Dawn of War series - after Retribution

[Darksider]

meh. without the smilieys it's hard to spot sarcasm.

Mind you, FireWarrior wasn't bad per se, it's just an average FPS that's only notable because of the 40K logo they slapped on it. I wouldn't mind seeing Kais again, and Ardias was pretty cool.

Of course, I like the Tau. Or at least I did before the more recent fluff that made them less noble and more GRIMDARKtm.

[Serafina]

Do other MMOs really die that fast? I was looking into TOR because of the story-based content, but if it's just going to turn into a ghost town after a few months I won't bother.

Makes me wish I'd gotten into WoW on the ground floor. There's so much end-game content now that I just wouldn't be able to catch up.

They don't die that fast. They simply have MUCH less customers/players than WoW. They can still run a profit, just nowhere near WoW.
Meanwhile, the MMORPGs trying to do things very differently often have problems because, well, there is a reason WoW does things like it does - it appeals to many people.

Those games that do it differently don't appeal to so many people in the first place. Those that try to copy the formula do not keep as many people interested simply because WoW has so much more content due to running for such a long time, and is already doing it's formula very well.
Both types can still succeed if they have quality, but at the very least it would take a comparable amount of time to get to WoW-level subscriber amounts.

[Vendetta]

Makes me wish I'd gotten into WoW on the ground floor. There's so much end-game content now that I just wouldn't be able to catch up.

They don't die that fast. They simply have MUCH less customers/players than WoW. They can still run a profit, just nowhere near WoW.[/quote]

They can, but usually by changing their business model. It's common these days for MMOs go free to play if they're not significantly different to WoW (like, say, EVE Online).

[Stark]

Once they fail to hit critical mass, they either go F2P, cut back planned content expansion or updates (and just fall further behind), fire staff, etc. They generally keep running for years after they're obviously dead in the water.

Amusingly it appears that LOTRO is way more profitable F2P than on subs, going by the amount of content they push out. Sadly their interface etc is WoW 2008, which will limit their audience until they fix it. And sorry, I hate WoW, but it does 90% of what it does better than the other, 'different' MMOs, especially after the last year or so of updates. If a new MMO launches with a clumsy, broken interface or old-fashioned approach to quests and rewards, that's just sad.

[Broken]

And sorry, I hate WoW, but it does 90% of what it does better than the other, 'different' MMOs, especially after the last year or so of updates. If a new MMO launches with a clumsy, broken interface or old-fashioned approach to quests and rewards, that's just sad.

And this is what has killed Final Fantasy XIV. The design team was so wrapped up in "not invented here" and "different for the sake of different" that they murdered the game before it ever made it to open Beta. Not that there is/was a shortage of Square fanboys who defended every minor "difference" from other MMO's as a stroke of genius and lambasted everyone who wanted to drag the game into the last decade of game development thought. IIRC, the (former) lead designer even stated he never played any MMO besides Final Fantasy XI which he basically wanted to recreate with prettier graphics (and make no mistake, despite how horribly optimized for PC's FFXIV is, it's a very pretty game) and at least some of the design staff wanted to do new/different things. The end result is a mess and epic failure showing nearly every step of how not to go about producing and launching a MMO.