MMO Subs are a dead model - John Smedley

[Kageru]

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

[sinij]

What the fuck is this logic?

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

Um. No. It doesn't.

Sorry, I will not connect the dots for you.

[Simond]

You will not, or you cannot?

[UnSub]

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

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

[sinij]

 

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

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

[Lantyssa]

Which is exactly why the sub model will change.

[sinij]

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.

[sinij]

From comments section about EVE cash shop on Lums site.

 The whole “its not what you say its what you do” argument has always  bothered me. Because even if 99% (yes, I am generalizing) of the player base is against company sponsored RMT, all it takes is that 1% to actually purchase something for it to be a profitable endeavor for the company. Let’s face it, selling virtual goods is basically printing your own money. It’s really hard for it not to succeed when your long term production and operating costs for a completely automated cash shop pumping out imaginary pixels is ZERO.

Once a company decides it’s going to double dip and sell pixels, it’s already a done deal no matter what the player base, majority or otherwise, thinks/says/cries about. This is why the subscription model is “dead”. Players no longer have a say  because this is just way too lucrative to care about niceties like morals or ethics.

They say they are sorry and say it was a mistake, everything is forgiven and forgotten, except it’s not. The cash shop is still there and it will be expanded in the future. It will never go away. In any game. Ever. It’s the mmo version of dlc. You pay for the full game, you pay for, presumably, full access to the game, but somewhere along the line little bits and pieces just happened to get snipped off and get sold to you later.

Another example: I’m really digging aion’s solution to the rng problem. Clearly it is beyond the power of the developer’s to tweak the ingame rates of certain chance items… but they do have the power to sell you a 100% chance item in the cash shop. I’d think that would require a little more coding but what do I know? I’d love to shake the hand of the man who wrote that little ditty.


I do not play aion anymore but things like this, where the developer’s openly abuse the player base, really make me wonder just how much mmo players will put up with.

Let’s turn the original argument around on them for once. It’s not what you say… but what you do.

As I said earlier in this thread:

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. 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.

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

[DLRiley]

Man I wish I can troll a thread this long.

[Nebu]

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. 

[Kageru]

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.

[Ashamanchill]

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.

[DLRiley]

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.

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.

[Shatter]

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. 

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. 

[Numtini]

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).

[Malakili]

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. 

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. 

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.

[Dren]

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.

[Ingmar]

I don't think GW got tarred with the F2P issues.

Probably because GW isn't F2P.

[Mrbloodworth]

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. 

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

[HaemishM]

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

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

Every time you post, God kills a hippie.

[eldaec]

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.

[Paelos]

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.

[tazelbain]

It costs a Buck 'O' Five.

[eldaec]

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

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

Every time you post, God kills a hippie.

Don't encourage him.

[shiznitz]

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.

[Rokal]

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

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.

[Kageru]

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.

[UnSub]

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.

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.

[Kageru]

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.

[Ingmar]

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

[sinij]

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.

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 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 where you only need a sub for advanced and end-game content.

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.

[caladein]

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.

[sinij]

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

[sinij]

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.

Unlike the other Pet Store companions, the Guardian Cub is a tradable, one-time-use pet that permanently binds to a single character upon use. When you purchase the Guardian Cub from the online store, the character you designate will receive a bind-on-use item to carry in his or her inventory. You can either use the item yourself to permanently add the pet to your character's collection (consuming the item in the process), or -- after a brief initial cooldown period -- you can trade the item to another player so he or she can add it to one of their character's collections. Note that once the pet has been added to a character's Companions list, it can no longer be traded, so make sure you're giving the cub a happy home.

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

[Evildrider]

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