How to Make WO Competitive with WU

[Eyesgood 2,121]

I am going to make an assumption to this discussion - that WU and WO have inadvertently become competing twins for the affection of old and new Wurm players alike.

 

IF that is true, in my mind there are only two incentives to keep current players coming back to WO even if they also play WU.  First is the conception that WO servers are more likely to remain online longer than WU servers, or at least 99 percent of them - thus providing a more long-term investment guarantee (if a guarantee can even be assumed).  This also includes the fact that many of us have played for years.  The second incentive is the relatively larger community that is an intricate part of the WO experience.

 

Let's consider Ultima Online as an example of competing twins.  Players can pay monthly to play on the official servers or they can jump over to the free servers like Ultima Online Forever and play there.  The incentives to play on the official servers are pretty much similar to the ones I mentioned for WO.  But many players, especially new players that are testing the waters to see if they even like that game, will often download UOF over the official UO. I know I did.  Why?  There is less risk and less to lose.  

 

What I am actually pointing out is that WO now has a serious threat in the form of it's twin WU.  Fast forward a year from now and consider the real possibility of not one Wyvern success but 6 or 8 or 10 such WU servers. Eventually, the community will come to believe that WU servers can be just as stable and safe to play on as WO servers (just like UOF).  More tools will become available to serve the WU community with more options to choose from.   More servers will stand the test of time.  Populations will begin to rival that of official servers (some think we are there already).  If this happens, WO loses BOTH of these incentives.  The choice becomes, play for free or play for fee.  This is a REAL possibility.  Of course, the opposite could happen as well.  WU could flop and become a failed experiment forcing players to flee to WO.  Great, right?  Not exactly.  If that happens, imagine the grief that will be heard when WU players who have never played WO jump in to WO and realize the monthly costs of playing the game.  

 

In my opinion as it stands, if WU becomes a huge success, WO loses.  If WU becomes a huge disaster, WO may still lose.

 

Questions:

 

1.  Do you think these are the only two incentives WO has over WU?  If not, what others can you think of?

2.  What (if any) should be done to keep WO competitive with WU?

Edited November 18, 2015 by Eyesgood

[Gaul 339]

I have been having these thoughts since 1 month. But in all that this, there is one thing that will not Work on Wu. 

Ya people can make personal server and get more people online but one thing that wont ever be successful in WU is the PVP. 

 

Yup WO has 1 thing which WU will never have. We have a good pvp server chaos, now that server has been up for years and no other pvp server can match it. 

People can make WU PVE server but pvp wont be successful there as no one will basically play. Like 10 or some players. Moreover whether people like it or not but all Freedom players support one kingdom or another on chaos thus there is a connection. Ya we chaosians fight on forums and all that but we all love the pvp aspect and with more then 50 players in the bigger kingdoms MR and JK and more then 25 players in smaller kingdoms BL and Ebounara i think no one will be able to match it in WU.

 

So even if pve seems little down due to Wu.The PVP still remains, also Wurm PVP is one of the best in MMO's. 

All your work is counted, every skill you worked for. Every new trick you learned, also fighting as a team and and trying to get more land for the kingdom. Those hard hours of raiding and defending your deeds and the risk involved while doing so. Also we all know if  you die, the drama and banter is hilarious. Thus i cannot predict the future but i am sure the Chaos will trive through all this. 

Edited November 18, 2015 by Gaul

[Outlaw 697]

I think competitive is the wrong word.

 

They need to find a way to exist side by side, where people who want 1 type of experience play WO, people who want another play WU.

They need to differentiate themselves more, specifically WO.

 

It needs to offer something new and different over WU, to keep people playing, and paying.

 

Whether that's something as 'simple' as better customer service, more in-game events, higher quality content, large scale events for dozens/hundreds of people at once or other things WU cannot provide.

At the same time, WU needs to provide for its playerbase too. Through easy of access and more 'small group' based content, where groups of friends can play a server/scenario together for a few days or weeks and have a blast, then reset or play another scenario. Or expand upon the singleplayer experience and add more things to do solo.

 

That way they can co-exist and people can play both or whichever suits their needs best. Rather than trying to lure players from 1 to the other.

[Nappy 1,369]

Wurm has always appeared to me to be a community of mainly creative people. When there was only WO then the creativity was largely contained within what you could actually accomplish within the game itself (building things etc).

