| Have a look at these stats of numbers of players on Dust 514 and Tranquility (the EVE live server). Dust 514 was free to play, and still struggled to get a daily player base over 4000 vs the daily regular 35k-40k of paying subscribers (out of ~500k subscribers total playing EVE.
Of course, it's true that they had microtransactions for Dust 514, so they were making some money off of it, but considering the low player base and the fact that most items you could buy were cosmetic only, I think it's fair to say the MTs weren't the big money maker for CCP.
There are quite a few reasons for Dust's low popularity IMO. Making it Playstation-only to begin with was one. Making it dependent on microtransactions was another: there was a HUGE outcry in the EVE community when MTs were announced for EVE, making it quite clear that the player base was perfectly happy to pay a monthly subscription but was totally unwilling to lay out extra cash for anything that would give an in-game advantage. When it became known that the MT items were cosmetic only (I'm talking just EVE here, and this was prior to Dust's release) and didn't give any in-game benefits, most of that protest died out, but it was quite clear people didn't care for it. The final nail in Dust's coffin was CCP's decision to tie it directly into Factional Warfare, a game mechanic that was popular for a while when it was first introduced in 2008, but soon nobody but a few diehards played (mostly because FW is really really boring).
So, ask yourself this as a gamer, would you play a game exclusively on a console (which you may or may not already own), that's a tie-in to a game mechanic which most people don't bother with in the "main" game, and that has a business model which most people in the main game are very unsupportive of? Now as a developer, would you continue to support a product that doesn't have a huge player base and doesn't make a lot of money?
So yeah, I stand by last night's statement that Dust was dead long before they officially pulled the plug. Good idea, bad implementation.
Finally, WRT the "this isn't the first time CCP Shanghai has abandoned a game before full release and left people hanging", you'd be referring to World of Darkness, a vampire-themed MMO they were developing. Note that they acquired the WoD IP as far back as late 2006 and in the 7.5 years or so that they had it, the "game" never came closer to release than some concept art and a trailer or two, so I'm not sure how many people were "left hanging" by that. Can't even call this one a good idea with bad implementation, since there was NO implementation whatsoever. |
