I don't want Wildstar to be free to play. I want their business model to be exactly like WoW's. Barrier to entry, submission based, almost all perks and fun stuff are part of a monthly sub, other non-game breaking, cosmetic fluff in a cash shop.
I hate F2P games and the AH crash going on right now in Neverwinter is a perfect example of why. 20 bucks a month... sound fair? Please give me back sub based gaming.
What you actually want, is for this game to be good enough to warrant a sub, unlike almost all the other trash that is generated.
Archeage, Albion, I could even go into the freeware games area of things and point out titans of their niche such as Dwarf Fortress. Free does not equate trash, p2p does not equate quality of gameplay, SWtOR is a clear cut example of this, good production values, good story, good aesthetics, shit ass gameplay.
I have read many posts in these forums, one of my favorite is refunds on GW2, I really don't want to discuss ethics now. And to top it off P2P dying, lmfao. do the math 100k subs x 15$/month = 1.5 mil$/month, and 18mil$/year if you can not make that kind of budget work, I don't think you should be in business in the first place. Sure they make more on F2P cash shops, I want a good game to play, not a my game is better than yours epeen contest.
But ya one of the reasons I have a hard time with fantasy games, is I am getting so tired of trolls.
Wait a sec, you really think your investors will stand buy and wait for ~8 years for you to just pay them back? Before even starting to turn a profit? I do not think you understand timescales nor how expensive mmo's are to produce.
I did battle with ignorance today, and ignorance won.
To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
I have read many posts in these forums, one of my favorite is refunds on GW2, I really don't want to discuss ethics now. And to top it off P2P dying, lmfao. do the math 100k subs x 15$/month = 1.5 mil$/month, and 18mil$/year if you can not make that kind of budget work, I don't think you should be in business in the first place. Sure they make more on F2P cash shops, I want a good game to play, not a my game is better than yours epeen contest.
But ya one of the reasons I have a hard time with fantasy games, is I am getting so tired of trolls.
Wait a sec, you really think your investors will stand buy and wait for ~8 years for you to just pay them back? Before even starting to turn a profit? I do not think you understand timescales nor how expensive mmo's are to produce.
Depends on the MMO though, quite a few less visually stunning but solid gameplay experience MMOs from the indie scene are coming down the pipes one of which I can vouch from experience feels fresh and play really well at an early stage of development but does this using the unity engine so it looks , from a graphics fidelity point of view, no better than lets say Torchlight 2 but point still stands that if the devs do it right the MMO won't be a several dozen maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars in budget. The soul of the game is not in the budget, that comes from the dedication of the whole dev team towards their dream and that is a rare, rare thing these days in gaming as a whole.
Originally posted by Snigerknud Its NCsoft so I think they will make same model as GW2 and that one is working very well.. B2P model
That depends on WHO it is working for,I rather see a subscription and content that justifies it.With zero income coming in after the initial sales burst,there is no incentive to do anything for the game.
Every game i have played that was any good,encourages a ton of RMT that ruin the game.I can only imagine a f2p setup how out of hand it would get.That would of course depend on how dependent game currency is and item sales .
What i have also seen in f2p is even when a game gets boring,example not enough content,those players still login because it is free,they make a nuisance of themselves in chat.Things like "This game sucks" "I'm going back to Wow threats" "This game has a crap end game" trust me i have seen a million of them.Quite often they will ljust sit in chat and argue with other players over nothing,more or less just insulting each other
So you know if there was a sub fee and those players didn't lie kthe game anymore or got bored,they would msot likely leave,but they don't have to when it's f2p.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I have read many posts in these forums, one of my favorite is refunds on GW2, I really don't want to discuss ethics now. And to top it off P2P dying, lmfao. do the math 100k subs x 15$/month = 1.5 mil$/month, and 18mil$/year if you can not make that kind of budget work, I don't think you should be in business in the first place. Sure they make more on F2P cash shops, I want a good game to play, not a my game is better than yours epeen contest.
But ya one of the reasons I have a hard time with fantasy games, is I am getting so tired of trolls.
Wait a sec, you really think your investors will stand buy and wait for ~8 years for you to just pay them back? Before even starting to turn a profit? I do not think you understand timescales nor how expensive mmo's are to produce.
