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EA officially determines sub based games are dead.

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  • GrumpyMel2GrumpyMel2 Member Posts: 1,832
    Originally posted by kalrhael

    I'd say he's right, very few games can compete with a P2P model...and that's not even to say that certain games can't exist in that model, Not sure if I remember exactly, but I remember turbine saying they quadruppled their profits when LOTRO went f2p...probably off but yea, F2P is a major cash cow. 

     

    Honestly, while RIFt seems to be doing good, part of me thinks their insane for not maximixing profits, I wouldn't be surprised if they announced a f2p plan soon...they're nuts...simply too much money involved in F2P. If I were their publisher, I'd be stranggling somebody while yelling "I WANT MONEYYYY!!!!111". 

    What Turbine's PR mouthpiece say's means nothing. It's what's actualy on thier books that matters....and only WB knows that for sure at this point....beyond that, it's about as reliable as asking Bahgdad Bob how the War is going.

  • SuperXero89SuperXero89 Member UncommonPosts: 2,551

    The subscription model isn't dead, but if the game charges a subscription, it better damn well be worth it.  Realistically, the only games available today that are actually worth a subscription are EVE and WoW.  For other games, it's a lot easier to look past their shortcomings when they're not forcing players to fork over 15 dollars a month.  By itself, 15 dollars isn't a lot of money, but if you can play a game like AION or Lineage 2 without spending a bit of money in the cash shop, you're saving 180 dollars a year.  Even if you play games with more restrictive F2P options, you can still wind up spending a lot less in any given year.  

     

  • waynejr2waynejr2 Member EpicPosts: 7,769
    Originally posted by Kyleran

    They've misunderstood their exit interviews.  They assume that 40% won't pay a subscription, I maintain most of them will (since it really is a small amount of money) if the content is worth the buyers time.

    Apparently they failed to deliver on engaging long term content, but don't seem to realize it yet.

    Don't worry, when people don't stick around for the F2P version either, they'll understand the real issue.

     

    The problem with that line of thinking is that it could turn out to be magical thinking.  Like the myth of willpower, if only the game had this [black box] of features that were good enough that people would sub for it then people would sub for it.

    http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2010/QBlog190810A.html  

    Epic Music:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1

    https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1

    Kyleran:  "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."

    John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."

    FreddyNoNose:  "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."

    LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"




  • grimalgrimal Member UncommonPosts: 2,935
    Originally posted by Creslin321
    Originally posted by grimal
    Originally posted by Creslin321

    EA with Sports video games.

    Apple with MP3 players and tablets.

    Firaxis with 4X strategy games.

    NFL with professional football.

    Sooo...when doing analysis on any of the markets above, should I just ignore the clearly dominant player, because they are "an outlier?"

    With the exception of Applie, I am not versed in any of those other markets so how can I?  Also, what point am I avoiding?  You're the one arguing WoW dominates the market due to its superiority (which you paralleled with Microsoft).  I don't agree with that reasoning.  It's very naive to believe something succeeds as a business purely because it offers a superior product.

    If this is the case, how do you explain VHS beating out Betamax for one?  That's besides the point, but I don't see what point I am avoiding.  You and I have very opposing views.  What else is there to discuss?  If GW2 doesn't do as well as you have touted, will you do a reversal and say it failed because it was poorly designed?  Do you always NEED to be on the winning team?

     I never said that.

    That is a strawman argument.  All I said was that I don't think the business model was the primary reason SWTOR failed.  That does not translate to highlighted above. 

    I'm not going to respond to your VHS/Betamax thing because that is just more strawman.  And as for the GW2 thing, if it doesn't do well, and I think it is poorly designed, then yes I will say that.  If I think it was well designed, then I will state whatever reason I think it did poorly...maybe it was the cash shop, maybe it was lack of marketing, all hypothetical.  You have to analyze things on a case by case basis.  And in the case of SWTOR, I think the business model had little to do with its failure.

    And as for "what's my point..."  My point is that you can't ignore the dominant player in an industry when analyzing that industry because it's an outlier.  That's stupid.  That's ignoring THE MOST IMPORTANT PLAYER.  This isn't one dude out of 2 million that is 8.5 feet tall.  This is one company that owns like eighty percent of the market.  Get the difference?

