Stop Hand-Holding me!

[Abriael]

clearly you have never played anarchy online......

and just so everyone is clear,

you just made an argument saying options were bad.....

OMG NOT OPTIONS!!!!

Someone loves elaborating on what other people said a tad too much.

Options are not bad. A whole big menu full of 100 options is not exactly user friendly.

Anarchy online is and has always been an extremely niche game (not to mention a commercial failure). True that FFXIV isn't exactly a success at the moment, but I definitely wouldn't use AO as an example on how to improve any other game.

[JakeRoon]

Anarchy online is and has always been an extremely niche game (not to mention a commercial failure).

the "free play" program, started in 2004, has had the most significant effect on subscriptions to date. ”More than 400,000 new players" signed up for free subscriptions in the program's first ten months according to Funcom CEO Trond Arne Aas.[78] The next year, the number of free subscriptions created, independent of paid subscriptions, was stated as one million.[54] The income from the program—which had generated $1,000,000 by its second year—supplements revenue from paid accounts.[77][79]
Funcom attributed "higher than expected" company profits in 2006 to Lost Eden's release in December of that year.[79][80] Subscription revenue during this time was described as "steady" and "profitable". Subscription revenue remained "steady" for the next three years, until 2009 when they were described as "slowly declining".[81][82] It was stated that close to two million subscriptions, both free and paid, had been created by July 2008.[24]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy_Online (read the citations if you must)

For a commercial failure it sure seems to be making a lot of money OH and look at that it had over twice as many subscriber than FFxi........


I really wish you guys would stop talking out your @$$3$ before you make statements like this. It just drives home the point of how disconnected to the whole mmo gaming genre you really are.


OH Lahru_Hukurou!!!! wuv you baby! we'll have to go blitz some missions some time!

[Abriael]

the "free play" program, started in 2004, has had the most significant effect on subscriptions to date. ”More than 400,000 new players" signed up for free subscriptions in the program's first ten months according to Funcom CEO Trond Arne Aas.[78] The next year, the number of free subscriptions created, independent of paid subscriptions, was stated as one million.[54] The income from the program—which had generated $1,000,000 by its second year—supplements revenue from paid accounts.[77][79]
Funcom attributed "higher than expected" company profits in 2006 to Lost Eden's release in December of that year.[79][80] Subscription revenue during this time was described as "steady" and "profitable". Subscription revenue remained "steady" for the next three years, until 2009 when they were described as "slowly declining".[81][82] It was stated that close to two million subscriptions, both free and paid, had been created by July 2008.[24]

Perfect way to say absolutely nothing. Notice how they don't split between paid and free subscribers in their numbers (which, for the ones even slightly versed in understanding marketing jibberjabber, means that the paid subscriber numbers aren't at all impressive. If they were, they would be spelled out).
I'm a "subscriber" too. Too bad I didn't play for years, like a very large percentage of those "subscribers".

While the term "subscriber" is often used to trick the uninitiated in thinking that the relevant numbers are much higher than they are, unfortunately for Funcom a "subscriber" is a whole different animal than an "active user"

For a commercial failure it sure seems to be making a lot of money OH and look at that it had over twice as many subscriber than FFxi........

You mean that in several years of operation it accumulated twice as many free "subscribers" (which again, is very different from "active users"), than FFXIV in 5 months? Yeah, big discovery there.

I really wish you guys would stop talking out your @$$3$ before you make statements like this. It just drives home the point of how disconnected to the whole mmo gaming genre you really are.

The only sign of disconnection is believing that one million dollars in revenue for a MMORPG is any sign of "success". In scale with the market, it's a pittance.
Same can be said as considering numbers expressed in "subscribers" (that can very easily be people that subscribed years ago, and now don't even remember the game, or people that "subscribed" to try the game, and then uninstalled it after five minutes) anywhere impressive or relevant to the success of a F2P MMORPG.

If the numbers of "subscribers" was anywhere relevant, FFXIV would be a critical success by now.