Games For Sale

I logged into EverQuest II for the first time in... well, I can't exactly remember how long. Before I started playing Palworld, that's for sure, so about a month? It wasn't that I even wanted to play the game today, not especially, although I'm pretty much always up for an EQII session. It was more that I felt that, since I paid for an annual subscription last September and the recent expansion two months later, I probably ought at least to make an effort to get some of my money's worth.

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?

At the very least it represents a way of spending money to skip content and thereby progress much faster than those who choose not to purchase the packs or just can't afford them. And they aren't cheap. DBG conveniently sell their funny money at a thousand DBC for ten dollars, making conversion easy, although inevitably there are value deals for higher amounts to confuse things. For all intents and purposes, though, it's $40 for the Hero Bundle and $75 for the one with the boost.

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?

The Doctor Will See You Now : Daybreak Games

The final piece of this week's news jigsaw fell too late for me to fit it into Thursday's portmanteau post. This is the first chance I've had to write about it.

The upside of the delay is that at least I've had time to mull it over. Otherwise I'd have been reduced to posting a giant 🤔

Wilhelm wrote at some length about the possible reasons for Pearl Abyss's acquisition of CCP  (which I only learned this week is an acronym for Crowd Control Productions). So did Nosey, who posited my favorite explanation for the unexpected move so far - improved access to the vast  Chinese gaming market.

I have no dog in that fight although I'm very happy to watch. I do, however, have a major interest, both emotional and practical, in the current and future stability of Daybreak Games, publisher of two of my favorite MMORPGs, EverQuest and EQ2.

Unlike Nosey and Wilhelm, I have neither the academic background nor the personal experience to parse these kinds of financial transactions. I have worked for a couple of businesses that were acquired, bought or taken over and I've seen how that changed both internal practice and external presentation, but I don't think any of that is particularly relevant.

Anyone can google, though, and anyone can read Wikipedia. The entry on Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire behind the "strategic investment" leading to the "joint venture" between NantWorks and DBG, is intriguing to say the least.

Dr. Soon-Shiong has a background worthy of one of the current flurry of highly-popular novels examining the Asian-American experience. He was born in South Africa to Chinese parents who had fled the Japanese occupation in WWII. He grew up in South Africa and got his first degree there before moving to Canada for his Master's. From there he moved to the U.S., where he went on to found the bio-tech firm that eventually made him America's 47th richest person, with a current estimated worth of $9b.

None of which appears to explain why he would want to buy in to a relatively obscure company running a series of somewhat elderly and largely over-the-hill gaming franchises. Dig a little deeper into his extensive biography, though, and you find a considerable interest in both media and technology.

Earlier this year he bought both the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune for something over $500m. One might consider that buying newspapers in the current digital climate is not that far away from taking a financial interest in a gaming company whose products come from a bygone age.  Perhaps it indicates nothing more than an interest in our recent cultural history and a desire to preserve it.

The Doctor isn't just a nostalgist, though. Nor is he "just" a bio-tech entrepreneur. For the last decade much of his drive seems to have been directed towards the new digital world, particularly the infrastructure that supports it. His NantHealth company focuses on "fiber-optic, cloud-based data infrastructure to share healthcare information".

NantWorks, which seems to be the catch-all holding company for all the Nant projects, is also the company that has now taken an interest in Daybreak Games. It has a stated mission to "converge ultra-low power semiconductor technology, supercomputing, high performance, secure advanced networks and augmented intelligence to transform how we work, play, and live." Now we're getting somewhere!

NantWorks, curiously, is also the only one of the many Nant-prefixed operations listed in the wikipedia article not to have a hyper-link to a Wikipedia entry of its own. It does have a website.

There are nine Nant variants listed there (so far), handily laid out on the main page, each with a brief mission statement. The ones on the right are all directly concerned with healthcare. The ones on the left seek to cast their nets far wider.

NantStudio ("Sharing knowledge through education and storytelling") owns and operates "The only next generation soundstage easily configurable to both traditional and virtual production with a pre-lit 360° green screen and compatible with real-time compositing". It's "Conveniently located in Culver City" which is near L.A.

The other relevant Nant would seem to be NantMobile, which "provides technology solutions that harness powerful image recognition technology with artificial intelligence to create immersive augmented reality experiences". At this point I think it's becoming clear that Dr Soong-Shiong does indeed have interests that overlap with those of gamers in general and Daybreak Gamers in particular.

According to the DBG Press Release, the intent is to co-develop a "Next Generation Game Publishing Platform" which will "Establish E-Sports Leagues Across Multiple Games". All that unecessary capitalization is because I ripped the quotes from headlines, by the way.

It also involves the creation of yet another Nant, "NantG Mobile, LLC, which has been formed to develop and publish mobile versions of Daybreak’s current games – H1Z1 and EverQuest – and to build and publish video games across all platforms". Presumably the "G" stands for Gaming. Let's hope so, anyway.

