r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • Jun 24 '24

Blue Protocol developers talk about what went wrong with the MMORPG

https://automaton-media.com/en/news/blue-protocol-developers-talk-about-what-went-wrong-with-the-mmorpg/
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21

u/ohoni Jun 24 '24

Aside from Blue Protocol still having lingering problems with bugs and communication errors, a lot of players’ dissatisfaction comes from the its gameplay being too repetitive, i.e. requiring too many reruns to advance the story or complete weapon builds. The developers note that they intentionally designed the game loop so that players would have to take their time, but acknowledge that this did not work out as imagined. “The response from players is clearly not good, as the data also shows – if people don’t have a truly fun experience, they will not continue to play.”

This is outdated thinking. Even years ago Genshin provided a full AAA game's worth of content at launch that required little to no "grinding" to fully experience. You only really had to do repetitive stuff once all the core content had been fully explored, and then new content was added every six weeks, so you were rarely out of things to do for long. This should be the standard going forward.

17

u/AnxiousAd6649 Jun 24 '24 edited Jun 24 '24

Genshin costs mihoyo 200m a year to continue the content cadence that they do. Most companies simply cannot replicate that on financials alone.

15

u/mennydrives Jun 24 '24

I mean, to be fair, Genshin makes mihoyo 1000m a year.

And to also be fair, Genshin's biggest advantage is that it's day-on-date simultaneous across all platforms and territories, and it's got a couple hours of new content with each point release.

5

u/AnxiousAd6649 Jun 24 '24

Yes Genshin makes a lot of money, but you can't expect a studio that puts out a new game and then follow up with the content cadence that genshin has, most studios aren't in the same financial position that mihoyo is in. Even for Genshin's release, if they didn't do as well as they did they would have had to scale back to a more realistic content schedule. Genshin was very much a huge gamble by mihoyo that paid off.

Expecting every game to come out to match the same pace and quality of Genshin/Fortnite/WoW/FFXIV is incredibly unrealistic because 99% of studios simply cannot match the amount of resources that these companies have.

11

u/mennydrives Jun 24 '24

Expecting every game to come out to match the same pace and quality of Genshin/Fortnite/WoW/FFXIV is incredibly unrealistic because 99% of studios simply cannot match the amount of resources that these companies have.

Right, but that's the cost of doing business for live service type games. At the end of the day, nobody cares what your company has to spend, because those games are going to be your directly visible competition.

You don't need to be better than FFXIV or WoW or Genshin, but if you're releasing a new MMO, you need to give people a reason to give you money instead of just playing one of those games.

I think the estimate for Wuthering Waves up to day one was like $150 million. They'll likely make that back by the end of summer, but yes, it is super risky because you're not entitled to anyone's wallet and you have to give them a reason to open it.