True Fantasy Live Online canned...

This is so wrong.... Those bastards.. I was SO looking foward to that game.. Honestly it was one of the reasons that drove me to purchase an X box in the 1st place.. Luckily I have other X live games to play, this is a HUGE let down in gaming today. They seriously dropped the ball bigtime. Looks like FFXI will be getting more of my attentions now. Damn this sucks.
 
This sucks. I was looking forward to TFLO being the first MMORPG on the XBox. Oh well, looks like I'll have to upgrade for WoW or EQ2 if they are good enough. I am looking forward to WOW more then anything.
 
that blows...That was supposed to be the xboxs answer to all the mmorpgs on other systems...Cancelling such a hyped title like that is bizzare.
 
Yeah that is weird. I don't pay any mind to console MMORPGs but this one looked like it would be worth a shot.
 
....well, now im really glad i got that PS2 not too long ago...2 games i was actually looking forward to are dead. great.
 
I can guess that either microsoft was a bit impatient, or Level 5 needed more time that they didnt want to grant. Its wierd because Level 5 made some kickass games....

Shite.
 
[quote name='Eclipse']I can guess that either microsoft was a bit impatient, or Level 5 needed more time that they didnt want to grant. Its wierd because Level 5 made some kickass games....

Shite.[/quote]

If Time was a factor, you really need to start questioning Rare...

This honestly makes no sense to me. Ive been part of LIVE for almost 2 years (including BETA) and this game was one of the few reason i didnt just cancel. To qoute Charlie Brown: ARGH!
 
Yeah it sucks... and for those that bought a PS2... I'm there with ya! Looks like I will be buying a HD and FFXI after all. But first I'm gonna wait till the price drops a bit... I got PSO for cheap and that will keep me company for a while.
 
TFLO looked kinda good. I expected a lot from it, considering how suprisingly great I found Dark Cloud 2 to be. But I probably wouldn't have bought it anyway...MMORPGs aren't quite my thing.
 
Damn, this was seriously one of my most anticipated games on the Xbox other than Halo 2 and Fable.

All the screens looked extremely promising, so I don't know what was going on.

Looks like I may be going back to playing EQOA.
 
Considering I don't remember seeing anything major from E3 this year I'm not shocked or surprised. Am I disappointed? To an extent, it would have been nice to have. However if they were planning on charging monthly for it they probably looked at the colossal failure of Everquest on the PS2 and figured they were going to lose their shirts on the deal.

MS made big bets with Blinx, Voodoo Vince, XSN, Brute Force and a number of other first party titles that were either mediocre to just plain sucked. They have to stem that trend if they ever want to have a credible first party presence. They can't keep coming out with niche fanboy driven titles. Hate to break it to you but the mainstream doesn't play MMORPG's.
 
But MMORPGs can be lucrative sources of cash. If you only have 10,000 players paying $10-$13 a month, that's $100K a month. Server upkeep and bandwidth won't eat up all of that money.

Actually, I wonder if this is another trend. MS sold off Asheron's Call and Asheron's Call 2 earlier this year, then they cancelled their in-house MMORPG, and now this.
 
They suck that the only reason i got my xbox... n now they r cancelling one for the game that i m looking forward 2... Damn them to HELL
 
If you're subscription driven you don't need to be mainstream, you just need to reach those who like the niche. EverQuest has been nicely profitable by continuing to get a chunk of cash from mostly the same group of people every months for several years. That revenue stream adds up to be much greater in net revenue than most single purchase games.

It's really a different kind of business that just happens to have a lot of elements in common with standalone RPGs. Consider the issue of minimum attach rate, that is the number of game sales that must eventually accompany a console sale to make the console profitable for the manufacturer. If somebody buys a PS2 and subscribes to EQOA for a year but buys no other games Sony can be in profits on that unit. The companies don't care if they make a their money from a bunch of games sold or a continuous stream from a single game's subscribers, just so long as the money comes.

