Quote:
Originally Posted by RecondoJoe
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Part of what made EverQuest a good game is the people who designed it set out to make an amazing game that they themselves would enjoy playing.
Companies don't set out to make good games anymore, they set out to make profitable games. At so many Q&As and annual reports to investors, Activision has straight up said they are very okay with releasing subpar, low-quality content as long as it's more profitable than releasing high-quality content that players love. They literally leave major bugs and balance issues in the game so they can later sell the fix as new content.
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Too much money involved nowadays. The cost of video game development has been ever-increasing for more than 40 years. A high-quality MMO-RPG these days can be expected to cost many tens of millions of dollars to produce and launch. It's one of the reasons so few of them are made at all anymore. Hence the accounts get involved and start veto'ing anything that doesn't seem safe or data-proven. Cuts both ways, too. EQ would've broke even with an average 50K user base over its projected 5 year lifespan, and matching Ultima Online's 100K would've made it a success. ~500K was a huge (and unanticipated) success. Today, costs have increased such that similar numbers aren't adequate anymore. You're not going to get the accountants out of it until you figure out a way to get the cost of video game development back under control.
Hence why mobile games are so common--they're cheap. You don't need millions of sales, and if you make one that flops it won't bankrupt your studio.
Danth