Subscription MMOs are dead, long live Free-to-Play
By James Pinnell on August 6, 2012 at 6:19 pm
We’ve all seen the signs over the past couple of years, as the dull thud of MMO properties dropping dead against an avalanche of post-30 fleeing subscribers fought unwinnable battles against smaller players giving away their wares for “free”. The groans we all collectively moaned when yet another group of developers and publishers decided that they would finally be the ones who would be able to steal away those dedicated paying customers from the few titles that have been able to successfully support the subscription model.
Blissfully ignoring any lessons learned from the many that had fallen before them, they pressed ahead with multi million dollar development schedules and marketing efforts, hoping to ride the hype train of favourable reviews and beta weekends into ultimate success. But what many people had realized, even as early as 2008, was that the business model that had sustained niche properties of die-hard players, such as Ultima Online, Planetside, Everquest and Eve Online, could never extend into the million plus mainstream audiences many of these “extensive” games required to stay afloat.
All of them saw nothing but dollars in their collective eyes, as Blizzard’s extensively profitable behemoth stood, almost mockingly profitable in a field of straggling contenders. After all, it was – and still is – positively ancient in gaming terms, slowly hemorrhaging players and less-than-gracefully extending its life through an almost unending pile of paid content expansions. As the cracks began to show, with Blizzard offering basic free to play elements as it attempts to stem the flow of players leaving – a whopping 1 million active gamers dropped subs over the last nine months.
A new hope
Enter EA/Bioware, one of the most bankable and successful partnerships in recent gaming history, with phenomenally successful franchises such as Dragon Age and Mass Effect, who thought they could be the combination with the clout to take down WoW. But they’d never admit it, claiming that there would be a new and yet to be unearthed audience that were waiting to get their paws on the diamond of fantasy Sci-fi: Star Wars. But unlike Star Wars Galaxies, which catered to a very niche audience and featured more experimental and creative elements, this new property would essentially emulate the gameplay of WoW but emphasize story over grinding.
Unsurprisingly, the absolutely epic cost of development they had in mind, and the quick turnaround in funding they needed, relied on a successful stint at the yet to be cracked monthly subscription (although EA had already begun to dabble in F2P with games like Need For Speed World and Battlefield Play4Free). Like most Godzilla stories in gaming, EA began to build the entire foundation for itself to fail, as it quickly set the stage to replicate every single thing that caused others, including one of its very own failures, to resort to death or freemium within the space of months.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this
First of all, they built a business model that relied heavily on a top-down approach – get an enormous number of subscribers, push them through a client purchase with 30 days, then take the initial hit to the base after the first month. If the subscriber loss can be stemmed, and those same subscribers kept, then it’s just a free ride on the gravy train to the land of potato wedges. The problem with this tactic, however, is the sheer fact that it’s flawed by design. To get large amounts of initial subscribers means a larger marketing budget, which means more money spent on development. The more money spent, requires more players to break even quickly so investors are happy.
So having a large number of subscribers after the first month isn’t necessarily a mark of success, at least not if you had to spend millions of dollars to get them. The sheer fact is that only the most diehard player will re-sub in order to see if the game will get better, since they have invested money already. Nothing has been earned by the developer, since there’s still a lot of debt to pay, and the project backers begin to get worried. The second mistake was a common one, and one they had already made before; developing the exact same experience in a different universe.
Gamers are not stupid, and they are well aware when you are not trying to reinvent the wheel, but simply modify the tread. So, in most cases, many will play along, just to see if things ride a little smoother this time. But this sort of trust is rarely granted while there are other options available. Back when World of Warcraft released, there was not the enormous smorgasbord of full featured F2P options there are now.
Almost every failed property up to SWTOR was begging players to come in and stay a while, buoyed by the success of others who noticed that revenue increases once payment becomes optional – making SWTOR‘s decision to use a subscription model strange.
The third, and most important, mistake is one that almost every single MMO has made since; people don’t play WoW or EVE for the game (necessarily), they play it for the relationships developed through it. Call it the rewards of being the legacy option, but millions of people are willing and able to drop $15 a month because they have grown strong bonds with other players through the game. Many people have met and married, started businesses, or just find the game idle entertainment to wind down alongside their long standing guild mates. Very few of these groups are willing to take risks and branch out to other environments when they may lose the connections they have grown exclusively online, just like many would be loathe to change from a forum or social club.
The barrier of entry is rarely a problem when creating new communities; games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Guild Wars and so on have dedicated players who willingly move across the properties since there is no forced ongoing fee. But subscription fees always require value, as simply charging people for the right to exist in your game is not enough to keep people invested. Players have already decided that they want to choose the direction of development, and support those options they feel deserve feeding with their cash. As a result, content packs are offered, and can be modified based on player feedback. Unsuccessful projects can be scrapped, like any market based object, and reshaped to suit the audience.
Free is no longer a dirty word
Free2Play was once a dirty word in this industry, the filthy realm of dodgy casual games and South Korean WoW clones. But as time wore on, small developers found solice in its ability to reverse the traditional model of MMO. Growing a player base with the titillating freedom of a full game, but dangling extras in front of them, found surprisingly rewarding results. The lack of barrier to entry simply removed that “hrm, maybe” resistance from friends and allowed subscriber numbers to be up to 15 times the amount of a subscription MMO. So even if less than 20% paid a single dollar, the amount that did drastically made up for it. In an instant, the two biggest problems were solved – keeping numbers up across the experience spectrum, and introducing new and varying possibilities for added revenue.
