MMO Subs are a dead model - John Smedley

[Ingmar]

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 should take up D&D. 

[Sky]

I'd be willing to bet MapleStory beat Rift (Runescape may be 3rd or 4th, it's been losing ground).

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.

[Lum]

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

[Merusk]

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 should take up D&D. 

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

[Malakili]

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 should take up D&D. 

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.

[koro]

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

Done and done.

[Malakili]

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

Done and done.

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

[koro]

I like real books too.

I just like saving $300 in material costs more.

[Kageru]

... 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.

[Fordel]

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

[UnSub]

Put another way, at what level does profit become more important than making a good game?

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 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.

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.

[Lantyssa]

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.

Guild Wars.  Free Realms with a Lifetime sub.

[Fabricated]

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.

[SnakeCharmer]

... 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.

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

[Malakili]

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.

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.

[Merusk]

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. 

[Ingmar]

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.

Guild Wars.  Free Realms with a Lifetime sub.

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.

[Kageru]

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.

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.

[Furiously]

I'd argue that EVE is a F2P game.

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

[Kageru]

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.

[UnSub]

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 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.

[Kageru]

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.

[Velorath]

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

Here's the major problem with subs: the vast, vast majority of players only have 1 sub-based title on the go at once. If you choose to go sub-based, unless you are the single sub game on a player's PC, then you aren't even in the running to earn money from them. On top of which to start playing most games still require a box sale, making most sub-based games buy-to-play-the-sub-to-play which isn't as cost effective up front as F2P.

So, is the MMO you are developing the best (maybe second best will do) sub-based MMO on the market, or the only one that caters to a large-yet-particular group of players? No? Then prepare to fire all your staff and shut your offices down, because you aren't going to keep a large enough player base to keep your game viable.

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.

[Shatter]

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?

[01101010]

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

[Nyght]

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.

Lotro is doing well if you believe this 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.

[K9]

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.

[Azazel]

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.  

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?

[ghost]

I'd argue that EVE is a F2P game.

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

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

[Kageru]

see: APB for that model

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).

[K9]

What's this D3 model?

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.

[Merusk]

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.

[Azazel]

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).

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.

[UnSub]

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. 

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.

[Azazel]

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.

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.