I currently have 300+ TRILLION, 99% of which is all from ONE MMO.
As soon as you get one good MMO, you can get into a routine of doing your own conventions, and releasing expansions. My MMO has sold multiple billions of copies and it was rated a 6 average, most of the expansions have been around a 6 too (I didn’t focus on 3D when I should’ve and got behind the competition).
It seems silly to have to purposefully kill my MMO’s to not get a massive amount of money. The game was challenging up until I unlocked the ability to make MMO’s and then that was it.
I’m sure others will have found the same, unless I was just weirdly lucky?
The games seems to treat MMO expansions as totally new releases (a la Sequels), and grades them accordingly, rather than tracking how many expansions you have already released.
Perhaps the fans are getting tired of stretching out this MMO with expansions? Nope, every new expansion jumps the game right back up into the stratosphere.
Good to hear, everything else has been awesome so far. I just started missing the challenge of the game when my MMO made me the richest man alive!
My only other concern is that if you get behind in research, all of your games fail and make it rather difficult to get back in line with the competition. If that’s intended, then it’s fine, but I think without my masses of money I’d have been bankrupt due to my negligence of 3D early on.
Will you guys ever cap MMO sales with console sales? I rarely, if ever, hit this problem with non-MMO’s, but I have almost every time with them.
What I mean is, if I release my own console, even with the most market share, I tend to hit ~8 million units sold (which seems a tad bit low, but I digress). When I release my own MMO, I’ve doubled, tripled, even quadrupled those figures in sales. Which seems odd, since it’d mean everyone who owns the system would have to have several accounts and copies for me to hit that figure.
It seems like if I’ve sold 8 million systems, then that should be the highest I’ll ever sell with a game.
I think the focus on re-enacting the last 30 years makes it extremely important to keep up with research.
The masses don’t want to see a text based game 30 years down the line!
This is weird, i have the total opposite experience with MMO’s ingame.
Maybe i was not doing something right i had 3 MMO’s
The first one got a 5.5, not good, but it was running. I tried to “fix” it by creating an expansion pack for it, since you can only create expansion packs for MMO’s i wanted to give it a try. The Expansion (seemed like it was threatened as a new game, or more like, replaced the old game) got a 7 so it was an improvement. But it was not a wise move to make the expansion. The Maintaince costs went up as more users where getting it and since the game got “Re-hyped” it would be bad to cut off the servers right away. The Maintaince costs where insane eventually i would lose 30M per week on an 750M budget. And since ingame the time flows very fast (too fast imo) your money wil slink fast. Eventually when i got below 150M i decided to cut off the servers.
The other 2 where heading into the same, didnt create expansion packs for them, but i made more losses than profit on all 3 MMO’s i tried.
The early 3D graphics suck compare to the 2D you will have around. You need to skill up on them if you hope to have the nice 3D that will sell best later on. Remember the early 3D games were crap and you had beautiful 2D games around? That’s the way it was back then. Still the early pioneers kept at it and then wham, 2D was no longer cool.
Well, to be honest I think that the whole point of MMOs right now is to get them late in the game, like 20-25th year. Then you have time to do 1 MMO along with 2-3 expansions.
Get the calc:
10 months to make an engine
10 months to make an AAA game
or 6 months to make a large game
= 2 years in the void.
In the end, by the time you create your first MMO it will not generate that way much money, as it will in 10-year run. The point of MMO now is (i guess) for you to be able to make a console (100M investment + 10 months 3M = 130M total). That’s waaaaayyyy too much money to get before year 30 without the MMO.
I do however agree to cap the MMO revenues in the long run.
Will try it on my 3rd run of the game again, let’s see what happens. Didn’t get console by Y30 in both of the runs so far.
Awesome game!
oh, p.s.: didn’t buy it yet; going to next week once I get money in the account… You know that last week before salary comes, right? Voted on steam though.
To get the Lab you need a Design Expert (700 Design). Then research Internet Opportunities and then MMO should be unlocked for research. After that you can add the MMO-Feature to a new Engine and create a MMO.
I created an MMO which was a hit on launch. I went from 500m in the bank to 300+trillion. As you say al you have to do is just keep on bringing out your own conventions every time the Cool Down is over and you just get an insane surge in the revenue from the MMO. The other side affect I noticed was that my console sales were sky rocketing as well. My 2nd gen console has a 15% market share and it’s growing.
To sum up in Year 100 all my devs have 900 Game Design & Technology. I have 4000 Research points (nothing left to research) and as mentioned 3,000,000+M in the bank.
Thanks for taking a swing at MMOs with a nerfbat. Next up, could you please bash the hell out of IRL MMOs with a nerfbat? Thanks. Make sure you film and youtube it too.
The other problem with MMOs is that they don’t match console sales at all, I’ve sold 11.1 million consoles yet at the same time I’ve sold 725 quadrillion copies of the game. Unless each person actually bought 65 billion copies, I think the numbers are a bit off.
with expansions you could have a % of players who own the main game buy the expansion bassed on raiting and have new players who buy the expansion also buy the orgional game.
Will there come an update to stop the Game Servers? To stop the MMO Support for a MMO? I have the problem that i cant stop makin expansion packs cause i will go bankrupt because of high cost to keep it online an supportet.
Will be great to have the option to stop support for the MMO
I actually don’t mind that MMOs make stupid amounts of money. Its kind of like winning the game. You can’t easily get to MMO tech and scales without being successful with everything else. And yes, having your own convention is a great way to keep those games profitable, but that’s the point of investing research, time and money into them… right?
Voted on steam though.