Now everyone’s doing it. Valve made one of the most ambitious, polished and controversial attempts via Team Fortress 2. TF2 isn’t the first FPS to attempt using the model, but it’s easily the most polished and likely, most successful. It was then followed up by Blacklight: Retribution and Tribes: Ascend, both of which are easily two of the best F2P games I’ve ever played, let alone FPS’s. Then you have trading card games, dungeon crawlers, real time and turn based strategy hybrids, MOBAs, shoot em ups, flight sims – the list goes on. On top of this, China, after banning game consoles in 2000, has millions of young gamers with an enormous thirst for F2P titles; so much so that Activision has teamed up with a local company to produce Call Of Duty Online: a PC & Chinese exclusive that will almost certainly do extraordinarily well.
But not all games are designed to fit the bill, particularly small independent and single player focused titles, which will always fill a market for traditional pricing. So, also, will big budget titles, such as Guild Wars 2, where development and scope justify a relatively high initial cost. But the era of forced payment for most online, massively multiplayer games is drawing to a close, especially when titles like Planetside 2, Firefall, and the very keenly awaited Path of Exile are all joining the F2P future. The power is finally in the hands of the player, so it’s up to us now to answer the question – will we end up paying to support the games we love?
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I’m sure eve online would have something to say about this.
The problem as you rightly pointed out is that subscription games were always meant to be top knotch games. The reason free to play is working for many who used a subscriber model first is simple – they just aren’t very good.
I’d hate to play rift and be paying a subscription, or dungeons and dragons online.
EvE Online is subscription and growing constantly – because it is a top knotch game.
Game companies seem resistant to accept the fact when their games are not happily accepted by the people playing them – for reasons of quality.
A new payment system might populate their worlds, and give a great market where people can impulse buy. However, perhaps a better approach would be to make a decent game in the first place?
thefinn,
Eve Online and WoW have the luxury of what I like to call “player legacy”. Both games were (and are) stand out examples of quality in their respective sub-genres. Both perfect what makes their particular playstyles rewarding and are blessed with the tireless dedication of talented developers – but this is due to being in the right place at the right time.
But frankly, I think either game, if introduced in 2012, would find it difficult to build strong communities on a traditional subs model. EVE is original, but it’s very niche, with its core userbase largely staying unchanged since its inception in the early 2000′s, and WoW, frankly is easily replicated by hundreds of other F2P properties but is propped up by very strong marketing and consistant content quality.
But their continued support by players is dependant on the same thing – strong communities of core dedicated players who will refuse to even look elseware.
It’s only dead for games that require a subscription but still charge you for expansion packs or DLC/cash-shops.
Games like EVE Online, Mortal Online and historically, Ultima Online do this well.
I heard that you have to still buy SWTOR in store/online to be able to play and that the only thing being dropped is subscription costs. If that’s the case then how exactly is this F2P?
That should be “do this differently”.
Lack of a sub is actually one of my biggest concerned for GW2. The original Guild Wars 1 shared its revenue model, but only managed to bring out new content in very sporadic ex-pacs, and largely relied on its esports pvp to keep it going.
Meaning (not sure how I missed finishing my point), that I don’t think GW2 will have enough content to sustain itself, especially as it sells less than nothing in its item store. A meager selection of 10 items that can also be had in the open world from loot isn’t enough to keep consistent revenue in for producing new content.
I thought GW1′s expansion packs were essentially their version of subscriptions.
No mention of rift or LOTRO?
No shit the game is going F2P, it’s a ghost town.
stopped reading “people don’t play WoW or EVE for the game”, reading articles on sites like this about MMO’s make my head hurt
Path of Exile is great, loving the beta at the moment, can’t wait to see the finished product :) F2P win
Subs aren’t dead, it’s just that it isn’t 1998 any more and you can’t release a half finished MMO and expect people to hang around. You get ONE chance at launch and that’s it.
SWTOR was just shitty game design and based on what I’ve seen of gw2 so far it would go ass up as well if it wasn’t f2p, it’s just that nothing recently is of the standard required for a pay to play game. 15GB of lovely sound bites don’t make a good game, even if they DID cost you 300 million dollars.
“Sites like this?”
Subscriptions do not make the game. Free2Play does not make the game…Developers and investors have gone completely off the rails about games, and what people actually want. They haven’t a clue…given the right game, people would pay for a subscription that would overtake the number of subscriptions that WoW has had in the past, and a Free2Play game could do the exact same, while profiting even more than subscriptions if their game algorithms and marketing were correct. The problem, is developers have no idea what to invest their time in any more, and nobody is able to give them a clue. You see, there are multiple “gaming generations” now, which have totally different outlooks on what the gaming industry should be doing. Both generations are wrong. The developers need to grow some balls, and make what they WANT to make, not what the differing generations want them to make. Someone will buy the product regardless.
Marius,
Guild Wars 1 released content at a fairly steady rate, about the same rate as WoW did. Guild Wars Prophecies in 2005, 6 months later released a free dungeon for end game (Sorrows Furnace) 6 months after that they released Factions. 6 Months after that they released Nightfall and then just over 6 months after that they released Eye of the North.
After EoTN it began to slow down as development ramped up on GW2, but they still kept up with more free content to expand on the game. War In Kryta which had a few months worth of free content then they had the factions equivalent.
It its now the age of F2P MMOs. As stated in the article it really lets people who are not sure about it play for free and if its good they are more than willing the shell out a few dollars to keep it going, especially now when people are not willing to risk their hard earned dollars on new untried games.
for example i play a ton of League of Legends. I tried it thinking that it wouldn’t be my sort of game but after a while i really enjoyed it. Now i play it too much, so i wanted to pay back the developers for making such an awesome game. i shelled out and bought some in game items giving them the income to keep developing a great game.
its not an mmo, but because it was free i tried it and now happily throw money at them, its this type of player that mmos really need to try getting many more of with F2P.
spitfiresson,
Content every 6 months is pretty slow tbh.
exe3, the official price from EA/Bioware for SWTOR is dropping to $15. Don’t know what that would mean for retail prices here in Australia though.
You don’t need to buy it to play. You just go to the website, make a F2P account and install the client. That’s it.
