Shortest MMO ever? APB closes its doors after a few short months
primesuspect
Beepin n' BoopinDetroit, MI Icrontian
primesuspect
Beepin n' BoopinDetroit, MI Icrontian
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But i didnt... I guess its one of the reasons of the faillure... Many people was "thinking about trying it" and few did it in the end.
I know there is likely an endless stream of reasons why it can't happen, but i still wish these dying MMOs could release something before they die to allow you to play offline.
It had enough potential to at least get me to try an MMO but it didn't deliver what it promised. I guess it never will now. If anyone wants to play on my account while the servers are still up they are more than welcome to.
From all that I've read the failure of the game had more to do with what was said here than anything else. The mechanics, the goals, the game itself just wasn't what it was billed to be on paper. Those in the closed beta were logging minimal hours into the game, even when the servers were running 24/7 for the final months (prior to that, servers would only let you play for 12 hours before a 'reset').
Essentially, it talked the talk...but that was it. Gamers were disappointed in the lack of what it actually delivered. Ideally, they were hoping for a mix of Saint's Row and GTA.
Thats how you build a subscriber base.
If I was being subjective I'd put the bad game hammer on WoW long before DDO. WoW is just a massed mess of 100's of 100's of hours of point click kill and resource grinding. It's addictive and all that crap but in terms of game play it's no more game then pokeman. It just costs you $15 a month to play it - plus however many hours of life your soul is worth.
"Free to play MMO" may have once been synonymous with "bad game", but those days are over.
And EverQuest, and Eve Online, and Planetside, and...
Who? Are those Hockey teams or something? We're talking about video games here.
EverCrack still has a significant (and dangerously vocal) subscriber base of over 20,000. Not EQ2; EVERQUEST. Ultima Online still has a fairly significant player base, and thrived for ages. Neither of these games even does the nickel and diming; just a straight up subscription fee. City of Heroes, which is the star example of how not to properly manage development and maintenance of MMOs, continues on with a subscription fee and not even the slightest consideration of going F2P. EQ and UO both predate WoW significantly, and CoX is only a few months younger as I recall.
Oh, and let's not forget Lineage. Peaked at over 3 million subscribers in Korea at one point. 10 years on (it was released in '98, LONG before WoW) it still had over 1 million paying subscribers.
So no, WoW is not the only "success" story. WoW succeeded due to a huge built-in fanbase and an army of fanbois who would have bought it.
The point is that it's not the only way to do bussiness anymore, and for any MMO which isn't one of these elite (compare the number of successes in your post to the number of video games published over that time, and you'll find that "commercially successful subscription based MMO" is a very small percentage of games, compared to, let's say, commercially successful FPSs.
There isn't much room at the top of that market, and if you're not at the top, you're dead. It only makes sense that smaller or more independent thinking developers and publishers will seek another model. That does not mean that their games are crap.