EQOA was a failure largely due to Sony's years long delay to release their hard drive. The earliest demo I saw had a lot more of the PC EverQuest's feature set because it used an outboard hard drive in a early Japanese PS2. (You know, the ones with a PCMCIA Type III slot instead of a 3.5" drive slot.) Final Fantasy XI has much better parity between PC and PS2 versions thanks to the hard drive requirement and is a much more successful product.
 
[quote name='PittsburghAfterDark']Considering I don't remember seeing anything major from E3 this year I'm not shocked or surprised. Am I disappointed? To an extent, it would have been nice to have. However if they were planning on charging monthly for it they probably looked at the colossal failure of Everquest on the PS2 and figured they were going to lose their shirts on the deal.

MS made big bets with Blinx, Voodoo Vince, XSN, Brute Force and a number of other first party titles that were either mediocre to just plain sucked. They have to stem that trend if they ever want to have a credible first party presence. They can't keep coming out with niche fanboy driven titles. Hate to break it to you but the mainstream doesn't play MMORPG's.[/quote]

Not having it come out here wouldnt have been that big of a surprise, but having it cancelled in Japan was actually quite shocking. FYI, they also did one of the Dragon Warrior games over there, so on that cred alone it would have sold systems which MS REALLY needs over there. This is like valve cancelling HL2 now, except on a much smaller, personal level.
 
They can be lucrative sources of cash if they have 200,000+ regular users. $100,000 monthly isn't enough to run a good MMORPG. Your bandwidth bills are probably about a third of that if not more. The salaries you'd be paying to 20 full and part time DM's would eat up another $50-70k with benefits and payroll taxes. Creating new content is another massive investment running $50k+ a month. Oh and I never even touched on servers.

Plus with a mere 10,000 users a month you'd have to deal with a churn rate. The number of players that come/go, drop/join. If that number was 20% you're looking at huge swings in potential losses.

Xbox Live has been a very bold service however Live users are extremely trendy. Seemingly every Live enabled game becomes the flavor of the week. It's one thing to have PGR2, Crimson Skies or Splinter Cell have thousands of active users for a month or two and then have that number drop to a few hundred. If that happened to an MMORPG it would be a fiscal disaster and Xbox has had more than its fair share of seemingly top shelf projects fail to live up to expectations.
 
My 10,000 number was
a)completely made up for example and
b)extremely low.

I played AC for a long time. When I left earlier this year, they would have 8000-9000 players logged on pretty much all the time. I would estimate they had close to 80,000-100,000 players. AC was and still is the bottom of the MMORPG totem pole player-wise, yet the company behind it (Turbine) does pretty well.

You would not see a MMORPG have a huge drop in playerbase unless there is something very very wrong with the game, and it's not being addressed. MMORPGs are designed to be played for months, if not years, at a time, and will likewise attract players who will play that long. Yes, you'll have the few that come in for a month or so then leave, but that's taken into account by any realistic company.
 
"Xbox has had more than its fair share of seemingly top shelf projects fail to live up to expectations. " Thats because the games were crap. Style before substance. Everything i had seen/read for TFLO was the opposite.
 
I'm fully aware that your number of 10,000 was very low. However EQ has been up and running for what, 7 years now? It's taken it that long to reach 300-400k. That's out of an installed base the size of the PC market. The Xbox market is like 1/15th the size of the PC base.

I know about the philosophy of an MMORPG hooking you for a year or more. I had a major PSO addiction and it wasn't even really a MMO game. However when you add up how many of them there are between the 5-10 MMORPG's of note on the PC side you're dealing with a finite crowd. I doubt there are more than 2-3 million people in the U.S. that would be "good" players for this type of game. Of those gamers tons of them already have a game of choice.

Do you think you're going to lure a high level EQ, Galaxies, Baldur's Gate, DAOC or Mythica player to a new game easily? Do you think the average Xbox Live player that spends an average of 45 minutes online with a game into an MMORRPG player that will pay month after month? Not many people want to get online to have a virtua job making horse shoes 6 hours a night. I'm being absurd here to make a point.