ATM it’s still F2P to Level 15, but it will expand to Lvl 50 soon, as noted here: http://www.swtor.com/free
sites that are full of writers that are generally bad players with little understand of either how the games they are talking about work or what makes them good or bad
Subscription MMOs can work just fine, make a good game and people will pay money for it, make a horrible game like SWTOR and you might get a bunch of box sales thanks to hype but people will quit it not long after.
standard rate for most MMO xpac (including WoW), BEFORE the F2P craze comes in.
When F2P MMO and games comes in then you see the more frequent xpac and content injection and that’s only natural because most F2P games tend to need this injection to maintain energy and activity and THUS MONEY because most of their F2P money generation system depends on the activity of the players.
what F2P games tend to use is 6 months cycle for major injection, and a month cycle or so for micro injection.
this usually means that every month or so they release some new tidbits, ie: new heroes, new skin, new map or what not in a trickle form.
then every 6 months they drop the major hammer in the form of significant changes and update, anything from major rebalance, new game mode and what not.
Same thing really essentially as the old model per say except they need the micro injections to keep the heart beating before the major injection can comes in since they need stable cash flow throughout.
So question is, will WoW go F2P before or after Vivendi get rid of Activision/Blizzard? Guessing before because I’d imagine investors would bail asap once WoW went into any F2Pish system.
I thought WoW already was F2Play, in a way, they allow a trial account up to lvl 20, and with unlimited time to play it. So wouldn’t that mean WoW already had a F2Play model?
Not quite…
for it to be F2P, it’s financial model have to be based on the F2P
at the moment all the free trial account does is let ppl sample the content, but they can’t progress further (to where their content meat is) nor are these trial account adding to the WoW profit (until they turn into subscriber or spend money on the cash shop).
In another word, the bulk of their profit model is still based on subscriber model..
the free trial is merely a tool to stem the player base bleed out, and partially mitigate it by increasing the recruitment rate of new players (which isn’t working out because as most ppl have predicted ages ago, there’s an upper limit of how many ppl are playing MMOs like WoW and that ceiling have been hit quite some time ago).
I’ll ignore the massive slight towards my experience with MMOs (I’ve been playing and writing about them for years) and the site in general – which I think is uncalled for simply because you disagree with my consensus.
I also highlighted the many reasons why EvE and WoW are exceptions to the rule in the article. Player relationships aren’t the only reason the games are supremely popular, but if you compare it to something like Perpetuum which is subscription based with similar mechanics to Eve, it’s struggling to get a strong user base due to its restrictive trial and subscription costs.
I also mention, in the article, that the quality and polish of the games are also a significant reason for their continued support by players.
My point is that any NEW games with subscriptions are doomed to fail generally because the market is not interested in the model anymore. Name 3 games with subscriptions that were introduced in the last 3 years that are still doing well? By well, I mean strong active player bases, consistent content updates, no F2P elements and a definitive dedication by the developer. You’d be hard pressed to find one.
It’s all well and good to make a comment that I don’t know what I’m talking about, when you’re simply throwing out arbitrary statements about how “sub games can do well if they are good”. The Secret World is probably my favourite MMO out at the moment – it’s clever, deep and well designed, and I would almost guarantee that it will be F2P within a year.
Again, no mention of Rift.
What about it? Rift is just like LOTRO, DND Online, Aion, Star Trek Online, Champions Online, DC Universe and a host of other titles that either have or are gradually making the move to F2P over the past few years. Most people already know they exist and are in this situation.
I didn’t see the point of listing all of them and discussing all of them because they are all basically in the same boat, and SWTOR was a more recent and high profile example of the same situation.
It’s about economcs: the idea of paying for something. Think about a virgin guy going to a prostitute for sex, first time he enjoys paying for it – it’s something new and wonderful. Next time he goes, it’s a bit less special and he doesn’t want to pay as much. It’s ‘diminishing marginal utility’ in economic speech. Same thing happens in MMOs, most people had their ‘first time’ with WoW, but now they can’t find that same magical sensation with any other MMO and hence don’t want to stay and pay for it. The key question is: is it the money or the sensation that has been lost? I think it’s the sensation…I don’t think the MMOs are worse now, it’s just that the market has become saturated with them and they are no longer unique or special.
I’ve noticed a few common threads in the discussion of this piece:
- The difference between a free trial and F2P
Most permanent free trial systems are usually in place to buy time for the developers to create a form of currency or cash shop to monetize the game. The trials create an ongoing flood of lower level characters to keep starter areas filled and to create the sense of an active game world when entrenched players are all generally sitting on the top tier areas for raiding and dailies.
In WoW’s case, like bronzed correctly summarized, the free trial element exists primarily to pull in new players who may be put off by needing to purchase the game to try it, even if its only 1 or 2 dollars.
- Subscription games still work if they are good
The only examples of games I would honestly consider successful under the subscription model are the two I named in the article: Eve Online and WoW. Regardless of the reasoning behind their success: Legacy player bases, existing relationships, quality of the games themselves, they are the only two games that have, and will, consistently pull subscription payments for the near future.
If the model worked well, legitimately fantastic games like Tribes, Blacklight: Retribution, GW2, Planetside 2 and Path of Exile wouldn’t have needed to go F2P to attract players in a heavily congested and competitive market. There are countless interviews with both developers and publishers that extol the reasons why they have chosen to go F2P, especially since there have been some crazy successes.
Quality is subjective personally. I thought SWTOR had a fantastic questing campaign with a set of legitimately great storylines, but was let down in endgame, like most of the other titles I listed.
Also – please note that this article was not just about MMORPGs, it was about the whole Massively Multiplayer game genre in general.
So quick to dismiss, but RIFT certainly is not F2P. It has the free 1-20 lvl thing, but so does WoW which you clearly indicate is not considered F2P.. plus Trion has been consistently brining out new content every 3 months or so, not 6 to 12 like WoW.. and high levels of support.