NantG, naturally, has some mission statements of its own, the most intriguing of which promises "creative problem solving to create fresh possibilities for new gameplay, improved quality of games, and increased fair play." Fair play? Hmm, now there's an idea...

There's more that I could excerpt and comment on but I think that's enough to give the general idea. This does not appear to be either a cold financial purchase for arcane accounting reasons we'll never know nor a Curt Schillingesque rich man's whim.

On the contrary, it appears to be a move that involves #2 on Wilhelm's list : "Entering a Market". Possibly with a smidge of #3: Tech of Expertise.

What I definitely don't think has much to do with anything is #4 : Brand. Yes, H1Z1 may be the "first-ever standalone battle royale game" but being first isn't what counts. PUBG and Fortnite ate H1Z1's lunch long ago and even PUBG doesn't have the kind of brand recognition that gets your name banded about by politicians and used in banner headlines aimed at terrifying middle-class parents. Only Fortnite has that.

As for EverQuest, much though I love Norrath I'd dispute whether the EQ name even has brand recognition among MMO gamers any more. Try starting a discussion about EverQuest in General chat in your MMORPG of choice and see who bites. Most players haven't even heard of it, unless they have some vague recollection of the EQNext debacle. You might as well try talking to Drake fans about The Last Poets.

If you step outside the MMORPG niche, EQ's brand recognition hasn't just faded, it never existed in the first place. Even gamers didn't know what EQ was until WoW gave them a hint and anything they once knew they've long forgotten. As for the non-gaming public...

All of which puts me in an odd position. I can see why this latest injection of capital is potentially far more beneficial to Daybreak than the purchase of SOE was to Columbus Nova (who, as we now know, never bought anything, ever, wasn't us guv, honest!). Dr Soong-Shiong or his people evidently have an actual, material interest in what DBG does, namely develop and run multiplayer games.

That's certainly not something that could be said of Columbus Nova. We all struggled back then to understand why whoever it was who'd bought SOE had done so, or what they thought they might get out of it.

It seemed that about the only explanation was that someone thought the EverQuest and H1Z1 brands were going to appreciate in value. H1Z1 was a hit and EQNext was still in development. When EQNext got canned for being the pipe-dream it always was and PUBG executed a headshot on H1Z1 it did look like the jig might finally be up.

It wasn't. Instead, the games all trundled on. H1Z1, like a true zombie, staggered back to its feet and lurched towards a minor comeback courtesy of the PS4. The EQ duo acted like nothing had happened, which, from the perspective of the astonishingly insular and blinkered playerbase for both games, it pretty much hadn't. Their reduced teams just kept pumping out content and everyone carried on being as grumpy about it as they had been for decades, while still paying their subs.

As for DCUO, well, for all intents and purposes it might as well be owned by a different company altogether. And then there's Planetside2, which just got a new map and, rumor has it, may spawn Planetside3 some day.

Meanwhile we supposedly have mobile versions of H1Z1 and EverQuest to look forward to. Possibly with ARG and VR versions now NantStudio is in the mix. Not to mention that promised development  "in video games across all platforms". We can't rule out a PC EQ3.

All of which makes me even more inclined to believe the rumors from earlier in the year had substance. I now expect to hear confirmation that this year will see the final expansions for both EQ2 and EverQuest.

I would expect the EQ games to continue in something more than maintenance mode but less than full development, adding small content drops in updates or at holidays and anniversaries, as they have been doing for the past few years between expansions. That's the sort of thing that can be handled by a very few developers or designers, allowing the rest to be moved to new projects.

I'm confident we will see an EQ-branded Mobile game of some description. Given the lack of brand recognition in any other field, it seems pointless for any such game to be anything other than some kind of MMO or RPG. Whether it will be any good or not is another matter, but Villagers and Heroes amply demonstrates that a full-feature MMORPG can work on mobile devices.

A new EverQuest game - an EQ3 - on PC seems a lot less probable. Also, oddly, less attractive. If one does come, it will undoubtedly use action gaming controls, which means almost no existing or former EQ or EQ2 players will go within spitting distance - other than actually to spit at it. It will be something I'll dabble in at most, I imagine.

As usual, for the time being it's all about waiting. Wait to see what happens to the existing games. Wait to see how that works out for the players. Wait to see what new projects are announced. Wait to see if they ever happen. Wait to see if they're any good.

As is my wont, I am cautiously optimistic. At the very least this seems to augur better times for the games and the franchises than either fin-de-siecle SOE or the immediate aftermath of the sale. DBG have managed the games well, particularly in the last couple of years, and this would seem to remove the immediate risk of either a fire-sale or financial difficulties.

Watch this space for further developments and in the meantime, keep on keeping on.

Off The Record : Daybreak Games

MassivelyOP has news of a rumor of a leak from an unnamed source about things Daybreak may or may not be working on, which might happen sometime... or never. I wasn't going to respond but then Wilhelm wrote a neat, coherent summary with commentary and when I began replying in his comment thread I quickly realized I was going to end up writing the equivalent of a full-length post.

So I thought I might as well write a full-length post.