     

    Your examplifying the viability of the entire P2P model based off the success of one product!  Everything else that has tried to follow that same model has by all approximations FAILED to compete with that product in numbers or success.  You are attritubuting that success due to "people think(ing) WoW is a superior product." "I believe that when you have a product, but there exists a similar, but superior product already on the market..." the other product fails, WoW being implied as the superior product:

    "So basically, I think WoW has everything to do with the "sub model being dead" for other games.  It's not that the sub model is dead...it's just that hardly any of them are good/different enough to compete directly with WoW"

    There is no strawman argument here.  I am just trying to understand your line of thinking, a thinking obviously severely affected by the Bandwagon Effect.

    By your thinking, Stephen King is the greatest author to ever live and the Toyota Corolla the best manufactured car.  Afterall, they are the best selling of their respective markets.

  • rdrakkenrdrakken Member Posts: 426
    Originally posted by tiefighter25

    In all seriousness, it's spin statements like this, and their subsequent industry media bylines and articles that keep an unhealthy ammount of ire and discussion going about this title.

     Depends on how you look at it.

    If you look at it from a closed minded, narrow, ignorant view...it doesnt look dead.

    If you look at it from a world view, it is.

    The F2P market is far larger than the sub market. The amount of F2P games that have broken the 5 million playerbase is double that of the sub market (wow and gw) and the amount of F2P games that have broken the 1 million player mark greatly exceeds that of the sub market. Then if you throw in the freemium games...the F2P/freemium market has a far far greater playerbase than the sub game market.

    Now throw in games like D3, browser based, facebook online games...the F2P field is taking over and its far easier for companies to make money with them, than with a sub. Any game that starts out with a F2P with a shop mindset has a far greater chance of succeeding than going sub. The sheer size of the bigger F2P companies is proof of that...I mean come ON companies making games like Atlantica Online is posting better profits with F2P games than some of the bigger gaming companies out there...lol...get with the times.

    From a business standpoint it looks like this.

    Charge a subscription for $14.95 a month to a possible 12-15 million consumers which you have next to no chance of getting half of and if you get 1/10th of them you did something special or...

    Create a shop with microtransactions to a possible 40+ million consumers, odds of success is high, chance of getting multiple transactions is great and profitability is near impossible not to achieve.

    Then again, there are the freemium games, being run by moronic companies like Funcom where they are ignorant of what the word microtransactions means and somehow manage to drive away their newest consumer target with high prices...

  • ktanner3ktanner3 Member UncommonPosts: 4,063
    So EA had this "epiphany" right after release? RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT................................

    Currently Playing: World of Warcraft

  • grimalgrimal Member UncommonPosts: 2,935
    Originally posted by ktanner3
    So EA had this "epiphany" right after release? RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT................................

    No, obviously they are spinning this in their favor.

    But I happen to agree with the statement .

  • GrumpyMel2GrumpyMel2 Member Posts: 1,832
    Originally posted by rdrakken
    Originally posted by tiefighter25

    In all seriousness, it's spin statements like this, and their subsequent industry media bylines and articles that keep an unhealthy ammount of ire and discussion going about this title.

     Depends on how you look at it.

    If you look at it from a closed minded, narrow, ignorant view...it doesnt look dead.

    If you look at it from a world view, it is.

    The F2P market is far larger than the sub market. The amount of F2P games that have broken the 5 million playerbase is double that of the sub market (wow and gw) and the amount of F2P games that have broken the 1 million player mark greatly exceeds that of the sub market. Then if you throw in the freemium games...the F2P/freemium market has a far far greater playerbase than the sub game market.

    Now throw in games like D3, browser based, facebook online games...the F2P field is taking over and its far easier for companies to make money with them, than with a sub. Any game that starts out with a F2P with a shop mindset has a far greater chance of succeeding than going sub. The sheer size of the bigger F2P companies is proof of that...I mean come ON companies making games like Atlantica Online is posting better profits with F2P games than some of the bigger gaming companies out there...lol...get with the times.

    From a business standpoint it looks like this.

    Charge a subscription for $14.95 a month to a possible 12-15 million consumers which you have next to no chance of getting half of and if you get 1/10th of them you did something special or...

    Create a shop with microtransactions to a possible 40+ million consumers, odds of success is high, chance of getting multiple transactions is great and profitability is near impossible not to achieve.

    Then again, there are the freemium games, being run by moronic companies like Funcom where they are ignorant of what the word microtransactions means and somehow manage to drive away their newest consumer target with high prices...