I bellieve it has and still is a lot more sucessful than the others you bunched it up with, and once SWTOR goes F2P – even better than that and Secret World which I agree will be F2P after a year..
I think the whole argument of this article is flawed as there are now 3 proven sucessful exceptions to the rule – apparently great games does work with a subs model.
Let’s face it, any MMO which “goes” F2P is considered a failing one – Not the Norm, especially in the first year..
What are the 3 games? If you read carefully, I said NEW games released in the past 3 years.
If Rift doesn’t go full F2P over the next year, along with TSW, I would be very shocked.
Even if you took into account WoW and EvE – those games being around for 8 and 9 years respectively – and Rift – that’s 3 games over the course of 9 years.
How many others have released in that time that had subs and failed? Here’s a selection.
- SWTOR
- The Matrix Online
- Vanguard
- Magic: The Gathering
- Pirates of the Burning Sea
- Heroes of Newerth
- Star Wars Galaxies
- Everquest 2
- Anarchy Online
- Age of Conan
- Aion
- DND Online
- Lord of the Rings Online
- Star Trek Online
- Champions Online
- DC Universe
- Warhammer Online
- City Of Heroes
- Ragnarok Online
- Shattered Galaxy
That’s just the majors. There have been countless others. How can you say it’s a successful model when there’s been less than a 10% success rate across the board?
Many games that had failed as subscription titles go on to make buckets of case in F2P – LOTRO is a perfect example of that.
Personally I thought SWTOR was a great game, I enjoyed it for at least a couple of months.
If you compare it directly with WoW it is a significantly better game imo but because I did the whole end game thing with WoW for such a long time a new MMO is going to have to do much more to get me to part with my cash month on month.
In summary I agree with James, games that are successfully using a pay to play model are only successfull because of that legacy factor.
New MMO’s simply won’t manage to be anywhere near as succesfull unless they completely buck the trends of MMO’s and give people something completely new.
Dunno bout anyone else but I feel like a big bowl of potato wedges and gravy
Everyone knows WoW only got as popular as it was by copying the other MMOs around it. It is just too convenient that when the WotLK expansion came out it added features almost identical to Warhammer Online and Age of conan (just a few of many prime examples ).
I’ve been playing the free trial for SWTOR and I’ve really enjoyed it enough that I’m going to buy and subscribe this week.
I also played the free weekend for TSW and I think I’ll buy that as well and play with a friend.
Just a slight correction,
GW2 is NOT F2P
GW2 uses the same system it used in GW1, ie: we pay for the game’s price just like regular game.
the difference being of course in GW2 they now have implemented a full fledged cash shop inside the game to further monetize the game, based on the work and experiment they did in GW1 cash shop as well, a similar cash shop system to an extent as the one in EVE for that matter since one can actually purchase the currency in the cash shop with regular gold as well and conversely convert the cash shop currency to regular gold.
but it is not an F2P… we still have to pay for the game in a one off purchase… just like it was in GW1.
Easy, because all of those were either extremely mismanaged (SWG) or they didn’t follow the subscription model in the same way that the 10% did.
Ultima Online should be on that list given it’s population is less than some of those games mentioned.
UO has been around since 1997 – if anything it is the enduring evidence of how to design an MMO & maintain a subscription model.
UO/WoW/Eve are successful simply because they manage player attachment to their avatars in addictive ways.
Most post-WoW games haven’t managed to do that at all – content, polish, story, voice etc are all meaningless if you don’t feel attached to your characters.
Jimmah
James Pinnell,
Did all of those really fail? I thought a number of them like Everquest 2 and Star Wars Galaxies did very well and many of those you’ve listed also did well but eventually went F2P when they eventually started to not do as well as they originally did.
Also yes GW2 is not F2P.
If you turn that argument around though, one can ask what argument can we use to convince someone that a properly managed game with identical subscription model will succeed in the same way the 10% did when there’s so few of them that succeeded at all…
such few number in fact indicates more than anything that the venture is far more likely to fail than to succeed when there’s only so few that have managed to do it.
or rather if you want to look at it from another point of view:
How do you know that there are still sufficient untapped player base out there that can be drawn in with your game?
And failing that, how do you know you can draw players from the existing successful titles.
That is the real test – at what point does an MMO fail?
All MMOs will inherently cease to exist at some point, the real test is RoI and longevity.
Jimmah
the simplest test mark point would be…
did it turn a profit?
did the development cost return at least?
and of course it could still ‘fail’ even if it turned a profit if it does not meet the profit that the investor are expecting.
Since I was originally talking about the subscription model and not the game “as an entity”, the idea of failure I meant was that the game dropped its subscription model for F2P because the former was not earning it enough money. Or in SWG’s case, SOE dropped the license altogether because it wasn’t worth renewing with LucasArts.
Many of those games continue to exist and actually flourish under a new pricing regime, meaning that people still want to play them, but under their own terms. So if they were bad games, noone would want to play them *at all*, even if they were free.
World of Tanks is a great example – originally a tiny little game by a tiny little company in Eastern Europe – could you imagine if they just started asking for $15 a month out of the blue? The free entry allowed the devs to build trust with their community and positive word of mouth made it one of the biggest mmogs around. It also earns their benefactors a crapload of money.
SWG did not do “very well”. It struggled through every part of its drawn out existence (it peaked early, by 2006 it was down to roughly 10,000 users), and by the time it went down it could barely fill a few servers.
There are a million theories as to why decade old games – Wow/UO/Eve have succeeded and the rest failed. My personal argument is not that recent games are inherently bad, because they aren’t. So many of them are phenomenally successful, popular games (Again – Tribes, TF2, LOTRO, etc.) because they work on a system that suits the market they belong to. UO, WoW and EvE built player bases in a period where paying for MMOs was the rule of thumb, thus the legacy.