There is a MAJOR problem with gaming>>> "investors".Free money,not your own.I guarantee you put out a better effort when working with your own money and have your whole life on the line because of it.
FFXI was just that game that took 5 years to turn a profit and reason it is imo the best rpg game ever made.There was no investor,they used their own money,made their own game engine,so no licensing fees either and published their own game,run their own servers,so no publisher fees.
That is imo the best setup for a developer,nobody to answer to but yourselves,no added loss of income to outside sources like publishers ,investors.Having a sub fee also gives you a much better understanding on how many players and how much bandwidth and server space will be needed.
Even more bad things come about f2p,they have no income coming in ,so they create a game that runs very cheap,example shards.I can't speak for others but i absolutely hate shards.
I also have no doubt what so ever that future content xpacs will be cheap as well as that is their only source of income.All a game needs to do is create a carrot and gamer's keep coming back even if the game is shallow in content ideas.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
In the end after all being said and done..... P2P model depends upon the players and not the gaming company. If players are not ready to spend 15 bucks a month just to get access to the game well then you can not blame the companies.
The more I think about the F2P business model the less interest I have in playing their games. The really big issue I have with F2P and yea even multiplayer B2P games is that money plays a part in the decision process for how you play the game. Back in the days when they had true sub games with no cash shop that wasn't the case. What you did in game was based on what you and your friends wanted to do not what you needed to do in order to avoid spending money in the cash shop.
Need a few examples?
1. Inventory management. Sub games let you purchase inventory slots with in game currency where F2P and B2P games make you buy it with real money. This means that every time you get something you want to keep in a F2P or B2P game you have to judge it's value against your willingness to take up valuable inventory spots that you ultimately will need to spend real money to expand.
2. Real money to in game money conversations. I remember when buying in game currency was taboo. The people who did it didn't brag about it. Now it's accepted practices that activities that a few years ago dev's would ban your account for because of how detrimental to the game economy it was now are a core part of the game mechanics. All the issues that buying game currency with real money create still exist just like they did years ago when it was bad for the game the developers have just cut out the middle man.
3. Gambling boxes. I have no issue with gambling and I really look forward to my yearly trips to Vegas but this is really ridiculous. I have to say that STO is probably the worst example of this. Why is it that players would have a fit if a developer put a item up for sale for $100 on the game market but don't think twice about spending $1 at a time trying to get a item that has 100 to 1 or worse odds of winning? I really wise developers would be required to release the odds because than we would see just how bad this system really is.
From my point of view the real problem with subscription based games at this point is the sense of "obligation" that comes with paying that sub, in that sense that once it's payed any free time you spend NOT playing that game feels like money wasted. What this creates is an environment where every sub game is directly competing against every other sub game in a way that's make or break because most people ( in my opinion ) will only choose one or the other. Your game has to be without a doubt better in every possible way because that little payment obligation dictates that there can be only one, creating a metaphysical game of mmo-highlander.
Now, don't get me wrong. In practice it doesn't always play out like this, historically speaking many sub based mmos have been running at the same time and a lot of the older ones are even still around. What that doesn't change however is that subscriptions create a very narrow market space, where your game has to compete against monitory investment ( of the players into your competition ), the quality of the competition itself, and then nostalgia and time investment on top of it.
Those last two points are particularly brutal and are two very important things that need to be addressed if you want to compete against something like say, WoW. People have been playing wow for a long time, they have a lot of free time invested and fond memories. In order to successfully "steal" players, what you need to compete not only against WoW itself, but also the players memories and commitments, which is what I believe is what led to what span a while back where virtually every mmo on the market was an "easymode wow-clone" because, in the end what better way to try to compete with time and memory than a similar system that's easy to catch up in? By that same token, if that is the most logical way to attract subs what investor is going to dump money into development of anything but?
What free-to-play creates, is a shared space where players can always go to where there friends are and because you can play whenever you want, it eliminates that sense of "What game do I play this month" and the complications that come with "All my friends are playing X but I really kind of want to try Y...." ( the latter of which was actually what stopped me from playing rift a lot when it was new, because while I wanted to play it all of the people who I play with had just went into one of their "I miss wow" phases ).
