The computer gaming industry has been evolving for many decades now.  I can remember when I was a kid and when the first home gaming consoles game out.  Pong was the first we had in our household followed by the Atari 2600 in all it’s 8 bit glory. Later on, we bought an Atari 520 ST and that was the beginning of the pursuit of more advanced home gaming.  Soon afterwards it became games on BBS systems, then the LAN parties, Diablo II and finally leading to the MMORPG world.

I wanted something different.  So, Star Wars Galaxies was next.  Yup, Atetsioshi Edeu on the Chilrastra server, that was me.  I had loads of fun, spent many hours playing to become a Master Ranger and a Master Rifleman.  I had loads of fun.  Yes, the game was incomplete and had it’s bugs, but I was willing to live with them as I had found something else.  I found an interesting community of people.  Being online and in game was just something to do while we chatted about almost everything.

Online life was good until NGE. I gave SWG three months and with most of my friends gone, I packed up Atet and called that quits.

Then enter into the scene EVE Online.  I played for over five years and used to run a successful related blog, recently I retired as you may have heard.  :P

So, where am I today?  Well, I still play online games, but the tried and true persistent world games like EVE Online and the soon to be killed off SWG just don’t appeal to me anymore.  World of Tanks has been a nice play for a few months now, it’s one of the few free to play games I will recommend.

The time investment in the persistent world MMORPG is just too high for me and with the recent trend toward a operating model of a subscription based game with an ‘micro transaction’ shops is just not appealing.  

Sure, everyone likes vanity items, but the pay to win model wrapped into a subscription game, that’s just insulting to anyone self respecting gamer.  I’m not going to pay more for a game that already has a monthly subscription and honestly, I don’t think I am alone in that thinking.

I can understand the trend towards this model and from a business perspective, it makes sense. Milk the cash cow while you can, but there comes a time when the udder will become empty and then your business will “udderly” fail.

It’s a fine line between making money and making too much money from your customers. You want to balance everything bewtween what your target audience can pay and what they are willing to pay. Time will only tell, but I think the online games industry has strayed into the unsustainable side of the line and they are all desperate to pull in as much cash as they can. If you stray too far, you end up pissing off your customers and they leave.

For a textbook example all you have to do is look at the recent EVE Online drama called “monoclegate”, the apology letter from CCP Games CEO Hilmar and the recently announced layoffs at CCP Games. CCP is learning the hard way that they should have listened to their customers advice from the past 4 years and focused on their core product.

SOE will forever be known as a textbook example of how not to realize a new product with an old name as they did with Star Wars Galaxies. CCP Games will forever be known as a textbook example of a small company that bit off more than they could handle and failed at fundamentally changing their monetization model on their core product.

I tell ya, if I was a business major, there is one hell of a paper to be written on the collective business practices of SOE and CCP. It would definitely make a great paper on how to NOT run your businesses!

See you out there!