ArchAngelWC, on 17 May 2015 - 08:41 AM, said:
MPBT3025 didnt die because EA decided they couldnt make money...it died because MS
MS also killed Mechcommander with MechCommander 2 (and the decision by the lead MS rep to basically tell the Head League Admin (me) that all of us could fk ourselves the game was broken buy it or dont get patches...once it was dumped by MS tho...instantly fixed and had massive additions depending on mod(s)
MW3/4 were pretty cool particularly if you were in the right league
Now thank god for NBT4's rebuild and additions to MW4 cause that sustained a lot of us for many many years..
for Me I also had Neveron...which made a fortune and would still be around if the Admins were not greedy and lazy at the same time....
The game can be commercially viable and successful and Battletech...it has existed and it could be this game lol
They just need to have the balls to actually go down that road...and us as a community go with them...(or get back on the bus if that is the case)
EA's game died because EA couldn't make a profit, they didn't have enough people in the closed beta, which was actually very VERY open, to cover the cost of development if every single one of us in it paid them $50 plus a monthly fee, which was the plan. MS wasn't the reason, lack of a playerbase was, no money to be made.
MC2 died because it was a horrible game, sorry to beak that to you, but it was. Great intentions, started out looking good, but like so many MS products at that time, horrible implementation. Not enough people bought it to make patching and spending more money on it by MS worthwhile, that's called a free market economy, not enough people buy a product, said product goes the way of the Dodo. You even state that yourself, if enough of you had purchased more, MS would fix it, but you didn't, so...
MW3 and 4 were single player games, they had multiplayer addons and the leagues, which were all totally player run and the rules for each and every league were decided by whomever ran them. They were also freely mixing Clan and IS tech, even the planetary leagues, like NBT4, which I was in, allowed this once you started getting salvage, remember? You might remember SRM from NBT4, we were House Steiner, and we were the reason the league reset the entire season 2 months into it, and we didn't even bother to use Clan tech after taking entire Clans out of the game. Then again, MW4 maps didn't really give the Clans much chance to use their better Tech, and we beat them both via combat and tactics on the interstellar map, hard to field Mechs to fight with when your planet is cut off and you didn't bother to put forces ANYWHERE but the front line planets..silly Clanners!
The online leagues did NOT make the MW titles, they were something that let us continue playing the games long after they should have been left behind, mainly because there were no other BTech titles for us to play, mainly because they just weren't commercially viable as online games. They did well as single player titles, sorta, since MW2 outsold all of them, so MW3 and 4 weren't really successes, they just weren't the massive failures that Kesmai's MPBT 3025 on GEnie was, Solaris MPBT was and EA's MPBT 3025 was. Even on the Zone, MW3 and MW4 just didn't have enough players for MS to even consider keeping them going via their Messenger service like they did other games, and that says a LOT since many of the games they kept alive were free games that no one paid MS for ever. Then again, once you bought MW3 or 4, you weren't usually giving any more money to MS either, so... Simply put, not enough people bought MW3 and MW4 combined to make them profitable enough for MS to support them long term, long term being more than a few years btw. MWO has already been around longer than MW3 was played, and it's fast approaching MW4's lifespan. And, unlike either of those, it's still making money, so PGI seems to be doing something right.