Now, this isn't to say that free to play itself isn't without problems, it most assuredly is. Price gouging, demanding payment for things that you need. EQ2 for example, while better as of late is guilty of one of the things I find the most annoying which is having to pay to wear gear above a certain quality level, and to learn the max rank versions of your skills. Then you get into the realm of anyone with a computer can get in, which really does bring in some negative people ( which is not to say that mmos don't have negative players with a sub model, but at least in my experience you're less likely to see people running around past beta spamming chat with "Omg this game sucks" half the time, or using baby accounts to troll people ).
Personally, one way I would handle that in a free to play game that also has a sub option, is to have 3 server types. Free to play servers, a few for people who've spent money at least once, and then a couple more just for people who sub ( with free character moves to those server types if you should choose to ).
That brings me to my final point however. One thing free to play does bring? New players, granted you'd probably get more from a sub game converting to free to play, as opposed to a game that's just free to play from the get go but... at the end of the day, new players are the life-blood of any online game. Without them the population stagnates, and with a sub, you have to compete against all the factors that keep people playing wow, and eventually all of those people with wow accounts are going to get wow nostalgia and if your game doesn't provide them that fix, they're going to be going back for a while and then, even if it does? Well if they wanted to play wow they'd be playing wow.
From my point of view the real problem with subscription based games at this point is the sense of "obligation" that comes with paying that sub, in that sense that once it's payed any free time you spend NOT playing that game feels like money wasted. What this creates is an environment where every sub game is directly competing against every other sub game in a way that's make or break because most people ( in my opinion ) will only choose one or the other. Your game has to be without a doubt better in every possible way because that little payment obligation dictates that there can be only one, creating a metaphysical game of mmo-highlander.
I have a subscription to Netflix and don't feel like I have to watch movies every night to get my money worth from it so why is a game sub different?
Yea F2P/B2P does have the advantage of being able to drop in and out of the game whenever you like but I have yet to play one that had anything resembling a game system I would want to stay around more than a month or two for so that;s a good thing.
My personal opinion is that F2P and B2P MMO's make great short term distractions that you can do whenever you feel like where a SUB game done right is a virtual 2nd home that you can retreat to after a long days work. It's a subtle difference but a important one and one that I have found myself missing.
I don't know about anyone else but I have never played a F2P or B2P MMO a fraction of a precent as many hours as I have put into a sub based game. They just don't have the depth or compelling content to hold my interest that long. Part of it is community but also I think part of it is design. F2P and B2P games are designed to suck as much money out of as many players as quickly as possible before they get bored and move on where sub games done right are designed to keep people playing the game for years.
From my point of view the real problem with subscription based games at this point is the sense of "obligation" that comes with paying that sub, in that sense that once it's payed any free time you spend NOT playing that game feels like money wasted. What this creates is an environment where every sub game is directly competing against every other sub game in a way that's make or break because most people ( in my opinion ) will only choose one or the other. Your game has to be without a doubt better in every possible way because that little payment obligation dictates that there can be only one, creating a metaphysical game of mmo-highlander.
I have a subscription to Netflix and don't feel like I have to watch movies every night to get my money worth from it so why is a game sub different?
Yea F2P/B2P does have the advantage of being able to drop in and out of the game whenever you like but I have yet to play one that had anything resembling a game system I would want to stay around more than a month or two for so that;s a good thing.
My personal opinion is that F2P and B2P MMO's make great short term distractions that you can do whenever you feel like where a SUB game done right is a virtual 2nd home that you can retreat to after a long days work. It's a subtle difference but a important one and one that I have found myself missing.
I don't know about anyone else but I have never played a F2P or B2P MMO a fraction of a precent as many hours as I have put into a sub based game. They just don't have the depth or compelling content to hold my interest that long. Part of it is community but also I think part of it is design. F2P and B2P games are designed to suck as much money out of as many players as quickly as possible before they get bored and move on where sub games done right are designed to keep people playing the game for years.
I really hope Wildstar is a Sub game done right.
Absolutely 100% agree with that last paragraph.
It's been a long time since I could "settle down" in an MMO and enjoy a rich game experience to the full.
