So why are people over and over making the claim that te game have lost 80% of the players?
I agree. But is that normal? I don’t know. How many concurrent players does MMORPG games usually have at launch and 2 month after launch? Do you know? Do you have any data to compare with?
Amazon’s whole business model have been since start to go into markets and become big with low prices and good customer service. Making a profit short term have never been their business model.
YOU DO NOT KNOW THAT.
OMG dude, here you go again. You do not have any data of how many players have stopped logging in to their account to play New World. Can you stop making this claim?
Look here what YOU said:
And then in the same god damn post you say:
Do you see the problem here?
Where do you find this data?
How many players have New World lost since launch? Do you have ANY DATA what so evewr on active playerbase?
They need a big player base. This game is run off of cash shop sales. It’s just a math problem for them. How many whales is more important than how many players. If the servers are full it may seem like it’s alive with one or two available but without the cash shop sales how do they keep the lights on? They need a lot of players who have confidence the game will still be around in a few months.
Comparable to Microsoft’s approach with Flight Simulator to be fair. The product receives major patches at high interval, basically functions as a live service as well with the massive bandwidth that is being used for the live telemetry data. In terms of concurrent players New World is still well over 10x as high. Nonetheless, updates keep on being pushed out. Which as a flight simmer myself, I’m happy with. But let’s be honest, it’s existence is only really possible in current form as a showcase product.
And I can definitely see New World living a similar premise. That’s why myself I’m also not too afraid about its future. AGS shows clear intent thus far to keep working on the product as well. And as long as I’m having fun myself, I’ll just keep playing and also have no objection to spend some money in the cosmetic store for example.
If the day comes on which I’d no longer be having fun, I’d just move on. Often to check back again a year or two down the line to see if the feeling changed.
The 80% loss is a fact, because is calculated on a like for like basis, which means taking the numbers from peak time and comparing it with numbers of peak time of previous weeks.
If a business lose 80% of it’s players on peak time, it is reasonable to think they lose the same amount across the board, meaning during other times of the day.
I might not be an Amazon manager, but I am a manager for a big corporation and I know how business read the numbers.
I also understand what numbers are important for a business, and raw sales are not the top priority, potential future sales is what matter the most.
If a product has no potential for future sales, they will just kill the product regardless if it is profitable or not.
When a company have many products they only keep the ones with more potential.
Your argument works only for small businesses where every sale count.
There are a couple of assumptions that aren’t necessarily true…
That making a single-player game would have been cheaper.
Not necessarily. Some of the most expensive games of all time have been single-player. The New World team isn’t enormous; as far as I understand it, with my limited knowledge, I don’t see a reason to believe that the budget exceeded 100m, given the team size and years of development.
That a drop in 80% of daily players means a commensurate drop in future sales.
The very high number of unit sales so far are all potential future customers, far more so than if they’d not bought the game. They are all potential cosmetics customers because they’ve already bought into the project. If the game had only sold 400k or so copies, even if there had been fewer bugs, the pool of potential future customers for cosmetics would be smaller.
I agree that projected sales are what a share price is based on, which is the prime concern for a lot of multinationals, but don’t think it automatically follows that they’d consider New World a failure. Those 900k+ accounts are all ready to log in and spend in future, as new updates happen and the game improves.
If their initial forecasts for player numbers had been correct, and they’d only sold enough units to fill the servers they initially had, they would have sold something like 500k units. If they planned for a 50% drop within a few months, as others have said is normal, that would bring us to 250k - not a million miles from where we are today.
The answer is exactly what I had said - roughly 5K-10K active players and one server.
That’s it, it’s the bare minimum that is necessary.
The rest - development team, expansions, subscriptions, patches, events, websites - are all gravy and are entirely dependent on how successful the game is.
With 5K-10K players, there would no other operational overhead than running a server, and having a team of three or four developers to maintain the system.
We are looking at this backwards. How much does the cash shop have to do each month. That’s the real question. We already bought the game and there is no sub. So their future revenue is based off of cash shop sales. Once you guess how much they need each month to warrant updates then we can just ask what % of players buy things each month.
If you love the game in its current state, prove it with your wallet not here on the forums. Good reviews on steam are nice but they live by cash shop purchases. A sub is 15 a month so that’s the minimum average they have to be expecting.
That said, not every player who is happy will spend money and not every player is happy. If 80% are happy and 1/4 will buy things in the cash shop then they really need players to lean in and buy. Buy buy buy.
I’m sure the box sales can carry the game for a few months but in the end all of this conversation is pointless if the lovers of the game don’t buy things. They should have had a sub and a cash shop in my opinion.
His perspective is not wrong. First of all, he gave logical arguments. Second of all, he can have different perspective, not a wrong one. Also, we can only hypothesise what are the goals of developers. Probably if YOU would do MMORPG you would like to make money on steady basis. As they made B2P model probably they had something on their mind regardless if its clear or concealed reason.
think of it differently. the game has sold alot, sure. exceeded expectations? sure.
however this is a b2p game with no sub attached to it. lets say the initial sales have covered the production cost. it probably didnt but we have no concrete data on that so lets just assume it did.
that would bring us to a net revenue of 0.
now you have to consider salaries, infrastructure cost (maintaining servers, electricity and so on) and also the cost of development of new content. there are many other cost factors but lets just keep it simple.
if the playercount is too low so the cash shop revenue doesnt exceed the costs for keeping the game running it is a failure regardless of initial sales. yes they probably didnt expect 900k concurrent players at launch but they probably also didnt expect to lose 80% of those players within 2 months. now we dont know the exact cost of running the game and we dont know the revenue they make from the cash shop + ppl still buying the game but i can guarantee you if the cost ever gets bigger than the revenue they will instantly cut their losses and shut down the game just like they did with crucible. in that sense the game is very much in danger at this point.
AGS is a company, they dont give a shit if you´re having fun aslong as you keep playing the game and leave a few bucks in the cash shop from time to time. thats how companies work, they dont provide a service so you can have fun, they provide a service to make money. as soon as they are no longer making money there is no reason to keep the service up.