You can make excuses however you like – that they were badly managed, poor quality, lack of avatar connection, lack of content, poor design – but the fact remains that people don’t want to pay for subscriptions anymore. Tribes has done so well, in particular, because you can pay to get quick access to classes and weapons if you want, or you can slowly earn your way there through gameplay. Since people want to get into the game quickly, they pay. But there’s no disadvantage if you don’t.
WoT one would argue is an example of a rather worrying trend in F2P though since it’s more akin to another F2P market that is not the western F2P zone.
the whole gold shell is the most ostensible issue of all from it.
but equally worrying to me is that it seems the fund they acquired from the game’s profit is immediately channeled towards the next games more than improving the old one, which technically IS a sound strategy.
the only problem is that i’ve seen this strategy before… which incidentally comes from the same place where there are a lot of cash objects giving direct advantage on the field for the player, ie: chinese F2P games, particularly their MMO which ironically was one of the first to utilize the F2P mechanism in large scale.
Their business model is sound considering the incredibly cut throat and competitive field in china’s MMO, a very brutal competition to be honest… so it was a good model from their dev and investor point of view, but not quite exactly pleasant for the player.
ie: Make an F2P, net as much profit possible from it, use that profit to fund the next one, then move on to it and repeat the cycle again, the old one can then be discarded so since it’s going to be discarded anyway issues like long term balance and what not are irrelevant, the game only need to last as long as it takes to get the fund for the next one plus profit.
Yes, but for every WoT there is a Tribes, or a LoL, or a TF2.
The model is still new, and players will vote with their wallets if they don’t like the idea of Pay2Win. Lots of games don’t work on this system.
Seems like what swtor did was fairly business smart if you ask me…
Release game for $90 + subscription after first month, then when sub numbers begin to drop below a pre-determined level, go f2p.
That way u get the best of both income streams, die-hard fans will shell out as soon as it goes live, and the people you didn’t get will be back once it relaunches to try it for free.
Twice as much coverage in the gaming press and media too…
Seems like a sensible move to me?!?
The Secret World is a sub game still doing well. :P
It’s a new game, yes, but it does have good player retention as far as I can tell. It also has a lot of “this game is awesome” posts made by players to counter out the typical “the game sucks ass” posts. Our own RPG forum is evidence of that. More than me is saying it is great!
People are willing to pay a monthly sub here.
I don’t consider the move to F2P after a few years a failure. It is just a move to a different price structure. I don’t like that argument, because then you’d have to argue that every game on Steam is a colossal failure. None of those games retail at their full price anymore. They moved to a frequent sales model, and make more money from it. But it is not a failure. They just moved to a different business model.
In this vein, the sub business model is fairly common. Release something at a premium price, discount it as time goes on. The only way you can discount a sub MMO is by turning it into F2P, so am not sure why F2P is seen as some business revolution. Discounting has been happening for centuries.
My comparison point for that comment, was, again, The Secret World.
It’s no secret I really enjoy this game (I wrote a glowing review about it!), but it also does something I like with content.
The monthly updates. This month the update contained two nightmare dungeon revamps, more clothing options, 5 new investigation quests (which typically take several hours to complete each), an entire new roleplay-oriented map, and 2 new ‘normal’ quests.
It’s more than tidbits, less than an xpac. However, it’s enough content to keep me subscribing. Single player games give less than the content provided (by my estimation 20 hours or so) for much more (people are willing to pay $90 for a 10 hour single player game).
As such, gamers’ value considerations are all over the place. On one hand you have gamers regularly shelling out $90 for a 5-10 hour FPS, on the other you have people saying they don’t want to pay $15 for playing a game for 50 hours in a month.
This is difficult to reconcile for me. I don’t see MMOs different to other games in terms of price/value considerations. I will balk at paying $90 for a single player game where others won’t, but I’ll also happily pay a sub price where others won’t.
i think calling it … LESS than an xpac is somewhat of an understatement.
it is however slightly more significant than most update on F2P games…
But, there are 2 things immediately comes to mind though with it…
A. Are you certain that this is actually made after the game gold state was attained?
or is this part of the content originally should be in the game but was not ready for release date.
B. When you say they take several hours each, how much of that time is actual quest length and not transit time (otherwise every single fetch and kill quest in MMO updates would be considered anything from several minutes to several hours when the object is either hard to reach or rare to spawn which is essentially an artificial brake on the player’s progress)
C. Assuming the best case scenario of all the above, ie: they were all several hours worth of actual quest activity design instead of some artificial delay, and they were made after the game original content was finished.
The next question would be, how long can they continue making content at that rate? Can they do that on the next month? The month after that? and how much player retention do you actually get from them?
Marius,
The Secret World is probably not a good comparison point as it has just been released for a month and there’s nothing to say that they’ll keep up with this monthly release of content as subs start to dwindle.
The update you mentioned (As i don’t play TSW) sounds like content they didn’t fit in time for the release and they’d been working on it towards the release and post release.
Tidbits each month are nice, but when you think about how much you spend over 6 months worth of subs compared to an xpac every 6 months, you end up paying more for those tidbits than if they crammed a major xpac.
When they do 3 months worth of (substantial) free content and then also manage to release an xpac, then I’d be impressed.
It also seems like their idea of keeping subs (and it’s probably a good idea in this day of MMORPG) is to release new (free) content as often as possible. But you can only keep that up for so long.
A few new quests here and there and new clothing options aren’t going to keep people in the game when they’ve reached whatever TSW has for end game. At some point the month to month updates will need to stop so they can devote enough resources for a nice fat xpac.
bronzed,
This guy
A. Yes. To say otherwise would be to call the game’s director, Ragnar, a liar, and I’m not in the habit of calling people liars just because it’s cool to talk about withheld content. He responded to that allegation on the game’s forums, and said it was “stupid” to withhold content from release because the first week is the single most critical time for an MMO.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by ‘should be originally in the game but was not ready for release’. All MMOs are released ‘incomplete’. Doesn’t matter if they’re F2P, Pay2play, Pay2Win, whatever. Even GW2, with all its polish, is struggling to get everything done on time. And it is billed as a PvP game, but will only launch with two or three competitive pvp maps… bleh.
