Why MMORPG Companies Can Afford To Be Assholes
Originally, I made this post about Turbine — you know, those guys who managed to practically waste the two probably greatest MMORPG licenses, and were actually one of the first companies to permanently shut down a big, professional MMORPG. But on second thought, this article really applies to most MMORPG companies.
People keep asking why Turbine has such a horrible customer service, why Envoys can get away with obviously unfair bannings and an availability rate for actual problems that is somewhere around zero.
They ask why Turbine raised their subscription prices to match that of modern games, while at the same time providing smaller and smaller patches and going back on promises.
They want to know why Turbine can just take their servers down seemingly every other day, with little to no compensation, why they overshoot their self imposed deadlines regularly by over 100% and why there’s a standing saying “Don’t play on Patch-Day”.
The answer is simple and obvious: They have no competition. Unlike Walmart and Target, there is are no competing MMORPG companies. If you want to play Asheron’s Call, you have to go to Turbine. You want to play WoW, you have to go to Blizzard. It’s like they are the only dealers of a rare drug. They can get away with almost anything, because the users have no choice other than quitting what they love.
I know what you are going to say: “But Blizzard is competition for Turbine!”. That is right, and yet wrong. True, they have a basic competition, because they are in the same genre – MMORPGs. And if one company becomes TOO reckless, people might actually wander off to the competitions games. However, they don’t compete with the same product. Blizzard doesn’t have Asheron’s Call servers, and Turbine doesn’t have WoW servers. If you want to play Asheron’s Call, THERE IS NO COMPETITION. Only a single monopolist who owns the entire franchise.
Competition is what makes businesses improve themselves, and competition is what stops organizations from stagnating. Because you can get a steak in fifty different places, you will never see a restaurant that tells you that they are repainting the tables this week, and you’ll have to eat on the floor. They will never give you a rotten steak and say, “Well, we didn’t have time to check all the steaks we bought. Tell you what though, the salt is on the house. You’ll still have to pay, by the way”. And you won’t be given a steak half the size of what you ordered at 1.25 times the price.
Well, I suppose those things do happen, but those restaurants then go bankrupt within a month. Because people can and will just get their steak elsewhere.
If tomorrow a company like Blizzard who treats their customers like customers, instead of strung out junkies, would open an Asheron’s Call 1 server, ask 20 bucks a month for it and start producing quality patches, with quality customer support and professional server hosting, Turbine would be out of players by the end of the next month. Heck, probably by the end of the week.
Of course, they know that. That’s why they are cracking down so incredibly hard on 3rd party emulators (much harder than any other game I know of, despite of the minimal playerbase they have for AC). That’s why no emulator will ever see the light of day, unless it’s based in North Korea or Romania.
Sadly, nearing the end of this post, I can’t offer you any helpful advice; there is nothing you can do, and there is nothing Turbine will do. Maybe a Turbine employee will read it, and hopefully feel a little sick inside because he knows deep down how true it is.
But in the end, nothing will change. We are the suckers, and we have no choice other than to quit, which we don’t want to. Maybe we will get luckier next life.
In an ironic twist of fate, this post was originally on the Turbine forums, obviously got locked, and when inquiring about it, I was faced with some of the worst and most unprofessional moderation I have ever seen (other than on VN/IGN, who tend to employ power hungry children exclusively). Yeah, I’d go take my business elsewhere in a second, where mods are fired if they treat customers like crap, if only someone else would serve me some Asheron’s Call steaks.
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