f13.net

So I heard about it from Lum's Site (http://www.brokentoys.org/2011/09/20/soes-john-smedley-subscription-model-dead/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BrokenToys+%28Broken+Toys%29&utm_content=FeedBurner) but it requires a login at [http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2011-09-19-the-free-future-editorial]Games Industry[/url] to read the full thing, which I can't be bothered to do.

Still, I find it hard to disagree with the idea that SWTOR will be the last big-name sub MMO.  We're seeing the Korean F2P model explode over here with games that realize they're going to make a lot more money on trinkets and boosts than catering to the hardcore crowd that demands a sub fee. 

I can't say I'm completely disappointed, but it does worry me that we'll see the other side of the Korean coin as well - a landscape flooded with games that just won't die because some cabal of idiots is able to pay enough per month to keep these Auto Assault Abominations alive enough to be profitable.   Sure, there will be niches of niches but wow will you find a quality game in this landscape?

At the same time I agree with Storm that the sub game isn't going away entirely.  There will be people willing to pay per month for either a more hardcore experience than the F2P model allows, or for the gated community rules where mouth-breathers get booted (or at least gagged) because they can't keep civil in public channels.

Thoughts?

Oh well, I had a good run with MMOs.  If Planetside 2 or that Tribes MMO don't work out, I'll just stay away.

At the risk of being cruel I'd suggest he puts out a F2P game that dominates the MMO market  before he says that.

If Titan is sub-based then he's dead wrong.

And while I don't know the financials I'd guess that the MMO games making the most money right now are:
1) WoW
2) Rift
3) Eve

All sub-based.

Don't the Korean F2P games stay profitable because they're cheap to make and cheaper to maintain, so only 15% of players paying ends up subsidizing the other 85% plus some? That seems at odds with the Western idea of an F2P version of your traditional MMO where you spend $35 million to develop a game, then run a nickle-and-dime cash shop (possibly coupled with the crippleware Turbine/Cryptic/SOE model) but then expect everyone to be that guy who pays $40-60 a month in virtual goods because getting less than 100% of your possible profit is considered poor business and leaving money on the table. I think World of Tanks is one of the only non-Korean games I've seen do the wholly F2P model right.

Besides, if Cryptic's development post-F2P (and to an extent, Turbine's) is any indication, money spent on a Western F2P game is more likely to go towards making new frilly frou-frou cash shop bullshit and not actual new things to do in-game.

I'll make the same point I made following Lum's post:

Cryptic's development for sure, but the Rise of Isengard, IMO, would object to your claims.

As for MMO subscriptions, the model isn't 'dead', it's been subsidized, and it's about damn time.  Anyone can still just as easily pay a monthly fee in order to get unlimited access to things that free people can't get at all or can at a premium one-time price.  Depending on how much love you have for the game, it may just be cheaper to go monthly instead of paying-as-you-go.

I wouldn't be surprised if TOR eventually went free-to-play as well once the vanilla content gets stale enough, so long as you can keep the mouth-breathers corralled from those paying a premium to enjoy the game.

In my case, the Turbine mention was for DDO. In the four or so months I played it after the switchover, I saw no real new stuff added aside from cash shop items and some extra difficulty modes for dungeons. I was in no way surprised to hear reports later on that the massive boom that DDO saw after the freemium switch almost entirely vanished after six or eight months. I was more or less fine with LOTRO's F2P, even though its store was way too pricy.

What exactly do you add to a game that's based on randomly generated content except more random content?   :why_so_serious: 

I prefer paying a subscription simply because it's more convenient.  I don't want to have to hit a cash shop and make a purchase every time I come to new content, want to attain a new level, or travel around a game.  

I wonder if those guys ever considered that it's not that the subscription model is dead, it's that the $14.99 price point for most MMO's is just too high.  Bring down the monthly sub cost and it very well could change your revenue.  I know that I would have never gone back to LotRO for $14.99, but their 9.99 deal was cheap enough to be worth a look.  Think of how many games you'll but on steam when the price hits 4.99 or 2.99.  There's a price point where playing a few days a month becomes reasonable.  Perhaps $14.99 just isn't it.  

People love this shit.  TF2 makes a billion dollars selling fucking hats.

Is it really $9.99, or $29.99 for three months up-front?   :oh_i_see:

Pretty much.  But they're also reusing the same engine over and over again instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time they want to release a new game which is why they're not blowing hundreds of millions every time.   

If your game is "just another X" then why not use that engine you've already got sitting there, tweak the code and pump in some new graphics.  Voila, new game just like the good ol' MUD days.  MMO devs seem to think they're unique snowflakes so doing this is a bad idea.

It certainly would save you problems like "oh, we didn't add 'standard mmo feature' YZW at launch because there wasn't time."

I think a big factor in decline of subscription as a mode has to be the sheer number of options out there. In 2000 when I went from casual to sadly addicted, I could choose from three MMOs. They were all very different and you more or less had one option for a specific type of gameplay, so you played it. Now there are dozens and a lot of them don't have a lot of differences.

What interests me more than subscription vs micropayment is how the micropayment is set up. Some of these options are a lot more player friendly than others and some I think favor a particular type of game more than another. COX is easy to sell powers and costume slots and that kind of thing, but most of the gameplay are generic dungeons, so it would be hard to sell content by the chunk. D&D Online was perfect for selling pieces of content (modules) bit by bit. World of Tanks premium account works well because if you're casual or just happy with lower tier, it's perfectly reasonable to play without paying, but there are Korean grinders where it's virtually impossible to play without the premium or xp potions or both and it just becomes subscription under a different name.

Sadly, Mr. Smedley's company is the last one I'd trust to implement a model correctly. Which sucks for me as an EQ-universe fan.

I haven't seen a single implementation of f2p that was better than the sub version of the game. Thus the sub version > f2p, imo. Zero interest in f2p after trying a half dozen titles I otherwise liked.

The very idea of playing a crippled game that keeps asking me for more money is the very antithesis of what I'm looking for in an entertainment model. I don't want a gold-digging woman, I sure as hell don't want a gold-digging game.

US MMOs have usually had pretty high quality production compared to the Korean counterparts.  I suspect that if F2P is the way these things are going you're going to see more quality like the Facebook games.  I also suspect you're going to see more games that aren't really MMOs but have a significant online component, like Guild Wars 1.  From evaluating the player base in WOW, probably 80% of the population of the MMO is fleeting and not really all that interested in interacting with other players other than in the AH. 

Not for long. :grin:

You prefer alimony?

It was just an illustrative example, Captain Semantics.  :grin:

It's a monthly allowance, not alimony. She's still putting out for the money  :why_so_serious:

I don't think the revenue from Star Wars®: Clone Wars Adventures™, Free Realms® AND Magic: The Gathering – Tactics® Is anything to turn your nose up at.


I have seen many that make Sub games laughable. I would rather the game ask for more money, than have it insert more "Not fun" to extend my play time one more month.

I love LOTRO's implementation. Sub or Free. I hope that's the Western standard. Go a la carte or go all in.

I'm with Sky; MTX style games constantly nag you to buy things and I just don't like that atmosphere. Dragon Age had the same problem for me. I'd rather just pay monthly then have to whip out my CC every couple days to buy the next dungeon or whatever.

Well what's funny is that a lot of f2p MMOs basically have a sub anyways, but instead of just paying it straight up and being done with it, you buy a 30 day "EXP booster" from their store that gives you 3x exp gain. Otherwise without it you are stuck playing some ridiculous grind f2p mode. This is a sub in name only, with the option of F2P nice for people looking to try it out, or some teenagers with no CC to play despite the grind (do you really want them anyways?). Yeah you can sell gimmick cosmetic items too at ridiculous profits, but we already see successful traditional sub games like WoW and Eve doing this for extra profits, selling cosmetic sparkle ponies and monacles.

The real issue comes from power enhancing items. They are balance, competition and immersion killers. When your game becomes dependant on selling crap to players to earn revenues, the temptation to juice them with overly powerful items that are must haves is already going to be there. I guess some people will play these ultra-grindy games where you need to pay2win, but if you're actually trying to make a great game instead of a farmville or korla-rpg deal I don't see how this item pushing model is so fantastic for you.

I think WoW and Eve are showing there's still plenty of people who don't have a problem paying a sub for what they perceive as a quality game. Devs working under this model can just focus on the game itself to maintain/improve that perceived quality and those maintain/grow sub base instead of worrying about meeting monthly item sale revenue quotas and balancing those items.

LotRO's implementation is hands-down better than the sub version. Even if you want to argue the point, the fact remains that you can still sub and get everything you had before the F2P conversion.  It's the only MMO that improved, though, imo.  The only other game that had a chance was EQ2, but they missed a great opportunity by not following the Turbine model.  

Generally speaking though, I agree with your assessment.  Outside of dabbling with LotRO, I just don't like F2P games.  The subscription cost creates a type of investment for me, a "I paid for this, I better use it" type of feeling.  But I wonder if that's half the problem.  That investment works for someone who has time to play MMOs a lot; I don't anymore.  So I can sub, but still won't have time to commit to anything 'real' in it.  

There's also that jarring feeling when I get to a point in the game that I have to buy.  It takes me out of the world, makes me rationalize my purchase.  Whereas the sub model, I rationalize my purchase of 1s and 0s only once a month, in F2P games I have to rationalize it every hour.  Or anytime I try to enter an area and need to pay, or whatever.  

Most store models suck.  Take Aion, they have a bunch of gay outfits and stupid virtually useless pets.  Recently they decided to really screw the players with pots you can buy that guarantee 100% success for manastones into your gear.  One of the reason I quit was spending over 100mil Kinah to try and get my armor from +12 to +15 and by the time I was done with failures I was at +10.  Point is I can see most games following the same type of player screwing store models where if you dont buy this stuff you either get left behind, have a generally harder time in game or no access to content.  Xp pots are another one, rather then a reasonable leveling curve make it grindy with xp pot options in the store.  Id rather pay my $15 a month and get a reasonable leveling curve, all content, mounts in game via quests, drops or for purchase, outfits made by crafters I can purchase or make myself and anything else(ie weapon skins, armor skins, etc) obtainable through normal means. 

There are 2 main ideas behind the store models.  One, get people who wouldnt normally play because of a monthly sub to play and spend some money.  This also helps the game even if they dont spend any money in the store because they are adding to the player base and in game economy.  Second is trying to get people to not just spend money in the store but to an amount close to if not more than what a monthly sub would be($15+).   I find it hard to believe that most store models could achieve this without sticking it to the players somehow in essence forcing them to purchase via bottlenecks and cockblocking. 

Trying my first stab at F2P games now with POTBS. I like the freedom of it- I can play or not at my leisure, and not feel pressured to log in because I paid for the month. Haven't really explored their store much yet, so I don't know how crippling or intrusive it is.

Um, have you even played DDO? There's no random content in that game at all.

Having never played it, I can't really answer this but: Could LOTRO be an outlier because it was originally developed under the idea of being a sub game? Some of you are pointing to it as an example of a well-done F2P game, but the F2P model was not applied to it until after initial development.

My own biggest beef with F2P has always been the gated community aspect. I'd rather be behind the gate when trying to relax. That may mean that I'm ok with the sub/free model, depending on the implementation.

DDO has content now?

I think AoC's F2P stuff is well done, with the exception that it needs about a 75% price cut across the board. Some of the stuff was just retarded expensive.

Well how else are they going to get The Secret World done?  :why_so_serious:

Don't be silly. They'll just stick to the grand old tradition of releasing it when they run out of development money.

I like the F2P models of League of Legends and World of Tanks. I don't mind spending cash on a game, but I certainly don't have time to get "my money's worth" on a sub to a MMO anymore. I'd rather spend 2 weeks playing 20+ hrs on LoL and spend $20 during that time, than pay $15 for a 30 day sub that I only have time to play for 2 weeks.

The difference between a sub and cash shops is like the difference between a magazine subscription and buying a new book - the magazine isn't that expensive, but if I don't have time to read it it's wasted money. But the book, even if I don't have time to read it now, it is an owned "asset" that will be read sometime when I've got the time.

If i play more than 2 hours a month i consider that my moneys worth.  Absolutely nothing whatsoever i do for entertainment beats the 15 bucks for 2 hours price point.

You are right on 1, but 2 and 3 would be F2P titles, both in the Western market and globally. NeoPets, Maple Story, and Runescape would all be high on the list and though there's no public 2010 figures I'd be willing to bet MapleStory beat Rift (Runescape may be 3rd or 4th, it's been losing ground). If you count LoL and World of Tanks as MMOs, they'd be 3 and 5 on the list. (Rift may or may not make more revenue than WoT)

Globally, outside of WoW and Aion (which might be #5) everything is Chinese F2P titles. The Chinese market currently dwarfs everything else.

You should take up D&D.  :grin:

I haven't played MapleStory, but I think it would be hard to make a case for Runescape being a better game than Rift.

Put another way, at what level does profit become more important than making a good game? This subforum has a long tradition of calling mmo titles failures, despite the fact that they made a healthy profit. Capitalism...I don't really understand it.

Good games that aren't profitable don't last very long.

Gas money + snacks.  (+ time wasted arguing with that rules lawyer you just can't avoid.)

Not to mention books, dice, dry erase pens, etc.   I mean, in the long run it probably comes out to a relatively reasonable price, especially if you aren't like me and feel comepelled to buy lots of the not really necessary but are cool to have books.

$15 D&D Insider account that you can share with multiple people.

Done and done.

Im one of those people that likes real books :-/

I like real books too.

I just like saving $300 in material costs more.

... People still care what Smedley thinks? When the last success your studio had was EQ1, and that was more a fluke than a planned outcome, global prognostications need to be taken in that context. It sounds more like someone admitting they're never going to be able to compete at the level of Blizzard. I mean they couldn't even get The Agency out as F2P? I'd be much more interested in hearing from the guild wars team on how they make their free to play model work.

Free to play is fine for a MMO that has already failed using the sub model (DDO, LOTRO, AoC, EQ2) to extend its lifespan. It can even keep the world busy and alive so that subscribers still feel the game has a future and stay subscribed. And there is potential for a more casual type of MMO with a bit less content and polish that is fun to log in every so often, buy the occasional extension to your gameplay, but not play often enough you'd want to sub to it (Tanks being a good example). But the big budget MMO still wants that subscription money and I hope people will keep making them, variety is good after all.

The main thing is matching your development ambitions with your funding model. Otherwise you get something like APB which might have been made to work as a free to play game if it was less terrible, planned around it and developed with a more limited budget.

I don't think Lotro was actually failing before F2P, it's just DDO made so much money that way they converted Lotro too.

At around the point the devs decide they'd like to eat this week.

Besides, "good" is subjective. The discussion around RIFT in the other thread said it was a polished, good title that was a bit too bland to keep paying for. So Trion got the "you must launch a polished game!" bit right and the "the game must be fun at launch!" but failed in the "your game must have character and feel fresh to me following the first 30 days of play time!" test. So their subs go down.

The pure sub-model dictates you are either the best MMO in the market or you struggle month-to-month to make enough cash to keep development ticking over. F2P forces continual content generation - even if it is just hats - to keep that revenue coming in.

Also, Cryptic have improved things a lot since shifting ChampO to F2P. When STO makes the move, it's also likely to see a boost in content development.


The problem here is that most AAA MMOs take something like 4 - 6 years to develop, while the Western market shift to F2P has taken around 2 years to really catch on.

APB had too many problems as either P2P or F2P to work, imo. Matchmaking being the key issue.

Guild Wars.  Free Realms with a Lifetime sub.

Personally I'd rather just pay $15 a month and know I have access to pretty much everything rather than having to make a judgment call for nickles and dimes over and over and over.

Kinda my thought too.  I tend to think the title of the thread should be "SOE is a dead studio - John Smedley"

This is precisely my problem with them too from my experience thus far.   Its not enough to make to make me shy away from them all together, but it sure doesn't encourage me to stick around.  I guess I'm just the opposite of most people in this regard.

Educated consumers that think about their purchases instead of going on impulse were killing the economy so we stopped all that nonsense back in the early 80s.  You guys are just freakish outliers.  :drill:

GW isn't F2P, it just doesn't have a sub fee. It took a very long time for them to lower their box prices at all.

Eve is a decent counter-example. If your game is doing something significantly different, and you are not spending 100 million+ on your development, I believe there are niche markets that can be quite profitable. Eve is 42 million a year and they could have milked that indefinitely if they hadn't got ambitions of grandeur. Once again the game has to be designed for it though, enough of a gameplay core to hook people, emergent gameplay where possible (if you do a "Fallen Earth" and promise endless high quality PvE content you will lose) and a slow growth. Half the problem though is the people planning the games just want to be the next WoW.

Of course why not go for a hybrid model from the start if your game suits it. Free play starting once the initial rush has abated to keep the world populated and replace the free trial, freemium for causal players who make the occasional purchase and subscription for the hard core. The CoH plan being an example of this.

I'd argue that EVE is a F2P game.

You just need to farm enough ISK to buy a PLEX.

Perhaps we should call it self-balancing. Some people with the time and means play for free and some other people inject cash over a subscription to buy things they haven't earnt. The relatively reasonable price of plex and CCP's profit indicates it works out okay over all.

But we could probably come up with other examples. Perpeptuum, Trial in the desert, Wurm online, Darkfall (?) are examples of other games trying to do something a little different to hold onto subscribers even though they're not remotely competitive with the big-budget titles.

Eve famously flopped at launch and got its restart by being bought back by CCP at pennies in the dollar. This allowed them a better head start than MMOs that actually need back to pay back their full development costs to a publisher.

CCP certainly managed to turn it around though, so all credit to them.

Eve's design suited it. A nice niche and being able to sell huge expanses of nothing as content plus a painless but lengthy grind. Something like APB (or Fallen Earth) were also probably sold for a tiny fraction of development costs but the structure doesn't suit the slow growth such a game would need.

I don't know that F2P titles are really going to be all that much different  I'm not any more likely to spend money in two MMO cash shops in a month than I'm likely to be subbed to two MMO's.  I'm sure it seemed like a great new business model when DDO and LotRO were the biggest F2P names in town.  Now you've got AoC, EQ2, CoH, ChampsO, DCUO, STO, and others all having recently switched over or are switching over soon, and you're still going to have the same problem.  All of these games  are competing with each other for a limited pool of money.

The other issue is that's unless developers drastically shrink MMO budgets, it's not particularly viable to launch with a totally F2P model because you lose out on all those box sales.

For a lot of people paying $15 a month when you are a casual player, <8 hours a week lets say dont feel that money is justified.  One thing thats been missing from MMO's over the years is a more time based sub model, not totally sure why.  $15 should be unlimited but give people other options like $2 for 10 hours or $5 for 20 hours a month or something.  Isnt that the same thing as an item shop for the most part?

see: APB for that model

Lotro is doing well if you believe this (http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/top10s/video_games.html) and statements by the producers early in the year that revenues had tripled (tripled!).

But it seems costs may be higher as well as evidenced by their current anemic expansion effort and generally unchanged development effort and pace. If they are wearing money hats, it is not flowing back into development and growth.

Subscriptions will continue to be one of the options in most models I believe, regardless if it is cash shop or by the hour.

I wonder where Diablo 3 is going to end up on these lists. That seems to be a pretty compelling model for future games from the perspective of a developing house/publisher.

That's a good call. As a LotRO lifer, I play very casually - maybe a couple hours every couple of weekends and lately I've been logging on most nights and turning a couple of mirrors for LI-XP (10mins). I enjoyed WoW enough from my recent 7-day "please come back" free retrial that I sprung for a 60 day timecard, which I'll play around with and then not think about WoW again for 6 months from about Jan onwards.

On the other hand, I'd buy a lifetime WoW sub for $300 or maintain a sub pretty much indefinately for $5 a month, even if I rarely logged on. I don't maintain a WoW sub because I don't/can't/won't put in enough time to make it worthwhile for a constant $15 a month.


What's this D3 model?

I don't count that as free.  Free to slave, maybe, not free to play. 

The APB:R model is pretty bad. Permanent weapons from the cash-shop so you only get a one-off payment (and not enough variety you need more than one or two) and 10 day duration weapons for in-game currency only the poop-socker's will use. A system where all weapons degrade with use (not by calendar time) and you can pay a small charge to get a perfect repair is much better (as used in crimecraft).

CoH's system is fine. Enough blocked content, especially brand new or end-game content, to make a subscription worth it for the serious player. Premium for the "I pick it up sometimes" player who can still be harvested for unlocks and content (and who also keeps the game feeling busy) and the true free2play model becomes the extended trial. Some of the content being rented for a month (as per D&D content guest passes too). Even a loyalty package so you'll eventually get more and more of the game permanently unlocked (D&D has one too, but that's from insane grinding in game, CoH's is better).

And a free2play game can blend the boundaries on title purchase. For example Dust has a one time "starter" fee that gives you a large package of shop points. So you're not buying a box as such, but you do have to convert real money into points to buy into the game. With the extra they hope it will addict people to the game.

I'm also finding, with free to play titles, I'm more willing to keep them on the hard-drive. For example when I stopped playing wow it was deleted because it's just dead space without a sub. But Tanks, Global Agenda, Crimecraft, CoH and D&D are all on my system because I can play them anytime if the mood takes me. It was partly subs that forced you to focus on one to justify the cost (as Shatter said).