B. Investigation quests means this is several hours of thinking time. You can’t turn your brain off and just go from point to point. For example, the biggest time sink of one investigation quest I’ve played was figuring out how to translate Morse code. I didn’t do that just by wandering aimlessly. :P
C. I hope so, but it needs substantial funding. Is one reason I think the game is doing a hybrid model. A cash shop and a sub price. And I’m fine with that, if it means regular content like this.
See, I disagree there.
The investigation quests are what many players most love about the secret world. They’re unique, and you won’t find them in any other game. I’d, and I’d wager to bet others, would pay $15 for 15 hours of them every month.
For the simple reason that no other game will provide that.
Marius,
Oh i don’t doubt they aren’t fun and interesting. I played during the beta and started on the first one, it was something different and cool. But I myself personally wouldn’t want to pay $15 a month just to do those when I could play something F2P, put the same amount of hours in without dropping a dime.
That’s 15hrs worth of content over 30 days, gotta keep that in mind.
15hrs over 30 days (If that’s all that is keeping you in game is what i mean.)
Well, my main thought there from my perspective is that free2play games don’t provide that sought of thing.
I’m more interested in quality of play than grinding these days, and I’m yet to see a F2P game that ISN’T a grind.
If we’re talking about business, then differentiation is a time-honoured strategy for charging more. :) If it comes to it, I’m happy to just pay $15 for the ability to jump into the game for a few hours a week to do some puzzles. No other game will give that experience to me.
I think it is a bad path to follow> Anyone can get legendary loot with their wallets.
We can only see in the months ahead how TSW will do with their monthly releases.
The quality of gameplay in TSW for me personally was stale, slow and clunky and just about as grindy as any other MMO. The only thing that seems to set it apart were those investigation quests and a few other areas I’m sure.
The aesthetic of the game world was new and fresh, but that isn’t going to do it for a lot of people when the game play itself feels outdated.
For me GW2 will do it. After playing the betas and waiting for release, I know I’ll get a lot of out it.
careful there, someone proficient with Morse would technically able to just say that he would’ve just passed through that in 5 seconds flat.
it’s similar to one of the quest involving the church and the code number for example, a fair number of ppl who are not familiar with how the church activity works like are completely confused, while those of us who have been doing this for ages (blame my school for making us do this every saturday), looked at it, looked straight into the church board… and got the code in 2 seconds from the moment we reached the church.
in which case that little quest ended in about 10 seconds from start to end, and for the ones that DIDN’T get it can take as long as they take before they ask ppl about it usually.
For GW2, we certainly could use more structured PvP map, but the time to roll that out most likely will exist under 2 conditions:
1. the RvRvR PvP work flawlessly (this is definitely by far the meat of the random PvP retention mechanism and far more important to get it to work right)
2. the standard Heroes Ascent or GvG PvP works still… which is where the apex of the old GW1 model PvP is.
The church mission was a sidequest, not an investigation quest. :P
The Morse code thing was just an example. Sure, if you had that training, you could decode it quickly. But if you didn’t, it took longer.
One of the Egypt investigation missions requires you to break a cipher- actually look up a common form of cipher and apply it to the text given.
Another one asks you to look at binary code.
in every case, there’s the chance someone will know the code and be able to crack it in 5 minutes. But the chances of that one person knowing everything needed to crack every investigation that quickly? Highly unlikely. :)
That kind of variety is why I maintain my sub.
As to people asking others or looking up spoilers, well looking up spoilers or asking for them in a puzzle game is like buying a crossword puzzle book and filling it out according to a cheat sheet. A complete and illogical waste of money.
Hehe… that actually illustrates how difficult it is to define value.
I personally found GW2 stale. The dynamic events are just a bunch of DPS spam. No holy trinity means encounters have no real strategy. Just personal healing and DPS.
I pre-ordered the game because the price was OK for what it was, and I expect to at least get 50 hours out of it. But I highly doubt I will play it more than an hour or two a week.
Everyone’s going to have different conceptions of value, which is why making a definitive statement on these topics is so hard.
When doing Catacombs of Ascalon Explorable I found strategy came in to play in almost every encounter, especially after just rushing in there thinking everything would be fine.
Strategy starts defining itself as working out skill combos/when to use certain skills /when people should be dodging or getting out of melee range, not just making sure the tank controls all the aggro and you’re getting your skills off at the right times to max your DPS.
An as a final point, I would however, like to commend James for this thought-provoking article. I may not agree with all of it, but this has been a very interesting discussion.
We did get a nice 66 comment discussion out of it :P
Lol you posted that as I posted my ‘final’ comment. :P
My main issue there is that GW2 is billing its dynamic events as its chief form of multiplayer. Dungeons seem to be the tacked on, red-headed stepchildren (not that there’s anything wrong with redheads).
The Catacombs dungeon is ok… but it comes halfway through the levelling game. What turned me off GW2 the most, and is why I’m sooo not enthused about it, is there was no decent group pve content in the early game. I don’t want crappy dynamic events to sub in for what I see as the real multiplayer content.
A lot of it also relates to the Lore of the world more so than traditional questing which is why some people probably don’t like it as much. That’s Arena Net’s whole gimmick that you affect the world and lore plays into a lot of that.
Apparently the dungeons are quite lore intensive, they explain more about Destiny’s Edge and why they split etc etc. So in a way, leveling up they feel tacked on but in terms of lore, they fit well.
Also grouping is one issue I have with GW2. Playing with a group of friends is difficult because for me I want to go out and explore instead of stick around doing quests/events in some sort of order. (Another flaw i feel in Arena Net wanting an open and interactive world without so much direction) It’s much harder to be organized in a group with PvE GW2 compared to say WoW or TSW.