From my point of view the real problem with subscription based games at this point is the sense of "obligation" that comes with paying that sub, in that sense that once it's payed any free time you spend NOT playing that game feels like money wasted. What this creates is an environment where every sub game is directly competing against every other sub game in a way that's make or break because most people ( in my opinion ) will only choose one or the other. Your game has to be without a doubt better in every possible way because that little payment obligation dictates that there can be only one, creating a metaphysical game of mmo-highlander.
I have a subscription to Netflix and don't feel like I have to watch movies every night to get my money worth from it so why is a game sub different?
Yea F2P/B2P does have the advantage of being able to drop in and out of the game whenever you like but I have yet to play one that had anything resembling a game system I would want to stay around more than a month or two for so that;s a good thing.
My personal opinion is that F2P and B2P MMO's make great short term distractions that you can do whenever you feel like where a SUB game done right is a virtual 2nd home that you can retreat to after a long days work. It's a subtle difference but a important one and one that I have found myself missing.
I don't know about anyone else but I have never played a F2P or B2P MMO a fraction of a precent as many hours as I have put into a sub based game. They just don't have the depth or compelling content to hold my interest that long. Part of it is community but also I think part of it is design. F2P and B2P games are designed to suck as much money out of as many players as quickly as possible before they get bored and move on where sub games done right are designed to keep people playing the game for years.
I really hope Wildstar is a Sub game done right.
Oh I don't doubt the Netflix thing. Right now I'm running a WoW sub and don't feel the need to spend every moment of free time better. What I should have said is "time when I want to play an mmo.".
I was simply speaking from the point of view that, given the option to run two sub mmos at once, I don't really see that as an option, because at the end of the month I feel like one of them got neglected, leading to simply not renewing the second until I'm burned out on the first.
I too can say that I've invested more time and effort into any sub based game I've played. ( my first character in WoW has almost a full year /played if I recalled correctly. ) Personally something that I think I would enjoy, is the concept of "Pay as you go" Mmos. Not in the sense of the cash shop, but rather the idea of buying game time in small chunks, so if say you have a free weekend, pay for a couple days instead of needing to do the full month, which in the end also lowers the bar of entry in the same way free to play does (although not as much).
I find this assumption way off base. How can they have been successful with gw1 as only b2p? Yet somehow they cannot with gw2?
The simple answer is that you don't have the big picture regarding money brought in compared to expenses out.
Gw1 and Gw2 were vastly different games. Gw1 had far less pve content, and they did not give anywhere near as much away. I would have to go dig up financial reports (assuming I can find them) but one can only assume that Gw1 was far cheaper to produce, meaning it took far less to make up the difference. The fact that Just 2 months ago Anet flat out said that they have no current plans for an expac and Ncsoft says otherwise, and you see them dropping the box price already shows that this trend cannot be allowed to continue. Relying on boxes is already tricky as most publishers only get 30-50% of that price, the rest goes to the retailers and various fees.
I did battle with ignorance today, and ignorance won.
To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
All those free to play games are underwhelmingly bad, lack of content.
Nickle and diming for evry small option to having 4 more bagspace slots or hey hide your helm option just buy it,
The way free to play is going is realy making me not want to play the game even if its free.
Those that shout and cry for not being a free to play model, well there is a whole pletora of free to play games even tho they are a load of crap you can go to there, but I guese you dont want too cause Wildstar seems to be heck of alot of fun or els you wouldnt be bursting in tears instead of going to one of those free to play games out there.
Also a big portion (not all) children or unemployed all want a hand out, im not the least suprised.
Originally posted by tet666 Yes and now have fun playing alone on ghost servers since everyone and their mother will just wait till the inevitable f2p move.....
because f2p games and soooo full of players and they never have empty servers ever. I cant even name 5 f2p "mmos" with terrible to non existent server pops. F2p "mmos" alllways have tons of poeple on hand for grouping cuz you know its an mmo.
No game dev. has ever made any money on an mmo with a sub and no cash shop with fancy useless hats and cool camo colors. Nope theres not one. All their servers are bone dry. -sarcasm off-
the state of f2p "gamers", i use that word lightly because they barely game, is if it isnt "free" and its not easy mode then i dont want it and therefore no one else wants it, ergo it will fail.
All those free to play games are underwhelmingly bad, lack of content.
