And that, right there, is the problem with traditional subscription and buy-to-play payment models. I can't help thinking the best reason I could have for wanting to log in to a game would be a strong desire to play it right now, not because I'm worrying about money I spent on it months ago.
The conter-argument would be that I'd paid for everything up-front so I could enjoy the game and the expansion at my leisure. And anyway, I'd made the decision to spend some time with the game today and I was expecting to enjoy myself. Only I didn't even manage to clock up five minutes in Norrath before I found myself back here, writing about it instead.
To some degree, that's reflective of where the pendulum is on my gaming arc. I tend to vary between wanting to play games more than write about them and the reverse. Currently I'm in an authorial phase. The pendulum will swing back. It always does.
Mostly, though, my failure to stick with what I'd planned for more than five minutes comes down to what I saw in the launcher as the game was updating, plus some things I've read about EG7 in recent days. Straws are flying in the wind and they're getting hard to ignore.
Wilhelm posted a thoughtful examination of the prospects for the company, under pressure from investors to maximize the profit potential of a portfolio that includes not just the two EverQuest titles but DCUO and - at a slight and somewhat nebulous remove - Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online and Magic: the Gathering - as well as the ever-promising but rarely delivering H1Z1 and the largely ignored and forgotten Planetside 2.
Except, on that last one... does the EG7 portfolio still include PS2?
It seems not. Not any more. Word is that Planetside 2 has been sold to... someone. To whom is less clear.
The Enad Global 7 Q4 Interim Report published this week simply states "Daybreak successfully closed on the sale of a non-core IP for USD 5.9 million." As far as I can tell, neither EG7 nor Rogue Planet Studios (The game's nominal developer.) nor DBG has made any public statement about who the new owner might be but it seems certain the title to all Planetside properties has been transferred to a shell company going by the name of Bay Tree Tower Ltd, about whom absolutely nothing of substance is known.
This, naturally, has lead to all kinds of speculation, from the game being shut down as a tax write-off at one extreme to the new owner being Amazon Games who, under John Smedley's auspices, will go on to make Planetside 3 at the other. Someone on Reddit even claims to have found proof on the dark web that the real owners of Bay Tree Tower are Tencent. Feel free to go look that one up for yourselves.
I have no interest in Planetside 2. I'm always a little surprised it's still going, let alone that it seems to be quite popular in certain circles. I have played it and while it seemed fine, it really wasn't my kind of thing. Seeing a whole game removed from the DBG roster and handed off to person or persons unknown, however, is a little... disturbing.
If I was going to speculate, which clearly I am or I wouldn't have started this paragraph by suggesting it, I'd guess PS2 won't resurface as part of the portfolio of another games aggregator like Gamigo or Valofe, for the simple reason that companies like that are usually all too happy to let everyone know when they grab a new moneymaker.
The use of a shell company suggests something someone doesn't want anyone to know about, which given Daybreak's record, would be business as usual. They seem to specialize in obfuscatory smokescreens, frequently for reasons that never do come fully to light, suggesting they not only do it, they're quite good at doing it. It wouldn't even surprise me if turns out they've sold the game to themselves, somehow, especially since it appears that although the IP rights have moved, publishing remains with DBG. Again, it probably wouldn't be the first time...
In other words, whoever owns PS2, it'll be business as normal for players until further notice, which I guess is something. Meanwhile, the other stand-out item in that quarterly statement was this:
EG7 has initiated several new growth Initiatives, including... EG7’s own release of a new H1Z1 game.... Currently in concept exploration phase with pre-production phase coming up next.
Daybreak is aiming to enter the production phase for the title on the second half of 2024.
It's ironic that H1Z1 features zombies. It's the franchise that just won't die. I did kinda-sorta know there was some idea of a new take on H1Z1 but I figured it would be another revamp of the existing property or a rerun of one of the old versions. I hadn't realized it was going to be a whole new game...
I'm not going to run through the full report. I'll leave that to Wilhelm, who I'm sure will do a far better job of it than I would. I'll just mention that overall, EG7 seems to be doing about as well as can be expected in what has been a brutal period for game development. The biggest hit to profitabilty seems to have been the inevitable bursting of the My Singing Monsters bubble; that and not managing to get DCUO onto the latest console generation in time for Christmas.
The latter is due to be corrected in the first quarter of this year although there has to be some concern over the letting-go of a number of people from Dimensional Ink, the subdivision responsible for DCUO. You might think they'd need everyone if the game is going to move forward this year.