True,
in which case it is back to the previous question of :
how long can they keep the update rate and is it sustainable for them.
and the other question of course being :
how long before the player becomes quite adept at solving and burning through them.
if you notice many of the TSW investigation quest are similar to adventure games puzzle in simplified form, which is not surprising since most adventure game are essentially that.. puzzle, after puzzle after puzzle.
Veteran players of adventure games became quite proficient at them and after a while are quite capable of burning through most puzzles quickly once they understand what style and objective that most puzzle designs are.
so how long and how much variety can FUNCOM jam into it before the player starts picking up the trait is another question i am pondering.
Hmmm, i just played TSW’s free weekend, and i liked it very much.
The setting and storyline are engaging, and it has a fresher feeling than wow clones.
I’ve gotta say though, the concept of investigation missons doesn’t really work for me, i would be cruising along doing quests and getting more of the story of a zone, then one of those would crop up.
I want to play the game , not crack open a browser and go looking for clues on websites then trying a bunch of hunches till i get the right answer to the puzzle to continue.
I am sure someone will point out that i should be playing a different game then, but when its 90% kinda normal mmo stuff and 10% investigation missions, i can live with googling a walkthrough for them rather than spending hours trying to figure out a puzzle.
I am not saying they should remove them either, the people that like them…really like them, for me though it’s just more fun to keep getting further into the storyline.
So Marius says , “As to people asking others or looking up spoilers, well looking up spoilers or asking for them in a puzzle game is like buying a crossword puzzle book and filling it out according to a cheat sheet. A complete and illogical waste of money.”
Imo , it’s not a puzzle game, for 90% or more anyway..
I can appreciate the time and effort to put the puzzles in, and as said earlier, some people like em, some just want to get on with the content.
Not illogical or a waste of money either, it’s entertainment, consume it how you wish.
By that logic, people should be “puzzling” the bosses out as well, but i don’t forsee you or anyone screaming “SPOILER!!” when a veteran explains each bosses abilities to you the first time you do each dungeon.
Or you could wipe until you figure it out!
I know which option i will be going with.
Oh oh, also SWTOR going Pu2P (Purchase to Play).
A 25GB client is what is stopping me from trying it out right now, but I’ll seriously consider it come November.
Fair enough, psychofruitrier. You’re right – it’s your money and you’ve the right to do what you will with your time. :)
It’s something I’m curious about Bronze, and I’d like to reflect on the game’s progress in say… 3 months.
I do like the variety, though. Spent 3 hours doing a quest called The Cost of Magic the other day. Why 3 hours? It’s basically Mario, lol. Think of the SWTOR lore jumping, just more intensive… with minefields.
I loved it, but others hate it. The variety is enough to keep me coming back, and paying, though.
However, I absolutely wouldn’t pay a sub without this variety. MMOs need to do at least SOMETHING new to justify a sub. The key problem, I think, is not the business model, it’s the rehashed mechanics.
Marius,
Yeah, it does always tend to boil down to rehashing mechanics.
Well the unfortunate part is that when it comes to making PvE content, rehashing is going to happen eventually.
either that or the cost to update them increases over time as eventually you run out of fresh template, it gets progressively harder and harder to design new ones that work well in gameplay and yet still new and fresh..
I don’t mind the mechanics of current mmo’s, and at this point i find it hard to see how you could change them too much before people who like the genre just aren’t interested anymore.
You do need to bring something new to the table, i agree, but that can just come down to the setting and story for me and i’ll be happy, as long as it is in my zone of “interesting enough story that i want to see how it plays out”
I like playing fps’ too, and they are basically exactly that, just reskinned versions of quake with a different story and extra cool new features tacked on with each iteration.
I guess i maybe just over the multiplayer aspect of mmo’s after years of raiding in wow, but i still like killing mobs and levelling up in an interesting setting.
The financial risk to an mmo going f2p would be people like me i guess, happy to just play through the levelling process, do each dungeon once or twice and keep my money.
Which i guess is why the most expensive ones to make stay on the sub model till they can’t anymore ;D
Yeah, I actually like the normal MMO mechanics. My problem is when a game brings absolutely nothing to the table, or how long a game’s differentiation will last.
SWTOR was actually great fun for a while. It’s niche thing – full voice acting and story, worked well.
The only trouble is… every character was a typical Star Wars cartoon, meaning I got sick of them. Eventually I was skipping most dialogue.
That was fairly typical for a lot of others from what I read.
However I don’t think a game needs to completely reinvent the wheel. And I’d prefer it if they don’t. I like making builds and figuring out the system.
I think GW2 is probably a step in the right direction. Obviously thing will be re-iterated over and over again. But removing a sort of “hub” of quests from one NPC and expanding things to be a bit more dynamic and world affecting is one step of logical outcomes in an advancement of story telling MMOs.
In the end of it all, a lot of MMOs have become a grind fest of “collecting X thing” and that’s how it’s evolved from table top RPGs. A more dynamic environment like GW2 is like a stepping stone into something more.
To add to that, a lot of MMORPG fans probably have their mind sets stuck in the whole “click click click” grab quest do quest advance to next hub of quests. This of course has removed any sort of world building, lore exploring element that the MMOs still bring to the table.
Obviously this all evolved from old school RPGs and that probably needs to be brought back but in some new variant.
GW2 interests me lore wise enough to enjoy this new system of story telling. With their dungeons, their dynamic events and day to day strolling around listening to NPCs talk in proper VO about what is happening in the world. Even though the dynamic events are more used to disguise the old quest hub npc.
GW2 isn’t the only way forward, though. ;)
Gets kindof annoying seeing it pasted as the second coming of Jesus when MMOs have been innovating for years. Just everyone values different types of innovation differently.
