Wargaming.net CEO claims that subscription model is dying – Video Games Update
Wargaming.net CEO, Victor Kislyi took a swipe at all the subscription based MMOs and said that the Free to Play model is slowly taking over retail and subscription based games.
Wargaming.net is a strategy game developer established since 1998 and has offices in Berlin and London. The studio is known for its Massive Assault series and Order of War which was published by Square Enix. Wargaming.net was the first western developer
to develop for Square Enix.
Currently the studio is supporting its Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) strategy games World of Tanks and World of Warplanes with a new game World of Battleships planned for release by 2013.
Kislyi claims that the game’s brand doesn’t matter anymore as he said, “You can have a huge sci-fi license with the biggest budget of any game, and what do you get? No success. It’s dying off. I think subscription tops the list of problems [with MMO development.].”
This does seem to be the general trend of the industry as almost none of the new MMOs have establish themselves enough after launch to sustain the subscription based model. Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic is a recent example as the game had a $500
million development budget and touted the Star Wars brand name yet player count is decreasing rapidly.
The game managed to sell over 2 million units at launch but reports say that the current user count is less than 60,000 and decreasing fast. The game was already announced to go free to play up until level 15 but chances are that it will be going fully free
to play with online micro-transactions just like every other MMO.
Kislyi said, “The gap between a successful and an unsuccessful MMO is very thin. Why? Because it’s social. Everyone talks to everyone else. Good news spreads very fast. The problem is when bad news, or when they’re suspicious of bad news, it spreads just
as fast.” This means that just one blunder during development can sink the whole game.
The evolution of MMOs from subscription based puts Wargaming.net at a very risky position as the Russian developer has two MMOs in the market with a third one coming out in 2013.
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