No, it isn't. It's definitely sufficient to keep the game running, support it and make good money from it.
That's a wildly vague and open-ended claim, and completely fails to take reasonable account of development and operating costs.
DDO is still operating for essentially two reasons:
1) It sold a lot of boxes due the D&D name. It was at the top of a number of national sales charts when released. This probably helped to cover it's development costs. Also, it was by Turbine, who seem to know to develop games on a lower budget, and re-use a lot of engines and so on (LotRO is practically a LotR-themed remake of AC2), so it's development costs were probably less than most games.
2) Atari are stubborn and want to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. They are certainly not making "good money" out of it, but they are probably running a profit as they shut down enough of the servers pretty quickly. Also this stubborn-ness is partially due, I believe, to a desire to IP-squat on the D&D name.
Don't be saying that a game that likely took multiple tens of millions of dollars to develop is "doing fine" because it has subscriber figures that are considered "good" for the "majority" of MMORPGs, most of which cost about tuppence and a bit of string to develop, which seems to be the heart of your argument.
I play DDO almost every day; I'd say I've averaged 15 hours a week since launch and that makes me a casual player.
Folks complaining about DDO not being a good game fall into three camps:
1) The game doesn't comport to their vision of D&D (or Eberron)
2) They can't solo
3) The game doesn't sport WoW's subscription base
Neither of these detract from the play value of DDO. It is a fantastic game.
It really isn't. Your post just proves that, no matter how unpopular a game is with most people who play it, no matter how it drives away it's customers, it'll still keep some core of players who like some wierd aspect of it. DDO has plenty of innovation and plenty to like, but calling it a "fantastic game" for anyone but yourself is somewhat unrealistic. It sold over 500k copies very early on in the US alone and I'd be unsurprised if it sold near 1m copies in the US all told), and yet retains less than 50k players.
Personally those aren't my complaints. Mine would be that it's fundamentally pretty dull to play, even though it claims to be "action-oriented", that the "rest point" system is unintuitive and downright unfriendly to your first time in a dungeon (esp. as RPs are often hidden), that the art direction is really, really weak, that it's deeply claustrophobic and has no "world" feel, and that it's so generic that if wasn't for the Warforged and the odd airship, I couldn't have told that it was Eberron at all.
I wanted to like DDO. Desperately. I preordered two copies. I played the hell out of it for my first month. I came back every single time they sent me a "come back!" letter. And I was disappointed time and time again.
Ironically, the #2 complaint you list as not being valid is one that they continue to be keen to address - the linked article says they are putting in henchmen. I would suggest that, had they done this from day one, DDO would have retained a much larger portion of it's customer-base (not me maybe, but a lot of others), because accessiblity and finding groups who actually wanted to do stuff were often problematic. In the end you need to face the fact that it's basically a failed game.
PS - 15hrs/week solidly since release isn't really "casual". What it is, I couldn't say.
It's succeeded on substance: All the bad stuff about previous MMOs was filed down or replaced with something better.
That's largely true. Note that it also had good basic gameplay, i.e. it was like a game, something utterly unheard of in MMORPGs (outside of PvP). The endgame and PvP were completely undeveloped and actually inferior to EQ and DAoC respectively at release, but they got them up to speed before people got bored of levelling alts (levelling was huge fun compared to other games), so it didn't matter.
DDO, on the other hand, came at MMOs saying "hey, that EverQuest I seemed like a pretty good game, let's fiddle around with it a little bit, make it conform a little more with 3.5, make it nominally Eberron and wait for the trucks full of money to show up!"
Did you actually play DDO? EQ seems like a poor comparison point to say the least. It doesn't play like EQ on any level that I can think of. It's action-oriented, it's ultra-heavily quest/mission oriented, it's not "grindy", you couldn't level up killing mobs *at all*, you only got XP from completing the missions (or parts thereof). The world was tiny and deeply restricted, most places on available on a mission, completely "gamist" as opposed to EQ's clumsy/primitive attempts to have a whole static world out there. I could go on, but it's hard for me to think of two more different level-based fantasy MMORPGs than EQ and DDO.
People don't want to pick up EQ1 nowadays -- the catastrophe that was Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, even before all of the interoffice politics began was proof of that -- no matter what the brand is.
They certainly don't, but what the heck are you talking about? For all it's flaws, I don't see any strong similarities between EQ and DDO. DDO failed because it wasn't fun and it wasn't accessible, not because it was old-fashioned or non-innovative. Indeed, it's good proof that innovation doesn't equal success.
The D&D MMO that's a big hit will be a big hit because of the game play, not because someone put name brand lipstick on what was still ultimately a pig.
Quoted for truth. I hope it happens.
I heard your cry and I'm here to intervene. No one should EVER be driven that far into despair as to play AC 2 again.
If you ignore the bugs and terrible server reliability, both of which were fixed, AC2 was actually better, imho, than a number of more recent MMORPGs. Well, maybe not a "number", but some! LotRO is dangerously close to being AC2, and directly includes a considerably amount of code from it (very clearly - even the instrument playing works identically), albeit re-themed for LotR and with some of the "lessons of WoW" learned (but not all), and it's kind of popular. I guess. Sorta.
