Quote:
Originally Posted by Gloomlord
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Didn't they say the same thing about WoW back in the 2000s? That only a niche would play it and that it wouldn't be that successful?
These are just lies. Of course EverQuest was about getting drawing out subscriber money by any means necessary.
I mean, I'm playing this game regularly for the experience, but I have no qualms admitting a lot of this game is extremely dull and monotonous grinding that exists for the sole purpose of keeping people in the game longer.
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Nope, with WoW they knew they had a potential audience and definitely made design decisions around trying to substantially increase their already high projected subscribers.
There's literally no logical sense saying devs from 1999 lied when they said they had no idea EQ would be as popular as it was. it had literally never been done before in a true MMO fashion. Shit they didn't even have enough bandwidth for the number of subscribers they had at launch. UO had about 120k subscribers, and take this quote about the devs' expectations vs that from the PC Gamer article: "But EverQuest was a cutting-edge game that required a computer with a 3D graphics card, a somewhat novel piece of hardware in 1999. The team would be excited if it sold even a quarter as many copies."
As CSR we were privy to some of the ongoing internal discussions about potential game changes and not once in the early days of EQ did I ever hear something being done with the goal of increasing subscribers. As we've seen in the height of WoW days, the way to increase subscribers isn't to make the game more grueling like EQ (and make design changes mid-game that just make things way more annoying), it's to make it easier and more straight forward, fully soloable until end game, etc.
You're looking at all of this through the lens of 2023. In 1999, no one knew what kind of a cash cow MMOs could be. The monthly subscription was basically proposed primarily as an idea to offset server costs to SOE given how expensive it was to run an online game back then. Devs thought it would be a somewhat successful RPG with less than 100k subscribers. They just built the game they wanted to see at the time, not with "how do we keep subscribers grinding and paying"