Why rise of the Hutt Cartel is a failure

Its like people saw it was for $10, and were told its on a planet called Makeb.
Some seemed to have assumed that it was going to be a years worth of content with lots of different planets

Every MMO before WoW favored group content. Every MMO since WoW favors solo content.

How many "classic" (in the sense of being profitable and long running) MMO's have launched since WoW and how many before? More importantly, the percentage of outright failures post-WoW is far higher than it was before.

I'm not saying solo content is bad or wrong. I'm just saying it's not in the best interests of the games or the genre to be solo-focused. Group focused games, by their very nature, hold the interest of players much longer than do solo ones.

The fact that it was ten dollars is inconsequential. The fact that it's so short would be inconsequential as well if it hadn't already taken a year and a half to develop it. Here's hoping they speed up development time or at least start work on something a little beefier.

The bolded part is where your ignorance of regional MMO mindset really shows.

The short of the long, is that Western gamers will not stick to a game that requires groups to advance in the game. At least, not enough of them to market, will do so.

Take Aion for example - when it launched, and the hype leading up to its launch, it was going to be the 'WoW killer', because it had everything WoW had and then some. Lots of great features. However, Aion was unlike other MMOs in that just about ALL endgame content (whether PvE or PvP) required a dedicated group (PUGs were possible but not likely). And do you know what happened to it? It bombed. 16 servers because 8 became 4. Then NCSoft revamped many elements to make it solo-friendly and went F2P, but it was too late, damage had been done & the population had moved on to other things. Today, probably half of Aion's playerbase are RMT/bots.

Same goes for WoW, to a lesser extent. Every expansion less and less folks are raiding, be it PUG or dedicated progression, even with the inclusion of LFR. The gamer's mindset is not the way it was 10 or so years ago (or even 5), and games that place too much importance on group requirements are not going to see much in terms of population.

These examples (there's lots more) only hold true for NA / Europe however. Korean, Japanese, Chinese gamers are a different kind of society, and the important of group play / teamwork means something entirely different in these regions, and thus the games / game elements that flop or do 'okay' at best in the west, are massive hits there in the east.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all about making things bigger, better, more fun, so on. But you're really talking our your rear with several of these points, a pattern you seem to repeat.

The bolded part is where your ignorance of regional MMO mindset really shows. The short of the long, is that Western gamers will not stick to a game that requires groups to advance in the game. At least, not enough of them to market, will do so.

There has not been any single blockbuster successful solo-centered MMO, besides WoW, ever.

What boggles my mind is why people are surprised.

The entire game can be played out in weeks and people expect some major infusion of content from its first mini-expansion?

Riiiighhht.

EQ and UO are still running. CoX ran nearly 10 years. Even Vanguard (the last really group-centered MMO) is still running.

In the "Western World"...

There has not been any single blockbuster successful solo-centered MMO, besides WoW, ever.

What many seem to refuse to acknowledge is that mainstream MMOs are now a mass-market entertainment , no longer a niche product for "hard core gaming nerds." As someone on the LotRO forums likes to say "Hard and frustrating do not make for good mass-market entertainment." There is a certain element of "hard and frustrating" regarding group content because it takes effort to coordinate a group to all play at the same time for the required length of time. That's one of the reasons I stopped playing DDO.


Define "blockbuster." LotRO is a successful solo-centered MMO. Of course you can wiggle the word "blockbuster" however you want to exclude every MMO but WoW.