Any bets on them shutting down EQ1 and EQ2 next?
I don’t know, they need some source of revenue. Without EverQuest, what do they have? Can’t imagine Planetside bringing in much money.
I would doubt it, only because I think these are still making them quite a bit of money. EQ1 and EQ2 still have quite a bit that you want to pay subs for to be able to be competitive at and quite a few people still play them.
Landmark, though, I am quite disappointed in. I really enjoyed what I played of it early on when I threw down my $100, but I also thought that it was going to be put forward toward an honest effort of a future EQ game. With this I certainly lost all faith and trust in SoE and then Daybreak, and even all trust in any game developer due to this game. I have been in quite a few early access games that went bad, but this one still feels like the worst rip off of them all and has made me more jaded than ever for the future.
The ones that have shut down early prior to official launch or shortly after like Transformers Universe and that DC Heroes MOBA have refunded the founders packs. I guess that won’t happen here.
Is there anyone, anyone at all, in the MOBA/MMO space besides Blizzard that isn’t on the verge of bankruptcy? All the Chinese/Korean-owned studios (ArenaNet) are all in danger of being shut down by their Asian overlords.
Off the top of my head: Valve, Riot, CCP.
Riot’s owned by Chinese Tencent right?
I’m not so sure CCP is doing so well lately, heard its player base has diminished after the F2P switch.
Back when this initially came out, the computer I had at the time wouldn’t run it for some reason, bullet dodged. I already have enough animosity for They Break Games to dislike them even more, even though I wasn’t personally hit with it. Their entire MO seems to be to grab up old games, do something on the cheap to get the last round of nostalgia buyers, and then shut it down once they have gotten whatever rush of money they are going to get. As a business strategy, it’s probably pretty sound, but as a customer loyalty/mood move, it’s pretty horrible. I guess given who they are actually owned by, they couldn’t care less.
EQ did great for a while, when they were pumping out new ‘start over’ servers, but can’t imagine there are many still sticking with that. Those servers tend to be really full for about 2 months, and then very quickly die off. I’ll be sad to see EQ go, but at least there is an actual fan server that’s been up and running for a long time.
[quote=“KevinC, post:222, topic:74224”]
I don’t know, they need some source of revenue. Without EverQuest, what do they have? Can’t imagine Planetside bringing in much money.
[/quote]H1Z1: King of the Hill has turned into a cash cow for them, and recently made a Steam earnings list discussed in the following thread, landing at gold tier for revenue in 2016:
Its a real shame. I loved the idea of this game. Id love to see a full AAA title that had something like minecraft + traditional MMO. That could actually get me to play MMOs again, assuming they didn’t design it to be grindy as all hell.
You’re right, I completely forgot about that game.
Not surprising at all. Landmark had all the potential and none of the support it needed to become something really cool. I bought in the summer it was released to beta so my son could tinker around with it during summer break. I think they had a sale where the lowest tier of Founder was $20. I would say we got our $20 worth out of it that summer between the two of us logging in and mining/crafting/building random stuff. We were done with it long before they added combat and creatures and stuff, then when SOE dumped everything to Daybreak and announced the cancellation of EQN I knew Landmark was done. I can’t imagine there were more than a handful of people still playing Landmark.
Daybreak isn’t going anywhere though. They make good money off of H1Z1, EQ and EQ2. They also just signed on as “publisher” for LOTRO and DDO, which means they’re going to be earning a cut of any sales and subscriptions those games generate, though thankfully Standing Stone Games (ex Turbine employees) actually own and develop the games still, meaning the quality should remain high for those titles.
Wonder if Standing Stone could put LOTRO up on Patreon, rather them get 100% of the proceeds than the scum at Daybreak getting anything.
Wow, this was an interesting read. Basically details how EQNext and then Landmark were hamstrung from early on at SOE and later at Daybreak.
The most telling stat from the article, at peak prime times, Landmark has an average of 150 players logged in. One hundred and fifty. Given that it’s B2P ($10 for Johnny-Come-Lately, as much as $100 for those who got sold the long con by SOE), I can’t imagine it was making ANY money at this point. Another interesting number from the article, SOE made nearly $10 million from the sale of Founder’s Packs for Landmark/EQN.
Anyway, with that information in hand, it doesn’t seem like Landmark’s closing is anything more than a sound business decision long overdue, and isn’t going to lead to the closing of any other properties (EQ/EQ2/LOTRO/DDO/etc.) anytime soon.
100,000 people bought founders packs? Seriously? That’s shocking.
As I recall the packs came with access to EQ Next beta when it was to be released. When EQ Next was canceled before it got to beta people who bought the founders packs were in an uproar. I think most people bought founders because of the promise of getting into the beta.
For me, I was far more interested in the premise of Landmark than another typical MMO, especially at the time (Minecraft with a budget and real gameplay in a persistent world? Hell yea!).
It sounds like the project was pretty mismanaged, but I was very enthusiastic about the idea. It’s a shame it didn’t pan out.