    This is part of the basic misunderstanding of the "Free" services model....and believe me, alot of services have gone bankrupt because of it.

    Under the "Free" services model...the number of users/players does NOT EQUAL the amount of revenue. USERS/PLAYERS are a COST to you. It's only when you convert those users/players to PAY for something in your service that they become revenue. If you don't find a way to monetize enough of your users/players to a sufficient degree, the only thing have a larger user base will get you is an increased operating DEBT.

    Now, clearly it IS POSSIBLE to run a proffitable service under that model...as there are companies doing it. However finding a way to sufficiently monetize your user base is by no means as simple and certain as it sounds....and there are alot of failed enterprises (mostly outside the MMO sphere) to give testimony to that.

    One thing every person involved in this sort of discussion should try to keep in mind is that a company with only 10 CUSTOMERS can actualy be significantly more PROFFITABLE then a company with 40 million USERS.

  • KiljaedenasKiljaedenas Member Posts: 468
    Originally posted by tiefighter25

    http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/08/22/ea-coo-maintains-confidence-in-bioware/

    According to EA the sub based model is dead. Perhaps this occured on Feb. 29th of 2012? In which case leap years are bad for sub based MMO's? I'm not sure, EA didn't go into details but they have exit surveys which definitively proove their assertion.

    In all seriousness, it's spin statements like this, and their subsequent industry media bylines and articles that keep an unhealthy ammount of ire and discussion going about this title.

    Those moronic twats...people will pay for a full subscription game if the game is GOOD. If a game is sub based and has very little to offer above another game that is F2P, people probably aren't going to play it.

    Where's the any key?

  • GrumpyMel2GrumpyMel2 Member Posts: 1,832
    Originally posted by grimal
    Originally posted by Creslin321
    Originally posted by grimal
    Originally posted by Creslin321

    EA with Sports video games.

    Apple with MP3 players and tablets.

    Firaxis with 4X strategy games.

    NFL with professional football.

    Sooo...when doing analysis on any of the markets above, should I just ignore the clearly dominant player, because they are "an outlier?"

    With the exception of Applie, I am not versed in any of those other markets so how can I?  Also, what point am I avoiding?  You're the one arguing WoW dominates the market due to its superiority (which you paralleled with Microsoft).  I don't agree with that reasoning.  It's very naive to believe something succeeds as a business purely because it offers a superior product.

    If this is the case, how do you explain VHS beating out Betamax for one?  That's besides the point, but I don't see what point I am avoiding.  You and I have very opposing views.  What else is there to discuss?  If GW2 doesn't do as well as you have touted, will you do a reversal and say it failed because it was poorly designed?  Do you always NEED to be on the winning team?

     I never said that.

    That is a strawman argument.  All I said was that I don't think the business model was the primary reason SWTOR failed.  That does not translate to highlighted above. 

    I'm not going to respond to your VHS/Betamax thing because that is just more strawman.  And as for the GW2 thing, if it doesn't do well, and I think it is poorly designed, then yes I will say that.  If I think it was well designed, then I will state whatever reason I think it did poorly...maybe it was the cash shop, maybe it was lack of marketing, all hypothetical.  You have to analyze things on a case by case basis.  And in the case of SWTOR, I think the business model had little to do with its failure.

    And as for "what's my point..."  My point is that you can't ignore the dominant player in an industry when analyzing that industry because it's an outlier.  That's stupid.  That's ignoring THE MOST IMPORTANT PLAYER.  This isn't one dude out of 2 million that is 8.5 feet tall.  This is one company that owns like eighty percent of the market.  Get the difference?

     

    Your examplifying the viability of the entire P2P model based off the success of one product!  Everything else that has tried to follow that same model has by all approximations FAILED to compete with that product in numbers or success.  You are attritubuting that success due to "people think(ing) WoW is a superior product." "I believe that when you have a product, but there exists a similar, but superior product already on the market..." the other product fails, WoW being implied as the superior product:

    "So basically, I think WoW has everything to do with the "sub model being dead" for other games.  It's not that the sub model is dead...it's just that hardly any of them are good/different enough to compete directly with WoW"

    There is no strawman argument here.  I am just trying to understand your line of thinking, a thinking obviously severely affected by the Bandwagon Effect.

    By your thinking, Stephen King is the greatest author to ever live and the Toyota Corolla the best manufactured car.  Afterall, they are the best selling of their respective markets.

    WOW is hardly the only product to have made a proffit off of the subscription model and it is not the only one doing so currently.