MMORPG's are a niche market even in the market of video games. It takes a lot of "right" elements to make one a success. To make a right one for a console I think would be overwhelming. Hey, I'm not saying I like the choice, I'm saying I understand it.

EDIT: Wshakspear did you really feel the need to add "Thats because the games were crap." when I already said they were mediocre to just plain sucked? What did you add to this that wasn't already said? Thank you very much Captain Obvious.
 
Well, of course you have to make your numbers. Who suggested otherwise? Yes, there is ongoing expenses. That is to be expected in almost any business where the customer keeps sending you money long after they've paid for the physical component.

The comparison to flavor of the month conventional games isn't valid, though. The online popularity of those titles can be tracked alongside their package sales. They have an early burst of popularity when they're new and if they're popular settle down to a steady stream of sales with similarly smaller numbers seeking online opponents. What they lack is the openendedness and deep community of a good MMORPG.

Once in a while a new map may become available to reawaken interest but a MMORPG is a very different thing. The initial data set is typically enough to keep new subscribers for a better part of a year since its a long uphill climb before you have a character who has a hope a venturing anywhere near the borders of the starting map.

Frankly, I'd say the expenses you list are on the high side, especially for DMs. These ranks are often supplemented with players who are paid within the economy of the game and generate little or no real world expense. The actual EQ employees I've known in that role weren't making anywhere near that kind of money. Most of their work isn't any more complicated than the retiree guiding children across busy suburban streets. New content in downloads is a considerably lesser item. Most major expansions are released as new retail purchases (note the plethora of EQ packages) that mitigate both their expense and impose no bandwidth penalty.

These expenses pay for themselves quite quickly. If you start EQ today you'll pay only $20 bucks or so for a collection of modules that cost longtime players who bought them upon release hundreds of dollars. Once that initial production expense is met those module go down to $9.99 or go into low priced compilations, so new players see little of the cost but are offered that much larger of a world to entivce them into becoming subscribers.

The business model works fine. The trick, just like any proven business, is execution. Level 5 went wrong somewhere. The original creators of EQ are creating a new MMORPG which is intended to support a wide range of devices including cellphones, wireless PDAs, and XBOX. We can only wait and see if they produce.
 
I guess you could call it a niche market here, but it looks like a market MS won't have a peice of anymore. Also, it may be a niche market for us in the states, but this appears to have gotten the axe all over, which means no release for Japan and the rest of Asia. Places where MMORPGs are pretty huge not just the small market we have here. While I def. wanted a chance to play both games, I think it's a bad decision that will hurt MS overseas more than it will in America.
 
[quote name='PittsburghAfterDark']I'm fully aware that your number of 10,000 was very low. However EQ has been up and running for what, 7 years now? It's taken it that long to reach 300-400k. That's out of an installed base the size of the PC market. The Xbox market is like 1/15th the size of the PC base.

I know about the philosophy of an MMORPG hooking you for a year or more. I had a major PSO addiction and it wasn't even really a MMO game. However when you add up how many of them there are between the 5-10 MMORPG's of note on the PC side you're dealing with a finite crowd. I doubt there are more than 2-3 million people in the U.S. that would be "good" players for this type of game. Of those gamers tons of them already have a game of choice.

Do you think you're going to lure a high level EQ, Galaxies, Baldur's Gate, DAOC or Mythica player to a new game easily? Do you think the average Xbox Live player that spends an average of 45 minutes online with a game into an MMORRPG player that will pay month after month? Not many people want to get online to have a virtua job making horse shoes 6 hours a night. I'm being absurd here to make a point.

MMORPG's are a niche market even in the market of video games. It takes a lot of "right" elements to make one a success. To make a right one for a console I think would be overwhelming. Hey, I'm not saying I like the choice, I'm saying I understand it.