They are taking a cut of all cash player-to-player trades as well as charging a box fee. I think they may also be seeding the cash auction house with items you can buy direct (not 100% sure on this though). Essentially you have a box fee, then a potential RMT cash shop, and you also impose a transaction tax on all transactions made through an auction house or trading system that you implement and control.

Meh, K9 beat me to it.

But yeah, no subscription and all characters (not just multiplay) must be hosted on battle.net, so they've got to cover those server costs regardless of how you - the individual - play. Apparently the "well it goes to pay for server uptime" part of the sub fee is no longer a monetary burden.

lol. I actually forgot I have CoH installed on my PC till I read your post. I'd probably add World of Tanks if you could install via Steam, but I just can't be fucked with many things otherwise.

You've got the option of playing them without paying any money on a F2P, unlike a sub where you have to put $15 up to see if you like the new content / how things are going.

And as others have indicated, you can just leave the icons sitting on your desktop to fire up at any time.

F2P reduces the barriers to get players in-game, and that's a big thing when you are aiming for a large population.

Hm. So basically it's the Ubi-Assassins Creed model of needing your internet connection to be on and available all the time to play singleplayer?

I might end up skipping D3. I'll see. I love me some co-op of this kind, but I also like being able to futz around occasionally on breaks or trips on my work laptop, etc, and I'm not exactly able to access battle.net at those times.

And Unsub's post just reminded me of having Guild Wars and a bunch of expansions for it. I never got out of the training areas.  :uhrr:

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2011/08/05/blizzard-surprised-by-diablo-3-drm-reaction/1
I seem to remember that one of the arguments was singleplayer characters being used online, and people hacking those, and this was combating that, or something.

Yes, just like AC.  Lots of gnashing of teeth and blase "it's 2011 you should have a high-speed internet connection" responses in reply to it.

Yes the argument was it's so you can't hack games and disrupt the economy.  Fuck that I'd love to hack a game and play it modded as I do with most games once they bore me; but this has all been covered in the D3 megathread.

You have to make a choice when you want let people trade items for cash. You either make them always connect online and store their characters where only you can hold them on your corporate servers, or you let them play offline and let 3rd party sites make all the money trading your shit.

But, its not.

Just chiming in, but the best F2P MMOG that I ever played and spent money in (more than $5) was DDO.

Unfortunately content and the fun lasts only up to level 12.  But there really is soooo much to do.  After 12 there is too much grind and too much needing a group.

The only F2P MMO I've spend money on was Puzzle Pirates.

It's cute and I like it.

Shut up.

No PP was done extremely well.  Their F2P model is still the standard to beat.  It is simple. It treats payers and non-payers indiscriminately.  It is self balancing.  The in-game and RM economies are integrated.  Anyone know of any drawbacks of this system?

Or, you allow both. A single player/LAN/direct connect mode that lets you mod/hack your way to victory, and an "always online" mode with the official cash auction house.

I'm not sure you could open the box that way and keep it clean.

Another agreement. Puzzle Pirates should be an industry standard for how to implement a cash shop based game.

You couldn't. Allowing offline modding/hacking is incompatible with a real-money online Auction House. Activision wants to reap the benefits of skimming the AH transactions, and at the same time they want to avoid being the target of class-action lawsuits. Thus, everyone has to be online to play D3, whether you're going to use the AH or not.

I read they were doing something whereby most of the business was being run client side. I think a lot of the hate towards "always online" is simply ire for the sake of ire. The amount of time I am using a computer not connected to the internet is next to none, and I suspect that goes for pretty much everyone making the complaints. The system will be closer to SC2 I think, which works pretty well and unobtrusively.

You also don't live in the vast rural swaths of the midwest.   I know even 5-10 miles west of me you run into spots where there is no such thing as an "always on" connection as I drove through some of them this past weekend.   Dialup or nothing and we all remember how reliable dialup was.  That's only 25 miles outside of Cincinnati, not the middle of nowhere Montana.

My response to the rural argument is that if you want to be rural and throw off the shackles of the city, don't expect the city to program with you in mind.

Yeah, it's not exactly reasonable to expect cutting edge IT connected right to your doorstep when you choose to live in  rural areas with under-developed infrastructure.

I think if a normal MMO tried to implement pay features the way Puzzle Pirates does people would shit bricks, actually. Items that decay completely and you have to rebuy every month, with a doubloon cost every time you replace something?

In a non happy pirate co-op puzzle game setting, people would freak.

I think it would make more sense if raids dropped more items but they decayed regularly. And you bought the badges to raid. And you could sell those items for gold. And you could buy badges with gold if you wanted!

Spiral Knights has the same model without item decay so its not essential.

Hi, welcome to 40% of the US.

Ooooh.

Dumbasses.

40% of the land mass or 40% of the population?

The difference is that if you drop $5-6 bucks on some content in one of these games it doesn't vanish at the end of the month. I'm much more willing to play multiple F2P games when I know that whatever content/unlocks I buy will persist even if I stop playing in a week and then don't touch the game for months. I avoid the games that do have decaying content access, which are just sub MMOs with a different name.


How well you can solo past 12 depends heavily on your class. That said, I don't think it's a coincidence that my highest level character stopped at 12. They've added some more 12+ content to the game in the last couple patches, which seems slightly more solo-friendly, but you'll still run into lots of quests that are tough alone.

Only 21% of the US lives in rural areas.

Population.  1/3 of the total doesn't have 'net access at all - whether by choice or location.

The internet isn't as widespread as the tech industry would like to believe - or wants to make you believe so it's not turned into a federal program.

http://www.slate.com/id/2252141/
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/02/almost-a-third-of-americans-still-dont-use-the-net.ars

Choice or location is a big difference.

Is it possible to play these games with dialup or satellite or are they subject to lag. It's a significant difference whether you're validating an install by the internet or whether you're stuck with lag from "playing online."

Well, you could solo, but progression is snail-like where it gets tedious and boring.

Have you tried post-henchmen?

That one third, for the most part, is prohibited by cost. I doubt they are worried about the game, nor should a publisher worry about them when making designs.

In fact Comcast is trying to bridge that gap of cost through a new program http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20108897-266/comcast-offers-cheap-broadband-to-poor-families/ (http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20108897-266/comcast-offers-cheap-broadband-to-poor-families/)

The rurals (as I will call them, no intention to denigrate) will get wireless internet before they get wired high speed.  It makes no sense to build physical lines into the deep country when wireless is much cheaper and fast enough.

I haven't played in over a year, probably 2, whats the update?  Last time I played, you always had henchmen running with you.

I don't know when they added henchmen, I just came back after like 5 years. The store-bought ones you can have several of out at the same time, I have to imagine that helps the soloability at higher levels.

They were added when the F2P conversion happened. If you spend in-game gold on them, you can have up to one hireling out at a time. If you are buying them using store points, you can have up to 5. They do help with your ability to solo, but I don't like using them. It feels too much like babysitting dumb AI. If you don't mind the micro that is required to get them playing well, you could use them to do all of the non-raid content in the game.

I used them a couple times on quests that specifically required more than 1 person to hit levers and such, but I wouldn't say they made the game any more fun.

Dialup is somewhat playable depending on the game: WoW and most games pre-2006 or so tend to be okay over dialup, though I've heard of people struggling with most modern MMOs. I had a friend who played Champions and got stuck on dialup for a time. The game was essentially unplayable due to frequent disconnects and extremely long load times due to slow data transfer.

Satellite is essentially worthless for anything other than web browsing and straight-up downloading, though. Unless things have changed significantly in the past few years, satellite frequently has an even slower upload rate than dialup.

Using a constant internet connection as copy protection is still pretty dumb though when the game doesn't need it. As most people have realised it irritates and narrows the range of your customers while in the end probably still being hacked.


So did I. Apparently for 837 days since CoH helpfully mentions when you last logged into a character. Hard drive space is cheap, my windows partition is just for games and I always meant to come back to it. Though in practice the patcher didn't seem too happy when I tried to use it :)

You can play WoW on satellite, and that's about it.  If your ISP oversells their bandwidth though it can be fucking miserable at times.

The always-on requirement isn't solely a piracy deterrent.  More importantly it's to keep the cash shop free of dupes and hacks.

Then you have a constant connection required for when you are using finalizing the shop purchase (if that's actually the issue). Nobody is going to complain about that. They care about their game-play being suddenly killed when their internet hiccups.

Though I would have thought reliable and secure online transactions of that sort was pretty much a mature technology at this point. Or does spotty internet disallow you from using e-bay as well?

Single-player is important to tie into multiplayer.

Smedley trying to justify pushing crappier games with more obnoxious pay model. People like Free, but people don't like MT and DLC.  MT pretty much guarantees that your game won't be taken seriously, at least in mmorpg scene.

I'm not sure how that would help.  With an offline mode it would be easier to create items and then list them on the auction house.  It'd make a RMT auction house very ineffective.

If Smedley thinks subs are dead then he can prove it by removing the sub option from all his games.   The whole argument is nonsense.   AoC, Champo, CoH, EQ2, DDO, LOTRO etc.  These games are all still essentially subscription games that wanted to enjoy subs + cash shop.   They sell $40 worth of hats and bag slots to the game hoppers and everyone else gets to pay 20~30 bucks a month if they really like it.

Hmm, if it's been that long is it safe to assume you're patching it directly rather than using the NCSoft Launcher (http://us.ncsoft.com/en/launcher/ncsoft-launcher.html (http://us.ncsoft.com/en/launcher/ncsoft-launcher.html))? The launcher seems to be much more reliable and will even trickle download new patches if you have it running in the background.

(http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-bMtwfTg/0/L/i-bMtwfTg-L.jpg)

I let steam download it since that's all mirrored by my ISP and I bought the expansion on steam. Steam launches the NCsoft launcher when you play, though now I use a direct link to it. Which also means according to steam I've played only a couple of minutes of going rogue.

Now is a great time to not be subscribed to CoH though. 8.5 hour patch last night, 4.5 patch tonight... I'm thinking they're prepping for a possible surge when they announce freedom is open. Which is a lot more clever than crimecraft was (who just sent me an apology e-mail for their f2p promotion on steam being primarily people staring at a full server).

Yeah tell me about it, I'm in Ireland so have lost a lot of playtime with all the downtimes recently. But I understand the need to have stable servers when they (hopefully) get the surge of new people when it goes live. I still wouldn't mind if they threw us all a few hundred paragon points to take the sting out of it though  :awesome_for_real:

(http://i.imgur.com/CHPxE.jpg)

That's how you know if things are really bad over here - when people stop drinking it's time to panic  :grin:

TF2 has production values. Most MMOs don't.

Being "taken seriously" by neckbeards like us is pretty irrelevant to being able to make huge moneyhats, either in the West or more likely somewhere else.

I disagree. If you want to go "mainstream" you should go console or smartphone. F2P MT for PC mmorpg market is like trying to sell boxed wine to a connoisseur, wrong audience all around. Smedley wishing SOE was Zynga but failing to recognize what make it work.

I agree entirely, but the logical extension of that argument is games that charge $16 or more per month. Which for some reason is still considered an offence against god.

Hm. I guess the upshot of all this is that I should stop thinking of Diablo 3 as like Titan Quest, or Torchlight, or, erm, Diablo 1 and 2.

I should think of it as like Guild Wars instead. Or LotRO.

Lolz, this is not 1999 PC gaming isn't niche anymore, steam proved that much. The era of shockwave.com, newgrounds, warcraft 3 mods has raised just as many kids on pc gaming as the sims or age of empires. Even till this day 13 year olds first mmo experience more often than not with runescape, of all games, as oppose or along with whatever is sub game is hot today. And even less kids play sub games today, choosing f2p games that allow MT through prepaid cards purchased at your local target. That's not even counting the veteran pc gamers who prefer indieware like League of Legends or Magicka.

Its like 2 pages of this thread is dedicated to neckbeards with their monocles saying "My word, I'd never pay for a in game xp potion. I'd rather drink piss with vinegar thank you." When I'm going to be honest, the type of audience that siniji is talking about plays EvE or Darkfall and there "standards" are low (hence playing EvE or Darkfall). Its not that F2P MT games are crappy, which they often are, its the fact that F2P seems to ruin the notion of a gentlemen's club, because a long time ago mmo's were considered gated communities. Good thing EvE wanted you to spend 10 bucks on a barely pixalted monocle no one will see.

Scary when DL makes enough sense to understand...

He's right though.  Most of us here are old gamers.  We go with subs because that's all we've ever known.  The generations of gamers after us though only know f2p.  Selling a full-priced sub to them is a lot harder.  A sub-only model limits your base to those older, dedicated, and niche gamers.

I've been playing these games since UO and I don't want to mess with subs either.  I like the flexibility of micro transactions.  I travel a lot and like that I can buy premium time in WoT to fit my schedule and not some arbitrary billing period.  I also like being able to pay a few cents for conveniences like moving equipment between tanks and being able to convert experience when I want to skip over a vehicle.  So far I've spent less than I would have if I'd been paying a $15 a month sub.  Guild Wars is even cheaper, since I've only ever bought the various boxes.  I skipped Rift because I didn't want to pay a monthly sub and will skip the Star Wars game for the same reason.

Well, despite what some of you think, there are reasons this old fart likes the subscription model. And it is because, I want to be immersed in the game world, not play shopping online.

After a round of LotRO this summer in a guild filled with newblers who had come with FtP, I got really weary of the constant 'do I need quest pak x to play this area?' and 'how many TP will it cost me for x?'.

I want to be in Middle Earth dammit, not the Middle Earth Online Mall (We're have a Sale!).

Also: get off my lawn.

 :heart:

I don't mind a subscription model if it is a game I am going to be playing regularly. I don't mind a MT model if it's something I might pick up and play every so often (like Tanks, GA or CoH). I accept a big budget game with lots of content is going to need to consider subscriptions, a light-weight game (like Tanks) had better not.

There's no one right answer. Though there are many wrong answers. Like APB believing it deserved a subscription.

We are also rich gamers, at least when compared to 13-olds F2P audience. There is absolutely no reason why we couldn't drop 50$/mo on mmorpg subscription, most pay more for TV they barely watch. You also have to deliver more for 50$, you can't simply charge more for the same-old.

I said this countless times, but its worth repeating - mmorpg industry got it all wrong. PC gamers, as demographic, are aging and have less time but more money. We expect higher quality product that doesn't waste our time (i.e. grind)! Just like cars, while our first car might have been beat-up rusty Civic, given choice we sure are not going to buy one right now. Problem is that 'manufacturers' in mmorpg market trying to out-cheap each other in pushing shittier, rustier versions of Civics.

WHERE THE FUCK IS OUR PREMIUM PRODUCT?!

Hi, as a old PC gamer with a reasonable income, if you come to me with a $50 subscription price, I'm going to tell you to go get fucked, and then go buy something for $2 on steam.

If it had been a sandboxy game with proper realistic(ish) car physics, tons of real world gepgraphy, various racy things you could do etc, I would pay $50/mo for that.

A lot of the problem here is F2P levered into a game designed for subs.

Pen and paper D&D is fundamentally F2P RMT, only with source books instead of pixels.

MtG is the ultimate F2P RMT game, and again the payment model fits the game design, as a result happy gamers and >$15per player-month income for publishers.


MtG is exactly the game F2P producers should be studying. Limited game formats avoid the pay to win problem entirely, while also driving sales. Built in obselence through format rotation that both allows gradual balancing, helps new players compete and also drives sales. Even other TCGs have failed to achieve this to any real extent.

Despite being richer, the thought is that those 13 year olds have much more disposable income.  They're also prone to poor impulse control so they'll do stupid shit like pay $25 for a magic sparkle pony that they'll be bored of within 2 weeks.

Older gamers are - supposedly - less prone to such bullshit and will think before making purchases.  There has to be a much greater added value for them to drop as much and even then they won't do it in the same numbers as those teens.  Why? Because that $25 was the cash for Bobby's lunch & field trip this week or the haircut you'd been putting off or even just a few drinks after work on Friday. 

Plus, why bother when what you're doing will net both enough teens and adults with less time and effort than those paying such a price would demand.  The people paying $15 a month are demanding enough pricks as it is, do you think anyone wants to deal with the kind of asshole $50 or more a month would bring?

Im 38 and a pick pony sounds kind cool

50$ is not a lot of money, you'd spend about as much on movies or a dinner for two. You spend about that much on data plan for your smart phone to check your facebook while in traffic or HD channels for your TV.

Why are they pushing for shittier F2P games then try to scam their way to profit when it is clear that consumer would not pay for a game where 'fun' has to be 'worked for' ? Wouldn't it make more sense to make a better game, that doesn't force you to grind, that doesn't waste your time but simply lets you have fun?

For example WoW, industry's "golden" standard is choke-full of cock-blocks and only marginally less annoying than its predecessor. You still have to grind, you still have to re-run content many, many times over, you still can't play with your friends and get anywhere because game has punishing lockout system and you still can't just pick up a set of PvP gear and have some mindless fun in BGs or Arenas. All of this makes a time-constrained consumer interested in this type of game (DIKU) unable to play.

WoW's rate of content is not being limited by a shortage of cash, they're just putting the cash into profit or their next game. so I'm not sure paying 50$ a month would get you more. And the drop in subscribers would almost surely cancel that out.

I'm not sure why there's an argument here. There's no one correct payment model, or amount, it's just a by-product of what sort of game it is, how much they plan to invest into content development (and their user-base demands) and what the market will tolerate. At the moment there's a reasonable suspicion that there are a lot of players who aren't interested in even a 15$ sub but who will play and may be induced to make one-time purchases if you can present a compelling sense of value. If you can harvest that and balance the loss of subscription revenue (whether from having zero subs or some subscribers going f2p) you would.

I dunno about you but when I was 13 I got maybe 1-2 new games a year, mainly for birthday + christmas (for me).  Maybe tack on a few games for the nintendo that was more a family entertainment thing than just mine.  I guess its more common for younger kids to be given a credit card these days, or at least relatively free access to their parent's?  I'm not making a "kids these days" argument here, I'm just really wondering if 13 year olds have all that much disposable income as a whole, especially when it requires a credit card.  This isn't just begging your dad for the $20 in his wallet, its asking to put his CC info online.

These F2P games are still sub games.   DDO made a bunch of cash then Turbine quickly realized people were actually playing for free and made sure not to make that mistake with LOTRO.  Now everyone is falling all over themselves to copy this "F2P" model that's really just a sneaky subs+cash shop setup.

Smedly is arguing subs are dead because he's salivating at the thought of getting you to subscribe and pay $20 bucks for some textures as well.

My siblings and I got more than that, but we got more but nowhere near as many as my kids do now and my parents made more.  Different times.  My kids get 2-3 new games per birthday/ Christmas each.  That doesn't count the ones I might pick up throughout the year that I want to play.

13 might be a little young, but teens in general have between $90 and $106 per week that is all disposable.  That was just a quick Google and a result from '08 but this has been discussed here before.  Why do you think so much is aimed at that demographic and so little aimed at people in their prime earning years?  Because business people are stupid and "just don't get it,"  aka the way Sinij seems to think?  They wouldn't be in business very long.  No, it's because they and single males in their mid 20s are the ones seen as major consumers.  You think those Proactiv commercials are aimed at parents?

And yes, responsible parents expose their kids to credit and banking early and there's tools to do so that mean they're not able to OD but have a credit-type card all their own to enter on sites. Teen bank accounts w/ debit cards, prepaid cards controlled by parents and (for those willing to risk it/ able to afford) some parents give actual cards to their teens for which they cosign.   

I've had unrestricted access to my Fathers CC info since I was about 12 (I might have been even younger, I don't really remember). I first used it to pay for my one time fee for Kali so I could play Mechwarrior 2 online. Meeemorrrieees! This was partnered with my unrestricted and unsupervised access to the internet at the same age.


How terrified does that make you Mom's and Dad's?  :why_so_serious:

Yeah, maybe I'm hung up on the 13 number.  After I was a bit older and started working (especially in the summers) I had more money to spend, but at 13 I had no income but what my parents gave me, and even though I come from a pretty well off family, they did not give me too much money in my early teens (I guess to teach me to to think about what I wanted to buy instead of being impulsive, I had to save for pretty much anything that wasn't a few bucks).  I guess that worked though, I'm pretty good about not impulse buying things as a result.

Edit:  To get back on topic, assuming that number is accurate, then yes, I can see why F2P can work with a younger target audience.  Meanwhile, conservative (with my money) folks like myself who think a subscription is nice way to get a good bang for my buck are probably not going to make as much sense as a target audience.

In which case sub fees are a total waste of money too. "Less time" means "less ability to extract value for my sub fee" means "it's not worth paying the sub fee for a game I barely play".

Besides, it is never about money, it's about value. I think I spent more than $15 on lunch today and got value from that; I know that I'm not going to be able to sink enough time into any MMO at this point to make it feel worth $15 a month / $180 per year.

I get the resentment around F2P asking for cash all the time, but I also resent the sub-based MMO that promises, "Updates that will thrill you next month!" and delivers three new shades of green dye to the game at that point.

Smedley's point was that SWOR is probably the last of the big pure-sub titles to launch (or at least it will be, until it announces its cash shop). And it can do, since it has to be #1 or #2 in the market to even be considered a success. If you are developing a (by comparison) pissy $30m dev budget MMO, you are pretty unlikely to be top two and thus fail to recover enough revenue each month to keep growing the game.

