How is that different from movies or TV series? Has to have big numbers on the opening weekend or it's a failure. Must have huge ratings within the first two weeks or it's canceled.
Once the box sales drop off it's all about the monthly income stream, whether it's subscription, cash shop or both. How many people pay for that next month and the month after? How many buy something off the store?
First, to answer your question, the traditional television model is quite a bit different in that networks only have so many hours of programming they can support. If they want to launch a new show that they feel will be very popular, they
must make room for it somewhere on the schedule. This isn't like games. Sure, you can glut the market, but practically speaking, no matter how many games are out there, you don't have to kill one off to make room for a new one, especially in this age of digital distribution. (Incidentally, this is why I get excited over developments such as Felicia Day's
Geek & Sundry network; they are not bound by such time limitations and there's a good chance that this is ultimately the future of entertainment as companies like Netflix and Amazon jump on the bandwagon.)
Plus, who says that networks killing off shows with steady followings is a good thing? How many times have you been invested in a show for a year or two just to have it canceled because, although it was doing okay in the ratings, apparently some network executive didn't feel it was doing well enough? I know that drives me bonkers, to the point where I hardly ever watch any television any more, and when I do, it's usually some show that already has a year or two under its belt so that I won't get sucked into something that's unproven and may be canceled at any given time.
Last, I have to say that I really do miss the good ol' days of gaming when the industry was run by developers, not publishers. I mean, we've had publishers around for decades, but they generally had a hands-off approach, serving primarily as support for the developers in things like marketing and distribution, not directly in actually running the games. Nowadays, with gaming being a multibillion dollar business, it's all about the bottom line. Decisions are rarely made based on the artistic merit of games or the loyalty of their communities, and when they are, it's almost always out of an independent studio. It's just churn out a blockbuster, monetize it quickly into the ground, then churn out another.
MMORPGs in particular really require a commitment on the part of the publisher and developer. Without that commitment, not only does an individual game suffer, but the genre as a whole suffers because unlike a television show or movie where you've probably blown a bunch of time and maybe $20 on a ticket and some popcorn, people tend to invest years and hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars into MMORPGs. When a publisher like NCsoft yanks one out from under its community, it poisons the well for other MMORPGs. How many of you who had been loyal 8+ year subscribers to City of Heroes were ready, upon its shutdown, to go out and invest that kind of time and money into another game?
Is automating a game preferable to shutting it down? Of course. But in an ideal world, when you have a community and development studio like Paragon Studios that remains passionate about their work, neither should be an option. There was no reason in the world why NCsoft shouldn't have spun off Paragon Studios as an independent development studio, sold them the rights to the game, and let it continue running as long as the developers and the community cared about the game. Eventually it would have wound down naturally. Even at that point, the developers could have taken steps to sell, for example, a "server lite" version of the game to allow avid supporters of the game to continue playing in single-player or small-party mode with friends. 10 or 20 years from now if I still want to fire up the game and play some of my beloved characters, there should be no reason why I couldn't.