 

The release of WU has also unleashed the creative people who want to improve Wurm (whatever that means to them). They can now create mods that add items, add spells, change the way the game plays etc. This, I suspect, will be the ultimate winning part of what WU has over WO.

 

The argument about the server stability is both true and false. Within the existing Wurm community there are people who have designed and managed 99.999% uptime data centres (including me). Those people know how to create a server farm that can withstand the test of time provided they wish to continue to provide servers at that uptime level. The current WO servers are known for lag, connection problems etc that can possibly be eliminated with moves to new datacenters (something that will automatically happen with WU server hosts). Maintenance windows are seldom announced in advance on WO as well which has led to frustration in the past. Of course WU will also have servers that are hosted more casually.

 

Where the WO servers should shine is customer service. Unfortunately the recent controversies over Nahjo, Fountain pans, iron smelter (original smaller size suggestion), rules benefiting griefers and other non-positive community impacts have led to WO not seeming to have the win in this area either.

 

WO also has the advantage of a more defined set of built in capabilities. When you go to a WO server you will know exactly what has been installed and what game documentation there is will be referencing the WO experience. That experience could be far different then on a WU server (where for example a Bag of Holding spell cast on a wagon allows it to hold 45 large crates instead of the usual 9 large crates).

 

~Nappy

[CubeManV2 231]

rolf should open an mlg tournament

[sunsvortex 599]

Im going to say that your base assumption is only partially correct in that while they may be competing on some levels, I see it more like one is leeching the other. Which only slightly changes the viewpoint but significantly so. 

 

I dont think that one can use a competing viewpoint as if you go at the problem from that angle you undermine the "develop for one and therefore both" approach that has been talked about by Rolf. If one is going to start giving one uniqueness that the other doesnt have, then by default you start splitting up the dev team, which on some levels seems to have allready happened. And of course there are allready some natural differences that give uniqueness to each of them, however, the more one goes down this road the more you split the dev time between them, the longer it takes to actually develop any one feature and the more it becomes unsustainable. I already did a post looking down the road if you keep splitting dev time so im not going to rehash it here but the short version is that it doesnt end well for WO.

 

IMO - there is only one , sure fire way, to increase numbers on WO short term and most importantly...RETAIN those numbers once it gets them, and thats to increase action timers and skill gain. Those two items are nearly universally employed on all WU servers. Its clear people like it so maybe its time to do that. Now this will clearly piss off a lot of WO players and will change WO to WU on a CC hosted server. So maybe its not a good way to go. If you split the difference and create a new server on the WO side that has the increased skill gain and action timers its still leeching. So the problem isnt being addressed or solved.

 

Incentives in my mind dont work or work only for a short while. Take the argument for stability. So lets say that all the WU servers start to crash and burn. They are managed badly, they have crap people running them ect ect ect ect. If the only option for those players is to go to WO, they are just going to abandon Wurm alltogether. If CC has split the difference then some will migrate to the AT/SG server, but the amount that do will be totally dependent on how close it is to the server they are coming from in terms of AT/SG.

 

I have yet to come across a scenario in which the current state of WO can survive with more than a shadow of its former playerbase. The leeching, slow death seems inevitable for it at this point. There are simply more people that like the decreased AT and increased SG not to mention all the new features that the community is pumping out daily.

 

Every day the mods get better and larger in scope. That CC will not or cannot follow this level of development is a major problem for them. Right now if you look at the mod section 2 items stand out, the mod loader and the associated mods that run under it and the more animals mod. These items have been developed nearly over night and continue to be expanded upon by people of all skill ranges in JAVA and graphics. They are only going to get better and this will continually draw more people in as players become frustrated with WO.  To me , this says something about how CC views its own product.

 

I think the best way forward is to just let the current state of WO continue as is, and let it die or survive based on its own merits. Continue to develop as normal and if it comes to be that the current WO is just a small playerbase, so be it, if it dies, so be it. Whatever happens happens, it has to stand on its own.

 

Continually trying to con people / trick people / incentivise people / herd people to a particular play style does not work. We have a beautiful example of how badly it does not work already in place - Wurm PVP.  How long have people tried to get the pve players and new players to come over, how many forum campaigns have we went through trying this method. How many years and how many people have tried it and yet.....it did not work. There is no reason to believe that this approach will work for WO. If you take the sales of WU and then take the number of private servers that are AT/SG improved then its clear, people have spoken, the current state of WO is just not popular and hopefully we can learn from the example of pvp and not go down a road of trying to push cabbage on people that want candy, so to speak.