     

     

  • KakkzookaKakkzooka Member Posts: 591

    Make a game worth subbing to . . . people will subscribe to it.

     

    Make a piece of shit game solely with the intent of a quick cash grab; smart people will warn others to stay away from it and people won't sub to it.

     

    Why is WoW still a viable subscription game? Because Blizzard initially made a quality game.

    Re: SWTOR

    "Remember, remember - Kakk says 'December.'"

  • tiefighter25tiefighter25 Member Posts: 937
    Originally posted by rdrakken
    Originally posted by tiefighter25

    In all seriousness, it's spin statements like this, and their subsequent industry media bylines and articles that keep an unhealthy ammount of ire and discussion going about this title.

     Depends on how you look at it.

    If you look at it from a closed minded, narrow, ignorant view...it doesnt look dead.

    If you look at it from a world view, it is.

    The F2P market is far larger than the sub market. The amount of F2P games that have broken the 5 million playerbase is double that of the sub market (wow and gw) and the amount of F2P games that have broken the 1 million player mark greatly exceeds that of the sub market. Then if you throw in the freemium games...the F2P/freemium market has a far far greater playerbase than the sub game market.

    Now throw in games like D3, browser based, facebook online games...the F2P field is taking over and its far easier for companies to make money with them, than with a sub. Any game that starts out with a F2P with a shop mindset has a far greater chance of succeeding than going sub. The sheer size of the bigger F2P companies is proof of that...I mean come ON companies making games like Atlantica Online is posting better profits with F2P games than some of the bigger gaming companies out there...lol...get with the times.

    From a business standpoint it looks like this.

    Charge a subscription for $14.95 a month to a possible 12-15 million consumers which you have next to no chance of getting half of and if you get 1/10th of them you did something special or...

    Create a shop with microtransactions to a possible 40+ million consumers, odds of success is high, chance of getting multiple transactions is great and profitability is near impossible not to achieve.

    Then again, there are the freemium games, being run by moronic companies like Funcom where they are ignorant of what the word microtransactions means and somehow manage to drive away their newest consumer target with high prices...

    Well, Tor always implied it's main competitor was WoW. Wow is sub based.

    Secondly, EA is blaming their entire underperformance on the fact that sub based games are no longer profitable.

    That's a cop out, ignoring any other possible reasons for the game's underperformance. (Which eveen EA said on their exit polls, 60% of the former customers did not indicate the sub was the problem.)

    Also 100% of the the 2.6 million people who bought the box realized there would be a onthly sub.

    The P2P is dead spin in ToR's case is spin.

    As to the enormous profitability of the FTP market; I'm pretty sure Zynga is smarting quite a bit. (As is Facebook for that matter.)

    D3, based in all likelihood more on the success of D and D2, sold a lot of boxes; and while no means a failure, server lode has taken a big hit. Also, the RMAH seems to not be the cash cow it was hoped to be. (I don't have financials)

    The Facebook games, D3, and the other FTP games you mentioned seem to have one important thing in common:

    They aren't MMOs. Also, a FTP game can't really boast about the number of subscribers they have.

    For example Star Wars Clone War Adventures has over 10 million accounts.

    How many of them are spending money?

  • IselinIselin Member LegendaryPosts: 18,719
    Originally posted by tiefighter25
    Originally posted by Iselin

     I see many posts here and elsewhere that link monthly updates to the monthly sub. Trying to figure out if they got their money's worth this month. That's new thinking. WOW spent many years doing virtually nothing month to month other than the seasonal events and not many were bitching about the sub cost. But times changed and now we're expecting to see something tangible for our $180/year.

     

    The box-cost-only GW2 model just highlights the inherent problem with the monthly sub model... it makes it seem like a greedy, money-grubbing system... which it is.

    That's pretty much revisionist history. Vanilla WoW put out a decent ammount of content. The content released did a decent job of pacing with the players level progression. Call it gear grind or what you will, but they were tweaking their battlegrounds, releasing new 5 (and for a while 10) man instances, adding 40 and 20 man raids, adding tons of gear, quests, reputation factions, etc.

    SWTOR had a dismal record of releasing new content. A pittance of gear, 1 warzone and 1 raid in 10 months. That's it. What's more, progressing in SWTOR was much faster (blame casualization if you want). It was extremeley easy to find yourself essentially done with the all the games content in about a month.

