It's launch day. Everyone's eagerly downloading and patching this new much hyped MMO; the company behind it marketed it as an “AAA” masterpiece and people are speculating that it's a WoW killer. The hype is real. But unfortunately, reality sinks in pretty quickly and people grow disappointed with their new game and move on to something else. This is a [...]
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Heavy Gear Assault is the upcoming resurrection of the Heavy Gear franchise's video game legacy. It is an online mech combat arena in which players fight with highly customizable gears in an eSports setting. I recently had a chance to sit down with Vince McMullin, the President and CEO of MekTek Studios (who are developing the title) and John Nguyen, Marketing [...]
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Most of us know that developing an MMORPG is lengthy and expensive endeavor, especially for Western companies. South Korean and Chinese companies on the other hand, seem to be able to develop these games on much tighter budgets, but even so, some of the most expensive games ever developed are MMORPGs. The reason MMOs cost so much to develop is [...]
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This week on the MMO Investor we look at Webzen - a South Korean developer and publisher of free to play MMORPGs world-wide. They're definitely a lesser known company compared to Nexon, which we looked at last week, but they're still pretty big! How big? Well, as of August 22, 2015, they were worth ~$800 million and they generated ~$61 [...]
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Some background info: I've been playing League of Legends since Season 1. I started playing ranked in Season 2 and ended the season with 3 accounts in the top 100 ladder (all ~2400 elo). Ended season 3 with all my accounts in Diamond 1. Played season 4 on one account and ended in Masters. I've helped friends improve in the [...]
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Flaming, trolling, and flat out harassment have been part of online gaming for as long as online gaming has existed. When the MMO genre was young, small, and largely filled with the D&D nerd elite, what we now consider toxic behavior was considered a normal part of the online experience. The largely male, tech savvy audience was either happy dishing [...]
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While most users don't spend any money in a game's cash shop, some do. How much is a free to play user worth? How much money does the average user spend on a free to play game? Well, that depends on the game! [singlepic id=31611 w=500 h=338 float=none] The chart above is quite interesting; it reveals that World of Tanks [...]
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Interviewer's notes: As we were playing the game at the time and there were long periods of random chatter and silence, I have attempted to condense the interview down to the most important parts. Some transitions won't make much sense but the important information is all there, intact, in the order it was in. Questions are primarily answered by Thomas [...]
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I remember when I first started playing free to play MMOs, I was super excited to get a chance to play these games without having to buy them. The concept of microtransactions seemed really novel – play for free, but make small purchases along the way to enhance the experience. My first free to play MMORPG was Maplestory and the [...]
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Nexon is one of the largest free to play game developers in the world with numerous iconic franchises including MapleStory and Dungeon Fighter Online. They were one of the first companies to launch free to play games in the West with the launch of “Global MapleStory” in 2005 and are considered market leaders in the free to play space, but exactly [...]
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