The leak

The history of this kind of insider leak is pretty good, I think. Most of the ones I can remember ended up having  quite a grounding in fact. Still doesn't mean all - or any - of it will happen, of course. Even if 100% accurate, it's just a snapshot of the current situation and, as we have seen countless times, these things often change a lot before anything ever gets as far as a public release.

Everquest and EQ2 will have one last expansion each. 

I would guess that whether this year's EQ and EQ2 expansions really are the last will depend on how well they sell and how much money they make. I suspect the well is about drained dry by now and DBG are looking at this as one last trip, but if either of them were to do significantly better business than expected, who knows? It will be a great shame not to get any more EQ2 expansions because the quality has been high and I have enjoyed all of them.  I haven't bought an EQ expansion for a good few years though.

What happens after the last expansions is the more important question. There's a wide range of options, from complete maintenance mode a la GW1 to a full, continuing program of ongoing live content, new holiday stuff and special events. Again, I'm sure that will depend on how many people keep playing and how much money they spend.

Eventually the games will close but I hope and believe that's still a few years off.

Everquest 3 has been back in development for a year and is being rebuilt from the ground up. It aims to compete with Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen and to be the first fantasy MMORPG to put an emphasis on team battle royal PvP.

This is the most bizarre item on the list and the hardest to take at face value. What does make some kind of sense is that it would be fairly crazy to try and run three Everquest-themed MMOs in full development simultaneously so if there's an intent to build a new one it might be a good idea to scale down one or both of the old games.

On the other hand, where's the market? EQNext got traction outside of the core playerbase (and not much within it) because it was a wish-fulfilment fantasy full of impossible dreams, promising far more than it ever had a hope of delivering. Which is why it also got cancelled.

The reference to Pantheon is instructive, though. Brad McQuaid's project does seem to have gone from something of an industry joke to a potentially serious contender. It's a good while since I've seen any pieces poking fun at either the game or Brad himself and the word of mouth on it seems to be holding up rather well.

It's entirely conceivable that DBG do genuinely see Pantheon as a serious competitor, likely to leech a significant amount of their market share if and when it launches. It's quite easy to imagine a successful launch for Pantheon drawing players in numbers from both EQ titles, particularly EverQuest.
 

That would make the winding-down of the two older versions of Norrath in favor of consolidating effort and interest in one new EQ game- EQ3 - seem almost logical. One of the many problems EQ2 had at launch was its failure to migrate existing customers from EQ. This plan could mitigate that issue to some degree.

It doesn't explain the surreal reference to "battle royal PvP", though. What that has to do with competing with Pantheon or the EQ franchise boggles the mind. Of course, MMOs can contain multitudes and it's totally believable that EQ3, were it to happen, could include a battle royale zone or mode.

So long as it was kept to one side, in the manner of PvP Battlegrounds or Arenas in other MMOs, that shouldn't be a problem. The idea that EQ3 would "put an emphasis" on it, however, suggests a lot more than an instanced PvP zone in a PvE game. You'd like to think there were lessons to be drawn from H1Z1 here about over-extending your resources and diluting your core offer but when did MMO devs ever learn from experience?

My takeaway from this is that I'm more than ever becoming committed to betting on Pantheon becoming my last-ever long-term diku-MUD style home. As for EQ3, if it happens, as I said about EQNext, I'll play it because it's Norrath but I don't expect to like it. I don't believe they're making it for me.

It looks like a sunset is most likely for Just Survive.

Still haven't gotten around to playing H1Z1 in any of its formats and I don't imagine I'm likely to now. I'm never happy to see an MMO close down but I can't say this has any resonance for me personally.

Planetside 3 is in early development. This will be a team based battle royal game.

And yet Planetside 2 is continuing, apparently, with new character models and animations coming this month and a new map later in the year. Perhaps the theory is that, unlike the EQ games, the two PS2's will either appeal to different market segments or that they will be complementary and capable of being played by the same people at the same time (not literally, I'm guessing, although you never know...).

I have played PS2, briefly, but it's not my sort of thing. It's slightly concerning to read that "other teams will be siphoned into this project next year" because, given the announcement about the end of expansions for the Norrath games, that could well mean devs currently working on EQ and EQ2.

The focus on Battle Royale modes in general seems misplaced. Development cadences for MMOs are so long that it seems like a very bad idea to tie this type of game to what may - most likely will - turn out to be a cultural moment that will have passed well before any likely launch date. Battle Royale is a pretty robust game mode that will be around forever but it's not going to hold the zeitgeist indefinitely - nothing does.

If nothing else I've found this last week a useful exercise in managing expectations. I have long held the belief that, at 60 as I will be this year, the Everquest games will probably see me out. I may have to learn to do without that particular comfort blanket.

We do have to face the fact that no MMO will last forever, although I am willing to bet that some form of EQ server - official or otherwise - will be publicly available longer than I'm around to play on it. EQ2, probably not., which is a shame for me because of the two I'd probably miss EQ2 the most.