EDIT: Wshakspear did you really feel the need to add "Thats because the games were crap." when I already said they were mediocre to just plain sucked? What did you add to this that wasn't already said? Thank you very much Captain Obvious.[/quote]

Your welcome, Commander Stikup-Ass. The point was that in comparison to those mentioned games, this was a different breed. it was quality product with actual thought and care put behind it.
 
Another article said something like the press release stated the game was building up to offer nothing unique to the online Xbox market and thusly was cancelled. I could be wrong, but this was to be the xbox's first true MMORPG so wouldn't that be adding new flavors to the Xbox Live lineup?
 
[quote name='suprsaiyanMAX']Another article said something like the press release stated the game was building up to offer nothing unique to the online Xbox market and thusly was cancelled. I could be wrong, but this was to be the xbox's first true MMORPG so wouldn't that be adding new flavors to the Xbox Live lineup?[/quote]

I think the meaning is that while Xbox currently has no true MMORPG (PSO completely lacks the first M for Massively) it isn't enough to just have an Xbox entry. It has to stand out from the crowd to draw the needed numbers. While I haven['t been able to get interested I do know three people (two of whom were once deeply into Ultima Online) who I'd never known as console gamers who recently bought PS2 systems with the HDD add-on just so they could get into FF XI at a much lower cost of entry than the hardware requirements for EverCrack on the PC. They're happy with their old PCs that handle Quicken and web surfing but are inadequate for EQ. The entire PS2 w/HDD and $15 USB keyboard setup was considerably less costly than what it would have required to bring their machines up to snuff.

FF XI is drawing in some good numbers, and very importantly it's bringing in some people who might never have owned a PS2 because it offers such a lower cost of entry. This is one of the few places where a lot of Sony's PS2-as-home-computer hype is actually coming true, albeit with a big helping hand from Square-Enix where Sony's own MMORPG developer dropped the ball. The fact is that FF XI is holding up pretty well in comparison to PC-only games.

TFLO looked very promising and you'd think this was exactly the kind of thing to take good advantage of the Xbox feature set but none of that matters if the developers can't back up the demos with a real functional infrastructure. Level 5 apparently bit off more than they could chew. Happens all the time in the game business. The real pain comes from them dragging it out so long before the MS product manager pulled the plug. Not just because of the disappointment to interested gamers but also because other developers who might have pursued creating an XBL MMORPG shied away because a competitor was being heavily touted by the console maker, giving it a major marketing advantage over a third party entry.

Too bad Sony took over Verant. EQ on the Xbox could have been everything it failed to be on the PS2.
 
This is the biggest disappointment ever. This was one of the major things I was looking forward to on my XBOX. And I had many friends who were looking forward to this as well...I guess this will be one game we won't be playing online together.

Screw you Microsoft, I'm going to buy Final Fantasy XI for my ps2. Now there really is no reason for me to play Xbox live...and Sony is going to be getting my hard earned money instead. My Xbox is gonna be collecting alot of dust.
 
This is strange...I can see pulling the plug on the XSN titles because they sucked and were getting slaughtered by EA's and Sega's titles...but I always thought TFLO was supposed to be one of the XBox big guns. It's not equivalent to cancelling, say, a Halo 2...but it is equivalent to cancelling a Brute Force.

What's odd is I didn't hear much negative press on this one...although maybe that's because there wasn't much to play.

With this announcement I'm starting to think MS is just writing off Japan and forgetting about it in regards to trying to get the XBox popular there. Japan's gaming industry ain't doing that great anyway, it might not be worth the effort.


Disappointing that it was cancelled, but I honestly doubt that I would have paid the 10 bucks a month or whatever to play it.
 
[quote name='KaneRobot']Disappointing that it was cancelled, but I honestly doubt that I would have paid the 10 bucks a month or whatever to play it.[/quote]

Ditto. I would like to see xbox users have access to a mmorpg, but probably wouldn't play it myself.
 
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