This cannot be right. $400/mo requires solid part-time job, and good luck with that in recession. Are you trying to tell me that parents, who on average make 45K give almost 5K of it to kids to spend? You are probably confusing money spent ON teenager with money spent BY teenager.

Yeah, that cannot possibly be right.  20 bucks a week of actual "here, take this money and do whatever you want with it" seems about closer to what i would expect.

Having looked briefly at a google search, the figure is teens with part time jobs have 90-100 dollars of disposable income.

When my kids are old enough this will be "mow my dam grass" money.

You say that now, but it might also be "For twenty bucks I can drop my kids at the mall and have a day with the wife stress free money"

Lolz white people, you actually pay your children to mow the lawn in front of there house where they pay no rent.

You let your kids bitch about mowing the lawn.

At a certain age kids of non white families with attentive parents learn the meaning of "my house", "rent", "my money" along with "get a job if you disagree"

This has nothing to do with MMO subs. A politics thread is a good place to argue about how you treat kids.

Riley is just trolling, let him alone, he'll tire himself out.

Unsub ninja'd what I was about to respond to sinji with.

If free to play is so great why aren't any companies launching big titles as F2P at the start? After all, who needs $50 for the box and a couple months of subscription in your pocket when F2P will make so much more money.


It is the subscription with F2P conversion later on which is the new model.

 :awesome_for_real: someone else please respond to this.

Because it's hard to justify investment in a project that will net you an ROI over a longer portion than an up front box sale.

What are the AAA F2P's that completely lack subscriptions?   I just realized I can't think of any but I'm sure there are some.

Well the two best online pay to play games since EQ2 & WoW are World of Tanks and League of Legends and both are cash shop games. Neither is really an MMO, but they both have MMO-esque elements.

The big thing is everyone thinks they're going to be a blockbuster. They're going to be Star Wars. They're going to be Titanic. They're going to be WoW. They're going to be Jaws. Nobody plans on being a moderately successful but long term very lucrative middle of the road game.

But on average, I suspect if the entire industry was cash shop based, developers would overall end up with more money in their pockets.

League of Legends?  Are we sticking only to MMOs though? 

There aren't any.

F2P is "new normal" for failed mmorpgs. It used to be that you simply let subscriptions drop while not spending any money on further development. F2P model allows you to do the same, but in less obvious way.

Saying "subs are a dead model" is like saying that trying to produce A-title mmorpg is "a dead model". F2P can support Farmville/Angry Birds type of games, but not much more than that.

Do you get tired of being wrong?

Games make money if they are good. It isn't based on subscriptions or cash shops. Even if every game released was based on free to play model, there would still be just as many failed games.

And probably even more failed studios, as they wouldn't even have the box sales to defray costs.

Yea I'm really talking about MMO's.   Basically the expensive ones that aren't just pumped out cheaply in mass.    Nobody has ever taken a serious MMO and turned it into a game lacking subscriptions.   

The irony is if someone made a serious "F2P" mmo I wouldn't be able to afford it and I wouldn't touch it.   F2P SWTOR?   That would cost $40 a month if I actually played it all year.   I don't want to hear some bullshit about how the stuff in the store is "optional".   These F2P games are just not fun unless you get some amount of the stuff in the shop and that's reality.  That's not including the "subscription" you have to pay for so that you aren't paying $300 to perma unlock the basic content.   That is why subs are not going to die.

That's just not true.

Maybe the games which interest you are impossible to play without buying a ton from their shops, but I've played several where I never felt I had to purchase something.

Subscription design ideology is to keep most players entertained for longest possible time before they quit in boredom by designing captivating experience and through it encouraging feeling of investment/achievement. If players poorly tolerate some aspect of your design, you are expected to reduce to tolerable level or remove it.

MT design ideology is to keep most players annoyed for longest possible time before they quit in frustration by designing barely-tolerable experience to encourage MT use to get around cock blocks . Initial "honeymoon" stage of the game to get player invested is similar to subscription design ideology. If players poorly tolerate some aspect of your design you are expected to make it completely unavoidable and put workaround into cash-shop as on-going expense.


If MT model from ground-up takes off (I doubt it has a future in any 'big budget' title, because outcome is even less predictable than box+subs) I fully expect a slew of throwback 'features'  - from look-at-the-book meditation, to camping spawns, to exp. hit on death...

All this means is that the games I like to play are drying up. The next generation of MMOGs are all going to be low quality f2p (with advertising and microtrans) shovelware.

Bleargh.

Because with F2P it is better to start smaller and build than to build a massive game world and hope players stick around.

This is the other side of sub games versus F2P games - the development cost. For a game to be "worth" a sub plus box cost, it has to have a budget in the tens of millions of dollars just to even get into the arena. A F2P can launch with a much lower development cost and then add on extra development as players go through it.

I go back to RIFT here: this was the box+sub-model game that learned the lessons of previous failures, had some great innovations but the general sentiment is that it wasn't worth spending $15 a month on because it was bland. Seriously, there's little point in spending the development budget for the box+sub model if player are going to quit not because of crippling bugs or broken systems but simply because they feel the world lacks character.

Also, PlanetSide 2 is launching F2P, correct?

But outside of SWOR and maybe some holdovers from South Korea, which MMOs are being launched in the next 12 months with box+sub models?

Secret World I assume? But I haven't been following it really, maybe it isn't.

Prime: Battle for Dominus will be box + sub.

Nope SW is doing subs + cash shop (probably vanity items only).


I understand what you're saying but that wasn't really what I meant.   Perhaps this only applies to me but I don't play an F2P game like I'd play say WoW.   All these F2P games so far are like a diversion you log in to for some quick fun now and then.   A real MMO that I get engrossed in is something I spend 10~20 hours a week on.   If a game like THAT went F2P (say SWTOR) then ignoring the cash shop would make the game far far less fun.  We've also seen plenty of evidence that if people actually play for free that they'll just alter the terms and make it so you don't.

TLDR:  If this "f2p" model were ever applied to a game I highly anticipated and enjoyed it would hardly be free and in fact cost me more than subs.

 :awesome_for_real:

Ok while I'm taking you seriously please give us an example of one of your highly anticipated games that will cost you 40 a month.

www.worldofwarcraft2.com  Am i right?

Here is another point to consider - how MT games ever going to support competitive PvP or Raiding? Pay 2 Win not going to fly with ether of these crowds.

Not all MT games are P2Win. I was like you once. Then I actually played some F2P games.

You are asking a corporate suit to say no to money. Sure, developers will oppose it but they will have little to no say in the matter. Suits will boil consumer like a frog, it is only matter of time before P2Win is the norm for MT. Just like cable TV, where it started "commercial free" then when it displaced over-air broadcasting they brought in even more commercials. Now you have to PAY for cable and WATCH ads.

lolz.

 :nintendo:

Uhh. LoL is as competitive PvP as it gets (their tourneys are serious buzznss!). 100% MT based.  Asian games  like to use pay2win systems, but its not the only model

Have any of you people who think F2P is a disaster even played Puzzle Pirates?

If you haven't, play it, and then tell me you think that they have an awful, flawed design that will never make money and always piss off the fans.

Actually speaking from the prospective of someone who has played plenty if f2p games and seen the ones that crash and burn... the pay to win pvp games always end up closing within a year of launching.

The entire F2P market says you are wrong. And it's a large goddamn market.

League of Legends is a Micro-transaction game, based almost solely on competitive PVP. It's doing quite well.

I actually don't care much for the way Puzzle Pirates does it personally, but certainly I can't say it isn't successful or that people generally don't like it.

(http://x204project.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/monkey-shocked.jpg)

What can I say, I don't like spending real money on stuff that expires. It doesn't feel good to me. I realize that ultimately it isn't especially different than a sub fee, but that's not always in my face reminding me.

Subs expire too.

Yes, I covered that in my 3rd sentence. Consumer psychology matters as much as anything in this.

It just feels different when my sword breaks and I have to buy another one with real money than when my access runs out and I have to resubscribe, even though it's not especially functionally different.

I don't like F2P elements that involve expiration based on a linear time limit. To me, the advantage of free to play is I don't have to make the most of it while my subscription is on. I don't have to feel like I'm wasting money if I don't play. While I love the game, I generally don't pay for premium in WoT for exactly this reason. But then I don't have to. I don't really have an issue with YPP because all the wear there is based on days I actually log in. So my 30 day pirate badge lasts like a year.

If SWTOR was setup as an F2P I'd have to spend 40 a month on it to enjoy it fully.   I've spent roughly 40 a month over 2 months so far on LoL.   I won't play LoL forever though so that's fine with me.   Did I have to spend that money on LoL?  Of course not but calling it free when IP grinding is slow as a snail is BS.

Working as intended.

For the lolz, if LoL was an subscription mmo you would be expected to play master yi, annie, or nunu until you unlocked tryndemere, ryze, or gargas 3 months later. Yes LoL is grindy but the amount of champions you want to play verse the amount of champions you have peaks at 5, which unless you waste your IP on level 2 runes you should have by 30. Oh and there is free rotation. But yes I broke down the numbers to keep up with LoLs two champs every month goal a long time ago and its "really" no different than the months of time wasted grinding through levels, than grinding through equipment to grind the dungeon that gives the better equipment to grind that dunegon for better equipment. In fact your not even considered competitive in any mmo unless you sunk a half a year worth of play time being non casual. So GG.

Oh and dominion gives shit IP, dominion only players are going to crying once the new 6300k champ comes out and they only managed 1k gold.

I think you're confusing me and Sinji's arguments.   He didn't say anything about MMO's.    My comments are based on MMO's and my example is a full blown F2P SWTOR not LoL.

So are we getting Sinij and DLRiley collectively trolling the thread?

Just need Dark_MadMax to complete the troll triumvirate...again.

I just noticed DX3 offering DLCs of super gun + 10,000 credits. While this money-grab is laughable in a single player, you are crazy to think that it will be any different in mmorpgs.

Vorpal Sword of Win, 5 durability, cannot be repaired, $5.99 in a cash shop or 0.00001% chance of drop from a Monstrous Never There rare spawn.

DX3?

Deus Ex: HR.

But what he's actually talking about is the "unlock a preorder bonus via DLC" thing that everyone's doing these days. One of the preorder bonuses was 10k credits and two weapons. Though I don't know what he means by god weapon, since that pack's weapons are rather shitty compared to the other one (the explosives thing)

The simple answer:  If DLC is not worth it to you, don't fucking buy it.  I would love it if games were complete these days, but that doesn't seem like something that is bound to change.  As a a nearly-OCD collector of games, I actually like the "money-grab" option of buying preorder DLC that I didn't get.   At least they get to make a few extra bucks and I get to complete my set.  I get really peeved when a game has DLC I can't get...

Respectfully, I disagree.

Flat out, if you make it, and it's good, people will pay for it. That's the thing; what's coming out is purely derivative. It might be shinier, slicker, etc. but it’s still the same old yarn. Roll a toon, level up/gain skills/some goal to strive for by killing things or running errands  and repeat. “End games”? The same, but for gear or trophies.

Of course smed thinks subscription models are dead. SOE can’t make games large amounts of people are willing to pay for. Let’s face it, F2P games came about because the product wasn’t good enough to outright charge for. It’s crazy. What car company would simply give you a car, hoping you might buy tires from them?

None. But a ton of car companies will give you a base model for X (in your analogy, free) and sell you better tires, warranties, gear shift knobs and other bits and bobs.

Fair point and well taken.

Exactly. Thrashing of a dead company run by another has-been.

 Problem is that someone might believe his self-serving BS and spoil otherwise perfectly good project for no reason.

 :roll:

Base model of a car is 100% functional, it performs its function of getting from point A to point B just as advertised. F2P is like selling a car without seats or brakes, while you get something it is not functional product until you buy extras.

You've never actually played a F2P game, have you.

There's a widely held assumption that quality will out, but that isn't the whole story. There are plenty of examples of good games not selling enough to keep the studio open, or that the game is good, but not good enough to hold enough subscribers versus the competition.

The pure sub model (again, which is really the box fee + sub model) is ending because there are too many competitors out there to play. For that $15 a month, you have to not only be good at launch, you have to be as good as other titles that have been developing for years. You can try to charge less than that $15, but then you have to attract more players and it isn't clear that a $10 sub fee is substantively different than the $15 sub fee in the minds of MMO players.

Again, most MMO players aren't going to have 3 or 4 subs running at once - they'll have 1, maybe 2. As a developer, if you don't have the best or second best game on the market, you aren't going to keep subs and will have to start firing people. As a F2P, you can get a buck or two a month from a mass of players who aren't willing to invest the full $15 per month.

Its not a matter of just being good though.  It has to be BETTER than other MMOs you are playing or might want to play, and it has likely has to be better not just by a little, but by enough that you are willing to abandon 1000s of hours spent in another MMO to start fresh.  Now starting fresh is nice, and I know a lot of folks around here like that getting in on the ground floor and starting a new MMO thing (myself included), but at the same time, I'm not necessarily going to shell out 50 bucks for an MMO I might play for a month, I just won't.  

But Malakili, I hear you saying, you just bought Deus Ex 3 fo 50 bucks and you didn't play that for months on end.  Quite correct, but MMos don't work the same way.  Its fun to *be a player* of an MMO, as much as it is to actually sit down and play the game.  That means its fun to theorycraft, its fun to be a part of the long term development of the game, and its fun to learn the meta game and plot our you skills and gear, but all of that stuff generally is best in a long term commitment to the game.  So if I don't think I'm going to stick around for that part, I don't generally see the point of playing just for the first month even if it would be kind of "fun."  The point being that it in that first month I might not even get to the parts of an MMO that I really enjoy, or learn enough about the game to enjoy the meta game, etc.  Especially compared to a game I've been playing for a long time already.

This.

How can their be too many subscription MMO's out there when WoW has reigned unchallenged for so long? It would be just as easy to say that F2P is trying to find a niche without challenging, or even requiring the same polish and content, as a triple-A title like WoW or SWTOR.  Which is why most of the f2p MMO's are either faded titles or fairly shallow. I can't think of a serious challenger to those games that was released with a ftp pay model. Same in Asia where even with a profusion of f2p titles the big guns like FF and Lineage 2 are still subscription.

Basically if the game isn't going to have long term appeal, can't compete with the big-guns, and isn't doing anything novel enough to sell on that basis then they need to consider a low-energy F2p lifestyle from the design phase forward. Suggesting there are not going to be big name MMO titles in the future assumes no one wants to inherit wow's money throne. Which seems unlikely.

Market demands progress? Oh the horror! Sky is falling. What do you mean we can't just clone DIKU yet another time?!

You can't address my points directly so you went for good old credibility smear.

Here is idea for you - stop cloning DIKU and start designing games, leave cloning projects where they belong - civil engineering, subdivision planning. Fucking packaged goods "developers".


Industry spent last DECADE stagnating and trying to out-clone each others DIKU clone. Well, now it caught up to them - it got so design-by-formula that you can't differentiate your product enough to sell it. What the solution they came up with? KEEP ON CLONING!

So since you can't address the F2P question, so you talk out of your ass some more? I hear Mark Jacobs has a new gaming company looking for people...

I haven't played many F2P MMOs except for Wurm, and what it does is allow me to play for free and level everything up to level 20. That doesn't sound like a car without seats or brakes. It sounds more like a functional car, which you can pay extra for an AC, bigger engine, etc.

Please, do enlighten me as to which F2P game is like a car without seats or brakes.

How much progress are you going to get with a bunch of titles that have to be funded by hundreds of millions of dollar investments to compete?  If there is a reason we've seen stagnation, its because everything has gotten shoved towards the middle because you can't justify huge risks with that kind of budget.  I suspect having more f2p titles out there is better in the long run, even though it isn't my personal preference.  Sure, tons of them will be crap - but since when is that new in gaming?  If it allows more games to get made, we've got a lot better chance at progress than if every project is SWTOR sized.  We've seen SO much progress form the major monthly fee model games over the last 5 years haven't we?  Oh..right.

This thread seems to be based on the assumption that there will be one "winner" in the revenue generating stakes and all other approaches will be driven to extinction. That seems sort of unlikely. So having aggressive debates about which model you prefer is probably the most pointless thing possible.

A game that is good, novel and has a payment scheme that matches what it offers will do well.

No, seriously. You say that F2P games give you a non functional product. This is simply not true of any F2P game I've seen other than some really shady Facebook type things. The only conclusion is that you've never tried, you're just working on assumptions you built in your tinfoil bunker.

EDIT: Oops missed a new page. Post obviously directed at Sinij.

... all f2p games are going to have something you'd really like to have? Seeing as that's how they make their money I don't think that's too much of a leap. On the one extreme there are entirely cosmetic additions and on the other are things you basically need to make the game fun (paid weapons, XP or gear grinds shortened). The question of where the lines are drawn, and whether a cock-punchingly un-fun without MT game counts as non-functional, are matters of personal taste.

For example does this push the game over the line? (from Allods)

The reason Smedley is so keen on F2P is that, with the possible exception of the EQ franchise, no one wants to pay a sub fee for an soe MMO.  F2P is the only option he has left. 

As for F2P in general, they generally fall into three categories these days: 1) shitty grindfest crap like Allods and Alganon, 2) shitty Asian grindfests like anything from Perfect World, or 3) failed P2P MMOs like AoC, DDO, CO etc.   Theres a few exceptions, of course, like LOTRO (could probably have stayed a sub game but Turbine saw how well DDO did becoming F2P) and niche titles like ATITD or WURM.  I know its all relative, but IMO sub games are still superior when it comes to quality and game play.

Games are not good or bad because they have a sub.  There have been a metric ton of shitty sub games out there.  They were all sub because "that's the way it's done".

There is no cause and effect.

Is there something preventing the old guard MMO's from going F2P? We've seen more recent former-sub games go like LotRO, DDO, EQ2, CoH, Champions, etc... but why not EQ, DAoC, Asheron's Call, UO. Is it too hard to retrofit them to F2P or are they just too entrenched into the subscription model to be viable? I don't know if I've ever seen that discussed.

I think the really old games like UO are down to a core crowd of people that will keep paying for a subscription forever at this point.  Going free to play probably wouldn't attract many new players.

A bit of both I think.  I'm not sure there's much to be gained for them either.  Their communities are pretty much set at this point and any change in those dynamics could be pretty devastating in the long term.

I did. Not all F2p Games are "Pay to win". Whatever that means.

Cost to implement versus expected return, I'd guess. Plus you don't want to remind those communities that they can actually cancel the payment they've been making regularly for the last 10 years.


Everyone wants WoW's money throne. There has been at least half a billion dollars (Tabula Rasa, APB, Final Fantasy XIV, WAR, AOC, SWOR) or so spent chasing it. The issue is that the pure sub model may no longer be able to catch that dream - the market has changed. It used to be with a box cost + sub model that players would buy a title then grit their teeth and bear the agony of bugs, problems, broken systems et al for a long time before they quit. MMOs were seen as an investment. Today it seems a very different mindset has taken hold: if it isn't worth it in the first 30 days, players quit. This is sensible from the player perspective, but bad from a sub-based model developer point of view.


It isn't just progress, it's the issue that the title you release has to have all the features and content developed by your competitors over years and to be 3x to 9x better to get over player commitment and both acquire the player and retain them. In most cases, this means the question is, "is your game 3x to 9x better than WoW?".

There's also yet to be a really strong case for any other style of game other than the DIKU clone to retain sub-based players in large numbers as well. DIKU only means the base idea behind the systems - hack and slash - which still leaves a lot of flexibility in implementation.

The pure box cost + sub model is on its last legs for reasons other than devs failing to out-WoW WoW.

Perhaps you play games differently than I do. I never get into game with "lets grind some newbie levels" goal in mind. When I play it is more "what is need to be done so I can compete at the endgame, and how I can get there fastest". I for example never read quests and don't generally care about story (they all the same stale fanfic) but I research builds, classes and roatations before I even log in for the first time. For me F2P is not functional product because it does not allow me to compete.

Again, this is the case only because you tunnel-vision into DIKU. If you compete in cloning DIKUs, then yes your title needs to be that much better and include everything your competition has, and that generally requires prohibitively large budget since you getting into over-polishing territory. DIKU are done, WoW won it and you are not going to out-DIKU WoW without ridiculous budget.

What you can do, is come up with something else than Ding-Gratz gameplay. Then you don't need mega-blockbuster budget and point-by-point feature matching. People will play it because they want to try something different. Sure, its scary and there will be a lot of failed projects but at least you COULD succeed, while trying to outclone WoW on shoestring budget is GUARANTEED to fail, and no F2P will not save resulting stillborn turd.


They still have WoW to get back to! In the past, people tolerated a lot of BS simply to experience DIKU, it was new and exiting. Now they are ether "why do I want to do exactly same thing again, but with different bugs" or "WoW has this issuebug fixed, so I just go back to playing it". This might be too niche for you to know this - but truly open-PvP mmorpgs (SB, DF, EVE) are all buggy and feature-incomplete as hell, yet people who are into them tend to tolerate it. Why? Because there isn't open-PvP WoW to go back to it, so sad refuse like DF and EVE is all there is.


Agree to disagree. The core issue is that market has more clones than a deathstar.