    Love WoW, hate it; Vaniila WoW players were seeing much more content for their $15 a month then 8 years later with SWTOR. (The WoW expansions are a related but a bit of a different topic.)

    The Guild Wars Buy to Play model is intresting. They proved it could work with their heavily instances first title. Things look promising for their second, this time fully fledged MMO title. The long term success can only be determined by how well their expansions sell and are received. The B2P model is certainly different then the P2P monthly sub model but it has a lot more in common with it then the FTP/Freemium/P2W models.

    I'm not saying that vanilla WOW didn't have patches and additions--it obviously did--but I don't remember me or anyone else in any forum making a connection between the frequency and quality of additions and a monthly sub justification. People routinely do that now with any MMO.

     

    Monthly subs just were. It was the MMO way and all the ones worth playing had it. It's a financial model that is more like the old Compuserve, America Online or MUD models than anything else: of course you paid monthly to get access: those servers and high-speed connections cost the company big bucks...or so we figured.

     

    F2P games originally were (and still largely are) just a bunch of 2nd rate MMOs with amateurish graphics, etc. This "let's rescue our declining monthly-sub AAA MMO by going free to play" is a recent phenomenom. Turbine's DDO was the first one I remember that did that...and they had some success.

     

    But all of those F2P games--whether they started that way or not--have one thing in common: a way of getting a monthly stream of revenue by making the cash shop if not absolutely necessary, very close to it. You need it for certain dungeons, better equipment, certain races or professions, etc. It's a model that has been adopted by all the tablet games that are "free" in iTunes or Android marketplaces.

     

    The original GW was unique even back then in providing a persistent server system for free. You bought the box and everything you needed to play was there. No need to dish out more cash until the next expansion. But it couldn't really have an impact on the full-fledged MMO genre because, as you say, it really wasn't an MMO. This time around it is, and that changes everything.

     

    Bandwidth, HW considerations and minimum-wage GMs, are an insignificant part of the MMO cost that needs to be recovered. The months and years of development is where they spent the big bucks. And that's hardly different from any first rate FPS title... when was the last time an FPS-- a type of game that attracts hordes of people who play it for months or even years--charged for on-line play? Did those companies go btroke or turned a profit?

     

    MMOs are just catching up to the way other games with required on-line components do business and once one goes that way, they'll all need to do it.

     

     

    "Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”

    ― Umberto Eco

    “Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” 
    ― CD PROJEKT RED

  • darkboazdarkboaz Member UncommonPosts: 160
    Have said it before and I will say it again they misunderstood the people telling them that they were not willing to pay them another cent for this game, as people wanted a free to play model.
  • tiefighter25tiefighter25 Member Posts: 937
    Originally posted by Iselin
    Originally posted by tiefighter25
    Originally posted by Iselin

     I see many posts here and elsewhere that link monthly updates to the monthly sub. Trying to figure out if they got their money's worth this month. That's new thinking. WOW spent many years doing virtually nothing month to month other than the seasonal events and not many were bitching about the sub cost. But times changed and now we're expecting to see something tangible for our $180/year.

     

    The box-cost-only GW2 model just highlights the inherent problem with the monthly sub model... it makes it seem like a greedy, money-grubbing system... which it is.

    That's pretty much revisionist history. Vanilla WoW put out a decent ammount of content. The content released did a decent job of pacing with the players level progression. Call it gear grind or what you will, but they were tweaking their battlegrounds, releasing new 5 (and for a while 10) man instances, adding 40 and 20 man raids, adding tons of gear, quests, reputation factions, etc.

    SWTOR had a dismal record of releasing new content. A pittance of gear, 1 warzone and 1 raid in 10 months. That's it. What's more, progressing in SWTOR was much faster (blame casualization if you want). It was extremeley easy to find yourself essentially done with the all the games content in about a month.

    Love WoW, hate it; Vaniila WoW players were seeing much more content for their $15 a month then 8 years later with SWTOR. (The WoW expansions are a related but a bit of a different topic.)

    The Guild Wars Buy to Play model is intresting. They proved it could work with their heavily instances first title. Things look promising for their second, this time fully fledged MMO title. The long term success can only be determined by how well their expansions sell and are received. The B2P model is certainly different then the P2P monthly sub model but it has a lot more in common with it then the FTP/Freemium/P2W models.

    I'm not saying that vanilla WOW didn't have patches and additions--it obviously did--but I don't remember me or anyone else in any forum making a connection between the frequency and quality of additions and a monthly sub justification. People routinely do that now with any MMO.

