Games supporting themselves? You Jest!

I have been playing Marvel Avengers Alliance on Playdom.com now for quite some time. I really enjoy the game, even if it does have it's issues.

Today they announced that the game was going to be closed down in a month. I have to say I am not really surprised by this announcement. It was only a few weeks ago that Disney who owns Playdom announced they were laying off 700 employees. A number of them had to go from Playdom for sure. What it also means is that Playdom MUST look at it's costs on its games and save money. Or put another way, focus on the more viable content and games they have.

Lets look at this for a minute..
on Facebook I did a few PVP seasons and could see that they had 800K to 1.2M players.. WOW!
on Playdom I could see with the same method there were barely 35K players.

I seems to me that supporting maybe 40K players (some did not play PVP) was simply not viable, unless the Playdom players spent a LOT of money on Gold etc. I do not believe the Playdom players did this as they have a low tolerance for what they called Wallet Warriors, never apparently realizing that these WW players were the ones keeping the game going. Playing for free (ad supported play) was never going to support an entire development team.

I really enjoy the game. Yes some of the quality could be lacking, and some of the decisions on balancing were atrocious, but it is good. I like spending time there. Also some of the other players (not the moaners!) are great to chat with. I shall miss them.

Still, to suddenly lose the game in a month is odd.. but in the end the game MUST support the cost of itself. If it does not, how can it exist, or even why should it exist...

all Indie developers face this at some point, once what they do goes out of Hobby costs and into real money. I am glad I am not in that position at the moment. As I struggle to get my Indie games noticed. But it does absolutely mean my games are smaller and less interesting in a lot of ways than I really want them to be....

Space Invaliens is such an example...

good night,
Da Voodoochief