Way I see it, people can afford more than 15$/mo, you spend more than that just on cable or checking your Facebook on smartphone. People play different games all the time and can afford multiple subs. Issue is that most are simply unwilling to play more than one monthly sub for a DIKU because they are not different enough, so you play the best one and maybe pretend to quit and shop around F2P when your class gets nerfed.


DIKU means exp level-based (ding-gratz), epicz (gear drop) advancement system with a rigid role (class) system centered around cooperative PvE (dungeons and raids). EQ and WoW are DIKUs, UO and EVE are not.

You do this, in mmos, and honestly haven't quite the genre? Lolz, the ONLY way to be even remotely optimistic about an mmo is if you are completely utterly ignorant of what it takes to be "competitive", yet you seek this knowledge out first and still think mmo's are a competitive medium? LOLZ. Just wow sinji.

Alternative is to keep doing different flavors of "kill 10 rats". I don't inspire to reinact FedEx or Pest Exterminator employee in my spare time. Single player games do single player better, so if that all you do why bother with mmorpgs?

The only difference between "kill 10 rats" and "do 10 raids" are the size of the numbers flying off the tops of their heads.

Yes and no. While both are "kill 10 rats" difference is level of polish. Developers tend to spend A LOT more time on raids. So if you are going to do "ratting" why not go with the best ratting available?

No, the Alternative is to play a competitive genre.  Hell, this is, in fact, pretty much exactly the reason I quit MMOs.  Sure, I resub to WoW, or try something free every now and again, but I've found my competitive itch much better scratched by other genres.  In fact, MMOs were sandwiched between CS/Quake and TF2/Quake Live/Starcraft 2 for me.  The genre is just too played out, sub or f2p, if you are looking for something that really challenges you as a player.  Maybe ultra high end, i'm talking top few guilds in the world, or world class arena teams, etc, can match that, but I doubt you are in one of those, and if you are, then you are probably dedicated enough to WoW that you shouldn't care what else is available in the genre let alone the pricing plans or said games.

Wait you do that anyway and pay 15 a month for it. Your complaint has nothing to do with F2P and everything to do with how mmo's are built, and since your experience is with sub based mmo's your just complaining about sub based mmo's. F2P MT gaming just broke some fourth wall inside of you and you're trying to desperately repair the illusion that your monthly sub is actually affording you premium service, like the assumption was way back when, when people were charged by the hour.

If you enjoy doing co-operative and complex content in a group then MMO's are still the best game for that. And the "best" (newest, shiniest, most content filled) MMO is likely to require a subscription.

The people who just enjoy exploring new worlds, new mechanics or just treating MMO's as a single player game are more fickle and more likely to experiment with f2p options.

Wait mmos aren't good for that. MMO's are just starting to figure out what 2 person co-op means (or in other words people may just want to play with just one other person, go figure). Hell we may get a 2 man dungeons by 2014, where your noob friend who just bought and installed the game may not completely gimp your chances of not getting face whipped.

Yes, they've focused more on group than duo play. Possibly on the assumption that consoles covered that area... no idea really. Though some games seem to be allowing the duo access to more content (DDO, CoH and SWTOR coming to mind).

Pretty much irrelevant though. WoW has proven there is a large enough market whose itch can be scratched. And any game with the same degree of content and coverage is likely to be subscription based. Both to fun the expensive development and because they can get away with it.

WoW proved one thing back in 2004. Its 2011, going on to 12, WoW proved that the mmo can be sold as something far more successful than a gated community. Its 2011, and we now know that you don't have to charge suburbia prices to get the same content. 

WoW is still making huge amounts of money so whatever argument it made still holds. I'm sort of disappointed it is still so dominant, especially with the Blizzard C-team in charge and doing their very best to sabotage it. But I'm pretty sure the game that takes over from it as the MMO hotness (probably Titan, possibly SWTOR) is going to be subscription based, probably with a cosmetic goods cash shop as well. A game that can get the extent of buy in that WoW, or even EVE still has would be stupid not to keep accepting the money, plus the psychological effect of people "buying in" to the game and purchasing multiple month subscriptions. I suspect the number of people subscribed to Eve but barely playing it, who would not be generating any revenue in a f2p model, is worth considering.

The closest to a big-name game going free2play is probably guild wars 2, which will be fun to watch and looks good so far.

If there's a fully f2p game (no box, no sub) that is competing at this level I'm not aware of it, and would be more than happy to check it out (Dragon's nest looks interesting). The current games are mostly aged titles, failed titles (like APB) or shallow asian PvP grinders. Though I assume f2p games will also evolve.

When you have a small subset of people actually paying for the game then you are going to cater to that subset.   Doing that is going to often preclude appealing to a mass audience.    The alternative is a F2P game where it only looks free but nearly everyone actually pays for it anyways.

Instead of making better games, they just changed the way they get at your money.  :uhrr: Oh look, I can play 200 shitty WoW clones for free*.

*Xp boosters! Only 9.95 for a pack of 12!

I think Diablo 3 has as good a chance as anything of being the game that "takes over" for WoW.  Has more or less all the MMO meta game, we know most WoW players want to solo or small group anyway.   Somewhat ironically, the MMO genre has gone so far away from what it used to be that Diablo nails most of the things "the masses" want better than the MMOs themselves.

That would surprise me. Diablo 3 is likely to have smaller encounters, less continuous addition of content, less content (~20 hours according to a quick google) and fewer persistent world aspects. I don't think it will directly compete with the social and raid game-play that MMO's offer. I'd suspect people will take a break from their MMO, consume the content, and then mess with it casually after that.

Yeah this. There's no way it takes the MMO timeslot in people's schedule long-term, it just won't satisfy the social aspect on anything like the scale that an MMO does.

Isn't the player limit 4 in D3?   Pretty sure that's going to kill the idea of it taking away any MMO players.   They'll all play it for a month then go back to whatever.

I am re-posting this in vain hopes that there are some gamers left in the 'packaged goods' crowd that does mmorpg design these days.

Kageru, I can't think of any pure cash shop titles (or titles that might be F2P but don't also have sub bonuses), but games that offer flexibility in pricing options often get off-the-radar success. Wizard 101, Runescape, Club Penguin, Puzzle Pirates do very well financially afaik and have a lot of players. But these aren't games for those of f13 (although I keep meaning to go back to Wizard 101 and play through their pet system).

Another reason why the pure sub payment model is on its last legs is that it has only worked for MMORPGs as a payment model. MMOFPSs (exception: PlanetSide, and then only for a while) and MMORTSs (exception: Shattered Galaxy) have tried and generally failed to keep players paying that monthly fee, especially since their main competition are industry heavy-weights that let you play online versus other people for free.

There will be sub payments as part of the mix for a long time to come, but it isn't the dominant model moving forward. Hybrid models - F2P + subs + RMT + maybe something else - are the way things are moving because it keeps players in the game and spending money.

Sinij, if you are charging a pure sub fee on the PC, you are probably still competing with WoW, even if you haven't built an MMORPG.

While Allods has a lot of faults they dumped this a while ago. Now they've gone for a more Pay to Win model with their rune upgrade system.

The first part is a possibility, but I don't see any strong evidence for it. Maybe if you count it by number of users which tends to be huge for f2p titles, less so if you are looking at top revenue generators. I would expect a wide variety of revenue models, including subscription plus cash-shop for the really big name titles, to continue forward and the games that match their design, development budget and revenue model to do better than those which screw up the connection (eg "do an aPB"). I would not even be surprised if something like "CS:GO", or some future equivalent, wanted to charge a small sub-fee for "competitive league" access on vendor hosted servers. APB, Crimecraft and Global Agenda certainly believed this model was coming but none of them were big enough or good enough to buck the current trends.

Really, it could go either way.

Eve, Lineage2, Perpeptuum, Wurm, A Tale in the desert are all MMO's that are not really competing directly with WoW because they have gameplay focusing on a different aspect of game-play. There's no meaningful world PvP in wow, or world building, and likely never will be. The SWTOR people are convinced they are not competing with WoW because they have a story focus (though I think they're delusional).

Most MMO players want to solo all the content, or do it with a small group of friends.  It wouldn't compete with EQ or even 2004 WoW, but the MMO Market today is different, and they haven't had a AAA Diablo like game on their radars.  The "social aspect" might be different I'll admit, but I mean, like I already mentioned I don't think the huge swaths of MMO players are really playing their MMO to meet new people or something.

It's almost impossible to meet new people in WoW because of the cross-server thing. Maybe the changes to it made it a bit different, but one of my frustrations was I had in the past always been able to meet new people and get invites to guilds or raids or PUGs or whatever. The dungeon finder just ended that. Never saw anyone again etc.

A car with one seat and two gears.

If most MMO players want to solo all the content then the real question is why so many are still subscribed to MMO's. That need can be much better served by a single player game where there is no competition for content and the story can be built around them. At a guess I'd suspect while they spend a lot of time soloing they hope to be playing multi-player content, maybe at some point, and like the fact that the world is full and evolving. I know playing oblivion can feel sort of lonely compared to an MMO.

A somewhat different issue though.

Bragging rights. Having an audience.

"Living in a world".

Even if they goof off and don't take it seriously, having an avatar and being able to walk around and talk to people (or avatar watch) adds something that will be lacking in Diablo 3.  The importance of this should not be underestimated.

This.

But no, let's go ahead and  :dead_horse:

I think this is the important one, and I think games are learning to add this without a persistent world. See - Achievements in general. Diablo 3 will have a banner system for displaying e-peen.

Auto-facebook updates too.

I don't play MMOs for cooperation i play them for competition.  I want people around when i feel like kicking the crap out of them, not while im killing 10 rats.

  :angryfist:

Facebook is sooo 2010.

Smaller encounters? I guess you mean the size of the bad guy on the screen? I have been on somewhat of a Diablo 3 media blackout, but the last I played Diablo 2 you could turn a corner and encounter dozens and dozens of enemies at once. Since when does that happen in WoW? (I've also ignored WoW for years now as well.)

I really doubt D3 will have less continuous addition of content. It will present it differently - it will probably just use the DLC model like everything else these days.

People wanting solo content is not the same as them wanting to play solo all the time.   They don't want D3 competing with WoW anyways.   They probably even spent a pretty penny assuring themselves that wouldn't happen.

In the first case I meant number of players,  though some of the WoW encounters do have hundreds of NPC's. There are encounters in wow that do require 25 people acting with a fair degree of synchronisation and shared tactics. To the point where you have to do the encounter many times before you succeed reliably. Whereas diablo encounters tended to be more about 4 people attacking and operating independently.

If Diablo 3 is going to have a live team the size of the WoW one, while being subscription free, that would certainly be a good deal.

MMOs offer a lot of choice. As a casual non-raider, I'm a fan because of:
1) the persistent and multiple character thing
2) the characters on the same account can have some evel of interaction (twinking)

Depending on my mood and access to other humans:
3) I can solo
4) I can duo with my wife
5) I can play with my wife and our RL friends
6) I can play a PUG dungeon with little effort

And yeah:
7) I like the fact that the world isn't empty - like Oblivion
8) and there's regularly new stuff - particularly if you play on and off and not as a lifestyle.
9) so there's always things I'd like to go back and do. See what old content we can solo or duo, etc.

After 8 no one cares, hell 8 is a pain to get for anything organized, but the vast majority of gamers (not mmo players used to EQ1 and UO) don't care about any encounter that requires more than 8 players. That is why WoW can have millions of subscribers but only a handful of them get boners from raiding. Instance encounters to be engaging has to evidently scale on difficulty not the number of players you can throw at it.

I swear this section goes full retarded every four months, cause why are we discussing solo vs group play?

What are you talking about?  Nobody even brought up the "lol need to have 25 people to have fun" discussion.   We're discussing how D3 can't even meet the same level as WoW 5 man content.

If I'm following the discussion correctly
"D3 will totally kill mmo's"
"Naw D3 can't kill wow, its not mmo enough, even the encounters aren't epic enough."
"Wait what? the encounters are plenty epic."
"Naw you can't even have more than 5 to a party"

Not quite...


Smedley - mmo subs are dead
Gamers - only if you are barfing out shitty WoW clones
Smedley - ....
Gamers - lets talk about D3

 :oh_i_see:

Man, I used to play MMORPGs for the persistent game thing, but WoW cured me of that. There's hardly anything in WoW (or most any MMOGs nowadays) that require more than 5-20 players. That's less than current console FPSes!  :uhrr: Unless you play the auction house, and like it enough to stay for that.  :|

Back to the discussion of F2P:  I checked out MMORPG.com's list of games and the number of F2P or Item Shop games is enormous.  The list of games that are not released yet but already planning this payment model is only getting bigger.  Looking down through the list it was funny to see older games relisted for future revisions to their pay models (TBD in some cases.)  Also, many of the "For Pay" games generated a chuckle from me because I wouldn't give them a red cent, nor ever felt like I should.  Given the fact that I could probably spend the next 4-6 months trying out all the free games (crappy or not,) I'd be happy giving reviews plus seeing all the "new" things being done in the genre.  I've spent the last 2 weeks alone checking out CoH and CO to determine what I'd like to play for awhile. (Results recorded in the CO thread.)

Dren, with your method of "checking out" F2P titles you are not seeing anything but teaser. In MT title starting experience is _by design_ is nothing like what they have once 'gotcha, they feel invested' threshold passed and milking starts.


You said above about HG F2P in other thread. While HG isn't mmorpg, exact same process (maybe a bit more refined) applies to mmorpgs. You pay "20-30 hours worth of enjoyment" and then massive amounts of suck are pumped in and you are offered to buy your way around suck.

Question is - what you get to see in "20-30 hours worth" in a mmorpg? Well, you get to experience starting zone, get familiar with most in game systems, do some solo questing and a bunch of solo leveling. In a DIKU this is 100% solo 'teaser' content. At this point you only seen starter content and _nothing_  that makes a mmorpg an MMO games.

So, why are you playing mmorpgs again? To solo starting zones? Single Player games do it much better, give it a try.

We can ask why are you posting?

30 hours in and I'm still in the starting area? WTF? In any other game I'd be minimaxing my character and on my 6th boss fight. An mmo? Ive upgraded to purple rats, oh but an mmo wants me to pay full price + sub to dick around in noob land. I see major improvement :oh_i_see:

Much like sub-based games, then.

This bit is starting to sound a bit hollow these days.

Only because there's quickly becoming no such thing as a AAA single player game on a PC.  There's "single player campaigns" that last for miniscule #s of hours and then multiplayer.

Yeah, I didn't get his point there either.  Instead of paying to get that first teaser, I get it for free?  If you are saying you don't enjoy teaser portions of MMO's, then I'll turn your question back on you...why do you pay/play them? 

I do it to find one I might want to invest in for a few more months.  I guess you are trying to read too much into my statements.  I said you'd get 20-30 hours of play before you decide to play more or drop.  That's all.  Did I also mention it is free?

I do play non-mmo games.  I pay for them and enjoy them.  Not sure what that has to do with this subject though.  If you like them so much better than MMO's, why come to these threads and fling poo?

Huh? Why was I quoted?

Dragon Age 2 was just fine. Stop buying or supporting crap games and replay oldies if you have to.

Lowering standards is not an answer. This is what got us into F2P DIKU clone crapfeast in a first place. Remember how it all started? M59, UO... open sandbox, ecologies, communities, risk vs reward, real reputations? Now we have ding-gratz instanced-away DIKU clones where you could play without interacting with anyone, ever...

Kids these days....
:geezer:

When do we point out many F2P are not even DIKU.

What about the multitude of sub based DIKU clone crapfest, or are you even attempting coherence at this point?

EQ pk'd those games and stole their gold. Then along came WoW.

But this has very little to do with F2P since you could theoretically offer a F2P sandbox. Please stop confusing payment models with game types.

Honestly, the sandbox game type likely has more of a chance in a F2P world.

 :awesome_for_real:

First, I'm older than you, dipshit.

Second, my point was in support of your Single Player argument but pointing out there's a dearth of good SP games these days.  

Third, if those games had been more successful they'd have been copied.  Guess what, the audience didn't want them - at least not at the price the companies wanted.  Business reality sucks; get over it and move on.

Those games also had a lot of sociopathic shitsacks running around crapping up everyone's game time.

NOT ANYONE POSTING IN THIS THREAD OF COURSE

 :oh_i_see:

Cuz I was lazy. Sorry.  Was aimed at OP of course.

Ultimately, I prefer the F2P model because I'm tired of having to pay up front to find out later if the toy I just bought is broken later (yes, stolen from Lum...thanks Lum!)

I'll start to pay when I figure out the toy isn't broken or I just like playing with this particular broken toy.  Pretty simple.

I don't buy into this argument. You assume that 'successful' shares definition between gamers and business that sell them, you also assume that businesses have some, any ability to estimate what audience wants.

Way I see it businesses are clueless what gamers want (example - why would they push punitive DRM on PCs?), are risk-averse and unwilling to invest into unproven model, and following "past performance" modeling to write business cases for new titles resulting in unreasonable expectations for "same old shit" product. End result is that market is largely monolithic, mature and over-saturated (see Pepsi vs Coke). Traditional industry at this point would consolidate into 2-3 players and start advertising wars for the market share.  We are likely to see this with WoW vs Star Wars Republic.

I'm nearly certain that the majority of gamers don't give a shit about DRM.

If you're so certain it's just that they're risk averse why not write up a business plan and begin your own company?  Clearly you have it all figured out and there's throngs of people just waiting to jump onto something other than these F2P piles of junk or DIKU II, electric boogaloo.

Ask Ubisoft how their PC sales are going. I'm sure they'll say that the piracy rate of their games will have increased to 98%, coincidentally around the time they began implementing their DRM.

Funding.

Don't be a dick.

Maybe among denizens of neckbeardy old gamer forums.

I'm serious. They're currently whining about how PC sales are in the shitter without any similar uptake on their console versions. While I don't doubt that piracy is a major part of the number of copies being played for most titles out there, and I don't doubt that there are a lot of people who really couldn't give less of a flying fuck about DRM (my cousin is one of those), I do doubt that it's "just neckbeards".

His inability to acquire funding would prove the point, wouldn't it.  Hell, it's such a guaranteed money maker set up a donation site, people will flock, right?

I see you decided to go the other way.

My hypothetical inability to acquire funding to produce innovative mmorpg title would only prove that businesses are risk-averse. In the same scenario, I would have easier time securing funding for generic DIKU clone, this also doesn't mean that there is greater demand for generic DIKU clones, only that business are risk-averse. Don't confuse modern corporate risk management practices with satisfying customer needs and market-driven demand.

Which is why the innovation is in the F2P / freemium payment structure. Innovation doesn't appear just on the screen.

Again: sub-based titles require at least 3 years development and something like US$40 - $60m investment for exactly one swing at getting players interested. In your "player driven" market, this approach leads to players testing the game out for 30 days then sniffing discontentedly, saying, "This game's knees are too pointy" and going back to WoW. F2P titles can be developed faster and cheaper than that and then built up while the studio is less dependent on putting all their eggs in one basket for survival.

It's very easy for those on the sidelines to say, "Take risks!", but these people aren't the ones firing friends or begging investors for money to keep the doors open.

Besides, let's be honest sinij - you aren't asking for innovation, you are asking for a return to M59 / UO style gaming but with a new graphics engine. The problem there is that EQ appeared and very quickly became more popular than UO in its own heyday and thus pretty much ended the idea of the sandbox as the dominant MMO game type. (EQ has retroactively been re-classified as world-y, although at the time UO players were very dismissive of it as a themepark in comparison to UO.)

Innovation in MMOs would be breaking out of the MMORPG model and into something entirely different. The MMORTS model isn't feasible to charge a sub fee for as the sole revenue point (because Starcraft et al gives away better for free) and the MMOFPS has to be F2P since there are also better options available that you don't have to pay for. There may be other genres the MMO can enter, but box cost+subs will continually act as a barrier to player acquisition.

In fact, I can only really see subs working well in one area: educational MMOs. If I had the money, that's were I'd be - building a MMO that taught kids spelling, typing skills and the like. Parents will pay a sub for that. ... it would still have cosmetic RMT items though.  :awesome_for_real:

I don't agree with that at all. f2p works best with a game that is polished enough to attract a very large player-base so you can live off the small percentage who will cash shop. And in general you are going to want mechanics that are pretty easy to get into. An innovative MMO, with a limited budget and unusual mechanics is likely to be a niche game with a long gestation period that extends after launch. It is much better served by depending on a core of gamers who like the potential the game-play offers enough to subscribe. This is the model for Eve, Perpeptuum, Wurm, Darkfall. In most cases if those games went free to play they wouldn't expand their activity too much because the games are pretty painful and rough, they'd have difficulty keeping people around long enough to make cash-shop purchases and they'd savage their reliable subscription base. I'm also not sure f2p is going to give you the community that makes most of those games work, it's the "buy-in" of the subscription model that keeps players involved enough to form social groups.

The ideal f2p play game is more something like APB I think (if it was not broken). Log in and be at the action quickly, familiar mechanics and a large community you can flaunt your cash-shop bling or advantage in front of. The f2p document I see quoted a lot is from battlefield heroes which looks to be exactly that sort of game. They don't really have the budget to fully flesh out massively complex innovations in game design. Many of the free MMO's barely have time to do more than strew mobs over a plain (as per early EQ design).

