Fury Free to Download With December Expansion, 'Bad News' Coming for Dev
The game will still cost $9.95 a month for the top tier feature set available with "Immortal" status. Despite the good news for potential Fury players, developer Auran had some bad news--or news of bad news, rather--to relay to Kotaku Australia in conjunction with the announcement.
"We will then have some bad news to follow (unless a miracle occurs), but there will be a very positive end to the week," wrote Auran CEO Tony Hilliam. This ominous but ambiguous statement follows last week's confirmation that Auran laid off a significant portion of its staff due to the game's poor launch.
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David Craddock
replyIt's really too bad that things like this have to happen. Saturation of the MMO genre is unlike that of other genres, because MMOs come with a monthly charge. You can throw out thousands of FPS, RTS, TBS, adventure, sports, and any other type of game you want, and though companies still depend on sales to stay in business, they are not burdened with acquiring enough subscribers to stay afloat month after month.
It just depresses me to hear about all of these new start-up companies intent on developing MMOs. On the one hand, go for it; maybe something new and courageous will come from one of these companies. But on the other hand, there are just too many MMOs out there, which means more failures, more layoffs, and more "bad news" from developers like Auran.-
I hear this complaint often - "there are too many MMOs being made." I rarely hear this complaint about single player games or non subcription based games, movies, tv shows, books, magazines, etc.
Is this complaint attached to the fact that most MMOs charge a fee? If that's true, the complaint should really be, "I don't want to subscribe to a game to play it" - which is completely valid and might have a better chance(tiny tiny) of reversing the trend than bemoaning the amount of games in production.
Tangent - You know what - there are too many books being written, seriously, go to Barnes & Nobles, a majority of the books are garbage.-
I did point out that many other genres are over-cluttered. My point with MMOs is that over-cluttering in that particular genre can be bad for developers, because it's not a one-time buy type of deal, as with pretty much any other game. When I walk into a store and see the walls lined with MMOs--which is literally the case these days--I know that unlike, say, RTS games, I won't buy more than one and try them all out. I'm only going to be settling on ONE GAME because I don't want to pay more than one monthly fee.
There are uber-hardcore MMO players who subscribe to a dozen persistent worlds at once or whatever, but for most consumers, that isn't viable. You're going to play one, and that's it. When you quit that game, THEN you might dole out a monthly subscription for another game, but you won't be paying simultaneous monthly fees.
This problem bothers me because there are so many great MMOs out there that haven't gotten decent reception due to most players already hooked on their favorites (probably WoW or EQ2). LOTRO is so much better than WoW--and it's doing fine from what I understand--but what about other games, such as Fury? I've never tried Fury because in general I don't like MMOs--due to the subscription most require--but maybe it's crazy awesome, or maybe not. Some MMOs generally suck just like many other games in popular genres can suck, but in this case, people are paying EVERY SINGLE MONTH to play them.-
So your concern is for developers because the market space is too crowded?
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Exactly.
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Another problem with mmo's is they require an investment of time from the player. You can't have too many MMO's in the marketplace as there just isn't enough time in the world to play more than a couple of them together. Even one is enough to occupy the majority of a normal users time, so any other option outside that becomes much less attractive and risky with monthy fees attached. More trial periods might be the answer - the demos of the MMO market.
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If Fury was as good as LOTRO then Auran wouldn't be selling their furniture to pay rent, you know? This particular case, of Fury tanking and the company sinking, is because the game really didn't deliver. Which is unfortunate, because it had a rad premise, and was in development for quite a while.
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