Posts Tagged ‘battlefield’

EA Responds to Declining SWTOR Subscription Numbers

8 May 2012 | 25 Comments » | Mike

The first stage of grief is denial, which seems to be where EA is headed after it released its financial report yesterday revealing that subscription numbers for Star Wars: The Old Republic dropped 23.5% from its peak last quarter.

Active subscribers dropped from 1.7 million to 1.3 million, to which President of EA Labels, Frank Gibeau, responded saying this was due to casual gamers leaving the game.

We brought in a lot of users, and with a brand like Star Wars, it reaches out much past the hardcore MMO fan base into the broader market. And as the service evolves from here, what we’re seeing is that some of the initial casual customers have gone through a billing cycle and decided not to subscribe to the game.

Mr. Gibeau goes on to counter, saying that it’s core is actually growing,

the percentage of paying subscribers from our peak until now has actually gone up, and the folks that we have are as engaged as they were when they first bought the product.

Make no mistake, BioWare intends to grow subscribers.

I don’t believe that Gibeau mentioned to shareholders that EA gave every single player players with a level 50 character a free month of game-time only a few weeks ago. Hmm, I wonder if this 1.3 million number is at all deceptively inflated? I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the real number is already under 1 million.

Also mentioned during the conference call was that SWTOR was in EA’s top 10 franchises in terms of profitability, but was less profitable than the following franchises: Medal of Honor, Battlefield, FIFA, Madden, The Sims, and SimCity. However, it did beat Tiger Woods Golf. This places SWTOR somewhere between 7-9 on the list.

EA is doing what all companies do when they have bad news, put on a happy face and try to explain it away, but casual gamers? I won’t consider anyone that uses Xfire to be casual and from their stats, SWTOR is in serious decline.

Questing: The Horrors of War

22 March 2011 | 4 Comments » | iTZKooPA

There Solidkieron was. Just minding her own business. Flogging some random mob for a “kill 10 rats” quest while scanning the horizon for sparklies in the same area. The staff-wielding cleric had decimated the area of both when she spun around to find a disheveled house nearby. A little nameplate behind an innocent mound of dirt/roof refuse/barn debris. It’s crimson color
denoted an enemy, one that the damage-dealing healer needed to complete her mission. Off she trundled to ring another skull, to add another notch to her belt when that innocent mound came in to focus. And snapped her conscious mind to reality.

“You’re in a god-damned war. A war with death, decay and destruction. And it’s not only the deserving horrors of the Death Plane, heroes of the Defiant or oppressors of the Guardian that fall. The innocent bleed like any other. You’re looking at the proof.” Her mind lectured.

Visibly shaken, Solidkieron defended herself against the aggressor behind the “innocent” mound. She scurried around the corner after its defeat. Leaving the un-pilfered body to retch at the base of a tree.

War. War never changes. And you’re at war in Rift.

Lore Hound LivePlay: Watch Amatera Fail At Black Ops

9 November 2010 | No Comments » | Amatera

Call of Duty isn’t an actual MMORPG, but it might as well be one. I mean, the series was always popular, but it wasn’t until the inclusion of experience points and a leveling structure — traditional RPG elements —  that the franchise became the world’s premiere multiplayer experience. And, let’s face it, while there is no persistent world, there is a massive number of people playing the game at once. It fits the bill, even if I’m stretching the terminology just a little bit.

Just about a year ago, Modern Warfare 2 had a terrible, powerful hold on me. I was still playing World of Warcraft, but this was a way for me (and a few of my fellow officers) to blow off some steam after a bad raid night. In fact, I’d be checking my watch feverishly between every wipe or secretly hoping we wouldn’t have enough people on that night to actually do anything. For all of the game’s inherent problems — lack of dedicated servers, bugs, glitches, hacks, and general imbalance — it was a much-needed, twitchy, fast-paced alternative to the overthinking and babysitting required of a 25-man raid. The game eventually wore on me, though, and I switched to Battlefield: Bad Company 2 when that came out, but even that soured over time.

I swore to myself that I wouldn’t fall for the next Call of Duty game. Not only was the series’ second-string developer, Treyarch, having another go at it, but I just didn’t think I could put myself through the torture again. I kept myself in the dark, ignoring the game and its impending hype. Well, until a couple days ago, I read some well-informed impressions, and became hooked on the idea of playing all over again. Much of the multiplayer cheese had been addressed, Treyarch was bringing back their popular Zombie co-op mode from World at War, and to be honest, I kind of dug the Cold War theme.

So here I am again, trying to get my bearings and dealing with the launch day lag. As well as getting my ass kicked. I’ve got, oh, six hours to kill before my girlfriend comes home and so, I invite you to watch, chat about or (if you have the game) even join me for another Lore Hound LivePlay. All you have to do is click on the little window embedded below. It’ll be more exciting this time. I promise.

Battlefield Enters the F2P Market

5 November 2010 | 1 Comment » | Amatera

OK, so according to the title of the game, it’s actually Battlefield “Play4Free,“ but that’s nit-picking. It’s still a bit of an interesting revelation. We may not normally consider DICE’s seminal shooter much of an MMORPG, but if we’re lumping games like Global Agenda into the mix, it’s really not that far off from matching the classification. The Battlefield series has always focused on dynamic, large-scale battles, but the most recent ones have adopted an experience and level-based system, which seems to be lock-and-stock for the first/third-person-shooter ever since Modern Warfare became a breakout hit. Meeting new benchmarks naturally unlocks new equipment and new abilities for you to use in combat.

While lacking in a grindy single-player experience with loads of quests and story to unravel, to a PvP-minded MMO player, building up a soldier in Battlefield Bad Company 2, for instance, is not that big of a leap.

Now, to be technical, this is not the franchise’s first foray into the free-to-play market. That would be Battlefield Heroes, a comical and simplistic take on the formula meant primarily for younger players whose visual style takes liberal cues from Team Fortress 2, Nintendo’s Advance Wars, and Saturday morning action cartoons like G.I. Joe. And while you could argue that most shooters come with a free online mode (well, these days, it’s more like you’re getting the single-player gratis), it’s presumed in this case you won’t have to make that initial game purchase.

Battlefield P4F is taking the more traditional, semi-realistic tack that the series is known for, though the graphics seem to have been run through the stripper to remove that fine sheen of polish recent entries have been slathered with. I have a pretty beefy machine, and even I had trouble making Bad Company 2 run efficiently without really sacrificing some of the game’s visual splendor. The impetus for going completely free with a game would be to reach as big of an audience as possible, and that means making sure most of them can play it reliably.

This may also be explained by the fact that the predecessor it is most closely modeled upon is Battlefield 2, an entry in the series that is, let’s face it, a few years old at this point. I’m also presuming a lack of destructible terrain, which was introduced in Bad Company, but I suppose we’ll find out when the Closed Beta starts on November 16th.

That said, most of the series’ other hallmarks seem to have remained intact, including extensive use of vehicles (16 total) in battle and ticket-based, capture-the-point gameplay. The initial trailer, and more speculation, follows after the jump. Continue Reading