I could even say TSW did away with quest hubs before GW2, because if you follow the path given to you in each zone, you’ll do a full rotation of the zone before getting a second quest from the first quest giver.
Oh definitely. But when you look at it likes this “Go do this” Come back and they have anothe quest. “Do that, they tell you to go talk to another NPC. TSW does that the exact same way as it has been done forever.
GW2 doesn’t do that exactly. If Dynamic events ever revert to the same NPC (depends on what is happening) they continue to be the hub, but once their meta chain ends, a lot of the time they become a vendor of some unique item or buff instead of sending you off to another NPC.
TSW isnt unique in it’s quest grind, I can say that.
Yeah, I’m aware TSW isn’t unique. What more gets to me is that GW2 is claimed to be unique when it’s really not.
It actually just re-introdueces the kind of questless grind that existed before WoW.
Good example is that there isn’t quite enough xp on the dynamic events to get you to the next level without repeating content, or going to another map. From my time in the beta, there are XP holes at points, which leaves you either travelling tens of miles to another map to do easy content while delevelled, or running around in a circle doing the same few chains of dynamic events over and over.
I just wish the GW2 hype would recognise that there’s nothing new under the questing sun. :)
Definitely, there isn’t anything new in terms of leveling grind. But it is relatively new in terms of how it delivers that grind. (You can look at RIFT an others for sure, but when it comes to the quantity of quests delivered in that dynamic event system, GW2 is doing it differently compared to others in terms of sheer amount of those events.)
I think you may have the dynamic event system mixed up with the heart “quests” in regards to experience per level. If you only follow heart quests per zone, you don’t have nearly enough experience to level, but if you do some dynamic events (and follow the NPC around, which they don’t explain enough for people to actually do) you end up being leveled well enough.
What they’re currently working on before release seems to be that experience curve where people don’t know where to get the experience and are set in the old way of going point to point, rather than exploring the world to get experience. It seems to be something a lot of people are having trouble shaking when it comes to leveling. (I might just say yourself included if I would be so bold :P)
No I explored the world properly, I’m actually a PvE explorer in most games I play.
But there are holes in GW2… where you’ve explored the entire map, and still face a 3-4 level gap.
Playing dynamic events in these situations gets frustrating, because they’re so random. You run to a place where you saw a dynamic event spawn before… nothing. But then you get a notification that an event just occured at where you left from. Gah!
I know they’re meant to be dynamic, but there have been times that the spawn rate of them has just led me in circles.
To give a particular example, the human level 19 near the Krate village attack was particularly bad for this. There were three high teens dynamic events nearby in a triangle, but you’d never be sure which one was going to pop. Very frustrating area, I found.
I’m just not convinced that the system offers anything more than window dressing to grinding. And I like having narrative, cinematic quest intros. Something that both SWTOR and TSW do, but GW2 fails at. As a result, it all tended to blur together for myself.
If one goes by that though, then WoW did it before that, when they started sprinkling the quest around, and technically we had plenty others that went further back in time and did that.
That’s not the part that really interest me with GW2 though,
the ones i am far more interested with the dynamic quest is the prospect of having non static current state from any one of the handful possible state that follows the sequence of event.
It’s still too limited frankly right now, but it’s a step in the right direction by attempting to mitigate to an extent the fatigue associated with facing an identical set of state of the world again, and again, and again.
If i can log into the game just an hour each day and find a world in a ever slightly different state potentially each time (up until i’ve exhausted all the permutations of course) then that’s already a massive improvement.
To be more accurate… THEY ARE ALL GRINDS.
in every MMO you do an action that produce some form of progress of a sort that improve you to the next stage, EVERY SINGLE THING really.. is therefore a grind.
the key is making the grind enjoyable and entertaining enough that ppl don’t mind doing it.
there’s no such thing as no grind since if you take that away then you basically have a completely different game.
And this includes all of them, even TSW, the difference is in how they all dress up the grind and what they choose as the motive.
in TSW the investigation quest IS A GRIND, it’s a grind with puzzle game as it’s cover. In a GW2, crafting IS A GRIND, it’s a grind with the item collection and experiment as it’s cover, ditto with almost everything you do in all MMORPGs.
The only question left is which one do ppl like and willing to do.
I’m sure this has already been said but I believe that if a game is good enough, by meeting a ‘decent’ standard in all checkboxes, without having some glaring faults then people will be more than happy to pay a monthly sub. I know I would. Unfortunetly SWTOR has a huge disappointment, and had a LOT of glaring faults.
IMO F2P models are great if the pay part is only limited to cosmetics or similar. If you need to pay to get access to the ‘full’ game, then no thanks; the game obviously wasn’t good enough to warrant paying subs in the first place.
And btw, this new comments section approach is just plain awful.
I hate f2p games. They always cheapen the experience and they just sell gimmicky useless shit.
For an mmo you need to pay a price for it say $50 no subscription but have constant expansion packs of shit that you actually need to move on. No hats, useless items etc but actually $15 expansions maybe a choice or whatever say for dungeons, map expansions every month but doesn’t stop you from playing on the server.
So yeh pretty much what guild wars 2 is doing. GW2 the future imo for mmos fuck f2p.
Problem with SWTOR for me was even the class questline got so boring. It become so repetitive and uninteresting. I didn’t even get to endgame before I was over the game. And Huttball was not worth paying a subscription for.
What a discussion! This is easily some kind of GON record :)
Really? It felt pretty standard to me (as in a good interesting discussion, just one of many many more good and interesting discussions that usually take place, also the Crysis 2 demo thread had over 200 if memory serves :P ). I wonder if it’ll keep going though.
Crysis 1* :x
exe3,
I think the day you write a positive reply to anything I write will be the day I’ve seen everything.
ps: this convo died in the ass the second the thread dropped off the front page >_>
No I stopped posting because I was happy with what I said and see no reason to beat people over the head with my opinions. ;)