Recently this topic has been going around between me and friends.
Indeed there's many possible reasons, supportive debations, norm facts, personal perspective. To me, i would judge based on one's needs towards MMORPG.
In my personal view, i am listing them down based on my gaming experience.
To make things simple and narrow down the group of gaming players,
I will go by these 5 factors only:
- Graphics Outlook : This is the most common factor which most people would go for.
Some gamers will go crazy whenever they see a game title to be much more attractive than the ones they are playing. They will do game hopping and never have a stable gaming title.
They would go for outlooks only in gaming and normally they would unexpectedly missed out the essence of a game's hard work from other good titles.
- Fun Factor Gameplay :
The good:
Majority stays in a MMORPG due to this loyalty factor.
It is this one factor that attracts people's attention.
Unique features and UI will spur one's curiousity and keep them interested.
The bad:
Some would remain loyal to a game title despite multiple hackings and botters in-game that ruin the game economy. It is like what's the point ? A great game title was ruined due to this factor.
In the long run, yes there may be few elite players still lingering inside cause they can't face the fact that the community is gone because of the spoilers. They would only give up if ther server decided to close down due to lesser popularity. They would give up only when their account got hacked or removed by the hackers before they are perfectly convinced to move on.
- Game Community : To be able to interact, to make more new friends would be a selling point for every single MMORPG to date. This is the easiest approach to convince potential players to join and meet up together and explore their journey in-game.
It may not sound realistic but the truth is, community really affects the popularity of a title.
- Technical Support & Hacking : This would be under after-sale service.
Similar to other products in the market, if a company is able to provide an after-sale service of quality assurance, their products will remain popular and keep growing.
The same applies on MMORPG gaming. If we have good Admin support, reliable server speed, good quality in-game support, fast response to inquiries, anyone would love the product/title.
If a server is unable to address certain issues on technical or even breach of security incident, their supportors would lose their faith on the company.
This in end would link to many other products which this company is currently selling, due to the fact that their name had been tarnished.
- Free to play / Subscription : Since young we have been taught that there's no such thing as FREE stuffs in this world. When there's a cause where Game companies telling people that their games are FREE-to-play, behind back-end there would be a reason for doing so.
Many MMORPG companies relies on In-game Cash Shops to earn their revenue. Reason is because they realised that this is the fastest way of gaining profit turnover every year end.
Utilising human nature of greed, game companies added in features where they promise supportors that they will receive incentive or more bonus in-game where you will just require to pay few cents to a dollar.
An innocent gamer would be willing to pay just few cents for that item if it can make them grow stronger. Once they are starting to do so, the game company will add in more & more attractive items in the Cash Shops and increases these newer or stronger feature items at a higher cost.
Many gamers who wanted to be money-saving players in the end becomes a paying gamer.
This is where community, peer-pressure and competitiveness comes into play.
In order to be the strongest, people would fork out their money to whack onto these featured items. In their mentality they would always tell themselves, "i will only spend money just this once........".
In the end, these gamers spent way much more money than other subscription-based games such as WoW.