So basically the subscription model suits the slow burn approach of a smaller company trying to innovate, the "market leader" who can get away with demanding subs, and less so the middle bracket which has neither. And the games with the really huge budgets (like SWTOR) can't really afford to innovate too much because they need to be mass-market successes to justify their development cost.

So, league of legends?

Lowering standards is what got people playing mmos back in 1999 and has been the basis of the genre since, so again what is your point?

30 hours and still in the starting area? Really? At my play rates that's got to be at least 7-12 sessions, over as many days. If you're still in the starting area at that stage I'd suggest it's on you, not the game.  :why_so_serious:

I assume so, I've never really played them other than a bit of DotA way back (so if it was intended as a counter-point I missed it). Certainly it's a good model in that they can use well understood game-play as a base and then sell flavor and decoration in the form of your avatar on that battlefield. Of course they couldn't easily go subscription given they were competing with a free mod. And since it's entirely PvP they don't have to invest in expensive PvE content.

Not really an MMO of course.

It sure seems the industry is moving the other way though.   Rather than have a small percentage spend a lot they'd rather have a large percentage (maybe 40%) buy a fair amount.   CoH, ChampO, Conan and most of the others have fewer options for spending tons of money.   It's more like they're selling a lot of hats/bags to everyone who plays.   That way they don't need the large player base.

The point of f2p is not that only a small proportion pays, almost everyone is expected to pay something if they keep playing past the newbie stage. But they pay in proportion to how hardcore they are. F2p allows price discrimination - everyone gets to pay as much as they are willing to pay.

When the genre started out the assumption was that pay per hour of play would be the model. Customers rejected that, but f2p is essentially a more nuanced version of the same thing.

That's not really true of the original F2P model.   Sure a large percentage would buy bag slots but after that they would play largely for free.   The large majority of funding comes from those random item boxes which have a chance at an amazing item.   A small percentage of people would spend 1000's on those things.

Now the western side of the industry is moving towards a model where the casual masses buy lots of hats.  Hardcore types are expected to sub and buy hats on top of that.

I'm pretty sure the numbers presented by the Battlefield heroes lead suggested that a very small percentage buy anything, but some of them buy quite a lot. And that's pretty much what I'd expect.

CoH, ChampO and Conan are not terribly good examples of free2play games as they were funded on the basis of being premium subscription MMO's, failed and used f2p to try and revive themselves. A game designed to be f2p from the ground up is probably a better example both for and against. Likewise number of titles should not be indicator of "where the industry is heading" as I expect f2p MMO's to be more numerous (since a lot of them are content light and re-using frameworks). Revenue would be better, but hard to gather.

I'm not even sure the phrase makes any sense, it assumes there is one correct answer and the industry will move in a coherent fashion towards it. I don't see any reason for that. SWTOR isn't going to be going f2p (at least not till it fails) nor is Perpeptuum and Spiral knights will never be subscription because it's too shallow. I don't see any reason there will be a single revenue model other than people with strong religious beliefs.

(edit)

Found it, from Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=33371):


By introducing pay to win they tripled that number but it was still under 5%. And it is unashamedly pay to win,


And they seem to be selling magic style "booster" packs so you can buy a lot while you hope that the rare you need is in them, rather than a bunch of consumables.

We're not talking about F2P in general here.    We're talking about F2P MMO's that have a chance of "killing" the subs model.   Stuff like Battlefield Heroes is really for a different audience.

I agree with this. Innovative cannot work with F2P because to hit large enough numbers to be profitable off 0.1% that pays you can't take single step away from the mainstream. 25,000 sub niche sub title is feasible (but barely), but 250,000 F2P title is not.


How can you expect this not to be default feature of any F2P when this is executed result? What suit would say no to money, and why?

I think Global agenda is a good one to look at. No pay to win, and its funding 2 other games and was built for around 20 mill. ( Im sure a good chunk of that went to overhead to set up the compiney).

Games like GA, LOTRO, Wurm, and DnD  are great ones to use as a standard.

We are back to cable TV example that I mentioned earlier in the thread. At the beginning Cable TV had no commercials and sold based on that, then someone figured out that customers would actually tolerate commercials, so they started introducing more and more. Then they figured out that they can segment "channels" their product and charge you more for it. So now Cable TV has ridiculous number of commercials and costs tons of money despite the fact that no consumer want to watch that much commercials or pay that much for multiple "packages" to get few channels they do watch.

Mrbloodworth, your confusion seems to be based on the misconception that game designers, and not accountants, would be in charge of making these decisions. Business people don't care if 'P2W' makes games a lot shittier for all gamers, you will see it forced into every title for as long as it end up making 1$ more than games without 'P2W'.

End result of this process will be few gamers with high tolerance for eating shit will be doing nothing but eating shit.

What the fuck is this logic?

There is currently much more innovation in free-to-play games than sub games because, contrary to your logic, free-to-play has lower risk. You aren't relying on 100% of your players committing $15 a month to your game. Instead, you are relying on ~20% of your players paying ~$8 a month on average. You come out ahead because you have a much easier time getting people to try your game, and a much higher population as a result. DDO with its unusual combat and small group content failed as a subscription MMO, but thrived as a free-to-play MMO.

There is a reason Rift and SWTOR are both so similar to WoW: if you're going to make a sub MMO, you need to play it safe because your only options from any individual player are getting $15 a month or getting $0. At that point, your game is either at least as good as WoW in every aspect of the game, or it fails. Even if it is as good as WoW, people already have social ties and time invested to WoW, so what are the chances they are going to keep paying $15 a month to your game too?

I cancelled my Rift sub after the first 30 days, not because it was a bad game, but because I was already playing WoW and my guild was there. I cancelled my DCUO subscription because I thought "I am not going to play this game enough to justify $15 a month". Either of these games would have been much more appealing if they were F2P because I could play them when I felt like it without feeling like I was throwing away money when I played something else. I only play DDO and LOTRO a couple days a month. Turbine could have either gotten $0 from me a month for subscription games, or they could get ~$5 a month from me for quests/dungeon packs that I retain permanent access to.

Look at League of Legends for a more obvious example. Would anyone pay $15 a month for this MMO battle arena sim? As Fury found out: probably not, and you'd have had a tough time getting anyone to even try it. Why would I pay $15 a month to for this game when WoW has similar pvp and I'm already paying for it? Because it didn't require a subscription, it thrived. It did so without having a giant grind or handicapping free players. F2P does not mean "mediocre game where you pay to remove the grind". There are games out there like that, sure. There are also sub MMOs that have intentionally extended grinds to keep you around as long as possible (look at the 'must participate in every holiday event' WoW mount, or the daily quest grinds that took over a month). Your response to that implementation should not be "that business model is shit" it should be "that game is shit"

One that demonstrates that adoption of "pay 2 win" is inevitable evolution of F2P model.

By all rights Rokal's post should be the last point made in this thread, but I bet it won't be.

Sinji is still allowed to troll this thread so no it kinda wont.

Um. No. It doesn't.

Rift being a formulaic game doesn't really prove anything convincing about revenue models.

Sorry, I will not connect the dots for you.

You will not, or you cannot?

Can't, because P2W is a self-defeating strategy.

Pay 2 Hat, on the other hand, makes the money.

 :facepalm:

You really can't make a horse drink...

Kids, repeat with me - revenue and profit is all that matters in corporate decision making.

Which is exactly why the sub model will change.

Oh, no doubt. We already established that you can't release another DIKU clone into this over-saturated market as a sub model. Next round will be trying and failing to make DIKU clones work as F2P.

From comments section about EVE cash shop on  Lums (http://www.brokentoys.org/2011/10/05/a-brief-programming-note-from-hilmar-the-businesscat/#disqus_thread) site.


As I said earlier in this thread:


In F2P title that additional barrier "they are paying sub, lets not piss them off too much" goes away.

Man I wish I can troll a thread this long.

How do you remove the knee-jerk reaction that the game is F2P and must therefore suck?

I avoid most F2P games because I assume that if they were any good, they'd have a subscription plan.  So far, the only games that I've done F2P and enjoyed are a) failed subscription games and b) FPS. 

I don't really see an issue with Sinij's point. A f2p game is going to attempt to motivate people to use the cash shop because that's their revenue. Most players are going to do all they can to avoid using the cash-shop because they want to play for free. So the game design goal is to have a motivation which doesn't drive away the "will never pay" player while encouraging the growth of "paying just makes the game better" people. The ideal would be purely cosmetic content such that the non-payer isn't missing anything while playing the game. But in practice the use of in-game advantage or skipping a painful grind are much stronger revenue extractors. Some games are going to push a bit hard to the point the game is considered not worth playing if you aren't paying.

The current model seems to be having a "escape clause" where you could earn the in-game advantage offered by the cash-shop, but not without a painful grind. That defuses complaints about the amount of content that must be unlocked via the cash shop. World of tanks XP crawl can be mean but you can grind to Tier 10 if you really want to, DDO has favor, L2 resource grind, APB weapons renting weapons with in game cash. Which on reflection makes it clear that CoH is doing something quite different in that you can never earn more advantages in game but progressively free content as you pay. That probably suits a MMO refit better than a pure f2p model.

As before attempting to argue there is only one revenue model is pretty simplistic. Maybe at some point in the future where there are no subscription games, but that's years away.

Is it just me? or has this thread, having both sinij and DLRiley, crossed an event horizon of trolling. All it needs now is duesmatic to drop by to create a singularity.

The problem with sinji's point is that its negligible. Subscription games, all of them, already "motive people to keep paying". That's were sinji goes full retard, because he simply ignores the fact that his argument applies to subscription games made since 1999, in order to prove a point that he invalidates in the same sentence. Its like someone saying "don't eat that chocolate bar cause its evil and wants to get you addicted to sugar" while buying three bags of skittles.

Im with Nebu on this, I have a hard time believing in F2P games because I dont believe they exist, truly F2P or in other words where I am not limited on content, mounts, XP gain, etc.  If I pay to play I get everything without limitation and that provides me with some weird pyscho blanket of comfort. 

I don't think GW got tarred with the F2P issues. I think most gamers are capable of figuring out if a game is F2P because it sucks, because it's older not as successful (LOTRO for example), or if it was designed that way (WOT, GW).

Yeah, free to play is actually an unfortunate term to my mind.  I go in with this kind of adversarial relationship with the cash store, where I try to never have to use it, at least in an MMO.  It seems fundamentally opposed to the idea of a virtual world to me, I think that is part of the problem.  That being said, its clearly the way of the future and I think I am in the minority of players with an ideal for MMOs that hasn't been relevant for a long time.

From my experience, most of the decent F2P games direct you more to a subscription based payment plan anyway.  Sure there are cash shop items above and beyond, but pretty much on the same level as WoW for example.  I also don't consider a lot of the post launch F2P games failures when it comes to quality or playing enjoyment.  Many of them were just not as big of a commercial success as they would have liked for any number of reasons (WoW being a big reason for many.)

Some go more for the one time fee to some higher rank of membership.  I tend to like those better just because it is very cut and dry.  You can later drop the game and come back to it as many times as you want with very little pain.  If a new expansion comes out, market another upgrade to membership (one time fee.)  It's kind of the same as the GW model but with a free trial period at the beginning.  I feel more like contributing my cash because it becomes more of a scenario of paying for their effort and additional content as opposed to a service.

Each F2P scheme for each game is going to be different.  The hard part is that now when reviewing MMO games, you'll have to include the payment scheme to get the full idea of what you can expect from the game. 

For me, I'm going to have a very very hard time paying $49.99-$59.99 for any MMO at launch.  The odds over the years have gone against me for going "all in" at the beginning.  MMO's have to work harder at convincing me anymore past stating "Just like xxx, only better!"  A free dl and play in whatever form is a great step in the right direction.

Probably because GW isn't F2P.

Make good games. I can name a few, but eh... Someone is just on a tear.

Every time you post, God kills a hippie.

About a year ago we were still calling "f2p" games microtrans or pay per play. I don't really understand why we started calling them free to play, when they are not, in fact, free.

(http://www.ourcountryblessings.com/fif.jpg)

It costs a Buck 'O' Five.

Don't encourage him.

F2P cash shop models work because the designers can instantly tell if an item is popular or not and then make follow on decision based on that information.  There is no guessing what players want.  In a sub model, a change - no matter how good or bad - will not affect you economics for a few months, months in which you probably made other changes.  Therefore it is hard to exactly pin down what people like or don't like about the changes.  Players might report that "this new expansion sucks" but it is hard to get a good feel for what exactly about the expansion is unpopular (other than obvious things like increasing the levelling curve or something like that).

The only way General Mills knows if people like the new formula for Honey Nut Cheerios is if people buy it or not.  The problem is that they cannot change the formula overnight.  The developer of an MMO can change the "formula" overnight by adding or removing for sale content to meet likes and dislikes.  Coding offer infinite and instant adaptation to your customers' preferences.

Rift and SWTOR being formulaic does prove that, currently, it doesn't make sense to take risks with a subscription model. Both games stick with formulas that are popular and proved rather than making riskier decisions. Rift seems to have been pretty successful, despite being formulaic. This is counter to sinij's (poor) argument that F2P MMOs could not afford to take risks, and would therefore lead to MMOs continuing to tread water if F2P became the predominate revenue model.

Look at Warhammer Online as an example. Regardless of whether you liked the game or felt it succeeded at anything, it was the last big-budget sub MMO that tried to be innovative. It tried to introduce collision detection into MMO pvp so that tanks had a purpose, positioning mattered, and abilities like 'taunt' could actually be used. It tried to have large-scale RvR pvp content where you fought over persistent objectives that actually mattered (cities, not random towers in the middle of nowhere). Because it was a subscription MMO, and people are generally only going to pay for one subscription MMO, it needed to be everything to everyone. It needed to be at least as good as WoW in other areas of the game besides PVP. It needed to be that way at launch, because initial impressions matter so much for a subscription MMO when you are asking people to pay $50-60 upfront and then commit $15 every month or lose all access to the game.

Because Warhammer tried to be everything, they didn't put enough effort into fixing the aspects of the game that would have been it's strengths. If Warhammer Online had been free to play:

-the developers would not have needed to invest so much into PvE, because you could still have people as customers even if they paid $15 a month to Blizzard for PvE content
-the developers could have spent all that extra time/resources improving PvP and RvR for launch, making it work better and expanding it to be the highlight of the game
-the decline of the game would not have been so rapid, because generally speaking people are going to be more patient for fixes when they don't need to pay you $15 every month

Obviously, the inherit risk with F2P in a competitive PvP game like Warhammer online is the one sinij keeps harping on about: selling power. I don't think that model really works though. Look at Allods online: polished F2P MMO that looks and runs great, completely tanked in the western market when people saw that you had to pay to improve your items at end-game (or pay to remove the -stats death penalty unless you wanted to wait a day). League of Legends proves that you can make a competitive F2P MMO without selling power and be wildly successful. Warhammer could have sold new warfronts (just like 'map packs' in FPS games), cosmetic items, mounts, and experience boosts without impacting the health of PvP.

I'm not saying F2P games are perfect or that the model is flawless. I certainly prefer F2P at this point, but both models have obvious flaws. Sub games encourage developers to stretch content out as long as possible because releasing new content before the old content has missed its expiration date is like throwing away money. F2P encourages developers to think less about replayability when designing content, because you want people finishing content and looking for something new to buy.

However, arguing that F2P games discourage risky or innovative design is dumb. You would have to be completely ignoring what F2P and sub games are currently out to make that argument. F2P games are out there with designs that break heavily from formula, and they are successful.

My point is more you cannot draw conclusions from a clearly flawed game. Warhammer online was full of bad design not because they had to play safe but because they were bad, Rift lacked character and APB was a complete cluster-fuck. They don't necessarily prove that the failings were a result of their subscription revenue model.

I don't even know that the points you raised can be used in that fashion. PvE content helps keep people online when they don't have the energy or can't find PvP which is probably why global agenda has been steadily adding it while f2p. Wherease Eve has proven that subscription game can do quite well even with PvE content that is amazingly bad. Even the decline argument is uncertain, to an extent subscriptions encourage "buying into" the game and forming social networks which are quite resilient. There's people that have been playing CoH for years, there's still people playing vanguard, whereas the f2p market is very likely to move onto the next great thing because the barriers to moving are lower. And subscription games like Conan and Warhammer have shown that even a deeply flawed sub-game will get a lot of people trying it, but will get thrashed in retention.

I'd rather say that most MMO's are not terribly innovative. It takes a very brave and talented (or foolhardy) designer to take a pot of money and strike out into regions unknown. And even then it's probably only going to be innovative in a couple of ways rather than redesigning the entire foundation of the genre. It's also just as possible that subscriptions help a game iterate over time (like Perpeptuum) whereas a f2p title needs to be flashy and playable immediately to hold attention, and that trying innovation, for example SWTOR's (Rather dumb) believe in MMO story-telling, takes a substantial investment. Just as wow established the quest as being a central MMO progression mechanic by spending, at the time, stupid amounts of money on them.

Really the only difference I can see is that if you need a huge chunk of money for your development, but believe you can hold large numbers of subscribers, then that's what you'll try and do, that's still what makes the money-hats. If you have something that is really playable, but maybe not deep, then throw the doors open and make it f2p (sort of the WoT model). If you have something that is not very playable but might evolve into something cool you might well consider subs again. Perhaps like the perpeptuum model where there is no box cost to ease people into it, or a generous free trial so they can sample the gameplay.

The only real rule is that the sub model better match both the game and the amount of development budget spent.

And sub-based games generally require that you buy the box, meaning that they are actually buy to play (B2P) plus subs.

F2P are generally free to download, but then aim for a lot of smaller cost options to raise revenue. You can play many for free indefinitely, but you won't be getting access to everything... while with B2P+subs, if you don't pay the sub fee, you get access to nothing.

Not really. You get f2p with a time limit (eg. a trial) so you can explore the game, generally offered shortly after the initial rush has stabilized. And I would expect a lot more subscription MMO's to experiment with other models such as Wow's level capped endless trial or a hybrid plan like global agenda tried where you only need a sub for advanced and end-game content.

Not that it really matters, but WAR did the endless trial before WoW did actually.

Now pause for a second and think what would Warhammer as a hypothetical F2P GvG title would charge for in their cash shop? What would players competing against each other would want most?


I agree with this, whatever 'logical conclusion' of F2P, future subscription titles will be forced to be a lot more open about trials. Current system where you have to back-buy all expansions is... idiotic.

Not what you're implying for reasons we've already described.  Play to Win just flames out.

I think in no small part because a good proportion of the players willing to put money into that kind of a title also prefer to play against a rolling supply of chumps instead of each other.  And the chumps would avoid that game because it was Play to Win.

Edit: Since you edited I'll add that I'm referring to what a competitive title would (should, actually) offer.  Some players would clearly go all in with a Play to Win set-up, but for the reason I'm suggesting, it wouldn't be a wise course of action from anything but an incredibly short-term business standpoint.

In situation you describe, who are actually paying customers and who are overhead?

Interesting new development - Blizzard with WoW decided to allow players to trade (some?) store-bought pets. This means they are indirectly endorsing cash4gold and cash4gear schemes.


Eventually, they will cut pets out and just directly sell people "goods" they want.

Is this how they are going to control the cost of gold?  :awesome_for_real:

No, controlling the cost of gold was already achieved through near universal BoE and daily quests, in case you were serious.

Pay to win is just another lever. It will extract revenue, it will discourage free players if it gets too extreme. But since they're probably a churning population anyway it might be worth it.

Were you referencing a specific game?  You didn't indicate it.  Otherwise, this is false for many F2P games.  So far I've tried about 5 in the last month and all of them allow you to play indefinitely.  There is no "time limit."

The limit is only how long you enjoy the game without the advantages paying for content gives you.  THAT is completely different game to game and depends on your personal tolerance level.  The more min/max you are, the lower your threshold.  The more explorer you are, the higher your threshold.

Think hes confusing free trial with F2P

The problem is, there is increasingly no one name that can define how a game is set up.  Not even the original sub-only games are that anymore.

We really need more categories. 

Pay to play
Pay to play + shop with fun nicknacks
Pay to play + shop which you need to buy sht from because they put your balls in a vice even though you pay a monthly sub(cough Aion)
Free to play but screwing you slowly in certain aspects of the game(ie content, mounts, etc)
Free to play + shop with fun nicknacks
Free to play + shop which you need to buy sht from because they put your balls in a vice and leveling is about as much fun as a bike without a seat without their shop xp pots

Did I miss any?

Yeah, you should probably break pay to play down into ones where you buy the box (Guild Wars) and ones where you buy the box and pay a sub (WoW etc.)

Probably, but it is easy.  EQ2 does both.  Play for limited time on subscription based servers OR play for free on F2P servers!  If you choose to start paying on F2P servers, you are stuck playing with F2P players FOREVER even though you are paying as much as subscribers on the subscription based server who have to decide to pay a sub after 7-10 days or.....

Yeah, very straight forward and easy to understand...

I was responding to the "if you don't pay, you don't get any access" comment on subscription games. In fact trials are free2play but time limited and that limit can easily be extended to something like a WoW level limit or a freemium model "end-game and advanced content" limit. There's no hard boundary.

I believe those are known as "knick knack paddy whacks".

