Electronic Arts’ PC game Majestic takes new measures to gain users, just as Episode 3 goes live. The state of Majestic, the original and popular cult hit in the PC gaming world, has taken a turn for the worst.
The game, at its onset, was doing extremely well, with thousands of gamers signing up for the free trial episode and then continuing to play the game at the price of $9.99 per month.
Unfortunately, since early August, the numbers have steadily decreased to the point that Electronic Arts is having to develop several backup plans to keep the game up and running.
The game, which purportedly cost EA $20 million to create and maintain, is not pulling near that much in revenue.
Development for the game took approximately two years, which would put the costs at around $10 million each year. With twelve months in the year, and a monthly fee of $10, EA would need to make around $833,333 per month over the course of two years to simply break even.
Regrettably, the company is pulling in only $150,000 per month, based on the current numbers of users playing the game.
“Of those who started down the path of registration, only 8.5 percent completed,” Electronic Arts spokesperson Jeff Brown said. “The rest quit halfway through, in part because of the lengthy process, which included over 10 megs in downloads.”
In other words, people who were initially interested in the project went to the Web site with the intent of signing up, but once they found out what all is involved, they became disinterested and moved on.
Others played a few episodes, lost interest in the game, and canceled their subscriptions.
Based on the episodic nature of Majestic, players who keep up with the game only get to participate in one episode of the game per month.
For instance, the September episode was released on Aug. 26, and many players were able to beat it in a week in a half, leaving them with nearly two thirds of the month without any new game content.
This has upset many gamers and initial fans of the game.
Majestic was completely halted for just under a week, and players were not able to resume game play until the following Thursday after the attacks on the United States.
The recent week of downtime, in light of the Sept. 11 events, also upset a few of the people who had recently started playing. This comes as a great disappointment to EA, as the company has invested a lot of time and money into this PC game.
EA.com, the Web site that hosts the game, cost upward of $200 million to produce, so the company has taken a big gamble with every part of it. The fewer people that play, and more importantly, keep playing Majestic, the less likely the company is to keep making new episodes.
As for now, the Majestic team is still working hard on creating and releasing new episodes. Oct. 4, Episode 3, subtitled `Visions,’ was released to those who currently subscribe and will take about the first half of the month of October to complete.
At least one more episode will be released to finish out this season, but what happens after that is up in the air.
Due to the recent increasing drop in membership, the company plans to halt online subscriptions to the game and will then move to selling the game at retail stores.
The boxed version of the game includes the first five episodes of the game and will retail for $39.99.
Chances are very high that Majestic could end up being written off by EA if the retail version does not provide more business than the online version has.
Season two of Majestic is tentatively scheduled for release in mid-2002, but there has been no official announcement as of yet. It is officially in the public’s hands.