[stormlord]

Although it's true that EQ was gaining subscribers until at some point between 2002-2005, it's evident that it wasn't gaining at the same rate. People fixate on whether EQ was gaining subscribers over the years and do the same for those periods where subscriptions were decreasing. What they miss is the RATE of gain or decrease. The RATE of new subscribers went down from the very first year to the present present time. In fact, the rate was negative many years ago. MMOCHART.com and a few other sources point to this. I consider the rate of gain more important than the gain itself. Why? Because EQ is a group-based game.

Why did it happen? Well, it's arithmetic. Games get old. Pick a game, any game, and it steadily loses its audience. This is true for mmorpgs and online games as well even though they tend to have a longer lifespan of patches. This tends to be true for anything that's old. It's not a difficult concept.

How? First of all, the game gets old and people get familiar with it. The first kiss steadily becomes a memory. What once was new and fresh becomes old news. It's like watching a lost love slowly age until they're skin and bones. It can be painful. It can be discouraging. It can turn you off. The newness factor brings incredible appeal to a game. People are drawn to it like they're drawn to new sensations. They will leave old things for new things just to experience something new. You can only do the same old thing for so long. Eventually, you get tired of it. A game can't be new forever.

Second of all, code also gets old and it's expensive to keep it up to date. There comes a point when it's more expensive to keep it up to date than it's to make entirely new code. The primary reason is you have to understand the old code before you can effectively change it. That's an extra step in the process that drives up costs. It's comparable to an old computer you might have. How many people do you know that still use the same components they used in 1992, but happen to have a semiconductor factory in their backyard so they can keep it up to date? While this isn't a perfect or ideal comparison, it might help to get across why it's so expensive to stay with the same old code. Another example I can think of is an old person. Trying to keep a 70 year old looking like a 20 year old is a lot more difficult than just making a new baby that will grow to be 20 years old. This example isn't perfect because we know how to MAKE computers but we don't know how to manufacture babies. The key is that you have to know everything about the 70 year old before you can make them look 20 again. You have to master it. This is the same with old code. You can't just replace it. You have to first master it. Then, and only then, can you make appropriate changes to keep it up to date.

The problems that associate with old code, generally, apply to content as well. And this is ignoring the fact that people get tired of old content even if you could keep it up to date with the latest polygon counts and gfx. So maintaining peoples interests in content is not easy, and it's only one part of the puzzle.

My attempt at trying to convey why old code becomes a burden might not be effective. Keep in mind I program as a hobby. I've used VC++, C, Visual Basic, assembly language, various scripting languages, etc. I even have a programming degree. I'm familiar with coding, but I don't think I can express perfectly how code gets old. All I can say is that it does. People do complete rewrites often. They do have libraries for reusing certain routines and groups of routines that don't change much, but there're big portions of code, whether you like it or not, that're always eternally going to change.

Lastly, don't forget that there're types of games. Some games have larger audiences than others. If we picked a game, any game, we could probably produce a popularity graph of how many people play on easy difficult, medium difficulty, hard difficulty, and insane difficulty. These variations in the game itself are smaller examples of the kind of variation you find in different games. Not all MMORPGS are the same. The one example I can think of is FREE REALMS. It's technically an MMORPG and boasts over 10 million accounts. It has by far more subscribers than most other mmorpgs, but it's also not the same type of mmorpg. It was primarily aimed at the pre-teen and teen market. Just go to their website and take a look. It's very clear even with a brief assessment. The point is that you can't easily compare EQ, EQ2, Matrix Online, WoW, SWG, and all of the other MMORPGS. They're each different and tend to attract different audiences. Some of them try to attract everyone, but as the saying goes, you can please everyone, but only some of the time!

I'd be a lot more hesitant than most to say that WOW or any of the other MMORPGS is why EQ lost subscribers. Someone who says this is just skipping over all of the possibilities to please their own expectations. The reality is that people leave for other games for a multitude of reasons. There's no single reason. I think a quote that fits well here is one Bill Walton said in a recent chat during halftime of the lakers vs celtics game. He said, "It's what you know after you know it all that matters most."