Predicting 2010
Posted by Rockjaw in MMO-related on January 3rd, 2010
That’s Twenty-Ten to you soldier. (Still finding it hard myself.)
Well, a year to the day since I made some outlandish predictions for Twenty-Zero-Nine, here I am back to make a fool of myself for 2010. I’m a year older, a year wiser (ish) and probably going to be a mite more cautious, especially after what I’ve seen this year.
Let’s dive in though, see what the scrying pool has to tell us.
One caveat: being currently employed as I am, and wanting to stay that way, I won’t be ‘predicting’ anything to do with Trion World Network (my employers until October this year) or Gazillion Entertainment (my current employers). So no predictions for (deep breath) Heroes of Telara or any other Trion game in production, or Jumpgate: Evolution, LEGO Universe or anything else Gazillion has in the works which we haven’t told anyone about yet…! Sorry ’bout that, but I reckon you understand.
Known MMOGs
World of WarCraft’s latest expansion, Cataclysm, will launch in September, or very close to that (last week of August/first week of October). Backed by a huge global marketing campaign (TV adverts, etc etc) Activision-Blizzard will attempt to convert the last few humans living in a cave on the moon into active players by pushing – hard – the fact that the game is now easier to get into than ever. It’ll be a massive, towering hit at launch, breaking the current (US, NPD-data) records for fastest selling PC game. A month after launch, everyone who’s played for more than a year will find something to complain about.
Star Wars: The Old Republic will launch in Q4 as well, probably about two months after Cataclysm (say, November). EA’s marketing machine will be in full effect from E3 onwards, pulling out all the stops to get as many people into the Beta as possible, which everyone will call the ‘most polished since WoW’. Bloggers will spend endless amounts of words talking about whether SWTOR will topple WoW; of course it won’t, but it’ll launch huge, falling just shy of Cataclysm’s newly-established record for fastest-selling PC game. Naturally, we won’t hear a thing about subscriber numbers until EA’s first financial report in 2011… so I can neatly dodge predicting them. (Although I will say, they’ll be less than WoW’s…!)
Star Trek Online will launch on time in February, and will get plenty of early traction from Trekkers who’ve spent many a long year waiting for a chance to indulge their inner captain. Think 250K box sales in the US alone… but a month after launch, despite Cryptic/Atari keeping very quiet about the actual numbers, the retained subscribers will be less than 100K. We’ll all be guessing about this though. Reviews will be in the fair-to-good range, depending on the level of Trek-love the reviewer has.
APB will launch on time, with a big marketing push from EA. It’ll start strongly but will quickly be derided by ‘hardcore’ MMOGers as just being ‘CounterStrike with better customisation’. Realtime Worlds will promise a lot of exciting stuff post-ship, and will probably get a chance to do it, as their initial numbers (customers? subscribers?) will be decent. Talk of a 360 port will be mostly drowned out by whoops of joy from those of us already playing Crackdown 2 / MAG.
DC Universe Online won’t launch this year, but it’ll spend another summer doing the comic book convention circuit. I have to hope it’ll be in some form of Beta by the end of the year. Surely. Said Beta will be PC-only though, leading many to predict it’s never going to ship on PS3.
City of Heroes will launch Going Rogue, which will be generally well accepted, and give a small shot in the arm to the game’s subscriber base – undermining Champions Online a little in the process.
Guild Wars 2 will be demonstrated to press, behind closed doors, at E3. The previews are strong, mostly based on graphics and a few demonstrable features, but press are unsure if they’ll let it be called a ‘proper’ MMOG. The game will be playable at PAX in Q4, and the first public ‘preview event’ dates will be announced for 2011.
Aion will continue to suffer from bots and gold farming galore, although NCwest will try their best to make their finger-in-the-dam approach to controlling them look tough. The actual reason the bots and gold farming exists – the massive in-game grind – won’t go anywhere. NCsoft will continue to make enough money from Aion in Korea to keep it afloat elsewhere.
Unknown MMOGs
Blizzard will continue to not announce their next MMOG project. They’ll be too busy launching StarCraft 2, Cataclysm and pretending that Diablo III is ‘coming soon’.
I think it’s put-up or shut-up time for 38 Studios, Red 5 and Carbine Studios. All three of them should really be taking the wrappers off something this year. Having said that, if somehow all three have gotten funding for what we (read: marketing people and journos) like to call a ‘triple A’ MMOG, then it’s quite possible they’re on a 3-5 year development schedule. If that’s the case… then assume they’ll stay quiet for a while longer. (Still, it’s got to be getting pretty close to announcement time. Takes time to build a big community to get back that big funding.)
What else; oh yeah, SOE will announce a new game based on the Free Realms ‘engine’ but with a known IP. (Thus helping them earn back some of the big development costs on Free Realms.)
Me, personally?
All I’m going to say about me to finish, is that I hope 2010 is a slightly more quiet year than 2009.
See you in 362 days to find out if I’m right!
Scoring 2009
Posted by Rockjaw in MMO-related, Personal on December 31st, 2009
I guess one of the advantages of not going out on New Year’s Eve is that you get a chance to write that year-specific blog post… and no, it’s not 2010 yet, at least not by my watch!
Back in January I threw out a few predictions for the year. I’m sure if I could open a hole in time, stick my head through and say to my almost-a-year-younger self “By the time you look back at this post, you’ll be living in the US, in a job you don’t even know exists yet – oh and most of your predictions will be wrong…” Well I’d probably be half-surprised.
