30 Million down the toilet
by Alphaville Herald on 09/10/04 at 7:46 pm
Forbes.com has a very interesting article on the success of City of Heros, but along the way it drops this little nugget:
“Cryptic thereby defies a troubling trend: Internet games, first ballyhooed as the next big thing, have struggled. Electronic Arts dropped perhaps $30 million (EA won’t confirm it) building, marketing and supporting Sims Online, but it drew at most 80,000 users, and the fad has faded. Users said Sims, with no monsters and no fighting, was a bore.”
Terra Nova has a discussion of the article here.
trailblazer
Oct 9th, 2004
TSO failed because EA tried to make a online game based on a game that was pretty much built to be single player only, the whole fun in The Sims was building and creating homes, downtowns etc, and also making all kinds of diverse sim familes to interact with each other.
EA basically took the offline Sims, ported it over to a online game, didn’t even throw in all the objects from the offline version (which till this day baffles me), they tried to make it into a game by throwing in objects to make money, and having decaying skills so you would have to constantly skill to make simoleans to buy things to furnish your house that was way overpriced.
They basically left out the best thing that made The Sims the top selling computer game, creativity, when people joined this game they didnt want to roomie with other sims or play pizza for months just to afford a toilet, they wanted to buy a lot and create, just like in the offline version, so the appeal was lost instantly.
Well unless you wanted a big chat room with some nice avatars, and some furniture, basically Yahoo meets The Sims, then you would love it.
Also why would you make a new online game, that would costs 50 bucks on release, and it be nothing more than a exact copy of the offline version which was already two years old? No wonder people skipped it, hmm lets see, pay $50 for a game I already HAVE and with MORE STUFF IN IT, or choose a mmog that has 3d worlds and tons of new cool things to do?..hmmm Big Decision there.
EA should have done just what Civilization did, come out with a expansion pack that had multiplayer built in you play for free, so people could do what they wanted, show of their houses and chat.
RB
Oct 9th, 2004
Yeah TSO is a rotten joke. It’s disgusting. and EA will NEVER be forgiven for running TSO into the ground. cheap bastards, ANYONE could make such a ginormous brand an online succes, but oh no, EA can’t do shit can they? Electronic Ass is a giant fuck up when it comes to ANY online games. Barring UO which has the extremely old proven formula, hence it’s fairly good success. TSO will be the 4th or 5th HORRIBLE FAILURE of an MMORPG that EA has produced when it closes early next year.
I spit on EA’s shoes and walk off mortified by thier behaviour. they only get away with it because the online division makes up less than 5% of total revenue. so they can EXPERIMENT at will and screw people around as usual. EA is a very bad corporate citizen.
*drives up to EA HQ and unloads a very large 600 pound granite statue of a middle finger gesture on the lawn outside the front door. drives off in a hurry*
- RB
p.s i agree with everything trailblazer said
RB
Oct 9th, 2004
oh yeah, forgot to add COH is awesome and i can’t wait to join up myself.
And that article was very good reading. Anything EA tends to make me go off, lol. back to the point of this report tho. COH being a super smash hit.
- RB
Cocoanut
Oct 10th, 2004
OK, RB, but why don’t you tell us how you really feel? lol
I agree with Trailblazer.
coco
Mr. Simoleans
Oct 11th, 2004
I agree that tso was a huge failure, it could have been great, but EA ruinied it. As for coh, I play it and its 100 times better than tso. The only good thing about tso is its profitable.
urizenus
Oct 11th, 2004
How come there is no money in CoH?
RB
Oct 12th, 2004
When you have super powers you don’t need to buy anthing Uri. lol.
You can earn “influence” tho through your actions and crime fighting. I believe this “influence” can be used to access various power ups for your character. This “influence” can be given to other players and is thus sold like many other “currencies” .
Ask Mick
he plays COH.
- RB
dr_leviathan
Oct 12th, 2004
I heard that EA’s SOL advertisement budget alone was about $20M. However, they sold a lot of boxes and some subscriptions, so they made some of it back. Not quite down the toilet.
Simon
Oct 12th, 2004
Last week’s Time magazine said somthing about a online game thats like SL called “Habbo Hotel”, well thats not the Important part, but what is is when they said that online games have been around for a while, EA’s Sims Online “Which has so far been a flop”. the article is at http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1101041011-709014,00.html
but you need to pay to see the whole thing, also if you search for “Sims Online” there you get somthing else too.
Mafioso
Oct 12th, 2004
habbo hotel is ridiculously shitty. its like a rip off of Palace. only palace has vintage appeal, habbo hotel is simply a bunch of 15 yr olds in search of a cyber partner.
and habbo hotel is much more like sims than sl.
urizenus
Oct 13th, 2004
shitty as it is (and I agree that it is), it has at least twice as many subscribers as tso.
http://www.habbohotel.co.uk/habbo/en/