Nickle and diming for evry small option to having 4 more bagspace slots or hey hide your helm option just buy it,
The way free to play is going is realy making me not want to play the game even if its free.
Those that shout and cry for not being a free to play model, well there is a whole pletora of free to play games even tho they are a load of crap you can go to there, but I guese you dont want too cause Wildstar seems to be heck of alot of fun or els you wouldnt be bursting in tears instead of going to one of those free to play games out there.
Also a big portion (not all) children or unemployed all want a hand out, im not the least suprised.
Heck yeah. This craps gone on for long enough. I just hope Wildstar does deliver. These folks wanting every single release to be f2p have been making me sick for a while. Listening to a group of guys go on and on in a TS channel for a certain f2p so called mmo almost made me puke. Not a word is said about the lack of content but they can go on for hrs about collecting all the cool armor colors for their suits?
These type of people are allergic to a sub but will throw money every month at garbage items.
Comments
Archeage, Albion, I could even go into the freeware games area of things and point out titans of their niche such as Dwarf Fortress. Free does not equate trash, p2p does not equate quality of gameplay, SWtOR is a clear cut example of this, good production values, good story, good aesthetics, shit ass gameplay.
Wait a sec, you really think your investors will stand buy and wait for ~8 years for you to just pay them back? Before even starting to turn a profit? I do not think you understand timescales nor how expensive mmo's are to produce.
I did battle with ignorance today, and ignorance won.
To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
Depends on the MMO though, quite a few less visually stunning but solid gameplay experience MMOs from the indie scene are coming down the pipes one of which I can vouch from experience feels fresh and play really well at an early stage of development but does this using the unity engine so it looks , from a graphics fidelity point of view, no better than lets say Torchlight 2 but point still stands that if the devs do it right the MMO won't be a several dozen maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars in budget. The soul of the game is not in the budget, that comes from the dedication of the whole dev team towards their dream and that is a rare, rare thing these days in gaming as a whole.
That depends on WHO it is working for,I rather see a subscription and content that justifies it.With zero income coming in after the initial sales burst,there is no incentive to do anything for the game.
Every game i have played that was any good,encourages a ton of RMT that ruin the game.I can only imagine a f2p setup how out of hand it would get.That would of course depend on how dependent game currency is and item sales .
What i have also seen in f2p is even when a game gets boring,example not enough content,those players still login because it is free,they make a nuisance of themselves in chat.Things like "This game sucks" "I'm going back to Wow threats" "This game has a crap end game" trust me i have seen a million of them.Quite often they will ljust sit in chat and argue with other players over nothing,more or less just insulting each other
So you know if there was a sub fee and those players didn't lie kthe game anymore or got bored,they would msot likely leave,but they don't have to when it's f2p.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
There is a MAJOR problem with gaming>>> "investors".Free money,not your own.I guarantee you put out a better effort when working with your own money and have your whole life on the line because of it.
FFXI was just that game that took 5 years to turn a profit and reason it is imo the best rpg game ever made.There was no investor,they used their own money,made their own game engine,so no licensing fees either and published their own game,run their own servers,so no publisher fees.
That is imo the best setup for a developer,nobody to answer to but yourselves,no added loss of income to outside sources like publishers ,investors.Having a sub fee also gives you a much better understanding on how many players and how much bandwidth and server space will be needed.
Even more bad things come about f2p,they have no income coming in ,so they create a game that runs very cheap,example shards.I can't speak for others but i absolutely hate shards.
I also have no doubt what so ever that future content xpacs will be cheap as well as that is their only source of income.All a game needs to do is create a carrot and gamer's keep coming back even if the game is shallow in content ideas.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
In the end after all being said and done..... P2P model depends upon the players and not the gaming company. If players are not ready to spend 15 bucks a month just to get access to the game well then you can not blame the companies.
The more I think about the F2P business model the less interest I have in playing their games. The really big issue I have with F2P and yea even multiplayer B2P games is that money plays a part in the decision process for how you play the game. Back in the days when they had true sub games with no cash shop that wasn't the case. What you did in game was based on what you and your friends wanted to do not what you needed to do in order to avoid spending money in the cash shop.
Need a few examples?