Still, no need to panic just yet, I think. Even if everything in the reddit post turns out to be true I would guess we have a few more years to go before the final curtain comes down. Unless you're planning on playing Just Survive of course, in which case I'd get a move on if I were you.

Putting Out Fire With Gasoline: Daybreak Games

There's only been one MMO story this week - the fiasco surrounding who owns Daybreak Games. Wilhelm has the best summary of the position so far. Massively OP is also worth checking for the ongoing updates to the increasingly convoluted drama.

The one piece of information that hasn't been widely linked is this analysis of the original problem by ShadowInsignus on the Planetside2 reddit. Written by someone who seems to know how these things work it appears to explain that the sanctions in question were unlikely ever to have impacted DBG specifically, regardless of the ownership issue. Even if they do turn out to be among the targeted entities, there should still be options available to apply for exemption or for a license to continue trading.

If true, that makes Daybreak's bizarre behavior all the more difficult to comprehend. The most obvious and simple response to the initial flurry of interest and concern would seem to have been to issue a straightforward PR statement of the kind frequently used to pour sand on a fire. Something along the lines of "We don't believe the impending sanctions will affect the running of our games in any way but if we discover anything to the contrary we'll be sure to inform our customers right away".

That would have dampened interest to nothing more than the familiar mumblings of the usual haters. The troll army would have moved on, looking for new witches to burn. Instead, someone at DBG chose to behave like a clown in a rake factory, running full pelt in random directions, stamping on anything that might fly up and hit them in the face.

Who's driving the boat?

The issue almost instantly ceased to be about whether U.S. Government sanctions over Russia would have an impact on the EverQuest franchise, the H1Z1 PS4 launch, the renewal of the DCUO license or the health of Planetside2. If all that was at stake was the future of those IPs the story would have remained a very local one. While that would have been an impressive line-up of MMOs a few years ago, these days, no-one outside a sliver of the MMO community cares about any of them.

Instead, someone at DBG decided to go full George Orwell on the problem. They tried to rewrite the internet, thereby ensuring that people with no interest in MMOs whatsoever began to sit up and take notice.

Perhaps the weirdest aspect of this whole weird tale is that it's beginning to look as though the current, rewritten narrative could turn out to be the "true" one. Rohan from Blessing of Kings  makes a convincing case in the comments to the TAGN post that the way the sale was handled, as it's now being described, wouldn't even be all that unusual.

The Ars Technica piece is more revealing still and adds further clarification that suggests there may be many more layers to this supposedly done deal yet to be uncovered. A lot seems to rest on the somewhat nebulous term "owner", which, as I originally suspected, does not necessarily mean what a lay person would take it to mean.

I can affirm this from my own tangential experience. In the business where I work, both internal and external PR has referred for years to a specific individual as being "the owner". Recently, when the business was put up for sale, the names of other institutions and entities, none of which most of us working there had ever heard of, began to appear in  ownership roles. This stuff is complicated and frequently obscure, whether intentionally or otherwise.

Nibiru is coming!

Then, as if the ownership issues and wikipedia scandals weren't enough, we had the layoffs. Layoffs, like server merges, are never good news but, frankly, the thing that surprised me most was learning that DBG still had 70 people left to let go.

It seems likely that, rather than being a consequence of - or even a reaction to - the impending sanctions, these layoffs relate more to the collapse of H1Z1 as a profit-driver. That game, which played a John the Baptist role for PUBG and latterly Fortnite, had a good run while it lasted but it appears everyone agrees it's over. It's a shame the zombie depocalypse also had to damage the fortunes of the rest of the portfolio but if it results in a tighter focus on the core franchises it may not be all bad.

In normal circumstances (that's to say when the company appeared to be in the hands of responsible adults rather than teenagers trying to cover up the evidence after a wild party), I wouldn't feel especially concerned by either the layoffs or the ownership confusion. Apart from commiserating with the individuals involved and offering my genuine best wishes for their future careers, there wouldn't be any particular need to get involved even to the point of writing blog posts about it. I may have my preferences and my favorites but game ownership and personnel change all the time. We just smile or frown and log in as usual.

All I really care about is that someone is there, paying the bills and keeping the lights on, so I can log in when the fancy takes me and walk my countless characters around until I get bored. If there's enough money and enough people to bring some new content once in a while then that's a bonus. Even in the depths of the PSS1 debacle, the absolute nadir of the SOE administration, I never threatened to quit.

Portrait of The Owner.

It's when my access to the games themselves feel under threat I get anxious. Over the years I've seen a number of MMOs I felt an emotional connection with go dark: NeoSteam, Rubies of Eventide, City of Steam, Free Realms and, by far the most difficult to accept, Vanguard. None of those would or could have the impact that the simultaneous disappearance of both EverQuest and EQ2 would have. I might never recover.

Consequently the outcome of the current crisis is paramount. I want the games to continue and my characters to persist. If that means a sale to yet another owner (there are rumors) then so be it. I don't want them to change hands because, unlike most of the angry brigade that dominates the discussion, I am on record as believing that the games themselves have been better run, more stable and more fun to play since the sale than throughout most of the time they were owned and operated by Verant and/or SOE. If it's a choice between sunset and a new owner, however, then it's no choice at all.

