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you have N million customers. You make a change. X percentage of your customers love it, Y hate it, Z are ambivalent, and you attract M new customers. Cool..

you have N million customers. You make a change. X percentage of your customers love it, Y hate it, Z are ambivalent, and you attract M new customers. Cool...but Y was not a zero number. Often, the same things that M love about the changes are exactly what Y hate. You can't please both with the same product. Repeat for every successful game. For example: I'm a casual player, I prefer solo content because I hate not understanding what's going on, and my schedule doesn't lend itself to being online regularly. The same changes that will attract me to a game will tend to drive away those that like hardcore difficulty and massive raids. Thus, I think they ARE collectively "losing" something, but they are also gaining. The nostalgia servers are about regaining those lost Y, not about rectifying some terribly and inevitable mistake.

throwaway13337 11y ago
Of course you're correct that they're making these changes to attract new customers. The problem is when they drive enough player type Y away without attracting more M. The solution is to create another game that caters to player time M. This is not always desirable to the developers. Instead, they have the vision that they can keep Y can have M too without the cost of an entirely new game. But that model has proven quite a few times not to work. They lose Y and never attract M. I believe FFXIV is the only one where they saved their game by changing it drastically. The rest were shutdown quickly after.
- ergothus 11y ago
  True, though I think you're oversimplifying things: "changing it drastically" is fairly vague. WOW has changed lots in every version. There are plenty of holdouts that think it's gotten too "easy" since the first expansion, a flaw that has been repeated by every expansion after. Yet WOW has thrived (yes, their numbers peaked, but I've not seen any convincing argument that they have been better off not making the changes they did.) And that's just one example. In my limited experience, EVERY game that is maintained over time gets changes to make it more accessible, and some portion of existing players always bitch. In some cases, they are right (thus your above examples). In others, the masses decide these changes WEREN'T so drastic, and are content. (Or they decide them like them, which automatically makes them non-drastic). And those many examples simply fail to stand out over time, skewing your perception.

throwaway13337 11y ago

Of course you're correct that they're making these changes to attract new customers. The problem is when they drive enough player type Y away without attracting more M. The solution is to create another game that caters to player time M. This is not always desirable to the developers. Instead, they have the vision that they can keep Y can have M too without the cost of an entirely new game. But that model has proven quite a few times not to work. They lose Y and never attract M. I believe FFXIV is the only one where they saved their game by changing it drastically. The rest were shutdown quickly after.

ergothus 11y ago
True, though I think you're oversimplifying things: "changing it drastically" is fairly vague. WOW has changed lots in every version. There are plenty of holdouts that think it's gotten too "easy" since the first expansion, a flaw that has been repeated by every expansion after. Yet WOW has thrived (yes, their numbers peaked, but I've not seen any convincing argument that they have been better off not making the changes they did.) And that's just one example. In my limited experience, EVERY game that is maintained over time gets changes to make it more accessible, and some portion of existing players always bitch. In some cases, they are right (thus your above examples). In others, the masses decide these changes WEREN'T so drastic, and are content. (Or they decide them like them, which automatically makes them non-drastic). And those many examples simply fail to stand out over time, skewing your perception.