Story of Runes of Magic Launch the Stuff of Classic Literature in Gaming
Danny "Ralsu" Gourley got a taste of how astrologists who write for their local newspapers must feel when a Sagittarius finds a $5 bill after reading that "your finances will improve." This week, Frogster announced that the retail box for F2P title Runes of Magic had surpassed World or Warcraft in the European sales charts. If one of Ralsu's ideas for how to pave the way for F2P games to have success in the West works, what other "crazy" ideas do he have?
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The full impact of Frogster's choices will be difficult to measure for a while yet, but the sales charts don't lie: there is room for success in the West if a F2P game is built well, handled properly, and marketed wisely. In the short term, the first dent into the armor of F2P skeptics is here.
8,9, and 10 are all unplayable at the moment and neosteam open beta isnt supposed to start till "early summer" (the others i dont even have any clue about).
i will retry RoM since it keeps coming up (and no new games seem to be launching) and i still probably have a ton o cash shop crystals to burn through too... so i can atleast tie up those loose ends.
um so...their new little download tool is moving at 250kb/s ( long time) from mirror is 129 (7 hours) and torrent @ 700 (will probably need patches) 1 hour. i can down at 35000. THIS is why they are selling a box? or are they giving up crap speed to SELL the box?
Ralsu, I'd like to see your top ten be released titles, then you can list upcoming titles to keep an eye out for as well. I think it is a little misleading to have unreleased titles in there, though I don't doubt they will be there when released (except NeoSteam, which is rubbish in everything but the fact its steampunk).
As for RoM, you should change your article to reference Germany not Europe, as the boxed product is only available in Germany, not the rest of Europe. I also think Frogster are being a little silly with their figures, their press release announces 700,000 activated accounts, which isn't a true indication of the number of actual players, though based on the number of servers they probably have around 100,000 active players, which as far as the industry goes is a very healthy number of players. So I really don't see why they have to use that inflated number of 700,000. Maybe they feel intimidated by the launch figures that WAR & AoC published? Beats me, either way, its not as big as they are trying to make it out to be.
As for the gameplay itself, RoM is very well made, with the exception of the dual class system, which has a small flaw in it. The number of quests available in the game is insufficient to support leveling two classes to 50. So expect some grinding when playing your second class.
I'm suprised it's not doing better than it is, but maybe this is an indication that once you've played and left WoW, you don't really want to play another WoW, whether it is a subscription clone or a free to play clone.
EDIT: megaflux, Frogster throttle the bandwidth on their own downloader (slow it down), use one of the third party download options to get the client in a reasonable time.
yea i just torrented it and sat through 2 hours of patching after i uninstalled all station games since the matrix.exe they use (for some completely insane reason) sees the soe one and decides it cant patch the game. NOW i get to wait for a response from frogster to see if they will move my account from the global server to the US server (as opposed to the german server) or if i get to manually edit that .ini to connect to the global server to avoid kissing hundreds of diamonds goodbye...(to me this is where AAA games will always stay on top)
see what happened there? they have 3 server sets. this makes for easily distorted numbers. the only thing that really matters in F2P games is "how many credit card numbers do you have logged?" as far as i can tell.
i think neo-steam could be a good game, they just have to find a way to block all the furries, overly flamboyant gays, and other sexual deviants (trading porn for ingame $) from playing it, and fix the camping of the pvp zone entry points (if they didnt already). as cutesy as it appears on the outside i would never let my daughter play it based on the community i dealt with.
The Launch That Faced Thousands of Ships
Linear Mode
