Quote Originally Posted by Bizniztyme View Post
But are they failing or it's just people's perception that they failed. The games are still running, they are all profiting, how did they fail? People's definition of failure of MMOS are totally warped IMHO.
This is particularly interesting considering that SWTOR is more profitable now, after going f2p, than they ever were while being p2p. So by the definition of success for games being profitability, SWTOR is more profitable now, and is more successful as an extension of that, than FF XI, EQ, SWG, UO, etc. etc. (simple math proves that fact).


The truth is, there are only two ways to measure MMO success: the first is profit, the second is popularity. By the profit measure, it's silly to point to games like SWTOR as failures; they're extremely profitable with their current marketing approach. By the popularity measure, then games like EQ or FF XI that had small audiences and kept them for over a decade were never all that successful (which isn't wholly true either).

So the problem in pointing out this or that game as a failure is that it's far too complicated to boil down to one statistic. The best we can do is estimate, and because this is based on guess work, often a person's own biases and tastes end up being far more important than any reasonable estimation of a game's success.