For those without a wolf in the fight, it must make for a fascinating soap opera. I would absolutely love to know who panicked this week and why. When the easiest thing to do was to do nothing, why did someone instead choose to try to do the impossible?

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

I'd also like to know why John Smedley is keeping his counsel. It's not like him to stay out of any argument where his input could make things even worse. To be fair, the feisty Smed of a few years back has been conspicuous by his absence since the hacker wars and the demise of Hero's Song. Maybe he's just a changed man. On the other hand, maybe he knows more than he wants to tell.

There may be further revelations and surprises. Regardless of what else does or doesn't come to light, we will all know on June 5th whether the games will continue. With astonishingly bad timing that is also the day I fly to Spain. I'll be gone for almost two weeks and I would normally intend to avoid all gaming news while I'm away. I might have to make an exception this time but I'm keeping my fingers crossed the outcome doesn't spoil my holiday along with everything else.

As for the lay offs, I have yet to see a comprehensive list of the individuals who have left the company or what roles they vacated. Without that it's hard to estimate the impact on specific titles. If the sanction problem goes away, will we still get the promised expansions for EQ and EQ2 later in the year? At this point I'd consider that a luxury but who knows? Maybe Norrath will start to look more important to whatever version of the company remains, once the appeal of all things zombie fades away.

For now, all we can do is wait and watch. It will all be alright in the end or it won't. Either way, it's a salutory reminder of the impermanence of all things and the uncertainty of most.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, not to ruin my own carefully crafted, elegaic coda but after I posted the above I had my tea and then I logged into EverQuest. The news section on the launcher pointed me to "A Note from the EQ Producer Mooncast" which states, among other things, "Though we’re not ready to announce too much yet, both game teams are still gearing up for this year’s expansions, and EverQuest 2’s Game Update #106 is just around the corner with loads of new in-game content ... (stay tuned for news on that very soon!). Plus, on top of all that, we’re already entering the planning stages to make sure that EverQuest’s 20th Anniversary will be an event to remember!"

Onwards and upwards!

Off The Charts

In a serendipitous sequel to yesterday's post on non-MMO gaming, this morning I clicked the link from Atherne's Adventures to nominations for 2017's Golden Joystick Awards. Most of them I'd never heard of, unsurprisingly, but a few names I recognized from brief flurries of attention they'd enjoyed on various blogs I'd read over the last year.

What did surprise me was how quickly and completely whatever attention those games received in this corner of the blogosphere had shriveled and died. It's not even as though people had reported on their endings or their play-time coming to a close.

Did anyone finish Horizon:Zero Dawn? I remember several people starting but that's about all. I know someone was posting about Final Fantasy XV because I recall being curious about the apparently contemporary setting. Never heard any more about that one.

I could kill for a rum punch.

Much was made of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with its open-world gameplay that was either compelling or purposeless depending who you were reading at the time. Several people seemed to have bought the Nintendo Switch just to play it but other than a couple of tales of buyer's remorse I never found out how all that ended.

Mass Effect: Andromeda might be the only exception. At least a couple of people blogged the whole of that journey, not just the amusing visual glitches and the bad launch horror stories. Other than that, the games that keep coming up, the ones I was reading about last year, read about this year and will almost certainly read about next year, are all MMOs.

Various kinds of MMOs, certainly not all of them MMORPGs, but the genre's a broad church, wide enough to embrace PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds at one end and FFXIV at the other. It's something even the creators of the Golden Joystick Awards recognize: in the "Still Playing" category, defined as "...your chance to celebrate the games that have held your attention for years or even decades after release" almost half the nominations are MMOs. More than half if you want to count Diablo III and Overwatch.

Is anyone there?

Of the two non-MMO games I bought this year, no-one else ever mentioned Tanzia and I'm pretty sure no-one wanted to hear me going on about it either. I was browsing the always-fascinating Steam Charts last night and I noticed that Tanzia's all-time peak concurrency on the platform was ten players.

That's ten. Not ten thousand. Just ten. Although right now I imagine ten players online at the same time would be living the dream for developers Arcanity Inc. since September's average concurrency was 0.07 of a player with a Peak of three. And as far as I can tell, Tanzia is only available via Steam.

Yonder, the other game I bought, did much better, with an all-time Steam Peak just shy of 1300 players and a September average of just over 45. You can also buy and play Yonder outside of Steam as well as on the PS4 so that's just a portion of the audience. Still, it hardly represents the break-out hit and potential phenomenon I thought it was going to be when I jumped the bandwagon back in July.

Every MMO has to have a zone called "Crossroads". It's the law. Only this isn't an MMO. It just wishes it was.

Contrast those numbers with 2017's genuinely unexpected breakout, PUBG. Featuring heavily in the Golden Joystick Awards as "one of the year's biggest success stories", the survival arena phenomenon currently tops the Steam chart with a staggering 2.39 million players all playing at the same time.

