“But let’s say that things do work the way the developers estimate. The average gamer, age 33 with children barking in the background of Mumble, will run out of content after about two months on average MMO, by my estimation. During the third month, the developer will announce new content, but that new content rarely takes the player a month to complete. What does the developer do then? Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer other than to say that I hope after the third month the devs are on a four- to six-week content cadence.”
A bit further into the article…
“Although I’m not a big EVE Online player, I do give credit to CCP for maintaining a subscription game for such a long time. I believe the game’s success can be boiled down to two factors: a three-month development cycle and PLEX. Every three months, the developers promise new content that usually takes a month or two to complete. And the Pilot’s Licence Extension (PLEX) can be purchased for a reasonable chunk of in-game credits, allowing hardcore players to cover a month’s subscription by just playing the game.”
Yes, EVE has been one of the most successful MMOs because CCP is able to deliver new content every three months that takes EVE players about a month or two to complete. That’s what it takes to keep growing after ten years everyone!
Sandboxes can convince players to maintain a subscription by giving them the feeling that they’re going to miss something if they don’t log in.
Bingo Massively, bingo. Finger on the pulse reporting right there.
Hardcore Casual 
Heh, when CCP does actually deliver something you might consider new content… as opposed to new mechanism that the players use to create the real content of the game… the cycle is usually something like:
-Talk it up for 3 months
-Deliver it
-Watch people jump on it, find issues, complain in the forums, and then go on to other things
-Hope it catches on over time
-Finally get around to revamping the whole thing to make it attractive
-Find out they made it way too attractive
-Nerf it too much
-Tinker some more until it gets a stable following
-Swear to themselves never to touch it again lest the careful balance be disrupted
Elapsed time: 2-7 years.
There is that, haha.
I was reading that article and thinking about EVE players ‘completing’ a content addition like Wormhole space in ‘about a month’. It’s just “the sky is purple” commentary from people paid to know the subject to a certain degree.
Yeah, it was tough to read that article and come out thinking they had struck a blow for the subscription model.
Not a big EVE Online player was pretty close to the mark at least.
Exactly, the content releases do nothing but pull a few older people back into the game, and occasionally change some of the dynamics up enough in the real content, which is players interacting with one another.
In terms of them actually being engaging for months after the initial spike? You find them missing more often than hitting. Incursions I guess was the last chunk of content that really opened up avenues of interest for people… Before that, it was Wormholes.
I’m too lazy to find a facepalm gif, so just imagine one right here.
Why do people play Eve for more than a month? Your personal epic story doesn’t even have voice acting.
Life is far too short to read Massively comment pieces. It’s a good source for news, though.
The comment about “the average gamer” running out of content in two months is twaddle, of course. The weakest, thinnest MMO ever made had more content than that. What people run out of isn’t content, it’s interest.
Boggle.. just boggle.
Didn’t recognize the writer’s name, looking over his history it seems he normally writes solely about SW:TOR and Elder Scrolls Online.. neither of which are games I’d be likely to read Massively pieces about.
Maybe he should stick to those topics instead of trying to branch out into something he clearly doesn’t have even the vaguest understanding of.
I’m ignoring the EVE idiocy in that Massively snippet you posted to concentrate on the first paragraph:
“The average gamer … will run out of content after about two months on average MMO”
My experience with PvE games has been quite different:
* I never got to level cap in Burning Crusade before LK released, and by the time I did get there, I had spent a year exploring and levelling in Azeroth and Draenor, and loving every minute of it. And then I had raiding to look forward to. I never ran out of content.
* I never got to level cap at all in Rift. I played it for several months before my RP-PVP server (the only RP-PVP server) was closed, and my guild along with it. I never ran out of content
* In GW2, I didn’t even think about levelling. Although I now don’t play this with the same … intensity, I suppose … as I play(ed) subscription MMOs, I still haven’t run out of content.
I’m trying to understand what the writer of the original article is really trying to say here. That he doesn’t count levelling as interesting content, and tries to get to the endgame as quickly as possible, wherein he finds the “real” content?
There is a good chance you play less than an average MMO player if you never reached level cap during Burning Crusade.
Hey at least Massively gave you all something to talk about, So there is that…
You think that part about EVE was bad?
“To make it worse (and this is where the bad marketing kicks in), EVE is marketed as “sandbox”, which means that the developers did not create a proper victory condition. Was it simple laziness, lack of ideas or being afraid of losing the various roleplaying groups by telling that they aren’t winning, I don’t know. However if you arrive without an out-of-game group guiding you, chances are that you’ll find a big nihil, a perpetual Arathi Basin bridge where morons grind each other in cheap crap ships till the zombies of the final Apocalypse break into the server room.” And he actually likes the game…
The solution is obvious. First stop making finite content. Then focus on tools for players to make emergent content. Last base your game on a rotational system like PVP and resource acquisition not repeatable dungeons.
And then Massively will be taken more seriously? Sorry, to which question or comment are you responding?
I’ll give you one better. Asheron’s Call comes out with content each month. Back when I used to play it in the late 90’s, early 00’s, the content was on par with EQ’s bi-annual content and is way more than WoW’s every other year expansion.
I always thought this was the way MMO’s were going to go in the future. Ever changing world’s due to monthly content and story lines but instead we get cheesy every other year expansions that people plow through in less than a month.
Can we please go back to the AC/Eve way of doing things. I’d like it far better. At least if not monthly or every three months, move it up to every six months like EQ used too.