It's always an exciting day when a new MMORPG launches, isn't it? People take time off work or call in sick just to be part of that launch-day crowd. No-one wants to miss out on an event that might be something people talk about for years.
Of course, there are risks. The servers often buckle under the load. Even when the devs have been diligent with stress testing and allowances have been made for the crush, they always somehow seem to underestimate the demand.
Even if the servers stay up, there are bound to be queues. We've all seen the screenshots - #6,427 in line: estimated waiting time two hours and counting.
If only there was a way to ensure anyone who wanted to play could get into the game quickly and easily, without having to go through all those hassles...
Guess what? There is! Here's how you do it...
Charge $60 for the (Non-existent.) box and demand fifteen dollars a month to keep on playing after the first thirty days! That ought to do it!
Ah, but is it enough? If your game is really good and has fantastic word of mouth and the streamers are all plugging it like crazy and you've picked out a spot in the market where there's no direct competition, maybe you'll still find yourself overwhelmed by hordes of frantic players throwing money at you.
So, just to be safe, why not go head-to-head with the free-to-play game that inspired the one you just spent years on? And why not make sure your AAA-priced version of that familiar title looks like "a relic of a bygone era", specifically "the early 00's". Make sure it's "worse than games released 2 decades ago" and be sure it plays "like a student project or an alpha build with a bunch of placeholders for real icons, graphics, sound effects, systems, and so on".
Not my words, just a few choice quotes from the Steam reviews, where Ship of Heroes (Aww - you guessed...) is currently enjoying a rating of Mostly Negative from forty-eight reviews.
And since everyone really loves AI these days, especially gamers, why not use it instead of actual actors for your NPC voice acting? That last allegation appears to have been disputed by the developers but the general impression is that the voice acting is "awful" no matter whether humans or machines are doing it, so it probably doesn't matter much either way.
With all of that in place (And a lot more besides.) it's safe to assume your players won't run into any of those all-too-familiar launch day issues. Your servers will almost certainly be able to withstand the strain of the teens of people willing to stump up the cost of Baldurs Gate 3 for a chance to play "a buggy mess" for a month before having to get their credit cards out once more for the right to carry on.
If nothing else, you'll certainly be able to claim you had no queues at launch and everyone was able to log straight in.
I was going to post something more high-minded about all this but Wilhelm got there before me so I took the low road. For a less snarky take on the situation I refer you to TAGN. I do have a few semi-serious observations of my own to make, though.
Ship of Heroes launched yesterday to a largely disinterested gaming public, most of whom had probably only heard of the game at all thanks to the recent flurry of (Negative.) press interest generated by open disbelief at the price point. If the plan was to raise the game's profile then I suppose they achieved it but I suspect they may be learning there is such a thing as bad publicity after all.
The game is available through Steam and only through Steam, so for once we have an MMORPG whose exact population is relatively easy to ascertain. The numbers are in and they are not pretty.
The "All Time" (By which we mean two days.) peak stands at a tidy 100. As I type this, there are sixteen players online.
Just for contrast, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, which entered Early Access on Steam last December at a box price of $39.99, has an all-time peak of just under 7,000 players with five hundred people playing right now. That sounds like it might be a viable business model. This does not.
Then again, who am I to say? I played both games, very briefly, in open testing and decided not to pay much more attention to either of them. I might have been the target market once but that seems a very long time ago now.
It would also be ridiculous of me to pretend to be surprised by how the Ship of Heroes launch is going. Apart from that irritating clique that seems to think everything is de facto better the more pointlessly exclusive you make it, there has been universal incomprehension at the business model Heroic Games has chosen. No-one expected it to pay off and it has exceeded even those expectations. Or fallen below them. However that goes.
I'm not even really surprised to hear the game is janky, buggy and crashes a lot, as many reviews on Steam complain. I reviewed one of the tests a couple of years ago and made many of the same observations then. It seems little has changed.