     

    Monthly subs just were. It was the MMO way and all the ones worth playing had it. It's a financial model that is more like the old Compuserve, America Online or MUD models than anything else: of course you paid monthly to get access: those servers and high-speed connections cost the company big bucks...or so we figured.

     

    F2P games originally were (and still largely are) just a bunch of 2nd rate MMOs with amateurish graphics, etc. This "let's rescue our declining monthly-sub AAA MMO by going free to play" is a recent phenomenom. Turbine's DDO was the first one I remember that did that...and they had some success.

     

    But all of those F2P games--whether they started that way or not--have one thing in common: a way of getting a monthly stream of revenue by making the cash shop if not absolutely necessary, very close to it. You need it for certain dungeons, better equipment, certain races or professions, etc. It's a model that has been adopted by all the tablet games that are "free" in iTunes or Android marketplaces.

     

    The original GW was unique even back then in providing a persistent server system for free. You bought the box and everything you needed to play was there. No need to dish out more cash until the next expansion. But it couldn't really have an impact on the full-fledged MMO genre because, as you say, it really wasn't an MMO. This time around it is, and that changes everything.

     

    Bandwidth, HW considerations and minimum-wage GMs, are an insignificant part of the MMO cost that needs to be recovered. The months and years of development is where they spent the big bucks. And that's hardly different from any first rate FPS title... when was the last time an FPS-- a type of game that attracts hordes of people who play it for months or even years--charged for on-line play? Did those companies go btroke or turned a profit?

     

    MMOs are just catching up to the way other games with required on-line components do business and once one goes that way, they'll all need to do it.

     

     

    The Vanilla WoW players were constantly calling into question if the sub was worth the money. People weren't bitching about it much because most agreed it was worth the money because Blizz was releasing new content in a timely fashion.

    Comparing a fully fleshed MMO with an FPS isn't a valid comparison. Until an on line FPS game has more meat to it then new maps, I don't think anyone would be suicidal enough to attempt to charge for it. (Insert Project Titan speculation here.)

  • Creslin321Creslin321 Member Posts: 5,359
    Originally posted by grimal
    Originally posted by Creslin321
    Originally posted by grimal
    Originally posted by Creslin321

    EA with Sports video games.

    Apple with MP3 players and tablets.

    Firaxis with 4X strategy games.

    NFL with professional football.

    Sooo...when doing analysis on any of the markets above, should I just ignore the clearly dominant player, because they are "an outlier?"

    With the exception of Applie, I am not versed in any of those other markets so how can I?  Also, what point am I avoiding?  You're the one arguing WoW dominates the market due to its superiority (which you paralleled with Microsoft).  I don't agree with that reasoning.  It's very naive to believe something succeeds as a business purely because it offers a superior product.

    If this is the case, how do you explain VHS beating out Betamax for one?  That's besides the point, but I don't see what point I am avoiding.  You and I have very opposing views.  What else is there to discuss?  If GW2 doesn't do as well as you have touted, will you do a reversal and say it failed because it was poorly designed?  Do you always NEED to be on the winning team?

     I never said that.

    That is a strawman argument.  All I said was that I don't think the business model was the primary reason SWTOR failed.  That does not translate to highlighted above. 

    I'm not going to respond to your VHS/Betamax thing because that is just more strawman.  And as for the GW2 thing, if it doesn't do well, and I think it is poorly designed, then yes I will say that.  If I think it was well designed, then I will state whatever reason I think it did poorly...maybe it was the cash shop, maybe it was lack of marketing, all hypothetical.  You have to analyze things on a case by case basis.  And in the case of SWTOR, I think the business model had little to do with its failure.

    And as for "what's my point..."  My point is that you can't ignore the dominant player in an industry when analyzing that industry because it's an outlier.  That's stupid.  That's ignoring THE MOST IMPORTANT PLAYER.  This isn't one dude out of 2 million that is 8.5 feet tall.  This is one company that owns like eighty percent of the market.  Get the difference?

     

    Your examplifying the viability of the entire P2P model based off the success of one product!  Everything else that has tried to follow that same model has by all approximations FAILED to compete with that product in numbers or success.  You are attritubuting that success due to "people think(ing) WoW is a superior product." "I believe that when you have a product, but there exists a similar, but superior product already on the market..." the other product fails, WoW being implied as the superior product:

    "So basically, I think WoW has everything to do with the "sub model being dead" for other games.  It's not that the sub model is dead...it's just that hardly any of them are good/different enough to compete directly with WoW"

    There is no strawman argument here.  I am just trying to understand your line of thinking, a thinking obviously severely affected by the Bandwagon Effect.