 

In short - there really is no way, given the current paradigm of "develop for one and therefore both" in which WO is anything other than a small playerbase - given all the evidence thus far by WU sales, private server setups and mods.

Edited November 18, 2015 by sunsvortex

[Dairuka 888]

Step 1: Rip off every awesome mod that Wurm Unlimited makes, and use it in Wurm Online.

Step 2: ????

Step 3: Profit.

 

Joking aside. They did raise the timers. It's called Wurm Unlimited. Doing so for Wurm Online will only drive away the diehards, without any guarantee of them being replaced for a game that is in all accounts, nothing more than a abnegation based grind anyways. Hilariously enough, it would make most of those people go to Wurm Unlimited to play on "Old School" servers.

 

There are better, actually industry proven methods, to pull games like Wurm Online out of the dumpster, dust it off, and make it sparkle again. The problem is, they're unpopular, difficult, and would result in a very severe short term backlash due to the required change of direction in the development. Don't expect anything substantial overnight.

 

Hell, we might just see them kick the can along until the end. If they do decide to kick the can, there are major issues with Wurm Online that deserve attention, that would at least help retain the current fanbase better. Combat's lack of interactivity, and the feeling that Wurm is too expansive given it's current population being two of the most complained about in recent months.

Edited November 18, 2015 by Dairuka

[Aum 771]

I see two glasses and they are both half full.

[Brash_Endeavors 4,735]

 

In my opinion as it stands, if WU becomes a huge success, WO loses.  If WU becomes a huge disaster, WO may still lose.

 

 

I disagree with this "either it will suck, OR it will suck" conclusion. I think both games have great potential to flourish and for the combined community as a whole to emerge stronger than ever, with WO numbers improving over time as well. 

 

 

. The current populations of WO + WU at any particular time, are already much higher than they were for WO alone. That means new people are playing, not just cutting the community in half.  In addition, I personally expected WO to take a much larger hit in the first month of WU than it did. Front page login numbers are maybe down 10-20% but frankly  I expected even more from people INITIALLY  trying out WU at least. They are either getting some brand new players who discovered WO via WU (which is the IDEAL situation) or some are trying WU then "coming back home".

 

 

One thing people seem to be forgetting is, Wurm was already losing players, every month. it was something simply "advertising" was not going to ever fix. 

 

You know what this reminds me of, very much, was when Wurm was originally JUST a pvp game  (with safe/pve home areas) THEN rolf decided to open up the freedom servers to allow PVE only players too. PVP people yelled and said the game was DEAD but instead it flourished.

 

then, Rolf decided to allow F2P players onto the Freedom servers and the old guard cried about how this would KILL wurm online -- but instead. it flourished even more.

 

What happened each time was expanding the game to people who otherwise would not play at all, and the result was near constant growth over a seven year period. Now it was starting to dip again, in part because of an global economy that made subscription games less competitive, in part because other games were more alluring. They opened Xanadu (people screamed it would kill WO), and that helped for a time but it was  shortterm fix, really nothing had changed except a few weeks of fresh content. 

 

Now we have gone from a PVP only game with maybe 100-300 people online, to a PVP+PVE game that had maybe 300-600 people online, to a PVP+PVE+F2P game that had often 800-1200 online at a time.

 

Now we have made it WO-PVP+WO-PVE+WO-F2P+WU, and we have more than doubled where we were a month ago, with some 1200-2000 online at a time for both games combined.

 

PVP never died because of PvE, and PvE never died because of F2P.

 

Instead each group grew a little, as people who came in through one door, tried out other options as well. The more options Wurm offers, the more people it will attract. An ice cream shop that ONLY has pistachio  ice cream, "love it or get out,," will not last forever. 

Edited November 18, 2015 by Brash_Endeavors

[Eyesgood 2,121]

I disagree with this "either it will suck, OR it will suck" conclusion. I think both games have great potential to flourish and for the combined community as a whole to emerge stronger than ever, with WO numbers improving over time as well. 

 

 

. The current populations of WO + WU at any particular time, are already much higher than they were for WO alone. That means new people are playing, not just cutting the community in half.  In addition, I personally expected WO to take a much larger hit in the first month of WU than it did. Front page login numbers are maybe down 10-20% but frankly  I expected even more from people INITIALLY  trying out WU at least. They are either getting some brand new players who discovered WO via WU (which is the IDEAL situation) or some are trying WU then "coming back home".

