and away from us. MMOGames list the top 10 MMOs that died and left us with a hole in our hearts.
I agree when it comes to The Sims Online. That game was really fun and nothing has even come close to it. I still crave a new Sims with online multiplayer. Blows my mind they haven't done anything like that since The Sims Online or even The Sims Bustin' Out on PS2.
MMO-Play gathered a list of the most disappointing MMO's in the history of gaming.
Kevin from Denkiphile: "The first I’d ever heard of Titan was at the height of my World of Warcraft career, which was also the same time that several games, touted as WoW-killers, came onto the market and failed miserably. It made sense to me at the time that the only thing that could kill WoW was Blizzard themselves, but this also eventually changed with the advent of session-based, microtransaction-supported games like League of Legends. Titan was supposed to revolutionize and revitalize the MMO genre, but it certainly was not the first to crash and burn before its first flight. Here are some MMOs whose ambitions flew them too close to the sun."
300k?
http://www.shacknews.com/on...
LOL they lost 200k. The WoW killer.
Its more like a WoW take on Warhammer than a true Warhammer game itself. Trying too hard to be like WoW is the reason why WAR is where it is today. Let this be a lesson for all future WoW clones. Don't even try it, be your own game.
Still a good number, though.
Simple fact is EA cut 11% of it's work force - between 30 - 40% got layed off at Mythic. Things are pretty desperate in game too, quite a few of those were senior devs.
First they say there won't be cuts + no official forums, now look what happens. They rush out info on expansion to soften the blow of the drastic sub drop.
The problem isn't the 300,000 they have left, it is how quickly they lost 450,000 players. Do even a simple graph and put 750,000 at september, and then 300,000 on December 31st. That is just a huge downward slope and there is no reason to expect the slope has changed. Biggest and fastest drop in mmo history. It's also very very unlikely that they have 300,00 subscribers as of February 1st.
no matter how you the paint the picture in the brightest colors possible. ANYONE and I mean ANYONE will say that a loss of more then HALF you customers in a 2-3 month period is a bad sign. Yes there is some turnover after the first free month. But to lose more then half your customers is a bad sign simple as that.
Now on top of all that they cut staff numbers (doesn't matter what the reason is) when the game needs all the staff it can get. There are LOADS of bugs and issues throughout the game and even more so endgame. Will a reduction in staff keep the bug fixs coming at a steady rate like it has been? No, when you lose people things do not remain the same or even speed up 90% of the time. If a team of 400+ couldn't fix the issues how will a team of 200+ fix the issues?
There is no evidence to show that the population of Warhammer has stabilized as of Dec 31st.... so there is no reason to think there are still 300,000 people playing today.... or that there will be more people playing tomorrow that are playing today. At best, the game may level off someday, but it isn't in the near future.
It is leaking faster than any other mmorpg to date. Many are finding a return to AoC refreshing because of how much more polished it is because of the development time since launch that WAR lacks.
EA needs to attain around 500k for 18 months to break even. Do some research it has dropped poorly performing mmo's before.
It is a shame and we can hope it will keep afloat. Just there are better options out there.