Darkness has fallen on Caledonia and once powerful empires
have met their oblivion by no fault of their own.
Lord of Ultima is
dead, killed by a revenue model incompatible with its keeper.
Those looking for someone to blame need look no further than
Electronic Arts (EA.)
It appears that EA sees no value in what has been described
as "niche" gaming. "Niche"
in this case applies to gaming titles that weren't designed to leverage the
online cash cow that premium memberships and endless DLC offer in more recent
titles.
Lord of Ultima's
shutdown is just another casualty of the ongoing implosion of online gaming.
It's a growing trend following on the heels of a bomb dropped
by Gamespy
in April when they announced that their longtime gaming services would cease on
May 31st. Even if you've never heard of
them before, chances are you've used their services at one point. Gamespy provided the online middleware for
games on platforms from PC to Android.
More recently, EA announced it was dropping
online support for many popular older games on June 30th. A few notable examples include Crysis 2, Battlefield Vietnam and Need For Speed hot Pursuit 2.
Yes, most of the games getting the cut are a bit long in the tooth but a pattern's been developing . It wasn't so long ago that online gaming was a choice not a requirement. Multiplayer games only needed to involve as many people as you could gather at a LAN party and it didn't matter if your Internet connection was down.
As game development has moved from a few hotly anticipated
titles to annual installments of varying quality it seems it's less about the
game than the franchise it spawns.
Producing a sub-par game is irrelevant if you can prime the
hype pump with the promise of a seemingly never-ending stream of content.
For a price...
With that has come "always-on" requirements for
single player games, frequent server outages, half-baked triple-A titles and
increasing prices to cover "development costs" even as publishers
shut down their development studios by the dozens.
I guess all that bandwidth is expensive...
It's a model incompatible with games that are truly
"Free to Play" and in its wake has come an avalanche of titles that may
start out to be free to play but are almost always "Pay to Win."
Lord of Ultima was
somewhere in the middle. There were ever
more intrusive opportunities to purchase upgrades and buffs to improve the
experience but if you were willing to suffer a little more inconvenience than
your well heeled competition you could still do well.
That option runs contrary to a model dependent on the cash value
of players. After all, they're a discerning
bunch and won't tolerate banner ads and endless spam flooding the email
accounts they registered with.
They say nothing in life is free and it's a fair enough
cliche'. Servers and bandwidth aren't
free and the "Free to Play" model is built on the assumption that
dedicated players will gladly loosen the purse strings every once in awhile to
improve their experience.
But "once in awhile" isn't good enough anymore and
more often than not "Free to Play" isn't free at all.
The model has been perverted. The experience has become more about the store
page than the game itself leading to a score of me-too clones and one-offs
looking to cash in. Some are even
blatant about it but they're the exception not the rule.
The practice of "Pay to Win" frequently hides behind
the mask of "Free to Play" which is nothing less than "Bait and
Switch" and it's killing the gaming industry. It's bad faith and that's not a sustainable business
model.
Spend a little time reading the Wall Street Journal and you'll find out that companies often receive
a valuation based more on their "good will" than the products they
produce.
In that kind of scenario, EA's value is heading over a cliff...
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