 

 

One thing people seem to be forgetting is, Wurm was already losing players, every month. it was something simply "advertising" was not going to ever fix. 

 

You know what this reminds me of, very much, was when Wurm was originally JUST a pvp game  (with safe/pve home areas) THEN rolf decided to open up the freedom servers to allow PVE only players too. PVP people yelled and said the game was DEAD but instead it flourished.

 

then, Rolf decided to allow F2P players onto the Freedom servers and the old guard cried about how this would KILL wurm online -- but instead. it flourished even more.

 

What happened each time was expanding the game to people who otherwise would not play at all, and the result was near constant growth over a seven year period. Now it was starting to dip again, in part because of an global economy that made subscription games less competitive, in part because other games were more alluring. They opened Xanadu (people screamed it would kill WO), and that helped for a time but it was  shortterm fix, really nothing had changed except a few weeks of fresh content. 

 

Now we have gone from a PVP only game with maybe 100-300 people online, to a PVP+PVE game that had maybe 300-600 people online, to a PVP+PVE+F2P game that had often 800-1200 online at a time.

 

Now we have made it WO-PVP+WO-PVE+WO-F2P+WU, and we have more than doubled where we were a month ago, with some 1200-2000 online at a time for both games combined.

 

PVP never died because of PvE, and PvE never died because of F2P.

 

Instead each group grew a little, as people who came in through one door, tried out other options as well. The more options Wurm offers, the more people it will attract. An ice cream shop that ONLY has pistachio  ice cream, "love it or get out,," will not last forever. 

[Outlaw 697]

I can't see CC abandoning WO anytime soon though.

 

It provides a constant, mostly consistent income, whereas WU has already sold most of the units it is going to sell, other than maybe a spike around christmas when people get it as gifts or with christmas money. After that, I don't see it generating much more revenue to CC, unless they somehow add DLC/microtransactions or something along those lines. (Which I don't see happening, as people could just mod-in any dlc/micro stuff themselves for free)

 

What I do see, is increasing effort into developing WO and giving most of those developments to WU 'for free', at least initially. Who knows if/when CC will abandon WU or stop giving them all the WO updates. (They might just offer patches/fixes rather than new content in the future)

 

WO is the lifeblood driving the CC business. If WO shut down tomorrow, so would CC I would imagine.

5k subs times 8e a month, theres 40k euro a month, not counting deeds/silver purchases etc.

As for WU, say it sold 15k copies at 30e total, that's a huge 450k euro cash injection into CC, although that is a 1 time thing, not even a year worth of what WO generates...probably only a few months after including silver sales. (Who knows how many more copies will be sold in future)

[sunsvortex 599]

I disagree with this "either it will suck, OR it will suck" conclusion. I think both games have great potential to flourish and for the combined community as a whole to emerge stronger than ever, with WO numbers improving over time as well. ( This is good for CC but not so much the playerbase as they are now spread  not only across multiple servers but multiple games.)

 

 

. The current populations of WO + WU at any particular time, are already much higher than they were for WO alone. That means new people are playing, not just cutting the community in half. (True but those new people are playing WU not so much WO) In addition, I personally expected WO to take a much larger hit in the first month of WU than it did. Front page login numbers are maybe down 10-20% but frankly  I expected even more from people INITIALLY  trying out WU at least.(Would this be because the numbers your seeing represent alts? Could it also be that people were and perhaps still are keeping toons logged in to check things vs WU for development purposes? Could it also be that those numbers reflect a wait and see approach by the playerbase? could it also be that those numbers represent players playing both?) They are either getting some brand new players who discovered WO via WU (which is the IDEAL situation) or some are trying WU then "coming back home". (Or it could be that many people decided to wait and see before committing to one or the other and as time has progressed were now seeing prem toons and alts lapse in favor of WU ie leeching /bleeding)

 

 

One thing people seem to be forgetting is, Wurm was already losing players, every month. it was something simply "advertising" was not going to ever fix. 

 

You know what this reminds me of, very much, was when Wurm was originally JUST a pvp game  (with safe/pve home areas) THEN rolf decided to open up the freedom servers to allow PVE only players too. PVP people yelled and said the game was DEAD but instead it flourished.( Yes but that was expanding a game not making a new one. It only removed the pvp aspect, otherwise it was the same game. How has pvp fared since then? How many threads have been posted about shutting it down altogether due to it being perceived as dead weight? I wouldnt say it killed it, but it didnt do it any favors either. At best it kept a stagnant population on the pvp servers...at best.)

