Add new comment

Churn isn't a feature, but it isn't a standard of quality either. It's simply an inevitability. Look at EVE Online, which follows all your theories of producing one MMO and sticking with it, pouring resources into that one game instead of diluting them throughout many projects. Even with that mentality, they announced not long ago that the average EVE player subscribes for 7 months before they cancel their account. That's actually LESS than the industry standard of 10 months. Even the average subscriber to a game like WoW, with no shortage of resources and no real competitors, sticks around for a maximum of around 12 months in my experience. Churn is just unavoidable, because nobody wants to sign their life away to one game.

Given that fact, what is the publisher supposed to do? Be happy they're losing their players, or offer some sort of free trial to other games in their portfolio? I think it's a no-brainer.

As for the industry in general producing tons of MMOs instead of only a handful of giants, I think it's possible to be a good thing. Just look at the Chinese MMO scene, where there's an entire marketing strategy of releasing small, deliberately simplistic MMOs to fill the 6 month gap between the major MMORPGs released by the big studios. They capitalise on the inevitable churn of other games, and they plan their whole game around catching the players who fall through the cracks. There's no real reason that I can see why that same model wouldn't work in the West, it's just that the developers/publishers haven't quite caught up yet. It's still the standard logic to create a huge MMORPG that does everything Everquest and WoW do, and spend 20 million dollars and 3 years to do it. What they could do instead, is create 2 MMOs in the same amount of time which focus on different aspects and do them extremely well, and simply embrace the fact that they'll be a "fall back" MMO for players leaving WoW or EQ2. Like I say, it really works in China, and I think it'll be the future model in the West too.