Forbes: New ‘EverQuest II’ Expansion ‘Blood of Luclin’ Marks 15 Years With Trip To The Moon

Except as a single studio they could share things... like the folk that did livecasts. As seperate studios, none have enough demand for that role, so it goes away, from all games...
Seperate often costs more, because there are zero shared resources.

 

United we stand, divided we fall

Maybe someone needs to remind DBG that!

 

Yeah. To me, none of this was unexpected, and these moves are entirely consistent with the strategy I have suspected DBG is executing.

I'm more curious about how the sub fees and higher order resources are going to be spread around under this new structure. For example, in terms of sub fees, it's safe to assume that EQ1 is carrying the lion's share of the load for the other three titles. Eq2 likely coming in a distant second.

Understanding more definitively what DBG is doing structurally, the lifetime sub offer makes more sense for DBG, and implies even more that the company is setting up individual franchises such that they can be funded, bankrupted, or sold more easily and without co-mingling the assets of the parent company.

Presumably, DBG is going to sail this ship as if it is a publisher, and Longdale will run Darkpaw(?) as a studio. I know she shares development resources between eq and eq2, but I'm also curious about if there are any folks, like the engineers and art folks for example, who float among all the titles.

Also, and finally, I don't believe this eq2 team can survive under an arrangement like this.

Well actually, I believe the only shot this game has is if it stabilizes around a small population of p2w raiders and deco folks. If they are able to focus their resources on these two segments, they might be able to make things work ok.

 

If they split up (or better: The moment they split up) lifetime subs might truly be a thing of interest.
I know they have to account for all the station cash on the accounts - so it wouldn't make me wonder they have to account for lifetime subs one way or the other, too.

I just read up on how they announced it. It was an "Lifetime* All Access Membership" and also made sure to note that "All Access currently includes DC Universe Online, EverQuest, EverQuest 2, and PlanetSide 2." (watch that "currently")
Does anybody remember if they ever gave any guarantee that a game will only vanish from the All Access in case of sunset but never because they want to remove it?

In such a case they could just refactor "All Access" so that it only contains one game and you have to decide which you want to keep.

 

My guess it is only split up on paper for "shady" book keeping reasons... Don't forget that it is an investment company that own DBG and all the sub companies.

DBG is not about making good games any more, it is about how much can they squeeze out of the existing customers before they go bankrupt and used as a tax write off vs other profits from other investments. Nothing but the bare minimum goes back into the games, the rest is sent straight to the owners.

On another note, that bug report section on the official forum is now up to 12 pages of posts from this expansion.

 

As a player of LOTRO I can say that the separation helps a little but not much. The thing that is great about LOTRO is the lower level game is still thriving and active and the lore is very compelling. However, if you go read the LOTRO forums, the high end game suffers from pay to win complaints. I'm not at the end game there even though I've played from the beginning (got a lifetime sub at the start). I have an 80something but a lot of other alts and I'm content to doodle around because the lore is great, the low level game fun and full of other players, the in game events/festivals are compelling, you can learn to play any song you want on instruments in game, etc. But if their forums are accurate there is a lot of "pay to win" stuff built into the end game. It adds to the reason I haven't rushed forward and instead explore new classes (the classes IMO are far more interesting and different than in EQ2).

For those who don't know, Standing Stone Games is the company that develops LOTRO now (used to be Turbine), but Daybreak Games produces the game.

 

I see that DCUO is no longer listed at the bottom of the login screen - only EQ and PS2. Are they still going? Are they still included in All Access if they are?

 

DCUO Introduces Tax To Fix Money Exploit - MMORPG.com

DCUO is having some big problems also.

 

Yep, after all, they don't play their own game so why bother? If they did on a more consistant basis, they would have discovered it a lot quicker. And they obviously don't listen to the cliens/customers who reported something wrong or they would have eventually looked into faster than months later!

 

Spot on.

Compounding the problem, their idea of customer profiling appears to be looking backward to see what people do without considering that their game design forces to people to do stuff they don't enjoy.

I literally laughed out loud when Longdale was touting all the customer data they use to understand what their customers want. Think of statistical bias and precision this way: Imagine a target with a bulls eye in the center - that's the true mean value. Now imagine a very wide (not precise) confidence band around it (distribution).

Now imagine the estimated mean value is waaaaaaaayyyyyyy off in the upper right hand corner of the target, it's not even close to the true value but it has has a very small (precise) distribution around it. That's statistical bias, and the way they collect data about customer preferences (game-data analytics, soliciting feedback only from a very small and select group of players) is guaranteed to produce garbage decision-making information. In order to make their data analytics effective, they need to control for design decisions, and as you noted, put significant effort in to qualitative feedback data that reflects the tastes and preferences of all their customers (i.e large samples).

In other words, what would you rather have, accurate but not precise information; or precise information that not accurate?

DBG is a text book example of epic over-confidence; both with respect to marketing and statistical analysis. They do not know what they presume to know, and they're killing their business because of it. Been like this forever.