MischiefSC, on 19 August 2018 - 08:29 PM, said:
A downtrend for one quarter over 8 years is nothing. It's actually incredible that it's had 8 solid years as a niche game. The reality is that for an indie self-published game MWO is a huge success story and the fact that MW5 is made and getting released is also pretty incredible. It's winning the lotto odds to pull off. I'm critical of a lot of things but from the perspective of someone who works in analytics and who spent many long years in the gaming industry MWO is a successful game. It missed the opportunity to become a breakout world hit but so do 99.99999% of games. it's run for almost a decade and is still turning enough of a profit to help fund the development of a newer game in a new engine.
Huge? Did you notice the other three games I placed on the chart are also F2P indie games with a brand new IP?
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Steam has 26,553 total registered games right now. MWO fits on a very short list of games that have lasted 8 years and is only multiplayer. The IP is a really, really resilient one. It's lasted 30 years and still makes sales across all platforms from games to minis to tabletop to hardcopy books. You'd struggle to put 10 names in that category. If the IP had ended up in the hands of, say, Blizzard instead of Microsoft it would be a household name.
I can also see indie games that in a shorter time or so has become massively successful without a big publisher or IP backing. Take for instance DoTA 2 and PUBG. For an IP with a glorious past like Mechwarrior, we should not have a low goalpost comparing MWO to the many low end crappy games.
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It's not about having missed greatness, it's that it had near-misses largely because of mishandling. Movie, cartoon, over 100 novels just in english (there's like 30+ that are only in German as an example), it's got a long list of successes. The IP is a powerhouse. It just ended up with the digital media in bad hands and some poor business decisions about its media opportunities.
In the right hands the IP could blow up in a big way.
The paper print of novels is gone since MW Dark Age closed. That game alone would have made as much money as a successful mobile gacha game today. Today, you only have the literature in ebook form. The movie and cartoons are horrible and would constitute damage to the IP. A much smaller IP like Heavy Gear had a much better cartoon.
The emphasis for Germany is a bit overrated, and there is probably more players from Russia on MWO. I also think the lack of marketing on East and West Europe was a big mistake. A further big mistake was the lack of marketing on Japan, South Korea and the general Southeast Asian market where you have nation-size loads of players who grew up on anime mecha but where Battletech has zero presence. This is not even mentioning the Middle East and South American markets.
Too much emphasis on IP. In fact, North America and Europe may have the smallest mech interested players of all continents, and this has a lot to do in direct proportion with mech anime exposure, and as I said, the places with the highest mech related media exposure are the places Battletech has little to no presence at all.
My analysis on the rise and success of War Robots hinges on something MWO hadn't have and that is a bunch of highly competent devs. Whether the game will still succeed under new ownership and these team having left to create a whole new mech game (Battle of Titans) is another question. Another strong factor in the success of War Robots is that it was able to fill all these continental and regional sized gaps in the market --- the Asian, Middle East, Russian, Japanese, Korean, South American --- through internationalization and localization for different languages --- as well as through digital marketing. The game would hit you with players that have Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Cyrillic, Thai characters on their names, along with all the Filipino, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Brazilian, Mexican, and Indian clans galore. I have even seen players from Iran, Turkey and Qatar. This sheer sense of internationalization is something I have yet managed to see in any mech game throughout my life, much less from any Battletech and Mechwarrior game. A third factor is that the game is highly YouTube and Twitch friendly. MWO can be made YouTube and Twitch friendly but PGI lacks the concerted focus on community content support like Pixonic did, a model which they emulated from Wargaming. A fourth factor is that the mobile gaming is the biggest growth in gaming and possibly its very future. You really cannot beat over 300 million mobile devices added every year versus about 50 to 60 million PCs that is shrinking every year and a growing segment of these PCs are really Chromebooks.
The Battletech IP needs a boost. A new and competent developer team, a focus on global markets, a focus on YouTube and Twitch, and not the least, its about time to examine a Mechwarrior game on mobile, where the hardware resources are ripe for a quality 3D shooter, as well as strategy games where mobile is booming. For a mobile game, there would be more compromises for playability over lore than its needed for a PC version, but the idea for this game is bring maximum exposure to a vast audience that never heard of Battletech before and deliver a steady stream of income. A more lore friendly game can be developed for the PC or even consoles that could lure these players over if they wanted a more lore detailed game. Microsoft should not object to Mechwarrior games on iOS and Android, considering they got their own apps on these platforms.
Edited by Anjian, 20 August 2018 - 04:15 PM.
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