So, a few people on my MSN list who rarely message me all messaged me today, which was kinda weird.
All 3 folks were overly critical of my take of Perpetual Entertainment and the predictions i made in the latter half of 2005 with regards to the complete lack of thought and interaction the PE was taking with the community as a whole and the game of ST:O itself. It's no secret that my thoughts on Star Trek: Online have been...shall we say...critical almost from the get go. The 3 folks who messaged me wanted to get my take on what may happen in the future for the game which is now literally turning into a train wreck in slow motion which the whole community is looking at. Nothing like this has happend since the demise of Interplay and this is the second massive train wreck i've witnessed in this community, and it wont be the last.
What do i think will happen to ST:O in 2008/9?
I think the game will be released. Wether it will be Perpetual LLC releasing it is still up in the air, i personally am starting to lean towards the side of Perpetual going bankrupt again under there new company name and the IP being moved on to another company, like zenimax, to finish.
The fact of the matter is this. I have had serious doubts and misgivings about Perpetual and those doubts went sky high the minute the name of Gravity was involved in that 9 million dollar investment that the korean based company put into Perpetual Entertainment not so long ago. The fact that Gravity's own CEO was hauled infront of a korean court for embezzlement and that Grativy as a company has a death touch to almost all the games they are involved with (they also run Ragnarok Online) told me that Perpetual was desperate, desperate for money. The cancellation of Gods and Heros was the first marker to the future of Star Trek: Online, a future which WILL go one of 2 distinct ways.
1: Perpetual Hang On to ST:O
The first scenario which has a 20% chance of happening see's Perpetual LLC continue on with no money problems working closely with the new Korean investor. ST:O is released at the beginning of 2009 of the mid quarter of 2009 and the game is free to play but all the good stuff you need to pay a one off chrage for, much like most of the Korean MMo's are basing themselves off of thesedays, like rappelz and fly for fun there is no subscription, but ya wont get anywhere fast in the game without paying for those 2 or 3 dollar single one off downloads. The game will be a shadow of what perpetual had promised us back in 2005, it will be a lot more WoW like with grind, grind and more mind numbing grind and the race to Captain will be literally piss easy since the korean company wants the game to appeal to the folks who play online games for 2 or 3 hours during the weekend.
It will literally be Fly For Fun with phasers...
Perpetual's lack of communication to massive sections of the gaming franchise will further alienate anything their PR department wants to do and the time that perpetual do need the major site, during the launch and after launch, the major sites will turn round and bite Perpetual where it hurts. Subscriptions for ST:O for the first 3 months will be failry large, over 100,000. Once the "casual" system kicks in and people start to realise the game is another Star Wars Galaxies train wreck in the making over half of the subscriber base will fall off during the rest of that year and by the end of it less than 40,000 subscribers will be left. Roughly at that point in time Bethesda Softworks will announce a new series of AAA made for PC titles since they know know that Star Trek: Online wont cut into their own profits since the game is literally dead in space.
2: Perpetual goes bust, IP is moved to Zenimax or another publisher
Perpetual announces that they have went into liquidation by the summer of 2008. If Perpetual is still around by this point in time then option 1 above will now play it's course and the game will be released by Perpetual. If however they do go bankrupt then a number of things will happen in VERY quick succession.
The remains of the IP of Star Trek: Online will be sold off to any bidder...Zenimax will more than likely take it over and hand the IP off to Bethesda to finish off the development of ST:O and Zenimax will publish it.
The date of release of ST:O will be held back until the winter of 2009 and possibly the first quarter of 2010 since Bethesda's own developers will be dealing with someone elses code and they WILL want to stamp Bethesda Softworks all over this game. Once the game is released it will be much closer to the original idea for ST:O that Perpetual was telling us about the game back in the days of 2005. 100,000+ continous subscriptions and the game will recive well above average scores. Alternatively the game will fall into the lap of another developer, possibly Activision Blizzard (by this point in time the merger between Activision and Vivendi will have been completed). Activision Blizard inc will pass the game over to Vivendi Universal to develop and publish. If ATVI-BLIZZ dont go for it then a smaller dev company roughtly the same size as Bethesda will snap it up. The game will be released with an average subscription base of 90,000.
So...thats what i think is gonna happen, and before any of you STO fan's laugh, remember...i was right about the train wreck thats happening right now 2 years ago when it looked like perpetual could do no wrong.
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