 

then, Rolf decided to allow F2P players onto the Freedom servers and the old guard cried about how this would KILL wurm online -- but instead. it flourished even more.

 

What happened each time was expanding the game to people who otherwise would not play at all, and the result was near constant growth over a seven year period. Now it was starting to dip again, in part because of an global economy that made subscription games less competitive, in part because other games were more alluring. They opened Xanadu (people screamed it would kill WO), and that helped for a time but it was  shortterm fix, really nothing had changed except a few weeks of fresh content. 

 

Now we have gone from a PVP only game with maybe 100-300 people online, to a PVP+PVE game that had maybe 300-600 people online, to a PVP+PVE+F2P game that had often 800-1200 online at a time.

 

Now we have made it WO-PVP+WO-PVE+WO-F2P+WU, and we have more than doubled where we were a month ago, with some 1200-2000 online at a time for both games combined.

 

PVP never died because of PvE, and PvE never died because of F2P.( I wouldnt call pvp healthy either)

 

Instead each group grew a little, as people who came in through one door, tried out other options as well. The more options Wurm offers, the more people it will attract. An ice cream shop that ONLY has pistachio  ice cream, "love it or get out,," will not last forever. 

The main point I would make here is that yes its great for CC...of this there is no question, but for the individual aspect of WO...its not so great. Its like having a wife and then picking up a new concubine and expecting them to live together all happy. If CC is the guy that has both the wife and the concubine he is all happy as can be, but the wife and concubine are always going to be at odds assuming they dont kill each other.

[Outlaw 697]

The main point I would make here is that yes its great for CC...of this there is no question, but for the individual aspect of WO...its not so great. Its like having a wife and then picking up a new concubine and expecting them to live together all happy. If CC is the guy that has both the wife and the concubine he is all happy as can be, but the wife and concubine are always going to be at odds assuming they dont kill each other.

 

While WU is great for CC, it only reflects a 1 time injection of a few months worth of WO income. It wont be making them much more money in the long run unless they figure out a way to sell in-game perks in WU too.

 

It's not even been out a month yet..still in the honeymoon period. I still think a lot of the WO players who 'left' to go play WU will be back fairly soon, or just quit Wurm altogether once they get bored on WU or have tested all the things they wanted to. Except for the hermits/singleplayer types, who you likely wouldn't notice were gone anyway except from the /who numbers. (Sorry to say it bluntly like that, but I think you know what I mean)

Edited November 18, 2015 by Outlaw

[sunsvortex 599]

While WU is great for CC, it only reflects a 1 time injection of a few months worth of WO income. It wont be making them much more money in the long run unless they figure out a way to sell in-game perks in WU too.

 

It's not even been out a month yet..still in the honeymoon period. I still think a lot of the WO players who 'left' to go play WU will be back fairly soon, or just quit Wurm altogether once they get bored on WU or have tested all the things they wanted to. Except for the hermits/singleplayer types, who you likely wouldn't notice were gone anyway except from the /who numbers. (Sorry to say it bluntly like that, but I think you know what I mean)

Yeah, i know what you mean. I dont doubt some will return, but not many. Once the time is invested in WU, and as all the mods come to maturity and people become used to improved AT/SG they may migrate back in (for whatever reason) and the shock of having everything slow to a snails pace, possibly limited content (depending on the server they came from) will , imo, drive many away and they will just abandon Wurm for greener pastures.

 

What i cant seem to figure out is the first part you mentioned. Its a one time purchase. If your going to really capitalize on these new found gains in players one would think that there would be some ...i dont know...business plan or road map, something....some way to get a continuous income stream going. I can come up with all kinds of crazy ideas that would work, but the more that time passes the more it looks like they were really honestly expecting people that play WU to come over to WO. I really find that idea ridiculous in the extreme (given the crowd WU was released in )and when they first talked about it I took it as they were just fighting PR fires after the announcement. But if that is / was the real honest to god plan...then omfg....that would be a true mess, and i still find it hard to believe thats what they really thought, so Im going to go with, they have some future plan that allows them to get some kind of income stream from all the newfound gains.

 

If that turns out not to be true...and they are really seriously expecting people to come over from WU...then ...its going to be a really big mess. The only way I see people migrating over from WU and "staying on WO" is if they improve AT/SG, otherwise its just not going to happen.