Now, give the dog a bone.

Are you going to come rolling home soon, old man?

 ;D

I'm just kind of baffled that none of these crazy huge-money high-risk must-beat-WoW-or-we-lose titles haven't just started bundling more than one free month with the box. If you give yourself two or three months after launch before it's make-or-break time instead of one, then maybe you will get away with launching way the fuck too early. Your initial money-grab goes down, for sure, but it seems like a good enough tradeoff that I'm surprised nobody has tried it.

You may as well push back release then and fix up your game some more instead of blowing your release hype wad. A lot of people don't want to play a shitty game, even if it's free. Releasing early and getting that reputation as a shit game just digs yourself a hole to climb out of.

What if a game is not fully done but still awesome?

 :grin:

Well I guess you could release if with that 2 month free subs gimmick and that could help generate buzz/splash. It could get somewhat pricey though, skipping out on a month of subs if you sell 100,000 units will cost you 1.5 million $. Is your free month marketing gimmick worth 1 mill 5?? That could buy you A LOT of banner ads, google traffic, or whatever the marketing kids are doing these days.

You mean like Rift?   :grin:

I just don't see what the point would be. People would be more tempted to buy the game knowing they were getting more time, but none of these MMOs have problems with initial box sales. People usually get bored and run out of things they want to do after the first 30-90 days. The only thing this would have accomplished with Rift was Trion getting $0 in sub fees from a lot of players instead of $30.

It would help if your game launched in a broken state that you expected to fix within 90 days, but if you're launching in a broken state you're already fucked.

I suspect that they would lose a lot more of the people who automatically sub for the first 3/6 months that way than they would gain in long term retention.

 Who killed videogames?  (http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-ghost-story/)

Tim Rogers take on MT in social (smartphone) games.

Choice quotes:




TL;DR Design new user experience to be as addicting as possible, then exploit player with every possible psychological trick to spend money.

Well, yeah. Money is involved. Its not freeware anymore.

 :facepalm:

Mrbloodworth, I have nothing to talk to with people like you. In the future please let us know about any title you work on so I can avoid it, you soulless corporate cog.

the fuck?

I mean, seriously, what the fuck?

*sniff*

RIP freeware.  :heartbreak:

I always wanted to be corporate! Does this come with a raise, up from zero?

When I read the article from the industry insider I was appalled, and I knew about most of these dirty tricks. It is still disgusting that someone would go to such extremes to squeeze money out of people while pretending to be free. It isn't right, it isn't free and people calculating the best way to allow kids to steal most from his parent's CC to pay for worthless pixels or how to swindle customers with gambling addictions for tens of thousands dollars before they understand what is going on should be held accountable, the very least for hijacking and tainting our gaming past time and turning it into a gambling pixel whorehouse.  Bloodworth's "so what" reaction to this is equally appalling.

That wasn't a so what. Also, Tim Rogers sounds crazy, thats like a forum post gone "mainstream" there. You can see more analysis just like it on MMORPG.com. Pick any game from 1995 and on.

It reads like they pine for the freeware era. Hes also confusing ( IMO ) the need to design compelling elements into games, with some notion of cheating people out of money. Basic progression or or hooks that have been present in just about every game ever ( The "one more turn"/level/quest ), are now evil agendas to sap your wallet ( By reason of avoidance ). Granted there are some games that do this ( Mainly the "social" facebook type ), but not overwhelmingly, and not as brashly as its painted there.

I see this hysteria as a natural progression to the Ala-cart systems beginning to evolve. Just like when freeware games started getting box prices. There are lots of F2p games that are well crafted, fair, and nicely priced. Some will not acknowledge this. I also have a really hard time making the connection with facebook/"Social" apps, and how they are just like say... The next gears of war. Thats a leap I just cant make personally. You also cut off a really important part of his conclusion.

I'm still waiting for my key to the executive bathroom.

Aren't you just so cute!

F2P games and getting nickel and dimed to death slowly are a condition of the economic times. These types of models have no long-term future in an economic upswing.

Once people have disposable income, they will want things all-inclusive since nobody likes constantly paying for small things over and over again.

Darn NFL anyway.  They keep having games I want to watch every weekend.  That keeps me coming back for more until I see all the season content.  I have to pay a monthly fee to have access to the best channels that carry the games.  If I want to see them live I pay the monthly fee and a micro-trans to be at the stadium!  Then they want me to actually buy sweatshirts, coffee mugs, and hats (HATS!) with my team's official NFL emblems on them!  I mean, how can I really be called a fan unless I buy these things??  Then there are these little side games called Fantasy Football that require even more money!  This addictive system and micropayments are killing me!

The analogy is more apt if you got to watch the NFL game for free, but you had to pay extra per month to unlock viewing inside the 20. Otherwise it goes to a gamecast dot on you TV screen.

Sounds like every Bengals home game this year.  :awesome_for_real:

While there are tons of "free to play" games for, say, the ipad etc which are nothing but a trap for kids (we had an article in the newspaper just a few days ago where a kid used 24k NOK on berries in a game, which was refunded iirc), there's a huge gap between actively making that, and saying "well, money is involved, of course they'll want to actually earn money off of what they do". One which doesn't really warrant the automatic "BEGONE SATAN THOU ART EBUL" post which you just spewed forth.

We already established that there are "bad people" designing MTs, in the worst possible way, stopping at nothing to scam a quick buck. Turning these "games" into gambling and addiction traps, minus regulation and adults-only clause you expect to see from something that dangerous.
We have seen has-been old hand of the industry saying what boils down to "wouldn't it be great if we could do the same?"

Logical answer is: Fuck No! BEGONE SATAN.

Unfortunately, mmorpg crowd is not properly educated what MT-based "Free"2Play design is, failing to realize that even further generic-anizing and low production values are necessary element of F2P design. They make low production value, derivative addiction traps and flood the market with it to make money. Why do we need this in mmos?

In this thread, Sinij incorrectly argues that exploitative games like Farmville are still showing growth and are the future of the industry while completely ignoring that exploitative gameplay design was the core of the industry in the 80s. Intentionally obnoxious game design intended to suck small fees from players who were bad or lazy, sound familiar? It wasn't sustainable then and it isn't sustainable now.

You're still dismissing the entire business model while ignoring games that aren't doing this and are still successful. Meanwhile, we gave examples of games that did try this approach outside of 'social gaming' and completely flopped because of it.

You're right though. Exploitative free-to-play is inevitable, the world is out to get you, and video games were much better when you were a kid and were dumping quarters into Ghosts 'n Goblins.

I grew up doing all my gaming on C64 and NES, and then Amiga, and never dumped quarters into arcade gaming machines outside of amusement parks, and I agree with sinij. Sort of.

So, using this logic you're going to ostracize bloodworth based on the fact he's not going "FUCK YOU SATAN" because there's actually money involved in making a game?

You must be a real hoot at parties.

Sinij, I'm pretty sure Bloodworth's highlighted name and title disappearing overnight was supposed to be your cue to stop losing your shit at him.

You should also consider that sometimes a job is just a job, but that some people might decide to take umbrage to you painting them with the same brush as you do their (previous?) employers.

Sinij is mostly right here.

Gamasutra runs plenty of interviews with social games guys where they freely admit that they design revenue streams rather than games, that they purposely make their games annoying so that people will purchases ways to get around those annoyances, etc. A lot of these guys are no more game developers than guys tasked with developing new themes for slot machines. They are proud of the fact that fun is not even a consideration when making games.


This is a truly terrible analogy. Arcade games were fun and stressed mastery. The addictiveness came from the fact that the core game was enjoyable and you paid money to play more if you weren't good, not because the game was boring unless you spent $100 on Smurfberries to give your Smurfs extra energy so they could Smurf Smurfier.

The only similarity between arcade games and social games is reliance on incremental payments.

Arcade games sent you back to the beginning of the game if you ran out of credits. That you might be "rewarded" by playing the entire game on one credit required a lot more capital to get good enough to reach that point.

Social games remember where you got up to the next time you put in a coin / wait for the cooling off period to expire.

All video games do their utmost to keep players coming back. The best video games are addictive, at least for a short period of time.

The social games market is set for an implosion at some point because the bubble is going to burst, but that isn't going to kill the RMT model at all. RMT has been embraced wholeheartedly by gamers who buy the DLC of their favourite games and provide a better source of revenue than was received by simply having box sales.

... we're a hell of a long way from Smedley's point.

More importantly, it isn't fun, and it's what's going to lead to the FTP bubble bursting.

(http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/0/26/316516-et2600box_large.jpg)

One depressing and inevitable outcome of this is going to be tabloids running horror stories about little Johnny Atkins running if $1000 bills in MTgame2015.

Also, mediocre developers making mediocre cash grab games is nothing new and has never killed off other models before, it won't this time either. MtG wasn't killed by a thousand shitty yugihos. Original game ips weren't killed by a thousand shitty film tie ins. UO wasn't killed by a thousand shitty dingratz treadmills. PC gaming wasn't killed by a thousand shitty consoles.

I can still buy a fucking newspaper despite a thousand shitty news websites.

Shitty developers will continue to make shitty games with inappropriate payment models. Others will find more ways to make the same MT payment models work, and their games will last longer. Others still will make subscription or even stand alone games.

Using Allods online, the only borderline western (Russian, there was at least a serious attempt to market it in the US/EU though) example in this thread of a F2P MMO that had pretty blatant "exploitative" cash shop options (pay to level your gear, pay to -stats penalty from death), there's similarities to the old arcade game design.

The entire premise of this thread was that the F2P craze was going to degrade MMO quality and lead to exploitative design. We aren't just talking about shitty facebook games that aren't fun on their own. Allods online is by most accounts a pretty decent game. It was pretty popular during beta before the cash shop was added. It's not a game that is complete shit unless you pay to remove the boredom. The game does penalize you for dying (or did at one point) by giving you a -stats debuff that could only be removed for free every 24 hours, and giving your items a chance to get 'cursed' when you died unless you spent cash to buy protective wards for your items.

This is similar to quarter-eaters from the 80s. The base game is cheap (free in Allods case), but if you suck you'll end up paying a lot more in small fees throughout your game session. The games are both designed expecting you'll die. Some arcade games even gave you more credits for your initial quarter, meaning that you *could* just wait (not a day in this case, but starting a new game) and hope to do better next time. Or you could get around the inconvenience of waiting/starting over by spending more money.

There are similarities, and both are examples of "designing for revenue streams" instead of "designing to make the best game". The model wasn't sustainable in the 80's and did not permanently lead to all games adopting the design. Similarly, Allod's model wasn't sustainable and the game flopped in the US/EU. It's not an inevitable outcome that all F2P MMOs will eventually adopt exploitative design.

My biggest issue with the f2p thing is that it disincentivizes developers from outright fixing bad/clunky/grindy game mechanics. It's much better to keep them in and have the players either put up with them or pay $$ in the cash shop to bypass them.

See also this rant (http://skycandy.org/2011/09/the-monetization-of-middle-earth/) (that I mostly agree with).

Gauntlet says, "Feed me, Seymour."

It caused the 80s video game crash. Had it not been for Nintendo cleaning up that mess who knows if we'd even have home consoles right now.


I was going to mention Gauntlet and other arcade games where you lose life just by doing nothing but decided against it because I could only think of a couple. (Gaunlet and Xybots being the two that spring to mind immediately) That's not a through line of arcade game design. Also that's really a different model - in that model you are essentially paying for time. That's not the same as paying to remove barriers. (Also I would argue that those games were badly designed in that respect, although I liked both games!)

I cannot think of any arcade game where the game had some sort of barrier in it that paying more removed. (I don't consider "running out of lives" a barrier) Especially where the barrier was boredom and you could pay to make the game move at a decent pace.

It's true that free to play does not mean you have to inconvenience the player then charge them to remove those inconveniences but that is certainly the most common form it takes in "social games" and social/iPhone games was the subject of the piece Sinij linked to.

Actually on the original gauntlet machine you could play for quite a while if you worked together since you could find food to make up for the loss of health over time. Indeed Wikipedia mentions that as an issue,

"There were some skilled players that could play an unlimited amount of time on one credit, especially with the Warrior and Wizard, and thus causing the arcades to lose money. A ROM update was released, reducing the "extra shot power" and "Extra shot speed" powerup bonus for Warrior and Wizard, and adding a new points-based difficulty counter to the game. The difficulty counter caused the game to become more difficult, in 16,384 point steps, which removed more designated food from the levels, and made the monsters respawn faster. Unfortunately, this was not well thought out, as on the default game difficulty of "4", it was almost impossible to pass levels 1-7 without dying, and level 4 was designed so that some of the food drops would block the monsters from swarming the player."

I'm not sure bringing in arcade games really pushes the argument forward. At the time they were very expensive units, unmatched by the domestic equivalent and it was understood they'd have to generate a decent amount of revenue over time. There is not much cross-over with free2play.

Of course now multi-player games of that type cannot expect to demand a subscription fee. A subscription fee or even cash shop for something like dungeon defenders? That's not going to fly at all.

The same is true of Xybots, there was a way to recover health.

Anyway comparing some energy-based Smurf iPad game to arcade games is really inappropriate. Again beyond extremely reductionist "you pay incrementally" or "both try to make money" there's not much overlap. The through-line of design for energy games is you pay to relieve boredom.

You forgot green tag, because that is exactly what happened to MtG, UO and PC gaming. Sure, all of these still exist, but that is about it.

Spelled out for dense people:

Shitty DIKUs did kill UO
Shitty consoles did greatly damage PC gaming
MtG did lose entire generation due to shitty yugiohs.

I don't see "Shitty F2P MMOs killing off MMORPGs for another decade" as that far-fetched.

You do realize that Magic the gathering is the PINNACLE of what you dislike right? Its was built in day one that every deck and card would be obsoleted by the next paid for pack. Its like, the entire model. In fact, I would go on to say its card games like that that really opened the gates for this new model and conditioned a generation to it. The problem I have is this leap from social/Facebook games, that have always been for the fly by night casual player, people who spend 100's on online poker, to thinking all games use this model or will.

Sinij has brought it up in every thread he has been in, indiscriminate of game type. Social, console, MMO or standalone, blowjob preferential dongle enabled. Its the blanketing I do not understand. To the point he now blames the loss of popularity on games that lost popularity well before any of this. If he has a point, this just waters it. Even the last link he posted was squarely inside the facebook/social game area, it makes no mention of MMO games. MMO games, that arguably use a completely different MT model than Facebook games, its a different audience.

I can't even name one MMO that will be out in the next 3 years that will use facebook like practices in revenue model.

If you do not like the Facebook/social game model, do not play them. The vast majority of games STILL do not use it. There are still many really well crafted games out there. There are also many well crafted games that use Micro transitions.


EDIT: Also, UO is old, get over it, ITS OLD. That's why its not popular today. Has shit to do with Farmvile players and pigs. Though I am sure Mafia war players are VERY concerned with the goings on In PVP in UO.

This is exactly what concerns me. I realize that there are differences between card games, social facebook games, PC games and MMO games. Reason I brought 'social' games (and avoided arcade games and card games)  into this discussion  about MMO is that while they are quite different, they are not so different that design F2P methods cannot "jump species" and infect MMO. We already seen this happening with LoTRO, DDO and few others but so far it was mostly failed games that succumbed to this malaise.

Now we have Smed very publicly opening Pandora's box with a loud "Wouldn't it be great ..." There is no closing this box, and trust me there will be discussions just like that going on in multiple boardrooms between suits for who only exposure to gaming is golfing.

My very grounded fear is that next step will be a flood of even shittier (like decade of DIKU cloning wasn't bad enough) F2P MMOs that will put further stigma into playing few non-shitty ones out there, completely kill off overall grows of genre and make coming up with a decent subscription-based niche game all but impossible.

Now tell me I am wrong, because I WANT to be wrong. I just know better.

I really can't make that leap that LOTRO and DDO are anything like Facebook/Social game models. I can't make this leap. Not even Aloids is as bad at pushing you to the shop as Farmvile. Sometimes, I think perhaps you just have not meet a F2P you have liked, for whatever reason.

Lets make an example. Is spiral knights (http://www.spiralknights.com/) a game that has suffered loss of production value because of its F2P nature?

That's actually not how the game was originally designed. I don't feel like elaborating so suffice it to say you are wrong.


There is a lot of desire on the part of "real game" publishers to use this model. It's really pretty self-evident given all the interviews, articles, GDC talks, etc.


Firefall. Bang. What do I win? Firefall has what is basically the energy-game system, where you can do things like quests on long timers but can pay to do them instantly. And games like Tiger Woods already have things like earning special gloves by either playing a hundred hours or forking over cash. That's not precisely an energy system but it still fits the paradigm of something you want to get that takes a ridiculous amount of time and boredom but that you can shortcut with cash.

Sinij is painting with a broad brush but I think it's fair to say that the industry is moving in this direction. Wether or not that's a long-term trend is anyone's guess, but yeah, in every boardroom of every publisher people are asking how they can make their games more like Farmville. That absolutely is happening.

Hold on, hold on.

I am talking about what Sinij has been ranting about. Exploitative practices, Low production values, Intentional pay for advantages. Not something as mundane as energy systems. An energy system ( Basically pay for time played, like a sub does ) is not a root of evil.

All of those card games are indeed designed just as I said. Got to catch them all, after all. Hell, how many handheld Pokemon games are there now?

 :facepalm:

Sorry, I really don't have anything to talk to you about. We don't meet basic level of agreed-on concepts to facilitate any kind of meaningful information exchange.

How is having to pay for time played Exploitative, you paid nothing to get in the door. I feel you really keep mixing things up. Seems any kind of income for a free game other than a sub is exploitative to you. That then leads to the game being "low production value cash grabs".

Perhaps do this another way.

You see a free game you would like to play. What exactly is an acceptable thing you would pay for?

Bloodworth I am not a mind reader, I can only read what you write.

When you write something like this:


I can only read the words you wrote and understand what you meant based on the meaning of those words.

Firefall is using facebook like practices in revenue model. Period. Now maybe you meant "I can't even name one MMO that will be out in the next 3 years that will be the shoddy product of underpaid child laborers" but if so you should have written that.

Sinij is overly broad but so are you. For example claiming that Facebook-style energy systems and sub fees are basically the same thing. They aren't, except at the high level "you pay for something." If they are basically the same why don't FB games just have sub fees?

I am right now methodically going through a list of F2P games, even Korean grinders, trying to find a single non-shitty one out there. I am not seeing it, but at the same time I am paying attention to how cash shops working and presented to players.

What would be acceptable to me? Anything that is a) convenience feature and can be played without _or_ b) visual-only fluff and doesn't affect competitive aspect of game play _and_ c) is not a "solution" to artificially created "problem". If I am not hammered with "pay pay pay" I will gladly pay, otherwise fuck-off.

Acceptable things to pay would be extra bag/bank slots, extra character slots, gag items, funny hats, funny pets, instant travel, instant catch-up level-ups for alts, shared bank...

Penny Arcade has interesting review of  Skylanders  (http://penny-arcade.com/2011/10/17/skylanders), a game for kids with toy-based MT in it.

Choice quote:

"Shitty" is rather arbitrary. Games like Drakensang and Spiral knights are high quality titles, that do feature paid for items and in the case of Spiral knights, an energy system.  I'm not really denying that many houses are looking at using Facebook like systems, not all will. More so that any MT system instantly means its a bad game, in game-play, or production or that any MT system is inherently exploitative, grossly so.

I also do not believe that simply having an energy, or more simply a time based limit, is all that defines the majority of Facebook/social game models. Energy/pay for time is one method. Constantly being funneled into the cash shop like you say is also a defining point.

Big difference between sub fees and energy systems is the commitment. I believe that was part of the point of developing such systems. They still serve the same reason, pay for time, but in many cases with energy you can consume your time all at once.


This is a great summary.

Most of the "pay 2 survive" crap has actually been pulled from Allods...mainly because the unwritten rule zero of F2P games is "First, retain your playerbase". Make the game too punishing and dependant on "Insert coin to continue" mechanism and the playerbase buggers off for pastures new (or at the very least pastures greener).

That is the bit the "Monetised games are the MALIGNANT CRAFT OF THE INFERNAL BEHOOVED ONE" miss.

Not really, I think Sinij is saying that they would prefer to use cheap psychological tricks to get you to retain you as a customer than make an actual good game.  I think he is at least a little bit right.  I don't think the model is inherently as bad as he does, but the temptation to include game mechanics based on your business model, rather than on the value to the game itself, its very high when you need to keep getting money from your players in this fashion.    This exists in sub fee games as well, but I think it generally manifests it ways that demand your time, rather than explicitly your money (even though they are related things), and therefore it doesn't feel quite as bad.

None of this changes the fact that f2p is going to be the way of the future though.  We can bitch about it all we want, but in a couple years, we'll all either be playing no MMOs, old MMOs, or f2p MMOs, and this model is spreading to other genres too (Tribes: Ascend, LoL, etc)

Side note: I can't find any official anything about Firefall having an energy system. I was surprised that slipped by me. Only thing I see them officially supporting is cosmetics and XP boosts. Care to link where you had seen this announced?

MtG is more popular now than it has ever been in its existence. The end, full stop. And if you'd ever take off your anti-Steam tinfoil hat, you'd see PC gaming is thriving as well.

And if only companies such as ubisoft would cut out their DRM, they might see it too.

