Ghost Recon Online Expansions

[101459]

One limitations of the F2P revenue generation model is that typically only ~3% or less of the playing audience actually pay for content, and most often only when the game is new to them. Over the longer haul the most successful F2P games have made themselves so by constantly adding new content, features, and even entire new cross-over genre games and game modes; the Zombie content on many F2P games is just one visible example.

GRO's YETI engine looks impressive, capable, and if the art-pipeline is efficient for content creation and updating -- it seem reasonable to assume that Ubisoft will at least explore similar strategies that have made other F2P games long term revenue successes.

My hunch however is that a game like GRO that is meant to appeal to an audience looking for more play sophistication (even if it is miles from Ghost Recon design canon) won't get far with the typical micro budget content and feature expansions that many F2P games run with, and will need something more along the lines of a full-on expansion content to re-kindle Players interest that have 'played out' their enthusiasm.

The the obvious: new maps, weapons, game-mode all can go quite a ways, but only take a game of this kind so far, so I thought it would be interesting to see what GRN Fans would find the most compelling in the way of a content expansion that still was limited by the basic GRO game mechanics; I'll start with a few obvious possibilities many here might agree with:

· legacy or 'Original' Ghost Recon game with Cold War content

· WW II era tactical expansion

· Splinter Cell like game or a versus stealth shooter expansion

Lord knows there are oodles of others but those are a few that obviously pop that I think could be re-booted using core GRO mechanics & game design, and offer enough in the way of changes that could grow and broaden the GRO audience if or when that becomes desirable. What would you vet as your pet expansion?

Edited October 20, 2011 by 101459

[Rocky]

Interesting thoughts and opportunities there.

A word of caution though, that massively successful Relic game Company of Heroes re-launched in a FTP model a while back, as a demo, and then was never released. Not sure why exactly, as it was very polished, maybe they figured out there was no money in it. Must be a tricky model to get the sums right on.

[=SEALZ=MATRIX]

I think throwing in some original maps from GR would bring a lot of excited and even get a few of the old guard to try the game out. The gameplay would still be in question from what I have seen in the trailers.

[Bota:16]

Interesting thoughts and opportunities there.

A word of caution though, that massively successful Relic game Company of Heroes re-launched in a FTP model a while back, as a demo, and then was never released. Not sure why exactly, as it was very polished, maybe they figured out there was no money in it. Must be a tricky model to get the sums right on.

And Company of Heroes was an awesome RTS game. I miss playing that game actually. It was released in Korea with the intention of releasing in North America, but as you said it never was.

Company of Heroes: Online Open Beta ended on March 31st, 2011. According to Relic Entertainment, the reason for the servers being shut down is the developers' new unnamed RTS project which will be unveiled in August 2011.

[101459]

I think throwing in some original maps from GR would bring a lot of excited and even get a few of the old guard to try the game out. The gameplay would still be in question from what I have seen in the trailers.

I think that could work quite well too; the Battlefield franchise certainly has made it work where where we're seeing maps floated across multiple franchise titles and game designs almost a decade apart that as different as OGR is from GRO.

A word of caution though, that massively successful Relic game Company of Heroes re-launched in a FTP model a while back, as a demo, and then was never released. Not sure why exactly, as it was very polished, maybe they figured out there was no money in it. Must be a tricky model to get the sums right on.

On that same note, there have been over a dozen Korean, Japanese, and Chinese FPS realism flavored shooters, that were/are successful in the Japan, Korea, and S.E. Asia and got a trial run here as a betas and were pulled.

We can only guess why, but I suspect some fairly in-depth market analysis may be involved that looks at play-share statistics to see how long players stick with a beta, and extrapolate from that if the game can hit the sweet spot of revenue markers. ijji especially has had some really lavishly produced games that made a brief appearance in North America as betas and then disappeared completely.

Anyhowdy, now is probably the best time to bend the the GRO Dev Team's ear with GR Fan suggestions for the future of the title, as it's reasonable bet if the game hits its stride, they'll want to see how far they can take it. I just hope that's not a proposition like AVA where 'as far as they could take it' also included 'as far with as little additional expense as possible' -- and Ubisoft tries to captivate the PC audience not just milk it for money as others have.

Edited October 21, 2011 by 101459