    By your thinking, Stephen King is the greatest author to ever live and the Toyota Corolla the best manufactured car.  Afterall, they are the best selling of their respective markets.

    By your thinking...you have no idea what I'm thinking.  Seriously, I don't know what you're talking about here.

    I even brought up in another post in this same thread and both Rift and Eve have seen success with the sub model, and still are.

    Regardless though, that honestly doesn't matter.  In measuring the viability of a business model, all that matters is market share and profit...that's it!  If one company uses P2P, makes a healthy profit, and owns 80% of the market or if 20 companies using P2P own 80% of the market share and are profitable...it doesn't matter!  Either of these scenarios prove that P2P is viable.  If it wasn't viable then that company or those companies wouldn't be successful.  That's basically what viable means.

    Now P2P may not be viable for you because of the competitive environment.  For example, if I am making an MMORPG with my buddies in the basement...P2P is not viable for me.  There is no way I can compete with the other P2P MMORPGs.  But this doesn't change the fact that P2P is definitely a viable pricing model in the industry.

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  • jacklojacklo Member Posts: 570

    So all those people who left SWTOR went on to a F2P game did they?

    Or did they go to WoW, Rift, TERA, TSW or just wait it out for GW2?

    I left SWTOR because it was crap. Nothing to do with the sub fee, as did all my guildmates. Price was never in the equation other than we were paying for something that we weren't enjoying.

    There's nothing wrong with a sub model, so long as it delivers.

     

  • IselinIselin Member LegendaryPosts: 18,719
    Originally posted by tiefighter25
    The Vanilla WoW players were constantly calling into question if the sub was worth the money. People weren't bitching about it much because most agreed it was worth the money because Blizz was releasing new content in a timely fashion.

    Comparing a fully fleshed MMO with an FPS isn't a valid comparison. Until an on line FPS game has more meat to it then new maps, I don't think anyone would be suicidal enough to attempt to charge for it. (Insert Project Titan speculation here.)

    They never said it where I could read it...in WOW, in DAoC, in AC, in EQ in UO. People just paid the sub because that's the way it was...period. Any other way of remembering that really is revisionist.

     

    The FPS comparison is valid (despite the obvious quantity of content difference) simply because it's a game where somebody somewhere needs to provide server or at least an infrastucutre to accomodate and police distributed servers for on-line play by many people at once. Diablo is like that too. Obviously if they can afford to provide the service for free, so can MMOs.

     

     

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  • SuprGamerXSuprGamerX Member Posts: 531

    EA determining something? Really now?  The only thing they need to deternine is that they suck at doing anything outside of sports.  With that said , let's go abit beyond of what EA has "determined"

     Again , a succesful P2P doesn't count in numbers , but rather what the Dev team needs to keep upgrading their servers , expansions , and pay checks for employees. 

     Problem with most Dev teams these days is that they think doing a MMO will make them billionaires inside of a year and then they can quit and live happy lives.  Sorry but it doesn't work like that.  I always end up putting CCP as a prime example because they are the only ones that truly know how to operate on a P2P basis. 

      CCP has a mindset or a philosophy when it comes to their MMO which is EVE-Online.  They figure , for example , 20K subs a month is more then enough to sustain the game fully with expansions and such.  But the reality is that they got over 500K Subs , which is why CCP with EVE-Online have the most advanced servers in the world when it comes to online gaming.

     Again , with that said , these F2P / B2P models are cute and all , but do you really think the devs are working to make the game better?  No , they add in features that make people happy and forces them to buy more useless contents from a cash shop.

      Let's be realistic here , 99% of people cry about P2P because they can't throw out 10 to 15$ a month , but 100% of those cry babies are able to put double or triple the amount on a F2P cash shop?  C'mon man.  If you planning on crying on something , at least cry on something worth debating and where you got strong arguments.  

     P2P will always be the best model , but the key factor here is who's the Dev team in charge of a MMO project , that's the big factor. LoTro , SWTOR , AoC and countless others are all F2P and are still declining in player base month after month. So there you have it.