Indeed, has Sinj even walked into a game store in the last year or so?  Check out the CCG section and tell me MtG isn't doing well, I dare you!   

As for F2P games that "don't suck", that's going to be subjective, but off the top of my head:
LOTRO
DDO
CoH

None of those "SUCK" if you liked the gameplay before they went F2P you should like it after.

And if you didn't like it before?  Well, then it's not the F2P model that made it "suck" to you then.

That's not fair at all.  None of those games were designed to be F2P.  They became F2P when they ran into financial trouble with their subscription model.  I doubt we'll see many games developed on a reasonable budget with F2P in mind... particularly games as ambitious as Lotro. 

So let me get this straight.  These MMOs were made with the intent of being subscription based, but because they were unsuccessful they went F2P and then had a large revenue increase, demonstrating that the F2P model can be at LEAST as successful as a subscription model.

You then follow that up by saying we won't see many games designed (on a reasonable budget) that target what has already been admitted as a model which is at least as successful as one they WERE being designed for.

How does that make sense?

It is? God-dammit! I was kinda looking forward to it. I was attracted by the squad based PvE stuff, but if it's going to have "Energy", fugedaboutit.

The question is whether they made enough money to justify their initial development costs, which were predicated on the basis of a subscription model. And that is far from proven. If they were releasing a f2p game, rather than trying to extend the natural life of a dwindling game, it would be a much stronger argument.

Or put more simply would they have spent that much on development if it was going to release as a f2p game?

The guy who founded the studio was on the Weekend Confirmed podcast talking about it last week. Specifically he was talking about quests that you can only do every so often but you can pay to be able to do them immediately. That's not EXACTLY energy but it's functionally pretty equivalent. I don't mean to slag the game, I don't know much about it, but that sort of thing seems pretty clearly inspired by Farmville-style systems.

Thank you.  

The other question is how do you know this:


At least as successful?  I don't know where you got the figures to justify the point.  That's not to say that there aren't some very successful F2P games, because there are.  They just don't have AAA development budgets based on a F2P model.  


On a side note: How is Free Realms doing?  That would be an interesting game to watch the financial story of with regard to this discussion.

Really? DDO where you have to make characters on each server and grind favor so you can buy dungeon unlock to make past level 12 or CoH where "buy shit at the store" is part of the game tutorial? You can barely see a game under all that "buy buy buy" pitch, like you playing one giant Cash Shop commercial! Cash shop took an axe to what I assume was at some point decent (or at least redeemable) games. Otherwise, yes I agree these three games are few of the "better" F2P games, but only because rest of them (Korean grinders, I am looking at you) is outright vile, disgusting refuse.

Verdict - these three games are unplayable unless you plan to spend heavily in the cash shop.

Say, I have a fun game for you - my house needs drains cleaned in the basement, some vile stuff semi-plugged them, would you like to play Fun and Exciting game of Clean The Drains?! I even promise not to charge you to get to max level!

You're counting paying for content as an 'obnoxious design'? Are MMO expansion packs also obnoxious? It's the same damn thing (only without a required subscription).

I have no problem paying for content in DDO. You can get to level 8 or so for free without having to grind anything, which is probably a good 50-70 hours of free content. After that you either pay for the quest packs you want, grind points if you don't have or want to spend any money, or buy a subscription.

I would mind if they were asking me to pay money for gear repairs or to train new spells. But content? 100% okay.

Fairly pointless arguing something subjective like that. Whether DDO / COH cash shop makes it "unplayable" or even a concern is a personal judgement, or a statistical one in terms of changes in active player count.

I consider DDO a little pricey for what it offers, but I'm sure others don't care. I do prefer the CoH model (payment earns you permanent access to some things) over the DDO "well, you could try to grind that much favor if you really wanted" approach though.

I am not the one making them advertise as "FREE, LOOK, FREE TO PLAY". It isn't. They have free trial and even when you pay the game is infested with cash shop-ness. The very least it is false advertising. Buying content part of design is probably least objectionable, aside from the fact that it creates tons of issue for a group play, but when EVERYTHING in the game is MUST BUY it gets obnoxious.

What I mind about DDO (aside from boring combat) is that entire game feels like one huge DLC shop. They really did a bad job of cutting it up into small "content for sale" packages, to the point that there isn't core game left - its _ALL_ been sliced up into "buy this adventure" chunks. Want non-gimp character? Got to pay! Want to see past starter quests? Got to pay!


I personally don't mind paying for expansions because they usually come bundled with a whole new "ride". You typically get more content of every type, including new endgame, and on top of that whole bunch of balancing changes. This is very different from "can't go there" paywalls in existing game, especially when entire game is one huge paywall. The only obnoxious part of MMO expansions is that developers go out of their way to make sure you don't have an option of not buying expansion and just keep playing game as-is.

This is a really different argument that you were making before.

We are very specifically discussing the topic "is paying for content can be considered an obnoxious design". Answer is no, but its complicated.

Most expansion packs are literally '"can't go there" paywalls. WoW's first expansion, Burning Crusade, was a portal that you couldn't go through or level any further unless you paid for the expansion.

I can't think of a single game where balance changes were only made if you bought the expansion. Maybe some RTS expansions? For MMOs, everyone gets the balance changes for free. The most recent LOTRO expansion included a ton of balance changes, but there were a couple differences when you compare it to something like the last EQ2 expansion

1) Access was permanent even if you didn't stay subscribed
2) Content could be purchased a la carte. If you just wanted the questing experience, you could buy that instead of paying for raid and dungeon content you might not want. Or you could just buy the bundle.

I'd happily accept an MMO expansion model where I could pay $40 for the expansion, or $25 for the expansion without the new battleground/world pvp garbage I'll never use.

I really just don't see your point. Paying for content is okay as long as you only retain access to the content while paying a subscription and the game tells you up front that you'll have to pay?

Okay, I guess.

Take what you would spend on a box and expansions, not sub fees, just those.  How much content would that give you access to?  In most of those games it'd be a fair amount.

If you're smart about purchases, even more.  For LotR I bought the Mirkwood complete for $10, which gave me a ton of content after they went f2p.  In CoH I'd tended to buy their frequent box releases once they hit $10 to give myself a month of play plus the goodies.  That's resulted in a lot of permanent unlocks and reward points.  In Free Realms I would buy Station Cash on the double-coin weekends, then only buy stuff I really want when it's on sale, effectively giving me four times the buying power for being patient.

Plus a lot of these games like to have little give-a-ways.  Save the coins up and get something nice, or get lucky and receive free goodies.

I wasn't too fond of the idea of expansions limiting access to content, mostly because it segregates the playerbase. But that ship sailed long ago.

P.S. Eve gives everyone major expansions as part of their subscription. I'd also be relativley fine with F2P that limits access to expansions unless you have a sub, like AO's approach.

For varying degrees of "major". :awesome_for_real:

I don't mind paying for a new expansion as long as the content it delivers justifies the cost. Indeed I'd almost rather that large development efforts like that are specifically paid for rather than trying to get the money out of regular play. Even better if you have some potential to opt out of it if the value is bad (though of course they mostly tie it into the leveling or gearing path). You can selectively buy Guild wars expansions though.

I think it's reasonable to distrust how f2p conceals the true costs though. If you took the amount of new content in a wow expansion compared to buying the same amount of content in the DDO store you'd probably find free to play can be really expensive.

They're about as major as CoH issues - in other words, what they call 'content patches' in games with real expansions.

Thats not an energy system. More like daily with a cash shop unlock.

Devil is in the details. If once you've done those quests you might as well log it's functionally equivalent to an energy system.

Seems to go against what they are saying here (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9013-Evolve-or-Die).

Isn't that why Turbine made LOTRO F2P?  I had heard it was because of the outrageous success that making DDO F2P had on their revenue stream?

Are you really going to try and argue that All of these Subscription MMO's are switching to a F2P model because the F2P model is LESS successful?

The real question is if the revenue stream from a F2P game is at least as high as a middling-successful MMO.  I would suggest the answer to THAT is yes, given how many are going that way.

So basically, they don't offer you what  YOU want inside their F2P model and are therefore "unplayable"?  That must be a surprise to all the F2P players that are playing them.

Seriously Sinj, it's not like these are not playable games just because you can't get everything you want out of them without paying for something in the cash shop.


----

In reality, the BEST F2P game out there right now in my opinion is Team Fortress 2.  That is a game you certainly can enjoy JUST FINE without spending a dime on the cash shop. 

They are simply not "whole game" by any definition of game, incomplete and mangled to introduce cash shops, they are Free Trials at most. If you remove all non-free parts these titles would not be, could not be considered completed product.


That is not how I see it. CoH probably WORSE than others at forcing you to spend something, it is not playable until you pay up. Like you don't have access to any chat channels other than local, can't send tells and can't trade with other players - ridiculous restrictions like that. Now, you can get past that with minimal payment, but at that point it isn't free. Too bad, other than mandatory "pay something" scheme and dear-god-so-bad interface game is actually enjoyable.

Dude, he was on the podcast last week. You can listen to it and disagree I suppose but it's kind of silly to not listen to it and disagree anyway. I really don't think I am in any way misrepresenting what he said. Almost verbatim it was that there were quests you could do every so often but you could pay to do them more often. And that's ok because you aren't paying for power in that you are paying to do the quest but you still have to actually do it - you are paying for opportunity rather than power directly.

Having a quest you can do once a day but you can pay to do more often is functionally almost exactly an energy system. No, it's not quite the same but it's a hair away and the idea that you can do something on a overlong schedule but accelerate it with payment is the core of energy-based games.

It's not a very convincing argument because LOTRO was a declining game. So looking at another declining game in the form of DDO and following their lead doesn't lead to many conclusions other than it was better than shutting down.

You'd need a successful game going f2p (like WoW now) or a big name MMO launching with a f2p model as the intended revenue model rather than as a life-extender. At the moment the dominant model is launching as a subscription title and switching to f2p when the game is in decline (as STO and DCUO are in the process of doing).

Can we all just agree that Sinij should live (or already lives) in a padded cell and move on with our lives?

 :roll:

The vast majority of those restrictions disappear as soon as you spend ANY AMOUNT of money in the cash shop.  You don't need to invest heavily.  It's quite clear that those restrictions are only there to discourage gold sellers and scammers, and that makes sense.

Given the relative new popularity of F2P as a model in North America, I fail to see how this could be any other way.  This is hardly a knock against the profitability of the F2P model, which by all accounts is very successful indeed.

The other issue is that sub-based payment models looked a lot better 5 years ago, which is when a lot current MMOs started development.

Somebody posted  this drivel  (http://www.gamesradar.com/xfire-free2play-is-the-future-league-of-legends-player-base-skyrockets-while-wows-declines/) in other thread.

Choice quotes:


Translation: WoW pushed everybody out of DIKU market, so they were forced to go F2P. So yes, "free" games on the raise because alternative was to shut down.


Xfire doesn't have WoW numbers, aside from what can be seen in the end of the year public financial reports, so it is all speculation. While it is likely WoW has a subscription drop due to Cata, timing of the events suggest expansion and not releases of F2P titles made a difference.


Translation: We took a web survey, so it must be true! Look at us, we are relevant!


This is where it gets interesting - claim is that LotRO quadrupled users by going F2P and tripled revenues. "Quadrupled" part sounds believable, "tripled revenues" are not especially when numbers come from third-party. They are suggesting that your average F2P player spends nearly a full sub's worth of money in a cash shop. Research suggests that 'social' gamers spend 1-2$ on average, to approach "tripled revenues" point LotRO is off by a factor of at least 10.

As much as I want to see WoW dethroned, I don't see it happening from a F2P title. There just aren't enough MMO gamers in existence to play hypothetical F2P title to hit WoW sub revenues at a current levels of $/player. Do you think any F2P MMO could hit 200+ mil active players this decade? US population is about 300 mil.


TL;DR Whole article is a bunch of self-serving "look at us, we are relevant" marketing by Xfire, hard to believe that someone actually took them serious.

F2P revenue per player (free or not)  is 4-10 $. in WoT I know many people who spent $200+ in first 3 months. and game is 100% f2p

Yeah, $1-2 is for "casual" games, "social" games, whatever the term is this week.  It includes a *lot* of people who pay $0.  Figures for the average of people who have paid some are closer to $4/each, and even that is misleading because the handful of people who pour in thousands are compensating for a lot of people who pay a dollar or less.  In any give month, the percentage of people who actually put money into an F2P game on Facebook is in the low single digits.

It's much higher for the MMO that has gone F2P, or the MMO that has a subscription plus a cash shop.  Facebook games are all about casting as wide a net as possible in order to catch the whale with too much money and a desperate need to be liked.

--Dave

What you say sounds reasonable, but do you have any numbers to share with us?

Well, whatever it is, average normalized monthly revenue a F2P player brings must be greater than cost of infrastructure they use (bandwidth, servers, so on) and less than subscription they would pay. So that is anywhere from 0.25c to $14. Claim that going F2P only increased number of active players four times while supposedly tripling revenue still sounds highly suspicious, since you get awfully close to logical upper bound where everyone, including WoW, would jump into F2P.

They might hide these numbers from us, but inside industry such figures, especially if they are THAT GOOD would be impossible to keep a secret.

Over what time? Monthly? Lifetime? If lifetime, that is very close to my assumption of 0.75-1.5 per month per player, after initial 2 weeks to a month "active" status that generates nearly zero.

Also, what would be typical "active" duration for F2P? Lower, about the same or greater than sub? Yes, there is no need to unsubscribe with F2P, but if you are not playing you are not generating MTs.

I imagine #1 challenge for any F2P is how to widen "money" band, from after initial 'honeymoon' stage is finished and before player moves on, where they could generate money.  If you make 'honeymoon' too short, you going to hurt your average 'active' time a lot, if you make it too long you will make your "money" band too short. Well, I am sure its somebody's job to figure exactly how many foozles killed it takes to addict average player to your game so you could start milking them for all they got.

Any discussion of subscription versus f2p games that focus on participants, especially if they can count in-actives, is inherently flawed to the point of being useless.

Still, good to see WoW start to fall. Maybe it will open up some space for something to replace it. Though it's largely a self inflicted injury since Cataclysm was just a very poorly developed expansion.

I have a theory that any MMO is two bad expansion from collapse.  Thanks to Panderia, it looks like I'm going to get my chance to find out.  Just reeks of "We need to do something Asian-themed, but no ninjas."

Pander-ia, it kind of telegraphs it.  Blizzard has been reduced to design by marketing focus group.

--DAve

Well, Cata was design by asshole devs trying to force people into liking being clearly second-class players. This flew like a lead kite. Next logical step is to re-focus on what customers actually want and go with it.

Strangely enough Panderia (sp?) is what focus groups came up with? Who were they putting into these focus groups, 10 year olds?

Every MMO is exactly one patch away from complete unrecognisability.

I don't see it being MMO development by focus group, I see it as MMO development by forum in-jokes. Players love the idea of "developers listening to the player base", but this is exactly what happens.

To me, it looks very much like they asked a market research group "How can we recover momentum in Asia?", and this is what got spit out.  Business-wise, they could give a shit less if this drops US subs by 50%, as long as it raises asian subs by a like proportion.  There a race of athropomorphic pandas wouldn't inspire the same "you have *got* to be kidding me" dismissal.  On the other hand, if they used Ninjas for their asian flavor, they'd get nothing but grief from mainland Asia.

--Dave

All of the above. Definitely Ghostcrawler is no replacement for Enoyls and probably the same is true of the people working with him I'd assume.

Then again for a lot of people Arthas was was the final villain in the story.

Talking of SoE being a failed studio though, did anyone else think "The Heist" looked a lot like salvage from "The Agency"?

I know this whole WoW Panderia topic is a digression but Wolfshead Online called this a couple of years ago. (http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/?p=1294#6f1c2) New hero class of Monk and likely new race of Pandaren. His reasoning seems quite sound too.

Reminds me of how badly they failed with hero classes.

This was leaked a lot earlier in WoW history (a copy of the info here (http://wow.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=21&mid=119012268058738816&h=50)) with the progression up to level 100.

What about if you were told they were originally going to include Pandarians in the first expansion, but had to change it at the last minute.  "...and there's a story there you may have heard rumors about."

Not that part of it is marketing, but after the absolute cock-up that is Cataclysm they've got to listen to the player base on this next one.  That base has made Pandarans and the Brewmaster the #1 most-requested item for the last 7 years.

Yeah, I know, they wanted the Pandarans a long time ago but the Chinese government blocked it.  Since they now *aren't*, I think the theory that it was a maneuver in their conflict with their Chinese licensee just got validated.

How does the theory that they are just recycling old ideas from years ago *improve* things?

--Dave

Gamasutra headline today:

"Zynga VP Castle Leaves For Casino Product Company"

Am I good or what?

This was not a leak. It was a fake. It was made after the WotLK zones were known but  headed up with a statement saying it was found just after TBC. The author eventually admitted it was a fake and completely made up from the RPG zones a couple of years ago but it refuses to die!

The train fell off the tracks.  I don't think they know what their customers want.
http://www.eldergame.com/2011/10/wow-removed-talent-trees/

There probably are a group of customers who wanted that.

The 12 year olds that migrated from Runescape?  :why_so_serious:

Pandaria is the first WoW expansion I have absolutely zero interest in.  (Cata fascinated me before it lost me when I experienced what those bastids did to my beloved game).

Some of the people on this very forum have already been Championing the idea when it's picked-at.

I don't like the MoP changes, but after they gutted the trees in Cata I can't be arsed to care. Blizzard has essentially admitted that they're unable to balance complex, interesting talent trees. What I would love is something like EQ2's AA system instead of this "lol pick 6 skills" shit, but alas. At least I'm getting a pokemon MMO to make up for it.

I'm still boggled over how Blizzard openly kicked sand in the face of the more casual, less-skilled players with Cataclysm.

What was their fucking brainwave on that? I literally don't understand it.

I suspect it was accidental.  There's always been a bit of grumbling from raiders every expansion when the gear is reset, but around here it usually just merits a "sux2bu catass".  Cata is the first expansion where casual players were really impacted by it, because with the introduction of the LFD system and the ability to buy tier gear for points, it was the first time casuals really had access to high end gear at the end of an expansion.

My dad plays fairly casual and has maybe pugged a raid five times in his life.  He bitches every expansion about losing his 5-man and PvP gear, so that wasn't new to most players.  Everyone was seeing new gear inflation.

My opinion was that they simply lost touch with who their playerbase was.  I think they saw 'casuals' and new players that were playing the old zones that everyone felt were broken, so they fixed those and considered that would suffice as casual content for the xpac.  Then they simply refocused the 80+ game to be tougher, thinking that the hardcores will like the challenge and the casuals will just reroll if they find it too tough. 

A couple of lessons should have been learned, but were not.  First, a team should be in place, constantly re-working zones.  Every single major patch there should be a zone layout and story change.  There is no reason with the money that WoW rakes in, that the game cannot have evolving content. 

Second, not that this should even need to be said, but Normal dungeons/raids should be a relatively simple, fun, training zone with marginal upgrades.  Heroics should be really fricking tough.  You shouldn't be able to pug them and be successful.  That's where the casual/hardcore line should have been drawn before WotLK; instead, everyone now expects to be able to run heroics.  Which they shouldn't.  That's supposed to be the challenge that sets those players apart that want to be special.

For the record, the eldergames opinion piece above is pretty spot-on.  This ultimately makes the game easier for returning players, but for those that stick around 12mo/yr, that system looks really dumbed down.

The problem is kind of a double edged sword for the casual crowd.  People want content faster, but with the next big patch Blizzard ups the gear level and everything starts all over again.  It's like "Yay, I finally got all the stuff I wanted but in a week with the next patch I have to start all over again", that's fucking annoying.  I don't know if it's because of the way the itemization is in WoW, but they can't seem to find ways to make more desirable items within a tier.

AA is a retarded concept because it encourages endless levelling, means the reward is disconnected from the action (so you just find a place and grind AA's) and magnifies power inflation while freezing out new players. Unlike gear you can't obsolete powers that have been "baked in" to the character.

There's no really great solution to giving players carrots they want enough to grind for that don't unbalance the game. The Blizzard team has the problem that players are now so good at their analysis the check-lists with "best in slot" are out as soon as the new content is data-mined and the rest is effectively junk. They've responded to this by increasing the rate at which sets are obsoleted. Which isn't a bad mechanic in itself, since you can balance challenge against gear in a way you can't with AA's, but if the pace is too fast then a lot of people just become frustrated with the system and have no attachment to the gear they've "earnt".

At a guess, outside of the wow developers actually not being nearly as clever as they thought they were, the problem is they weren't willing to accept that gaps in content are inevitable. The super hard-core players are going to beat your content and whine about nothing to do but that's fine and inevitable. Tuning the content such that it keeps them busy to match Blizzards speed of content generation will inevitably freeze out very large sections of your player-base.

Well I don't necessarily mean the endless grinding of an AA system, just that EQ2's system had a TON of customization and depth. Rift's soul system had a good amount of depth too it as well. The early Cata beta talents were pretty cool, particularly when we were going to be able to max out one spec and get a decent ability out of a subspec (51/21/4 I think they were) and then they just scrapped it all for the Cata system.

