The once-thriving metropolis of London lies broken and devastated. Ash falls like grimy snow, drifting from the rolling smoke clouds that rise from fires that still smoulder around the city's great monuments. The terrified remnants of humanity huddle in the relative safety of the Underground, only venturing out to the streets in times of dire need, while above ground an ancient and terrible evil has taken grip of what was once the capital of an empire.
How easy is it to track sales of these kinds of online games? Are there lists places of how many registered users there are per game? I know people talk about how there's 10 million registered users of WoW, is that kind of disclosure common?
Hellgate: London is obviously trying to emulate the insane commercial success that Diablo enjoyed, but has Flagship added enough new features to keep the gameplay that players have been using for over a decade fresh? All the systems in Hellgate: London have potential for enormous depth with a few facets that need a bit of polishing, but there’s always the chance that gamers may simply throw Diablo II: Lords of Destruction back into their CD-ROM instead of picking up this title.
Compare with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars? I don't think so, as gamephantom said, this game seems to be anticipated more outside the US and Europe, mainly Asia because it seems to be cut of the same mould as Lineage and Diablo. Using a FPS to base sales for a Role-Playing game is not sound, it would be like using sales of Unreal Tournament 3 to predict sales for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. This game, though, will be hard to measure how successful it will be due to the nature of PC games.
The thinking is that because this game is already licensed around the world (EA in the US and Europe, Namco Bandai in Japan, and HanbitSoft in Korea with sub-licensees for the remainder of Asia, including The9 in China, Gigamedia in Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau, and Infocomm Asia Holdings for most of the rest of South East Asia). If you look at the demo stats, you'll see that in the first 7 hours, it's been downloaded over 57,000 times. Also, if you read the information presented by HanbitSoft, you'll get the impression that the game may be far more anticipated throughout Asia than it is in either the US or Europe, mainly because of its style of play.
Whomever writes the press releases at EA or Namco Bandai Games reveals that the singe-player demo for the PC game will go live this Friday, October 19. Gamers will get their hands on the full version of the game on Halloween day. Yay!
@shrimpjuice, hmm, it looks like the game may be OK. We should've had it listed as a future so we get actual numbers. I guess we'll have to compare with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.
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