by Jeff Woleslagle on Jul 01, 2009
Loading... is the premier daily MMORPG news and commentary newsletter, only from Ten Ton Hammer.
Yesterday, Acclaim Games announced that The Chronicles of Spellborn, released just three months ago, will undergo a period of re-development and become a micro-transaction driven game. In the age-old blame game between developers and publishers, who deserves to take the fall for tCoS's failure? Some insights from our own occasional brush with the game's troubled history and speculation on what's in store for tCoS post-F2P in today's Loading... Spell(re)born.
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Of the several MMO failures - Runescape, Tabula Rasa, and The Matrix Online, to name three - we've seen so far this year, none was worse than what came down the pipe yesterday. I've mentioned The Chronicles of Spellborn in past Loading... columns, saying that the game had good active-combat bones, a compelling storyline, and a look that was genuinely different than anything else out there today. The makers of the game, Dutch developer Spellborn Works B.V., apparently had just enough gas left in the tank to launch the game and come out with the High Houses update.
When the game met with a dismal reception in the marketplace, Spellborn Works B.V.was forced into bankruptcy. Yesterday, Acclaim Games announced that the game would be "re-developed" by Frogster Asia into a free-to-play, microtransaction-driven game. A CM from European publisher Frogster noted that: "the servers and system (subscription) will remain the way it is. There are still people available for running the daily work and systems. The F2P version is currently planned to launch in 2010."
Despite the uncertainty and gloom facing tCoS, it looks as if Acclaim Games has finally gotten their wish. In a brief interview with Ten Ton Hammer last year at Leipzig Games Conference just after the announcement that Acclaim had secured the North American rights to tCoS, Howard Marks and David Perry intimated strongly that Acclaim was in the business of publishing free-to-play games; it was a business model that his company strongly believed in. Acclaim refused to comment on what business model tCoS would take on at that time.
A "freemium" compromise was eventually reached (subscription based with 3 free-to-play zones), and after delaying four months past the European launch the North American "soft launch," preceded by a very short beta, met with a flat reception. In my opinion, between the delay, the publishing snafus, and the largely invisible NA launch, if The Chronicles of Spellborn's publishers had wanted to sabotage the game, they could hardly have done a better job, short of cancelling the game outright.
I'm not excited about tCoS's chances as a free-to-play game, at least in markets where the game has already been published. In the immortal words of NetDevil's Scott Brown: "If you launch dead, you're dead." A new and clever way to extract money from players won't change the perceptions or patina surrounding the game.
Do you like a microtransaction-driven The Chronicles of Spellborn's chances better? Did tCoS have a chance? Was I too hard on Acclaim? Have your say in the Loading... forum, or email me!
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-Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle and the Ten Ton Hammer team