Today
on Headline RePLAY: Persona 4 Arena reaches top tier in Japan, World of Warcraft continues to bleed
subscribers and ArenaNet sees the end of subscription gaming.
Knocking
out popular contenders like Street
Fighter IV and Tekken 6,
Atlus/Arc System Works’ Persona 4 Arena
soars to being the bestselling fighting game in Japan. Ever.
According
to Beast Note, the console version of Persona
4 Arena moved over 138,000 units in four days since its release. In
comparison, Capcom’s Street Fighter IV only
sold 86,000 during its first week and Tekken
6 sold 103,000.
Interestingly,
the only fighting games that beat Persona
4 Arena in the sales charts were the non-conventional Dissidia and Dissidia Duodecim
titles by Square-Enix, which sold 490,000 and 286,000 units respectively.
|Source:
Beast Note via SRK
The
slide of World of Warcraft
subscribers continues down to 9.1 million, the latest Activision-Blizzard
earnings call revealed, resulting in a loss of 1.1 million subscriptions.
Activision-Blizzard
noted that most of the losses were from the East, and due to users moving to Diablo 3 or waiting until the next
expansion releases. The “East” includes China, Taiwan and Korea regions.
In a
span of a year and a half, the MMORPG behemoth has lost around 2.9 million
subscribers.
|Source:
MMO-Champion
In
an era of “World of Warcraft clones”
and subscription models, the original Guild
Wars went against the grain and adopted a “pay to own” model, which was
almost unheard of at the time. With the advent of the free-to-play renaissance,
Guild Wars 2 is once more embracing a
subscription-less model.
Are
MMO subscription models a thing of the past?
“For
all we know there is a type of game out there that will continue to benefit
from a subscription model, I’ve just not heard of it,” ArenaNet global brand manager
Chris Lye told Polygon. “I think any developer who is looking to do an online
game and wants to retain a long tail of an online community that they’re going
to continue to work with has to seriously consider is subscription the best
model or has that been ridden to death?
“A
lot of players are telling us ‘we don’t want to be locked into a subscription,
we want an a la carte model of what we spend our money on.’”
Lye
concedes that while World of Warcraft
is an exception to the new rule, he asserts that even Blizzard and BioWare are
closely watching the paradigm shift, especially in the light of layoffs and
subscription drops.
A
subscription-less model is not without disadvantages, as Lye expects the Guild Wars 2 community to be
“significantly” larger than its predecessor, which consequently might be harder
to police.
“Does
the business model incline the community toward a certain negativity? In the
case of Guild Wars 2 that’s
definitely been a concern of our community team,” Lye said. “Small games with
small communities are easier to control and generally they’re better behaved.
And the more blockbuster your title goes, you’re more likely to bring in a lot
of people you can’t always control and can’t always moderate.
“There’s
a relationship between the size of communities. Does free to play naturally
blow the size of your community out the door? It’s definitely a concern.”
“It’s
definitely something we pay attention to,” he said. “But without having the
experience of having our live community under our belt I’m hesitant to make any
broad statements about that because I want to see how it goes. I can acknowledge
we do expect the Guild Wars 2
community to be significantly larger than the Guild Wars community and we will make sure it stays a healthy and
helpful community to anyone new to the game.”
|Source:
The Verge
