ERTS is EA's stock on the Nasdaq stock exchange. (Just for those who still need their coffee.)
EA's in big trouble. Years of lack of innovation, misguided projections, poor judgment and management practices have left
EA losing stock value in a big way.
But EA's not alone. The entire MMORPG industry is in trouble. Everyone's trying to copy WoW, which copied EQ but did it the best anyone could do it.
But these companies haven't realized two things, two very important things.
1) There's no room to compete with WoW by copying it. They are established. They have worked out the bugs. They have added loads of content. The only way to compete with that is
IF players wanted an all new game of the same sort, same experience, same thing. But that leads to number 2.
2) Players don't want more of the same. For several years now, players have left WoW to try out new games of the same sort, games that copied the "tried and true" falseness that was WoW. They've always gone back. The fanbois say it's because of bugs and incomplete content, mostly at "end game". But I'll tell you, most gamers are not the powergamers that the fanbois are. They never got to "end game". And they don't pick up on bugs like the fanbois do. They left and went back to WoW anyways.
Why? Exactly because it
IS "more of the same". They don't want to build characters all over again. They don't want to go through it all again. They create new characters in WoW just for something to do, not because they want to go through it all again. And they still have their maxed and leveled characters to play when they want. The average gamer is not a powergamer.
And WoW brought in a lot of average gamers to MMORPGs. Most of them never knew about MMOs before WoW. And most of them never played anything but Single Player games. So what WoW gave them was quite acceptable in that Single Player game style. Yet, they expected a world, and now that they've played the Single Player game style of WoW (EQ clone), they have hit an expected wall. A wall that the game producers can't seem to see.
That wall is the expectation of a "world". And the level/item quest grind is not that. And
THAT is why they have been looking for a new game. Yet everyone is trying to give them
"more of the same".
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More and more are going to FtP in desperate attempts to save themselves. And FtP is a sham for MMORPGs. It works and then leads to a drop off, in this sort of game. Because
only 6% of players buy cash shop things, leaving 94% who aren't enthused or willing, leaving a large number of possible drop offs from the "game". Cash Shops work for very casual games like on FaceBook, games that didn't cost a lot to produce. But there is a finite amount of $dollars$ out there willing to be spent in this way. And the market for those $dollars$ has quickly saturated. It may not have peeked yet, but it will. And then the competition gets really hot, but mostly we'll see the same trouble that the MMO industry is currently seeing.
So, overall, gaming is looking at a bleak future. They realize this to an extent, but I don't think fully yet. Gaming needs to change, but they don't know how or what to change it to.
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And that brings us to EA and SWTOR and UO, etc. SWTOR in trouble and they know it now because of lack of enthusiasm and ridicule on message boards. They also see, I'm sure, that there's been a drop off in interest for MMORPGs in general over the last year. But they know they are in trouble, and they've spent a boatload of money on it. They also are looking at legal problems and expenses, and general failure elsewhere in their investments. As the links have shown, they've lost more than half their value in stocks. And their future isn't looking too bright.
How does all this affect UO? Well, as a company, the orders are filtering down. Get more profitable. Period. And their response for UO is likely to be just as unimaginative and full of poor judgment as they've shown to be for quite some time now. It's likely to be FtP.
The funny thing is, that the way out of the doldrums that MMORPGs have been experiencing is exactly what UO was made to be.
Worldly and
Sandbox. And while I think there are people at EA that can lead them out of this mess, as a company, they are lost. As a company they are stuck in "copy" mode. They wouldn't recognize innovation if they saw it, for the most part.
gotta stop now.