All of that stands as background to what I saw when I logged in to EQII this morning, which was something much more immediately relevant to playing the game itself. As of now, if you'd like a leg-up doing that, Darkpaw would be more than happy to oblige.
To that end, they've added a couple of packs to the Cash Shop: the Darkpaw Hero Bundle and the Darkpaw Heroic Boost Bundle. The only difference between the two is that one comes with a boost to Level 125 and the other doesn't. Well, that and 3,500 DBC.
Both versions contain a whole load of currencies and tokens intended both to let you skip a large amount of grind and instantly acquire very powerful spells and abilities. Level boosts are no longer controversial. The rest of it could be.
Since there's no limit on how many of these packs you can buy, there's also no real counter to the accusation that this is pay-to-win, pure and simple (Other than to point out that the very concept of "Pay to Win" in a game that, by definition, cannot be won, having no win condition, is meaningless, of course.) In theory, since each pack comes with your choice of a Grandmaster spell, you could potentially grandmaster all your spells for a thousand dollars or so. And who's to say someone hasn't already?
And that might not be so bad if it was the end of the story but of course many, probably most, EQII players have multiple max-level characters. Even though some of the items in the pack are Heirloom and therefore tradeable within the purchasing account, a determined (Or should that be demented?) player might feel they needed dozens of these packs to get all their characters up to their full potential.
Instead of logging in, I clicked through the link in the launcher to read the forum thread on the announcement. It's three pages long and surprisingly evenly balanced between those who approve of the new bundles and those who object to them.
Even then, the disapproval seems muted compared to what I would have expected a while back. Granted, the rather good, newish Senior Community Manager, Angeliana, moderates the thread fairly strictly but I don't see much evidence of multiple posts being suppressed. Just the odd hothead, who can't tell the difference between forceful criticism and personal abuse.
There is an inevitable appearance of the old "I know five people who cancelled their subscriptions because of this" anecdote, of course. I think the first time I saw that on the forums must have been sometime in 2005 and it's been a constant, comforting presence ever since.
On the whole, though, people seem either glumly resigned to yet another development confirming their bleak view that EQII now exists only as a miserable means of extracting money from fools and cheats or that being able to pay money to progress in a video game is a human right to be celebrated and anyone who says otherwise is just, like, so out of touch.
I suspect that anyone who's genuinely unwilling to accept offers like these in the Cash Shop gave up playing the game long ago. Probably every game, since all of them do it. Anyone who's still here either does it themselves or has to play with those who do so it's pretty much a given of the game by now.
The more interesting question for me is whether something like this really works as a money-generating technique. It's really hard to tell from my perspective. As I've often said, most years I can barely get through the basic content included in the annual expansion before the next one arrives. The idea of paying to progress faster seems irrational.
I kind of hope it does work. As someone on the thread points out, they need to monetize the game somehow. And it's not like they don't also sell a ton of cosmetic items that no-one could claim were Pay to Win. I'm fairly sure if those were doing the job we wouldn't be in this situation.
I have to assume DBG know their customers, who are almost all veterans of many years. Equally, those players must know what the game is, now. The entire end-game has been slowly shifted to an endless, incremental grind for various currencies and tokens, while the vast, submerged, iceberg-like bulk of everything else that's been added to the game over the preceding twenty years drifts along beneath, free and fair for anyone who cares to enjoy it. Not that many do.
As with every aging MMORPG, it's current content or bust. And that applies just as much to "Classsic" or "Progression" servers as it does to the "Live" game. Even the old has to be endlessly new or at least sold as such. It's a false dichotomy to pretend, as some do, that the TLE servers, with their throwback gameplay, are in some way more authentic than the rest. They demand their share of anything new that can be shoe-horned in to their rulesets just as vehemently as anyone on Live.
That, or some of it, is what I found myself thinking about when I went to log in this morning, with the result that instead of playing through the next instance in the Ballads of Zimara Signature Questline, I logged straight out again and came here to write this post. Maybe that's what I pay my subscription for - content for the blog.
Makes as much sense as anything else, I guess. I mean, I have literally scores of games installed I could be playing for free. Sometimes I wonder why I still subscribe. Sometimes I wonder why anyone pays for anything.
I guess it's just as well someone does or this whole house of cards would come tumbling down.
And then we'd all be sorry.
Wouldn't we?
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