1. Inventory management. Sub games let you purchase inventory slots with in game currency where F2P and B2P games make you buy it with real money. This means that every time you get something you want to keep in a F2P or B2P game you have to judge it's value against your willingness to take up valuable inventory spots that you ultimately will need to spend real money to expand.
2. Real money to in game money conversations. I remember when buying in game currency was taboo. The people who did it didn't brag about it. Now it's accepted practices that activities that a few years ago dev's would ban your account for because of how detrimental to the game economy it was now are a core part of the game mechanics. All the issues that buying game currency with real money create still exist just like they did years ago when it was bad for the game the developers have just cut out the middle man.
3. Gambling boxes. I have no issue with gambling and I really look forward to my yearly trips to Vegas but this is really ridiculous. I have to say that STO is probably the worst example of this. Why is it that players would have a fit if a developer put a item up for sale for $100 on the game market but don't think twice about spending $1 at a time trying to get a item that has 100 to 1 or worse odds of winning? I really wise developers would be required to release the odds because than we would see just how bad this system really is.
I could go on but I'm hungry.
From my point of view the real problem with subscription based games at this point is the sense of "obligation" that comes with paying that sub, in that sense that once it's payed any free time you spend NOT playing that game feels like money wasted. What this creates is an environment where every sub game is directly competing against every other sub game in a way that's make or break because most people ( in my opinion ) will only choose one or the other. Your game has to be without a doubt better in every possible way because that little payment obligation dictates that there can be only one, creating a metaphysical game of mmo-highlander.
Now, don't get me wrong. In practice it doesn't always play out like this, historically speaking many sub based mmos have been running at the same time and a lot of the older ones are even still around. What that doesn't change however is that subscriptions create a very narrow market space, where your game has to compete against monitory investment ( of the players into your competition ), the quality of the competition itself, and then nostalgia and time investment on top of it.
Those last two points are particularly brutal and are two very important things that need to be addressed if you want to compete against something like say, WoW. People have been playing wow for a long time, they have a lot of free time invested and fond memories. In order to successfully "steal" players, what you need to compete not only against WoW itself, but also the players memories and commitments, which is what I believe is what led to what span a while back where virtually every mmo on the market was an "easymode wow-clone" because, in the end what better way to try to compete with time and memory than a similar system that's easy to catch up in? By that same token, if that is the most logical way to attract subs what investor is going to dump money into development of anything but?
What free-to-play creates, is a shared space where players can always go to where there friends are and because you can play whenever you want, it eliminates that sense of "What game do I play this month" and the complications that come with "All my friends are playing X but I really kind of want to try Y...." ( the latter of which was actually what stopped me from playing rift a lot when it was new, because while I wanted to play it all of the people who I play with had just went into one of their "I miss wow" phases ).
Now, this isn't to say that free to play itself isn't without problems, it most assuredly is. Price gouging, demanding payment for things that you need. EQ2 for example, while better as of late is guilty of one of the things I find the most annoying which is having to pay to wear gear above a certain quality level, and to learn the max rank versions of your skills. Then you get into the realm of anyone with a computer can get in, which really does bring in some negative people ( which is not to say that mmos don't have negative players with a sub model, but at least in my experience you're less likely to see people running around past beta spamming chat with "Omg this game sucks" half the time, or using baby accounts to troll people ).
Personally, one way I would handle that in a free to play game that also has a sub option, is to have 3 server types. Free to play servers, a few for people who've spent money at least once, and then a couple more just for people who sub ( with free character moves to those server types if you should choose to ).
That brings me to my final point however. One thing free to play does bring? New players, granted you'd probably get more from a sub game converting to free to play, as opposed to a game that's just free to play from the get go but... at the end of the day, new players are the life-blood of any online game. Without them the population stagnates, and with a sub, you have to compete against all the factors that keep people playing wow, and eventually all of those people with wow accounts are going to get wow nostalgia and if your game doesn't provide them that fix, they're going to be going back for a while and then, even if it does? Well if they wanted to play wow they'd be playing wow.
I have a subscription to Netflix and don't feel like I have to watch movies every night to get my money worth from it so why is a game sub different?
Yea F2P/B2P does have the advantage of being able to drop in and out of the game whenever you like but I have yet to play one that had anything resembling a game system I would want to stay around more than a month or two for so that;s a good thing.