I'm completely mystified by WoW removing talent trees. Everyone that I know loves the Rift system. Of course it's not balanced and people create cookie cutters and some of them are overpowered (X-icars for example).  But that's part of the fun and crafting these builds is part of the game--gives people something to do at work when they can't play.


Isn't that what they did though? Except it crashed and burned when they shoved them into the LFD system which encourages repeated runs with random PUGs. Which to me was the problem.

EQ2, once upon a time, had a very nice shallow item inflation curve that meant you were often doing dungeons and several raids at once because they all had at least some nice gear or at least enough plat to make it worth doing. They scrapped that in favor of a WoW token grind though.

Again, just my opinion here, but I feel that the change was too dramatic.  WoW had conditioned people in WotLK to think that everyone can do heroics.  Heck, my dad had heroics on farm throughout that expansion.  And he just doesn't have the time/skill to compete like that in early Cat.  So now everyone doing all the content is what the majority expect. 

I remember in BC, doing heroics back when I was a catass, running the lvl 70 Hellfire zone heroic.  I can't remember the name, but that thing was brutal.  That final boss had a 360 degree cleave, bounced around the arena area.  We figured it out over a few runs, but that was tough.  The way a heroic should be.

Asscleaves were retarded and it's good that they're gone. This is coming from a warrior tank who loved to run Shattered Halls.

Anyway, re-railing back to the topic at hand: This is still talking WoW, but I kinda think the whole "Buy an annual sub and get D3/swag" deal is both 1) A pretty hilariously desperate ploy to keep subs from slipping by literally offering players a game to play when they decide WoW sucks, and 2) maybe a bit of a white flag on their sub model in general?

If people are punching out because of boredom/frustration/ennui, and they don't seem to be into actually fixing the game you either "bribe" the customers to stay subbed, or switch models?

How are people not bored by a 7-yr old game that dribbles out content?

I play two or three months then leave for a year. It's worked out so far.

I play with a lot of friends who have thus far been unwilling to stick with (or all try together even) any other MMO.

All my old friends still go to the same old local bars and get drunk.

I hang out with different people now.

I believe the Wow "reinvention cycle" is completely intentional, and contributes directly to its successes.

I remember wondering if Mythic changed class balance each month knowing that the hardcore 8v8 people would reroll new toons to exploit the balance changes.  It was a way to keep people in the game by allowing them a new mechanism to optimize their group build.

The talent changes do play into that idea.  One of the big issues I have coming back to play after being gone for six months is talent spec.  I can head to the forums and hit the stickies, but I don't play at the level where I want to start parsing stuff before I play.  At this point, I'm not even sure why they didn't just roll talents into a reworked glyph system, as they appear to do the same thing in 5.0.

With only six choices, it sure makes coming back to the game a lot easier right out of the gate. 

(To derail, yes, asscleaves sucked and were a broken mechanic... but I was alluding to the challenge faced, not so much the mechanics.)

/rerail

This.  I quit over 4 years ago and all I remember was what I did the same the last X number of months I played.  Dailies, maybe a heroic of some dungeon I had done 55 times already.  PvP in the same Battlegrounds I had done about 1000 times each.  Farm some mats(herbs, etc) to make a few bucks, Logoff.  How is it any different?  I gave up on raiding 6 months prior to quitting when they decided that encounters should be so finite that one person screws up the raid wipes. 

They made the mistake of thinking that raid group cohesion stayed intact across expansions. "Everyone has been in the same raid guild since Vanilla, rite?"  :why_so_serious:

"OK, we successfully trained all the casual players how to raid in Wrath, now we can move the difficulty up a notch now that they've all gotten better!"

That's exactly what they thought. They made the same mistake at the release of TBC, it's just most of us didn't notice because we didn't raid at all outside of Kara.

Casual is a mis-used and mis-understood word.

"I'm casual because I don't raid.  Ignore my 55h/ week playtime!"

 :why_so_serious:

It contributes as much as an expansion does for any game.  Nothing more.

Everyone that thinks they understand what "casual" means should have children and actually care for them in a meaningful manner. 

http://www.slideshare.net/bcousins/paying-to-win

Interesting talk.  It's interesting to see things from the business side.  Most of it was expected, but there were a few interesting tidbits I hadn't considered. 

Isn't that what TV is for?   :why_so_serious:

I don't think so. Redoing parts of the rule set at set intervals makes even the core game new again for older users. Of course changing it to drastically or frequently is bad. But tossing out most of what you know, likely keeps people interested who were already saturated. It even effects core community sites, jockeying for the scoop on the new system workings. Like live hype for a game already released. Eternal buzz machine. After all, even a forum fight puts the topic on peoples tongs.

Example: look at the conversations here from vets, good and bad. Its 'new' again. Again. That doses not happen with just content updates, at least not to the degree that changing a core rule set does.

Content can be consumed, Version debates are eternal.  :grin:

People tend to dislike change.  Changing the core rules will make people nervous.  Who is dumbing down the classes supposed to attract?  Old players who quit because of the class changes to begin with?  New players who have no basis to judge the changes?  Is it worth the expense?  How are these changes going to bring up sub numbers? 

I can tell you that when I quit it was not class ability frustration, and none of the changes put in since then have enticed me enough to return.

Overused term. If you are coming from that perspective, your following questions can not be answered.

Also:

"everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler" - Albert Einstein

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" - Leonardo da Vinci

"It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away" - Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Anyway, my point was not about the methods used, but rather than with a 7 year product, Reinvention does add to longevity. You can look at any successful commercial product for this. Where other games have stagnated ( Due to lack of the loot bags blizzard have ), Blizzard has consistently reinvented Wow. Not always necessarily in major ways. But it does keep the game fresh over time.

Would you prefer simplify?

This is not marketing paper towels, your audience is different. 

I do not see this as a substitute for real content.  Do you honestly believe subs will go up?  Wow itself will remain unchanged.  Same monsters, same faction grinds, same quests.  More subs from that or less?  Mucking about in this fashion seems like a losing proposition.

The only people who prefer complexity are those odd ducks who enjoy lording their superior knowledge over those who lack it.  They have nothing else to cling to and fortify their dubious position at the top of the heap, so they hold to that tiny thread of relevance and guard it jealously.

See also: Unix zealots.

Its not a substitute. Nowhere does anyone think this. I believe pandas and such are the content. But thats again beside my point.  At this point wow is so wide, some streamlining is warranted, but I digress.

Lets put it this way. If you still had wow 1.0 talent trees right now ( Ignoring the perceived flaws ), and they had never changed the basic system. Would that not have stagnated that part of the game?  How do you think this would have helped player retention and growth? Again, I'm not talking about flaws, just the simple fact, it was never changed.

Hell, are you still playing DnD 1.0 with the same books you bought 40 years ago? Trading card games are an accelerated form of this reinvention, with lower initial investment.

Heh.

This explains the rampaging success of coin flipping in online game rooms.

I think calling the grind to the next tier of tank in WoT "content" is stretching the term past breaking.  The content is ownership of the tanks and the actual battles, not the Tech Tree. That's more of the incentive to put money into the game so you get XP faster.

Much like making tank prices so high you have to grind many, many battles or pay cash for the funds to purchase them and the relevant accessories.  Something that becomes more required at the high end of the tree. It's my understanding after T5 that prices for repairs, ammo and tanks take a steep incline while the currency payouts per match level-off or flat-out decline.

I see the entire fiddling with trees and theorcrafting as a kind of "offline game" that keeps people interested in the actual gameplay. So I can see changing trees around as being a player retention thing, but I can't see dumbing it down to the level that we seem to be talking as adding to retention.

For a subset of people, it is an attraction.  For someone still invested in the game but unhappy with current mechanics, it is an attraction.

For the majority of people, most of which are happy if they're playing, it is about as welcome a change as making dungeons harder.  Only the theory crafters and the unhappy welcome large changes.

That is a much deeper conversation though, isn't it?  I think it is a mistake that most MMO's make their own content obsolete to the point where they feel compelled to redesign the system.  We should be able to agree that retention can come from additional content and non fubar system enhancements?  

Isn't the contention here that this system redesign is more about retention (bored players)than actual content or fixes?  Did I get that wrong?  

For me, WoW never addressed the fundamental problems.  If anything, Blizzard has only exacerbated them.  You redesign the class system because it is flawed, not because people are bored.


As for the rest?  

Board games can extend longevity with expansion, so can card games, so can pen and paper games!  I will object to the D&D comparisons.  Today's D&D is substantially different than the 70's version.  They do not function in the same way.  We are not on WoW 4, they have not scrapped the engine.

And from time to time I do break out the 70's books, yes.   :awesome_for_real:

This is totally a non-sequitur, but you know you've been playing too much Blood Bowl when the first thing you think when you see "TV" is "team value."

Only part you got wrong was thinking I was saying its the only reason its done.


Same content included. Also, many re-bought new editions of the books ( $$ ). Discussions also happened around the gaming world. Many, have no clue about the 70's version, nor care.



How many systems are there now to define your Toon? Talents, Race, Class, Glyphs? Nothing wrong with streamlining systems as you add more.

Having played all the editions I disagree that it is the same content beyond "hey look, a wizard".  They have made so many mechanical and atmospheric changes the only things you really have in common are the name, dice and SOME basic character functions.  Of course it is about the money! 

On WoW, even if retention is only a part of the redesign it is a big gamble for reasons better illustrated by Lantyssa.

Has dungeons, and dragons.

You inadvertently used a very bad example, Bloodworth. Trust me, the little fights we have here about WoW vs. EVE vs. EQ2 vs. whatever don't even begin to plumb the depths of hate and invective that characterize D&D edition wars. There are indeed people who still play the 40 year old game and will rip you a new one for suggesting that it isn't the perfect incarnation, and these people exist for every single version, sub-version, and home-published variant rule set that ever existed. More people still probably play 3rd edition or one of its millions of offspring than play 4th edition in total, although 4th I believe has the biggest single slice of pie if you don't combine all the various 3e flavors.

You can do better than that Bloodworth.

Trust Baba Yaga there.

The last time I played D&D was in 1978.  Don't ruin my fond memories!  :mob:

Actually... that's the hermit from Keep on the Borderlands.  :why_so_serious:

3e sucks!  2nd edition all the way!   :awesome_for_real:

It likely was a bad example. But I also knew this. The discussion between those groups make buzz. I had already talked about that. Those fights are part of that products successes.
Indeed, I am trying to avoid bring in peoples pet peeves into the conversation about my original assertion. It does not seem to be working. I think I expressed my point best here:

We last played in 94, I think. 1st edition only! I should snap a pic of my rpg bookshelf.

Began a long tradition of hating constantly having to buy new rulebooks to keep up with the tards. We knew 1st ed, we knew the quirks and had extensive house rules, there was no reason to bother with newer editions. Especially if you look at the outlay of cash, which is of course the driving reason.

See also; MtG.

The people who prefer 2e are of course the smallest and saddest group out there.  ;D

I suppose the worst part pf my example is the fact the DnD books don't magically bust into flames when a new version comes out :)  But i bet this little bit of DnD talk has you guys thinking about it again. 

Our gaming "club" got 3 sets of free 2nd edition books to play test with.  it was the main reason we decided to switch over.  It was nice having gaming connections back then.

Don't even get me started on MTG lol.  I spent too much money on that back in the day.  I remember going to the gaming store and buying boxes of the cards.

See, I played Rifts. ( and/or Palladium Rules )

Yeah, that and the fact that you can't house rule things you don't like in a video game (barring mods in single player games, but that's not what we're talking about).

Well, I was only attempting to clarify what I was saying to Pezzle.

We never burned out on it, but we had also moved into music at 14. Most of my gaming friends moved into other things, which is how I got exposed to Star Frontiers, Villains & Vigilantes, James Bond, Toon, etc. Although my main gaming group did dabble in a few things like gamma world and gurps, it was mostly just ad&d for us.

V&V did give me a lot of fodder for my comic panels when I was still drawing, though.

I have more gaming books then I know what to do with.  It's rather ridiculous actually.

I had such high hopes for Star Frontiers, but it was never all that fleshed out.

TSR really had a hard time expanding on anything but D&D.

We talk about SWG all the time.  You don't see any of us actually playing it.

That last bit is the important part.  None of it matters if the subs fall.

Different beast, different level of severity and starting point.

Um, I guess that makes Minecraft the exception that proves the rule!  :grin:

And to bring it all back around to the MMO subscription talk, you can get access to all the D&D 4th Edition stuff on the D&D Insider site for $15 a month, no books needed.  :grin:

You probably want a PHB1 or a Rules Compendium.

$5.95 a month if you pay yearly, actually! But you actually only get all the rules stuff + the magazine content and the insider tools like the character builder, you don't get full text PDFs of the books or anything like that. So stuff like fluff from the hardcovers, published adventures, etc., is not part of the subscription.

Sure it was! They just made it more awesome and called it "Spelljammer".
(Still the best campaign setting TSR ever released).

I guess I'm That Guy, since I don't find the fluff content that interesting to read beyond a once-over anyway (and none of it's really as interesting as the old 90s White Wolf fluff or the Warhammer fluff, despite my deep undying hatred for anything Warhammer). And I've never known anyone who's used a published adventure. But I do totally see the draw of the hardcover books. But, since I can only mostly play D&D over the internet nowadays due to everyone I used to play with being hundreds or thousands of miles apart, it's pretty great for me.

And unless they changed it, you can share an Insider account with a few people as well, without Wizards getting bent out of shape about it.

I'm going to note that down for the next time you express liking something.  :oh_i_see:

Because it's a guarantee that anything I like is awesome?  :grin:

Spelljammer was horrible.   :uhrr:

F2P + virtual goods sales will be the new standard because there are gobs of idiots with wallets who cannot perform basic mathematical calculations to determine that they are spending well over $15 USD per month on "free to play" games. True, there may be a population who never go beyond the restrictions of a free account, but I am inclined to think that studios are making more money with free to play, otherwise, why would the actuaries suggest switching?

Yes, there may still be some with subscriptions models who stick around. More likely to happen is that the AAA+ titles and bigger studios will charge a subscription fee and have a virtual goods shop as well. Look at LotRO for example. Yes, you can be premium with a purchase from the shop, but the VIP players are the ones who pay a monthly fee and get a set amount of points to spend. Just enough to get you browsing the shop, but not enough to bankroll every tempting virtual good that the game funnels you toward. Suddenly, you've spent well over the standard subscription fee.

I have friends who play World of Tanks who are spending upwards of $50-$100 USD per month. That's a base $15 premium account plus a bunch of virtual goods purchases. Guess where the new monthly average fee for MMOGs is headed? Hint: it's not free.

Look how wrong you are.

Spending money to get an advantage/status/whatever it gets you is more attractive than spending money to be like everyone else.  This industry will end up like most, 80% of the money will be made off 20% of the customers.  That doesn't make the 20% stupid. 

While it doesn't make the 20% stupid, it does price me right out of those types of games. While I realize I don't need to spend money to play the games, if money buys better whatever, then it becomes a matter of how much ownage you are willing to tolerate before hanging up your hat. It's not that the model is horrible, it's just not something that I like. I suppose it's a good thing that I've grown exceptionally bored with MMOGs and have really turned to single-player and other multiplayer games as of late. (Yay, Skyrim!) Then again, on the single-player front, it appears as though the DLC model is really getting a deathgrip on gamers' wallets now... but that's another gripe for another thread.

Doesn't matter what we think of it, it's where everything is headed.  Shorter or non-existent SP games w/ DLC for the next chapter while MP is P2win.

Right. But shouldn't the consumer drive the markets? I know, I know. The United States doesn't work that way because people are far too willing to pay for stupid shit. But again, that's just my old man rant. Kids these days...

One could very validly argue that the consume IS driving the market.

People have paid for cheats since games moved beyond 4bit pong. Hell, there was a bug in pong that let people cheat it by slowing the puck.  The difference is the game companies are getting the cash instead of the cheat companies.

As for the DLC bandwagon, the price of games had to go up.  They've been $50-$60 since I first bought X-com in 1994.  No inflation in 18 years despite the huge increase in budgets and manpower? Hardly.  But what to do? Companies saw the backlash for raising prices even $10 and had to find another way of making more money. 

This is the solution they happened upon that met the consumer's want for more content along with their need for more profit.  It's only recently that it's begun to be "cut the game down to the minimum the consumer will still pay $50 for then churn out what used to be a full game for the new price point."  Which shouldn't be surprising seeing as businessmen run game companies now, not geeks with funny ideas about IP and enjoying your work. 

Arguable. X-com was probably selling to a fairly small market. The big budget games are moving a lot more boxes to a mainstream market which is what is funding the much larger development budgets.

Irrelevant any way. If there's a "more money" and "less money" way then the outcome actually isn't really too complex. The trick is working out which revenue model is the more money answer since you have to assume aggressive DLC is going to cost you some box sales. And it becomes much harder in the subscription versus micro-transactions case.

Hrm. I have boxes of RPG books that I'll never read or use again. Many that never got read or used in the first place. All in storage at my parents'. When we move next, the plan is to take all the shit out of storage, including those. Which, I'd guess, will just fill a bookshelf and never be used, since the old groups are fractured and gone, and the remainder of us play MMOGs instead now.

I wonder what I'll do with them all?

Sit in a creaky rocking chair and complain about how, back in the old days, you walked uphill, both ways, in the snow, to the RPG sessions, and you calculated your own THAC0 god damn it.

Get the band back together and run a game!

I play Pathfinder over Skype with my old crew who are in different parts of the country now.

If you use Google+ for nothing else, their Hangouts are made for gaming. They enabled screen and doc sharing over their system recently, to boot. It's the next best thing to sitting around a table.

I just set up a Google+ account, but since I declined to add Kim Kardashian and Sasha Grey et al, I have no friends, since my friends and I don't do the whole Facebook thing, and I don't much care to look up people I haven't seen in 20 years from High School (who I dropped off my FB a year or so ago anyway).  :grin:

Which is totally cool. I'm just saying that if you have a bunch of old gamer farts looking to do a TT game and they're scattered to the four winds, G+ is made for you. Just get those guys together, make your accounts, friend nobody but each other and check Hangouts.

They'll look pretty damned cool on a bookshelf. 

I love the memories of my old AD&D bookshelf. Paging through the monster manual and remembering different times and people.

I've still got all my old D&D shit upstairs in a bookshelf.  I wish I could find my gammaworld set.

I do the same, but it's kind of bittersweet, so I can't do it too often.

Metamorphosis Alpha! I loved that game (it was the precursor to Gamma World). I wonder if I can find a copy of the original edition.

There's probably a pdf out there on a torrent. I managed to snag all the old out of print Gloranthan Runequest stuff, which is my Game of Nostalgia. (The new Heroquest is pretty amazing, I just wish I had a group.)

Legit PDF:

http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=50526&src=FrontPage&

Yeap, what's left of my four olde-thyme Roleplaying groups are the two guys who are my semi-regular friday night WoW Titan Quest Left4Dead LotRO group.

Bigpoint sells 2000 drones in 4 days at E1000 a pop. (http://www.gamesbrief.com/2011/11/bigpoint-sells-2000-spaceship-drones-for-1000-euros-each-in-just-four-days/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GamesBrief+%28Latest+News+from+GamesBrief%29&utm_content=Netvibes)

That's E4m of pure cream (that yes, goes to supporting all those players who don't pay) from a single virtual item.

And it's why SWOR will have a cash shop.

That's 2 people away from a 'standard' Pathfinder group or 3 people away from a 4e one. Wives? Older kids?

And in the follow-up post, Mr.Shitty-Games Journalism figures out that they may have sold 2000 drones, but E1l a pop didn't happen. Also, apparently this game has 65m accounts, which aside from sounding very dodgy in and of itself, this tool extrapolates to mean 1/10 of all humans on the planet have an account. Rather than several million people have 10 accounts each. Or a pile of bullshit fed to him and eaten up with a spoon. Considering his fact-checking on the first post.. well...

There are more than 650M live humans on earth.

Yes, it was clarified that (http://www.gamesbrief.com/2011/11/bigpoint-does-sell-the-tenth-drone-for-1000-eur-but-may-not-have-made-eur-2-million-from-it/):


It wasn't clear how many people bought the 10th drone who also owned other drones, or the amount of RMT that took place to buy the drone.

So yes, Bigpoint didn't make as much money as originally indicated, but they still likely made a hefty wad of cash out of it.

Lets for a moment suspend our disbelief and assume that they did sell fair number of $1000 gizmos.

$1000 in real world would buy you 5 nice dinners for 2, or set of nice new tires for your car, or new tablet, or buy a nice new flat screen TV, or have a very good weekend in Vegas. While this is not mind-boggling amount, most would consider it "fair bit of money" and outside of compulsive purchase range. People might not count hundreds of dollars but almost anyone, except top 0.5%, count thousands. So if this is outside of compulsive purchase range it has to offer value comparable to other ways you could spend this money. This would inevitably translate to something so game-breaking that it will inevitably affect other players, creating ill-will. The only way around this ill-will is to provide in-game means of acquiring the same gizmo then making it so mind-numbingly boring or impossibly difficult that almost nobody could get it without paying.

At this point, as a developer, you are spending time finding a way to frustrate/cockblock player from getting most desirable cash shop items without paying. Wouldn't your efforts be better spent making game more fun?

Five dinners!?  The heck you eating at?