WTF is Daybreak doing?

I really have no idea what Daybreak is doing. Let me rephrase that; I think Daybreak has no idea what Daybreak is doing. At every turn they are showing how NOT to behave as a video game company.

Announce you’re working on Everquest’s sequel, launch a tangent EverQuest project that fails to live up to its promises and even become a game, then pretend EverQuest Next doesn’t exist.

Announce you’re building the spiritual successor to SWG, launch it as a zombie survival game, couple weeks later turn that game into a King of the Hill/Battle Royale wanna-be (abandoning the survival side), then a year later announce you’re splitting it into two games…

H1Z1: Just Survive is a persistent, open-world zombie survival game.

H1Z1: King of the Kill is a high-intensity last-man-standing shooter.

So you launch a game that has two modes. You abandon one mode, chase the other for a year, then try and resell both separately later. Huh. On top of that you drive urgency to sell more of the existing copy before it’s too late and you have to buy both separately.

And if there wasn’t already an epic mountain of reasons why you should distrust “early-access” gaming, both of these titles are being launched as “early-access.”

Get out of here.

  • Probably either:

    1- all about the money, not really gamers, and just looking to suck the IP dry of cash before it craters and they lose their investment.

    Or

    2 – major gamers that don’t have a clue what they are doing.

    Personally, I’m going with 1. But time will tell. Next is dead though either way.

  • At some level I don’t feel surprised about this kind of stuff, have to keep in mind that they were bought up by a pump and dump investment firm not all that long ago. The press releases said otherwise, but short term investment has been the main way this stuff operates for at least 20 years now. Unwise decisions that might have some short term gain? Sounds about right for a company looking to cash out its remaining investment with a good quarter or two to trick others into buying.

    That aside, I have to wonder if the dev teams are working in a siege mentality and have gotten too deep into their work to ask questions like ‘am I making something I would buy?’

  • I started to reply but it grew so long I turned it into a post on my own blog. The gist is I don’t see what the fuss is about and it sounds like a fairly interesting, reasonably positive move. I could see this concept working well for a number of MMOs I play – break them up into interest areas then sell and develop them separately. Haven’t we been complaining for years that the problem with most MMOs is they’re trying too hard to be all things to all players?

    It probably won’t work because of resource issues but I can’t see much wrong with the concept in principle.

  • There is a very good reason why the word break is in the companies name.
    Watch out PS2, DCUO and EQ

  • @Bhagpusss That idea may work for a few MMOs (I personally think it would just drain excessive resources and make everything fail), but this is not an MMO they are talking about. Its a survival shooter with custom hosted servers. In a setup like that, you LITERALLY just need to change servers to get that different experience. One server is Survival, one is KotH/Battle Royale/Whatever.

    Zero reason to divide a map ruleset into a “separate” game.

  • H1Z1 is no MMO. This is taking any multiple game with multiple modes and turning them into stand alone games with the hope of driving more sales.

  • SOE still being SOE.

    At this point (and for a while now really) all of this has been an experiment to see how much money you can leach off gamers with zero effort. It’s Zynga all over, just instead of targeting bored moms at home, they are targeting dumb gamers who are easily fooled.

    Anyone wallet-voting these guys is basically giving devs that actually produce a valid product the finger.

    Also this isn’t really an Early Access issue, as even without that system SOE would have basically done the same thing, just under a different label (beta or whatever).

  • Ok good. We all agree Next is dead. Actually, that’s horrible but true anyway.

    The real problem is, the old owners, as clueless as they were, realized the EQ story/game was about as close as they were ever come to WoW dollars and something they needed to try to figure out. I doubt these new people ever played eq.