[Outlaw 697]

If that turns out not to be true...and they are really seriously expecting people to come over from WU...then ...its going to be a really big mess. The only way I see people migrating over from WU and "staying on WO" is if they improve AT/SG, otherwise its just not going to happen.

[Ayes 3,715]

Some interesting and thought provoking responses within this thread. Basically the premise is that with the release of WU Wurm Online has shot itself in the foot in terms of being the more desirable option to play. This would indeed seem to be the conundrum, at least on the surface of it. Yet therein remains the problem of predicting the future based upon this very short-term timeline of WU's release.

 

From playing on a few of the WU player hosted servers I can definitely understand the attractiveness of the shorter timers, increased skill gains and quickly implemented benefits that have been suggested by WO players in the past. If some of these better managed WU servers can continue on this faster paced experience and remain operable, then no doubt I would continue to spend more time enjoying playing on them than on WO. Remember though, these WU servers are hosted and maintained at these individuals expense, so it always puts them in a tenuous position, in my mind. How long they will continue this charitable situation I find hard to clarify with any certainty. 

 

The only reason I can continue to enjoy Wurm Online in contrast to these few WU servers is because my premium characters are highly skilled and don't suffer the shorter timers and building restrictions that lesser skilled players do. Forget even trying to struggle along with the mind-numbing timers and restrictions of a new player to the game. The contrast of WU will really outshine in this respect and WO has little to offer the brand new player in comparison. Add on top of this a Premium cost for over 20.00 skill levels and deed placement and upkeep costs and WO will really continue to be the harder option to attract new players into.

 

In the end this is all really not my problem to resolve and I will head in the direction where I find the most enjoyment. It's just that this whole process is very intriguing to observe and be a part of from the prospective of a long time Wurm Online player who has spent many hours enjoying what the game has provided. Yet translating this Wu experience into days in contrast to the WO experience of years does not make for a very reliable historical comparison. The jury is out and will be for a long time to come yet. Who knows what surprises Rolf and Co. will come up with to amaze even themselves with the results, be they good or bad, happy or sad. Ya, ya, ya...

 

Happy Trails

=Ayes=

Edited November 18, 2015 by Ayes

[Milosanx 716]

We have to look at what makes a game popular in this day and age.

 

1. Graphics - even though I have no problem with the graphic, I think wurm is beautiful in its own way. But updating to say Unity 5, would grab a lot of superficial players out there. I have no idea what would happen to the current server by doing this though.

2. Combat - Once again I think the combat suits wurm tbh. But the majority of gamers want a more exciting combat system.

3. Not so slow - Well, WU offers this now, so adding the 2 over this is a good start for WU. WO must stay at the same skiling pace.

4. More missions - Even though I can plod away on my own project for years, I think people need things to do. Adding the foraging for coins was a good idea.

5. Bugs - CC has been addressing a lot of bugs lately, which is great. People hate playing games with bugs, they'll just go play something else until the bugs are fixed.

 

Gamers want a modern day sandbox, they are dying for one. Wurm needs to be modernized to tap that market now. Also, CC need to let us know whats been worked on next, people need to see progress to keep the dream alive. Any of the points above will give wurmians huge hope.

 

I'd love all these things to happen, but I can keep playing wurm non the less, but without doing these type of developments we aren't going to get players to play wurm in droves. These points also would get older players that have left back.

 

Lastly, I think WU has been great for wurm. It taps a little into the gamers out there that we might not see in WO. It's definitely a step to opening up wurm in general.

Edited November 18, 2015 by Milosanx

[Llurendt 31]

Two points here:

 

1. The influx of money from WU could easily be used to inject new life directly into WO. Yes, it isn't sustainable money, but sometimes all you need is that quick loan to get you on your feet.

 

2. There is always the option of them funneling money into an entirely new project, though I really don't know Rolf all that well. With WO flagging and there being no easily seen solution to that and WU not really being easy to monetize, a new project might be the only good business option.

[Revnik 87]

It actually looks like WU has peaked and is losing players every week. WO is losing players no doubt, but I don't see this huge influx of players some others see. WU brought people in to the Steam game, and a few of those have migrated to the official servers. As a whole though, it appears WU has just fragmented the community more than it already was. 

 

http://steamcharts.com/app/366220#3m 

 

Each weekend it peaks and each weekend the peak is smaller and smaller. Still very early to jump to conclusions, and this is totally expected after any game launches.

Edited November 20, 2015 by Revnik