Well it means millions of dollars saved at no expensive so I wouldn’t say nothing. Just less costs while still maintaining all of the profits, not really nothing, more like an incentive to kill.
When you have literal millions to be saved in server cost and your game is a hot buggy mess and you already sold the hype… you make your own conclusion.
Content patches while the game literally burns at their feet, LOL cmon now.
I do not believe you understand marketing well enough.
Sure, momentary profits were made. Some of the long-term costs of development were covered. Game maybe even made a net profit.
Every person leaving the game in the first month is less probable to buy the next game that comes out of AGS. And every single one of them, when asked by a friend on their opinion of the game, will say “nah, buy something else”.
No Man’s Sky. @Jinxcat Reputation matters very little. People can’t see far beyond the present moment. So one day in the future, when NW gets all tidied up and functional, that’s all people will see.
Games like League of Legends and DOTA 2 cost $0 and have no subscription.
They make a ton of money on microtransactions. That was the business model Amazon chose for this game.
155K people instead of 900K people is a lot fewer microtransaction opportunities. This trend is legitimately disastrous unless the 155K were the ones prepared to spend all the money… when more likely than not they were the heaviest users who spent the least.
Final Fantasy XIV. @Jinxcat Reality disagrees with you. Don’t get me wrong. The game has an enormous amount of problems but that actually means very little in the grand scheme of things.
Did you even see FFXIV 1.0 release? It was such a failure that it tanked Square-Enix’s stock price by nearly 40% for months. It took totally re-releasing it to rehabilitate SE’s reputation and revive the game. The present moment is only the present moment. You have no idea what the future holds. For that matter, neither do I. I’m just saying that it isn’t as cut and dried as you say it is. @Jinxcat
Yes, because servers are free and developers also work for free after launch… They need people to purchase cosmetics and stuff to keep the money coming in.
The problem with referring to Amazon’s deep pockets is that they are a very business-oriented company. At some point, probably in the near future, the New World team, and AGS itself, will have to show how they make a profit for Amazon. My opinion about the current patch is that since they kicked both PVEers and casuals (who mostly don’t have their trade skills at 200 yet and certainly have not maxed out watermarks) in the teeth, this is going to be much more difficult. Add to that the serious communications problems associated with these changes - that is, they have said absolutely nothing to make me, a casual, mostly PVE player, feel like a valued customer, and they have a real problem with a future in Amazon’s ecosystem. (Remember that Amazon has as value number 1 prioritizing the customer.)
I have deleted New World from my computers and will look to other games, since this entire circumstance feels like a giant “get lost” to me, as well as to the other friends whom I now have deleting the game as well. We’re not a big number, but I’m not alone in this feeling.
Your analysis might have been right if all that Amazon did was make the game and sell it.
The problem is that the box revenues have been received, but Amazon’s expenses continue. Under the “they sold all the boxes” analysis, the most profitable thing for Amazon to do now would be to say “thank you”, then fire the devs and turn off the servers once a reasonable time has passed, so that they would have fulfilled the contract implicit in the box sales - no decent business person spends future money with no future revenue.
I suspect they were planning on getting their money from the cash shop so losing 70% of the player base has really hurt that income. If that drops to nothing they will close it down. Amazon isn’t Google, they either benefit from the game or they will cut and walk.
Amazon will spend what they minimally have to to keep people using the cash shop. Less people = less new content. That simple
Amazon Game Studios had a horrendous reputation and track record.
Not to mention it’s a $2 Trillion corporate environment where - well - the most creative and innovative game ideas are supposed to be conceived and implemented. Not happening.
For a typical MMO player, just give them a sword and shield, and start measuring how “powerful” their character is by the amount of time they’ve sunk in.
That’s enough for the player to feel superior to others, which is the feeling they are really after, not the game itself.
Your analyze of how they are going to treat a prestigeproject like NW and going into mmo/gaming market, couldnt (imo) be more wrong.
This is not so much a “lets make another billion” project. This is just a step into the gaming market. Im sure they over time will fix everything, learn a ton and in about a year, ppl like you will say “this is how it should have been when it was released. And ill agree. But abandon NW, no Im sure they wont.
You do realize they plan to make their money off the shop right? No player base = no cash shop sales. $40 isn’t enough to fund the servers. $7 a skin or $12 for a house pet per player adds up a lot faster.
Mark Twain wrote, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Whenever I read a post like yours, I chuckle at how a humorist from the nineteenth century had such a grasp of human nature that 150 years later, on a digital platform that he could not have imagined in his wildest dreams, his quote is still spot-on.
New World is a free-to-play model with a box price. The downstream income comes from store currency sales: cosmetics, housing items, and service fees for name/gender/appearance changes and server transfers. Take a look at the in-game store, convert the in-game store currency into USD, add a ~15% tax (because currency bundles are designed to mismatch the costs of the items). Then imagine how many people would be willing to shell out USD for the items and multiply it every month. How soon does that number exceed $40, the box price?