With room to improve, because that record was set yesterday and the numbers are still trending upwards. PUBG's concurrency has increased inexorably since it appeared seemingly out of nowhere in March, almost doubling month on month.

I haven't played, just like I haven't played the game that seems likely to have suffered the most from PUBG's meteoric rise, H1Z1. Arena survival is hardly my thing, although ironically I played three games of Southsun Survival for dailies in GW2 yesterday and, as someone said in chat during one of them, "ANet invented PUBG years ago".

Adorable the explorable.

Bad things happening to H1Z1 always worry me, not because I have any interest in or affection for the zombie slaughterfest but because I imagine it's the Catalonia to DBG's Spain, doing most of the hard lifting and paying most of the bills. Certainly that won't be Planetside2, currently languishing at #154 on the chart.

Although perhaps "languishing" isn't the right word. Not at all. That placing still represents four thousand players at Peak and nearly half that on average. And again, PS2 is available through other channels than just Steam.

H1Z1: King of the Kill (soon to be rebranded without the unfortunate, foreign revenue sapping corollary) is still in the Steam Top Ten. Just. Number nine and falling, with a September Peak of 105,000 players but a current 24-hour high of less than half that number.

I hate to be the one who has to break it to you but that really isn't an Ice Shard.

Still, it's a lot of people. I knew H1Z1 was popular but I hadn't quite realized just how successful it was and still is.

DBG's current re-focus, both the upcoming rebranding, the significant changes now on the Test server and the re-invigoration of H1Z1:KOTK's thought-to-be dead in the water prototype, H1Z1: Just Survive, suggest a clear understanding that the entire playing field has shifted with the arrival of PUBG. (As an aside, DBG's evident current revitalization, the new decisiveness and increased intensity across all projects, is a topic for another post. Something's going on, I'm sure of it, and I'd be all over it... if only I knew for certain what that something was.)

Back to PUBG, success that fast and on that scale changes everything. Amazon's Breakout won't be the only project going on hiatus or worse, I'll wager, as executives around the world try to figure out how to get some of that sweet PUBG action. Brace yourselves for another half-decade of WoW-killer hype, only with "WoW" airbrushed out and "PUBG" scribbled in.

One day this will all be yours. Oh, wait, it already is.

The perhaps ironic upshot of all this is that I might, finally, get around to downloading the original H1Z1. The re-purposed Just Survive is beginning to look quite interesting. As for the many nominees for the Golden Joystick Awards, though, I'll probably pass.

Except, maybe, for a couple of the Indies. The annoyingly-named Everything looks intriguing. Thimbleweed Park, with its curious USP of "Monkey Island meets Twin Peaks" could be worth a try. In fact, I could imagine playing and enjoying any of the ten entries in the Best Indie list, which is not something I could say with a straight face about many of the various AAA nominees.

Aywren offered an early entry in the inevitable swarm of "what I'm looking forward to in 2018" posts but right now the only game on my radar that's guaranteed to launch next year is We Happy Few. I was fairly sure I'd get that but Compulsion Games' decision to go full AAA with a launch price of $60 has made me think twice. I'm not really price-sensitive when it comes to video games but bearing in mind what I said yesterday about Tanzia and Yonder it does seem like a good way to throw money down a hole.

Nope, I think I'll stick to my MMOs for now, and my old MMOs at that. I played a lot of EQ2 yesterday and it made me want to play a lot more. I know I don't need any new games but right now I'm not even sure I want any.

Maybe we already have enough games. Anyone ever think of that?

Hybrid Vigor

It occurred to me the other day, when I was reading Azuriel's post about "Crafting Survival", that I have never played a Survival game, crafting or otherwise.

I know what Survival games are. I know the names of several. I even have a vague idea what they look like and how they play; at one time or another most of the MMO bloggers I follow have written about them, often at considerable length.

By and large they're games that sound interesting, on the surface, but I've never translated that interest into action because I can't shake the feeling that, more so than almost any other sub-genre of video game I can think of, Survival games are objectively pointless.

They do, of  course, share the single purpose of all leisure activities, which is to pass the time in an entertaining manner, and time spent enjoying oneself cannot be considered to be time wasted. Still, there are many ways to keep yourself entertained; countering a set of pre-determined conditions in order to achieve stasis has never struck me as being one of the more appealing ones.

Games - or perhaps they could better be described as entertainments - where surviving is merely a backdrop to achieving another goal, those are a different matter. Minecraft, when played in a certain way,  may require the player to focus on surviving a number of threats but, once that's achieved, other, more creative goals take the place of simply not dying. At least, I believe so: I've never played it.

Conversely, looked at from the outside, titles like the reflexively-named "Don't Starve" seem to hold as their ultimate goal a state of Nirvana in which, finally, nothing happens, nothing changes. It's a state that can never be achieved because the game is coded in such a way as to ensure that, no matter how long you postpone the inevitable, in the end you will starve.

