I was writing about how franchises can boost their user-base by jumping on the MMO bandwagon earlier this week and how that’s sometimes successful and, more usually, not successful. It got me to thinking about how games can have millions of dollars of marketing, hype throughout the internet and hundreds of thousands of players and ultimately they can still shut down. I’m not getting soppy here, bad games end when nobody decides to play them, but there are hundreds of online games that you may have sunk hundreds of hours and lots of money into that you can no longer access. There are storylines and character arc s that I couldn’t experience even if I wanted to.
Franchises have a limited sale life. Very rarely does a series of books or films - or indeed video games – last so long that the userbase they are made for begin to get tired of them. For every long running series like Super Mario, there’s an Alex Kidd that just couldn’t make it through those long, hard years. So what can a developer do when they find their characters aren’t having the influence on popular culture that they once did? How can you overcome a tired storyline and bring back that sparkle to your creation, your world that once entertained the masses? You can turn your franchise MMO.
Some people look down on gaming as a hobby; it’s relatively new, popular amongst the young folks (also relative) and comparatively complicated. I say comparatively complicated because the people who bash playing games began to learn to read and write a complicated language below the age of five but somehow can’t run in a straight line on a 2D platform game. Reading is something almost everybody can do without any effort, watching a movie is as simple as sitting back and waiting for it to end but, for somebody unversed in playing video games, interacting can be difficult and stressful.
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