My personal opinion is that F2P and B2P MMO's make great short term distractions that you can do whenever you feel like where a SUB game done right is a virtual 2nd home that you can retreat to after a long days work. It's a subtle difference but a important one and one that I have found myself missing.
I don't know about anyone else but I have never played a F2P or B2P MMO a fraction of a precent as many hours as I have put into a sub based game. They just don't have the depth or compelling content to hold my interest that long. Part of it is community but also I think part of it is design. F2P and B2P games are designed to suck as much money out of as many players as quickly as possible before they get bored and move on where sub games done right are designed to keep people playing the game for years.
I really hope Wildstar is a Sub game done right.
The game will have a hybrid model.
Source: an interview with Jeremy Gaffney from gamebreakernation on YouTube posted earlier today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfnpbIhY2PU
The last few minutes of the video is when he answers the "undisclosed" game model, 15:56(ish) seconds in.
Absolutely 100% agree with that last paragraph.
It's been a long time since I could "settle down" in an MMO and enjoy a rich game experience to the full.
I'm really hoping Wildstar delivers...
Huh?
Oh I don't doubt the Netflix thing. Right now I'm running a WoW sub and don't feel the need to spend every moment of free time better. What I should have said is "time when I want to play an mmo.".
I was simply speaking from the point of view that, given the option to run two sub mmos at once, I don't really see that as an option, because at the end of the month I feel like one of them got neglected, leading to simply not renewing the second until I'm burned out on the first.
I too can say that I've invested more time and effort into any sub based game I've played. ( my first character in WoW has almost a full year /played if I recalled correctly. ) Personally something that I think I would enjoy, is the concept of "Pay as you go" Mmos. Not in the sense of the cash shop, but rather the idea of buying game time in small chunks, so if say you have a free weekend, pay for a couple days instead of needing to do the full month, which in the end also lowers the bar of entry in the same way free to play does (although not as much).
I find this assumption way off base. How can they have been successful with gw1 as only b2p? Yet somehow they cannot with gw2?
The simple answer is that you don't have the big picture regarding money brought in compared to expenses out.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
Gw1 and Gw2 were vastly different games. Gw1 had far less pve content, and they did not give anywhere near as much away. I would have to go dig up financial reports (assuming I can find them) but one can only assume that Gw1 was far cheaper to produce, meaning it took far less to make up the difference. The fact that Just 2 months ago Anet flat out said that they have no current plans for an expac and Ncsoft says otherwise, and you see them dropping the box price already shows that this trend cannot be allowed to continue. Relying on boxes is already tricky as most publishers only get 30-50% of that price, the rest goes to the retailers and various fees.
I did battle with ignorance today, and ignorance won.
To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
Im happy this is a pay to play model.
All those free to play games are underwhelmingly bad, lack of content.
Nickle and diming for evry small option to having 4 more bagspace slots or hey hide your helm option just buy it,
The way free to play is going is realy making me not want to play the game even if its free.
Those that shout and cry for not being a free to play model, well there is a whole pletora of free to play games even tho they are a load of crap you can go to there, but I guese you dont want too cause Wildstar seems to be heck of alot of fun or els you wouldnt be bursting in tears instead of going to one of those free to play games out there.
Also a big portion (not all) children or unemployed all want a hand out, im not the least suprised.
because f2p games and soooo full of players and they never have empty servers ever. I cant even name 5 f2p "mmos" with terrible to non existent server pops. F2p "mmos" alllways have tons of poeple on hand for grouping cuz you know its an mmo.
No game dev. has ever made any money on an mmo with a sub and no cash shop with fancy useless hats and cool camo colors. Nope theres not one. All their servers are bone dry. -sarcasm off-
the state of f2p "gamers", i use that word lightly because they barely game, is if it isnt "free" and its not easy mode then i dont want it and therefore no one else wants it, ergo it will fail.
Heck yeah. This craps gone on for long enough. I just hope Wildstar does deliver. These folks wanting every single release to be f2p have been making me sick for a while. Listening to a group of guys go on and on in a TS channel for a certain f2p so called mmo almost made me puke. Not a word is said about the lack of content but they can go on for hrs about collecting all the cool armor colors for their suits?
These type of people are allergic to a sub but will throw money every month at garbage items.