Enjoying these entertainments probably requires a similar mindset to that which seeks to experience and record incremental improvements in anything: a runner trying to improve her best time; a raider trying to improve his DPS; either by even the smallest measurable margin. Such a mindset may be the signature of someone as, or probably more, interested in process than in outcome.

In the comment thread to Jeromai's post linked above I asked "Is there any reason we couldn’t have a Survival MMO with persistent characters?", a question to which Jeromai gave, most likely, a fuller and more convincing reply than the question deserved.

It wasn't really a very intelligent question. Just how would I expect a "Survival MMO" to work, anyway? What would the players do once they had "survived"? Pacifying an unruly landscape and bringing civilization to the four compass points is a healthy ambition for an empire but settling down to a quiet, virtual existence in a safe, stable and peaceful world scarcely seems a viable endgame for an MMO intended to run on (and take money)  indefinitely. (Then again, Second Life...).

Presumably this is why sandbox MMOs, which frequently require a good deal of surviving, also tend to include the endless existential threat of player versus player violence. It's either that or never-ending waves of AI attacks (wasn't that one of the USPs of both Rift and the original Horizons?).

Ashes of Creation, currently taking three million dollars to the bank along with the title "Most Successful MMO Kickstarter Ever", doesn't look as though it will start you off in a cave with a club and a loin-cloth, while expecting you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps to become Emperor of All The Nodes, but it does have a faint whiff of survival about it, at least on a meta level.

Supposedly, all your works there, like Ozymandias's, can turn to dust. Were this a survival game that would, presumably, signal game over and a restart, whereupon you, the player, would attempt to last longer or build bigger, so as to beat your personal best.

Since AoC is an MMO, with persistent characters and a persistent world, that can't happen. The Emperor and his acolytes may lose face along with all their nodes but all the players who counted on their protection will find most of their progress wrapped up and packed away for a quick and painless return. More like moving to a new apartment than starting a new life.

Persistence is both a problem and a predicate of the MMORPG genre. Many MMOs start out as survival games of a kind, where the player-character begins with literally nothing more than a worn vest, a badly-sharpened stick and a dream of slaying a dragon. At the start it's all scrubbing for a living and trying not to die; by the end it's DPS meters and dance parties with a couple of dozen of your new best friends.

After two decades of this it's increasingly hard to see how the two ends fit together. Often they don't. For those of us, who find the grubbing about in the mud for a piece of old armor the rust might not have eaten all the way through yet the most enjoyable part, a reset now and then is a requirement. That's why we play alts or change servers or move to a new MMO every once in a while.

Endgamers, meanwhile, curse the leveling curve as a waste of time and resources, while developers increasingly treat it as legacy content, once required but now best leaped over with boosts, preferably paid-for. The difficult introduction to the world, first surviving then consolidating, that seems like an anachronism.

Going back to "Don't Starve" for a moment, does anyone even remember the days when you had to eat and drink in MMOs? I struggle to recall the details now but in original EverQuest, if you failed to keep up your liquid intake, didn't you cease to regenerate health? Or maybe it was mana. I'm sure there were other MMOs where running out of food meant, if not the end of your character's life, the end of their progress for that session.

Despite the strong showing of Survival games over the last few years I sense no desire to re-appropriate such mechanics to the mainstream of MMOs, either theme-park or sandbox. As the wheel turns and MMOs emerge, gasping and spluttering, from their long submersion and MOBAs begin their slow, inexorable slide, it may be that Survival's short, Edwardian summer is also drawing to a close.

Conan Exiles appears to have stalled. H1Z1 "Just Survive" is choking through lack of interest. ARK appears to be on a one-way trip to self-parody. The Battle Royales that are currently raging, as H1Z1 King of the Kill gives way to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, are surely too far removed from anything we recognize as "MMORPG" even to count as belonging to the same genre. 

If Battle Royales and Arenas are scarcely even distant cousins, MMORPGs, Action MMOs, MOBAs and persistent Survival sandboxes all have closer ties, a shared DNA. Perhaps the next stage in the evolution of the strain will draw from the strengths of all of them.

Wasn't that yesterday's seven-day wonder, Crowfall's, plan? A genuine MMO with restarts? Is a true survival MMO what we'll find when we enter Amazon's New World? Will the Ashes of Creation give birth to a Phoenix that burns brightly with the combined energy of everything Intrepid threw into the flames?

Or maybe we'll just find ourselves sifting through another generation of muddled compromises. And
perhaps I should at least try a survival game before writing about them at such length. Y'know, just so I can pretend I have the shadow of a ghost of an idea of what I'm talking about...

Nah. Life's too short to just survive.

Hard Choices : GW2, Daybreak Games

As game director I have to make tough trade-offs. One thing I believe is that we have to focus on the core game first before taking on additional responsibilities. I wrote in the Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto in 2010 that our vision was to create a living, dynamic world, where there’s always something to do. Let’s ensure we succeed on that front.

