That hate towards Inno's money grabbing is quite funny.
Wouldn't you do the same if you were Inno?
I would. They are playing it smart. The idiots are those actually paying. Not inno for playing it smart.
Smart is subjective in this scenario. They're doing it the short-term profits way. They don't care about their consumers, and they will do anything to get more money from the last few hardcore users. Now, if InnoGames were a publicly traded company I wouldn't blame them as they would be obliged by law to maximize their profits, but they aren't. They're a privately owned company and could easily do some good for consumers. Judging by their rate of hiring they seem to be doing just fine financially, so building trust and brand-loyalty from their users could help them a lot in the long-run I think. Instead they're following the freemium model which exploits users as much as possible. Innogames could gain a lot from interacting with and caring more about their userbase I think.
Grepolis as a whole has been (and still is) a large financial and fame-building success. At the risk of parroting Joris, browser games (especially ones like Grepo) don't typically last longer than a few years. And you are correct in saying the game is dying - but that is because old players are in want of something new and the stream of new players has slowed (as to be expected).
Again, to parrot Joris: Inno is a company - a smart one. If you're a farmer and a cow can only give milk for one more year, what do you do? Give the cow a hug and make it fuzzy for the next year or try and get the most milk ya can while it grants profit? A true businessman would likely choose the latter.
You cannot say Grepolis still is a large financial success because earnings aren't released. Personally I still think it turns a profit, simply because browser games are very cheap once the game has been built already; however I'm expecting them to shut down the game soon enough because of the decline in popularity and growth.
Maybe the new can be the old. Bring back the orginal version of grepolis. RS brought back osrs and the players vote on polls on what updates they want done to the game. Smart updates provide a good game. Bad updates make people leave
This could have worked a year ago or so but I personally think too many veteran players have already moved on now. Grepo never had the level of success rs had so not enough people would care enough to come back I reckon.
Pebble you are smart and love grepolis same as me. This game is a success innogames made over 100million in the us alone.
There are things they need to do to keep this game new,fresh,entertaining
Again a baseless claim as InoGames doesn't release earnings. Their last statement I could find was that they had €50 million in revenue in 2012, from all their games, so €100 million in profits from the USA alone from a single game seems immensely unlikely to me.
This game has been around for over five years. It is a success in its own right. If we're going to quote outliers for game longevity, then I'm seriously going to win when I start bringing out games shut down pre-release, just after release, or short lived games.
Games being shut down early is much more common though, as stopping a project is simply part of the testing phase.
Inno sees that even without changing too much about the older versions of grepo they are slowly losing users and are trying to get as many out of it as it can. (Pebble's beautiful cow example).
Which is not a good thing imo. Sure it maximizes short-term profits but in the long run I would think building a fanbase, a franchise with a following, would be much more profitable. The "not really" freemium model which grepo has adopted now where you have to pay to compete is a fad and already losing popularity. They should have done this moneygrab earlier in 2012 when games like farmville were on it's peak. I think it's going to hurt Inno in the long-run, but that's just speculation just like everything in this thread.