Perhaps surprisingly, I wasn't entirely negative back then. I ended my review by saying "For all its many flaws, I quite enjoyed it. If and when it reaches some kind of always-up, no-more-wipes state - open beta or Early Access, let's say - I might be willing to give it an extended run - if they fix the most egregious of the technical issues, that is." I was clearly not expecting to be asked to pay sixty dollars for what sounds like much the same build, let alone another fifteen a month in perpetuity.
The thing is, I'd quite like a good super-hero game. I've been a fan of the genre since early childhood. I read the comics. I watch the TV shows and the movies. I even play one of the existing super-hero games, now and again. I ought to be an easy mark for something like this.
If Ship of Heroes had launched on Steam with an Early Access model with a modest buy-in I might have considered it. I considered Pantheon but thought the box price was a little steep. At $20 I'd have been there for launch.
I still keep it in mind in case of a sale, though. It's on my Steam Wishlist for that very reason. I'd at least have done that much for SoH.
If SoH had arrived on Steam as a F2P title, instead of this you'd be reading my First Impressions piece by now. I'd certainly have been interested enough to download it and give it a session or two.
Maybe I'd have been disappointed. Maybe I'd have made some negative comments. Still, I bet I'd have found a few good things to say, like I did with the tests. The goodwill would have been there.
No-one who isn't delusional is going to give much goodwill to a game that plays like a poorly-optimized, unpolished indie title but asks you to pay the price you'd expect to give for a triple-A critical darling. And then piles a monthly sub on top of that. If you're looking to create bad word of mouth, that's the way to go about it.
When you come in with a pricing structure like that, you have to expect to be compared to the peer group that lives where you've gone: household names, famous I.P.s, celebrity game designers. You're competing with games that win awards and break sales records for their innovation and execution. You don't get your slack cut just because you're a plucky little indie everyone's rooting for. Not in that company.
Where Ship of Heroes goes from here is hard to guess. You'd think it would be game over, so to speak, but I can quote you the names of half a dozen MMORPGs that have been trundling along with single-figure populations for years. You wouldn't recognize any of the names because they're super-obscure but they're out there.
Even some of the better-known ones have numbers similar to Ship of Heroes. Go check how Anarchy Online is doing on Steam these days. Or Rose Online. Although, both of those can be played outside the Steam infrastructure, so it may not be a fair comparison. Also, they've been around for decades. They didn't just launch yesterday.
It is possible Ship of Heroes will drift along the bottom of the genre, played by few and forgotten by all. I kind of hope so because as I said, there is potential there, somewhere. It's hard to imagine it will ever be realized but I guess it's possible.
Even if the bugs are squashed and the jank eliminated and the proposed DLC (Free with cost of purchase for two years, if that's all you were waiting to hear before slapping your cash on the table...) ever materialize, there's still the uncomfortable fact that this is a game no-one was really asking for.
The whole point of Ship of Heroes and the other two would-be wearers of the City of Heroes cape was that they would be a new home for all those players who couldn't play the game they loved any more, thanks to NCSoft doing what NCSoft does and shutting it down.
Except CoH resurfaced, the same as it ever was, and through some hitherto unsuspected super-power, managed to convince its former corporate overlords not only to let it stick around but to hand it its legal papers, allowing the Homecoming server to provide a genuine, enduring home for all those players who thought they'd never go home again.
And who needs a ship when you've got a home? Especially an overpriced cruise ship, sailing round in ever-decreasing circles.
[All screenshots from the Steam Store Page and I have to say they make the game look a lot better than the reviews suggest...]
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See, totally worth the effort and, with your experience in testing, not duplicative at all. I HAD to write at a higher level due to ignorance. I mean, I am still trying to work out where a ship fits into all of this.
ReplyDeleteI'd almost forgotten I'd played it. Of the three proposed replacements for CoH, the one I was most interested in was Valiance. I think SoH was my last choice. Also the "ship" is some kind of giant spaceship, I think, inside which the entire game takes place. Or something. I never really understood it.
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