Mike O' Brien - President - ANet

With a primary, near-term focus on growing the newest Daybreak franchise, H1Z1, I look forward to pushing the boundaries of emergent gameplay and expanding on the competitive experience.

Larry LaPierre - Senior Vice President of Games - Daybreak Games

Chinese companies will scoop up 1-2 western publishers a month from here on. The lesson to be drawn from Chinese mining company Shandong Hongda in talks to buy RuneScape developer Jagex for $300 million is that it will happen again.

Superdata (via MassivelyOP)

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear

Buffalo Springfield

My outlook on the ever-changing MMORPG landscape tends to be relatively optimistic, some might say Pollyannaish. For all the never-ending wailing and teeth-gnashing that goes on and for all the predictions of the genre's impending crash and burn, nothing much seems to change from one year to the next. Since I've long been happy with what I'm being offered, that's a situation that suits me just fine.

MMOs tend to persist. As Wilhelm observed recently, EverQuest just turned seventeen. RuneScape, currently on the table for $300m, is fifteen. WoW will be twelve this year. For a long while it's been arguable that the biggest problem the MMORPG genre isn't change but stasis.

Behind the scenes, though, something is moving that can. as yet, be only dimly seen. The one thing that is emerging from the mists is this; the days when MMORPGs could simply drift along on a whim and a prayer may be coming to an end.

It's not, necessarily, all about resources. DBG, having been streamlined (some would say gutted) by its new owners, still seems, somehow, to be able to come up with solid, new content at a very reasonable pace. A dip into the current, rather frenzied scrabble toward launch for Landmark does test that proposition somewhat, but even there a decisiveness and determination to get the blasted thing finished and out the door at last seems preferable to an eternity in early access development hell.

If DBG seems able to do more than expected with less than it needs, then by contrast, ArenaNet somehow manages the opposite. There's a very big team working on GW2. Mike O'Brien laid out the numbers in a recent Reddit AMA : "We have about 120 devs working on the live game, 70 devs on Expac2, and 30 devs on core teams that support both." And yet, even with those resources, few would argue the game has been well-served over the past twelve months.

The Heart of Thorns expansion, much though I was pleasantly surprised by its quality and accessibility, enjoyed, at best, a lukewarm reception. It seems sales were under-cooked, much like the expansion itself in the opinion of many, while retention of those who did buy in has been more disappointing yet.

The bulk of development in the last six months has been directed at Raids, which, while they have apparently been better-attended than similar content in other MMOs, surely remain a minority interest for the playerbase as a whole. At least the Raid team has completed its work in a timely and efficient manner, though, unlike the team working on adding the rest of the now "indefinitely postponed" Legendary weapons. Those, of course, much like raids, are also of direct interest only to a minority of players. A hardcore, you might even say.

The Spring Quarterly Update, due some time in April, far from bringing the new content many feel is desperately needed, is mostly focused either on fixing things that the expansion broke (World vs World) or fixing the expansion itself. Heart of Thorns, which has now officially been deemed too difficult, too exclusive and insufficiently casual-friendly, is going to get nerfed.

Whether the players who have wandered off elsewhere in search of the kind of meaningful realm vs realm warfare or entertaining, inclusive, casual gameplay upon which GW2 originally sought to build its brand will return to see if things have been tuned better to their tastes this time remains to be seen. Certainly the decision to abandon development of the Legendary weapons has not been received with universal approval, as the ever-growing threadnaught on the forums demonstrates, but for my money it signifies a long-overdue recognition of reality.

Just as the cancellation of EQNext suggests someone finally popping the hatch on the bunker and blinking at the harsh light of external reality, so Mike O'Brien's open acknowledgement that things have gone badly wrong recognizes a painful but unavoidable truth: things just can't go on like this. Someone needed to say it. Someone needed to do it.

Despite Colin Johanson's upbeat exit it now seems quite clear that the rumors of his taking the opportunity to resign before it was taken out of his hands could have substance. Under his direction the game has felt increasingly rudderless, surging from each new idea to the next with barely any time to reflect on the failures or consolidate the successes.

He failed to hold the line on free, bi-weekly content updates or on not producing paid expansions. Worse, when forced to change direction on these and other key, structural positions, he failed to make a success of the imposed alternatives. It seems the relative failure of Heart of Thorns was the final straw.

It's a bit rich of Mike O'Brien to arrive as some kind of white knight, driving away the darkness, waving the banner of that infamous, thrice-denied "Manifesto". He was, after all, Colin Johanson's boss for the last three and a half years. Still, let's not complain too much about the presentation. Let's just hold him to this:

I will work to make you happy, and I’ll do it by making you happy with what we ship, not with what we promise to ship.

It looks as if quite a few MMO developers may need to make some hard decisions in the coming months. We live in interesting times, as I'm sure they're saying in the boardrooms of the great steel-producing corporations of China, every time someone stands up to make a presentation on why they should buy a bunch of digital orc assets.

I'd kind of prefer those decisions were made by people who at least know the names of the games in question as something more than lines on a spreadsheet.