Let’s score me then – feel free to refresh your memory with the original post, although the important stuff is here anyway.
A million, billion, Gazillion (ahem) possibilities
Posted by Rockjaw in Jobsworth, MMO-related, Personal on October 16th, 2009
Today was my last official day working for Trion World Network. On Monday, I start a new job as Community Director for Gazillion Entertainment.
Yes, that Gazillion Entertainment; the company I called ‘the new 800lb gorilla‘ when they de-cloaked back in March, and who are working on a variety of MMOGs, including two based on Marvel Comics.
Not so surprised now, are ya?
Yes, I’ll admit that when Gazillion’s acquisition of the Marvel licence was announced, my interest was very definitely piqued, if that wasn’t obvious. What really got me intrigued was that they had acquired NetDevil, a development team who I’ve been a fan of since we worked together on Auto Assault. I made some enquiries, heard some pleasing noises, and six months later… here we are.
You might think that I’ve spent the last six months scheming to extract myself from Trion, but that’s absolutely not true. In fact, I’ve had a blast over there, and I’m genuinely sad that I’m leaving. The development teams behind Heroes of Telara and the Syfy-MMO(Action)RPG are packed full of great people who I’m going to miss and in the case of the Syfy crew, now don’t get to work with – boo! Both games are looking great, and unfortunately I now won’t be able to help them across the finish line. Don’t think I’m forgetting the MMORTS in production with Petroglyph Games, either; a trip to Las Vegas earlier this year convinced me that they are going to unleash something that’ll shake up the genre. I still believe everything I said about Trion back when I announced I was working there, however… when opportunity knocks, you don’t just sit back in your easy chair.
Gazillion has got a stellar line-up of games coming, including some I know are going to surprise a lot of people, and my new role allows me to work on all of them, as well as tasking me to direct community strategies for the entire company. Once offered, I couldn’t turn that down, even if it meant leaving behind new friends and some great looking games at Trion.
Weirdly – at least for me – this means that I’m back to full-on secrecy mode. I thought Trion had a lot of secrets, but even after signing on with Gazillion, I still don’t know about everything they’re developing! Roll on Monday….
It’s been a crazy couple of weeks and I’m sure it’ll be a crazy couple of months ahead, but I’m very excited about it; perhaps even ’stoked’ or ‘psyched’ if we’re being American. Here was me thinking I was done with big, tumultuous changes in my life. I guess all I can do is strap in and enjoy the ride!
On me hols
Posted by Rockjaw in Personal, Weird self portraits on October 3rd, 2009
We’re in Raleigh, North Carolina at the moment, enjoying the sun (here, more welcome gift than daily delivery), relaxing in the great outdoors, and catching up on our reading. Whenever I read a lot I get the urge to write, so here I am.
Life progresses apace in the Land of the Free, and the ‘dark days’ of early 2009 seem a long, long way behind me now. Not necessarily for the better. While I certainly prefer the daily stability of going to a job and being steadily employed, I miss a lot of people back in the UK, and the support network I had around me then which I’ll admit, I took for granted. That’s probably because it didn’t feel like a support network at the time, but the best ones don’t. More like an invisible hand holding you steady.
Now, life is a daily high-wire act, and although I feel confident in my abilities as… umm… a high-wire act, that doesn’t mean it’s any less scary to perform. To complete the metaphor, you have to pay attention to what you’re doing, otherwise it’s a long, long way to fall.
To all of you back in Blighty, then, I miss you more than I probably expected, although I won’t be running back any time soon. I’m not one to give up that easily, and although it’s tough, we’re going to soldier on. What I will say is that even if I haven’t been in touch recently, that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought of you, and doesn’t mean that I don’t want to stay in touch. I’ve just been busy.
With what? Well, mostly the banalities of moving your life halfway across the world, setting up a new place to live and assimilating yourself into society. It’s pretty much all done now, from the Social Security Number to the California Driver’s Licence (License, sorry). I’ve even availed myself of the American Healthcare system and found it to be very helpful, but then again it should be considering what I’m paying for it.
The day job has been good to me, with a few trips (Germany, Las Vegas, Austin) to keep me busy, and other stuff besides. We’re still at a relatively early stage with things, so I can’t spill too many beans here, but one day we will.
With that, I seem to run out of things to says, so I’ll leave you for now. Just know I’m probably thinking about ya. Talk soon.
Tagline is back, baby.
Posted by Rockjaw in Links of Others, Personal on September 7th, 2009
On the off-chance that people who check in here don’t stalk me on Twitter or similar, I wanted to mention that Tagline, the on-again, off-again movie podcast that I do with my brother Alistair, is back ‘on the air’.
We’ve recorded two episodes recently (#28 and #29) which are both online now, and actually just did show #30 this evening, which will be online later this week.
In case you’ve never heard it, it’s 30-minutes or so (when we run to time) about movies, which we both know far too much about. That is, when we don’t forget names of movies, actors, actresses, directors, plots… ahem. We try to be funny. Perhaps that was an example of humour?
Anyway, take a listen if you like. I’m also still guesting on John’s Limited Edition podcast, which has a new format now, so feel free to check that out too. Oh and feel free to let me know your thoughts on either.
You said what?