  • IstavaanIstavaan Member Posts: 1,350
    Typical EA always blaming everything except their own incompetence
  • DeeweDeewe Member UncommonPosts: 1,980
    Originally posted by TookyG

    A good game with a sub will attract players.  A bad game with a sub will not attract players.

    As simple as that.

  • KyleranKyleran Member LegendaryPosts: 43,372
    Originally posted by Creslin321
    Originally posted by Iselin

    Regardless of who says it or why they say it, the monthly-sub MMO model is at the very least deathly ill.

     

    GW2--love it, hate it, be indifferent, it doesn't matter--poses a serious problem for anyone still interested in continuing the sub model. If the GW2 content was visibly less than "full-fledged" AAA MMOs, the monthly sub could continue to be justified for a while longer. But GW2 has content and depth indistinguishable from WOW, SWTOR, RIFT, TSW... any theme park you care to compare it to. It has 1-80 PVE with dungeons and an open world, instanced scenario PVP with competitive ladders and a persistent, 2-week long, 3-sided PVP that looks suspiciously like an updated-for-2012 DAoC RvR model. Add a complex crafting system and you have all the MMO features. Apparently, even raids are in the work.

     

    And it has no sub. Yes it has a cash shop with fluffy crap for fluffy crap afficionados, but it's not crippled in any way like the other current type fof MMO, the "crippled-until-you-pay" or, as it's commonly refered to, F2P.

     

    LIke I said, you can think what you will about GW2, but anyone who thinks this isn't a financial model game changer is just fooling himself. This marks the end of monthly sub MMOs... period.

     Despite the fact that I don't think SWTOR failed due to the sub model, I think what you say has merit.  If GW2 winds up being as successful as WoW, then it will likely be the official end of the sub model for mainsteam MMORPGs.  Why would someone pay $15 a month for a product when the industry leader costs you nothing?

    If your talking about standard rehashed theme park MMO's, then yes, I agree, no one will pay a sub for them especially if they end up clones of GW2.

    But GW2 isn't the ultimate game, it has several key gaming designs it did not chose to implement that I'm looking for and if sonmeone creates a game with those features I'll gladly pay a sub, because in the end, it is a small fee.

     

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  • IPolygonIPolygon Member UncommonPosts: 707
    Originally posted by lifeordinary
    Originally posted by IPolygon
    Good quality games like WoW say hi.

    So i guess there is only one good quality MMO in entire  market based purely on sub numbers.

    Don't put words into my mouth. Keyword here is "like".

  • rdrakkenrdrakken Member Posts: 426
    Originally posted by GrumpyMel2

    This is part of the basic misunderstanding of the "Free" services model....and believe me, alot of services have gone bankrupt because of it.

    Under the "Free" services model...the number of users/players does NOT EQUAL the amount of revenue. USERS/PLAYERS are a COST to you. It's only when you convert those users/players to PAY for something in your service that they become revenue. If you don't find a way to monetize enough of your users/players to a sufficient degree, the only thing have a larger user base will get you is an increased operating DEBT.

    Now, clearly it IS POSSIBLE to run a proffitable service under that model...as there are companies doing it. However finding a way to sufficiently monetize your user base is by no means as simple and certain as it sounds....and there are alot of failed enterprises (mostly outside the MMO sphere) to give testimony to that.

    One thing every person involved in this sort of discussion should try to keep in mind is that a company with only 10 CUSTOMERS can actualy be significantly more PROFFITABLE then a company with 40 million USERS.

     Thankfully what I said still fits. More F2P games are successful than sub based games and the market proves it. Nexon is now one of the single largest MMO makers on the planet making over 1 BILLION DOLLARS a year in profits, they got that big off of Nexus, a game that was FREE up until end game...and almost 80% of the money comes from their many free games... Tera and the upcoming RaiderZ is being made by FROGSTAR and another studio that makes FREE GAMES...GW1 had around 6 million players at its peak...a B2P game, AKA free after you buy it...

    You just do not comprehend the size of the market. Outside of the US and Canada the F2P market far exceeds that of the sub market and there are far more players outside of the west...and Korea was the first to jump into the field and that is why several Korean companies are so big now they are buying out gaming companies left and right. Nexon and NCsoft are juggernauts because of free games...

  • ResiaResia Member Posts: 119
    I think there are still a fair amount of folks that would pay a sub, if the game is worth it. That is just the difference, you need a game worth the fee to charge the fee...

    "Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better." parrotpholk

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