2011 Turbine CEO gives a presentation about how successful their business model is.
Yet, why have the players seen less content updates since the game went F2P? And where are all these F2P players at endgame level? Does Turbine not want to invest in their successful game anymore? Or is the business transition not so successful as originally thought?
It's hard to leave money sitting on the table. Every one of us consumers is a potential pile of money to catch.
If you cast a wide net to catch as many of us as possible, then for each of us, you either catch us or you don't. Those you miss because the price was too high, you get nothing from. Those you catch, you only get what you charged, nothing more.
Cash shops give a publisher the ability to look at each potential customer individually and attempt to extract the maximum amount of cash that customer is willing to pay for the game. If you can keep the marginal cost of a person logging into your servers close to zero, then there is no reason to restrict access. You want to bring the whole world onto your grid and start running metrics and experiments on what exactly provokes them to open their wallet.
For established games, the subscription fee generates a steady income and you risk losing income from people who are suspicious of cash shops as it slides into the game. For new games coming into a competitive market or games that are declining anyway, alienation is not as much of a risk.
At the same time, traditional box sale games are coming towards the same cash shop model from the opposite direction - DLC packs are getting smaller and cheaper. But in the end, it's all about getting rich metrics on what triggers players to buy these small additions.
Thus the cash shop is where game developers who understand in-game player motivation and behaviour meet marketting departments who understand out-of-game consumer behaviour. United, they obtain the maximum possible payout per customer ... so long as they remember to create a game and as long as the subset of customers who reject cash shops on sight is small and marginalized.
(opinion only, based on interviews I've seen, but not to be mistaken for actual knowledge)
If this is true, why are almost all the P2P games going F2P? Do they just hate money?
If you ask me, the F2P was a decision by "marketing experts", you know, these 17-22 years old studied people that hardly had sex but know it all better.
Followed by that new principle, the market got flooded with F2P crap games, cash shops and whatever milking mechanix could be played out.
Well, they forgot the game itself with all these milking attempts, we joined countless F2P titles and all had one thing in common: they all been shit.
Ofcause we noticed that and many players turned back to the old but gold P2P games, nice you mentioned Eve.
Free to play is a market cash milking mechanic, you 14.- bucks a month aint been enuff, look how we all got fooled by SWTOR and people STILL PLAY IT. Its not over, they are still flooding the market with lousy games, promising the heaven on earth and deliver only new ways how they can get your money.
And by all this, noone noticed, that Monsanto is buying up all non-GMO seed companies.
it's the bad p2p games that go f2p. not all of them.
lol. That's kind of a myopic view. I don't think Rift is a bad game, even if I don't play it. And I thought EVE sucked. Maybe I'm just a "bad" player? Statements like yours don't work.
Talk about myopic!!
Your whole comment is all about you!
EVE, WoW and DAOC are all great games, even after all these years they are still strong and still have a sub. So obviously you are not the voice of MMO gamers, nor do you represent the current trend.
The very existence of the games I just mentioned proves it.
To give example of game as old as DAOC doesn't make your point relevant for current times. P2P worked in past but it doesn't anymore. Also these games have paid for themselves many time over so they have no reason to go F2P.
And EVE like i mentionedvearlier sin't a pure P2P game since people can use PLEX to buy game time.
WOW in an anamoly and more of an exception than rule. If you want to prove to people that P2P model is still viable and successful you don't use exception as a proof.
"The problem is that the hardcore folks always want the same thing: 'We want exactly what you gave us before, but it has to be completely different.' -Jesse Schell
"Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid." -Luke McKinney
WOW in an anamoly and more of an exception than rule. If you want to prove to people that P2P model is still viable and successful you don't use exception as a proof.
WoW has an upfront box cost, a subscription cost, a cash shop (for which they have added a minigame), a cross-promotion to give away their auction house game (D3) and links with their CCG game. To say that it is a subsciption game is oversimplifying their revenue stream a little.
I'm not against P2P and I'm not against F2P I like all models(to some extent).
But I hear it tossed around a lot, that P2P games make more money and get more updates and are hence better. If this is true, why are almost all the P2P games going F2P? Do they just hate money?
Even Rift, which was every P2P die hard's anthem. "Look at Rift! That game pumps out so much content because it is P2P!" well...they went F2P. Were they tired of making all that money?
Other than WoW, Eve is one of the only hold outs with a sub. But even that game allows players to basically buy in game currency through the plex system. (buy tons of plex and sell it all in game) so it's not a pure P2P game with everyone equal regardless of money spent.
I am just curious what the reasoning here is. The P2P games are better, because they make more money, yet they all have to go F2P. Something feels off...
There is some truth in the statement that P2P makes more money than F2P.... but the devil is in the details.
P2P makes more money, per person, than F2P. F2P makes more money, per paying customer, than P2P. In a P2P game, every customer is paying, so the earnings per person is higher. In F2P, only a small amount of players are paying, but there is more revenue generated per paying customer.
The reality is that most western F2P games are in fact hybrids, that make most of their income from subscriptions. In fact, for the F2P market in the west, subscription is the single most common method of payment. This has been the case for over 10 years. Subscription is very popular in the west, even for F2P.
P2P makes more money, per person, than F2P. F2P makes more money, per paying customer, than P2P. In a P2P game, every customer is paying, so the earnings per person is higher. In F2P, only a small amount of players are paying, but there is more revenue generated per paying customer.
Does anyone know of any publically available data on this for an MMOs?
I've seen lots of data from small mobile apps (example) where there tends to be essentially a power law distribution to spending and would expect something similar in MMOs. But I'm wondering if the overall participation rate is higher in MMOs than in smaller games.
I'm not against P2P and I'm not against F2P I like all models(to some extent).
But I hear it tossed around a lot, that P2P games make more money and get more updates and are hence better. If this is true, why are almost all the P2P games going F2P? Do they just hate money?
Even Rift, which was every P2P die hard's anthem. "Look at Rift! That game pumps out so much content because it is P2P!" well...they went F2P. Were they tired of making all that money?
Other than WoW, Eve is one of the only hold outs with a sub. But even that game allows players to basically buy in game currency through the plex system. (buy tons of plex and sell it all in game) so it's not a pure P2P game with everyone equal regardless of money spent.
I am just curious what the reasoning here is. The P2P games are better, because they make more money, yet they all have to go F2P. Something feels off...
p2p dont make more money (only WoW does...for obvious reasons, so far). They are all going f2p because they are making more money that way.
I dont support subscriptions but if the game is worth it i will pay the sub (nothing after WoW is worth 15 /mo TO ME personally). I personally prefer B2P like GW2, to me thats the best model ever. But i do have to aknowledge that both B2P and P2P are more transparent with the community and make their money in a cleaner way. Full Free to play tend to abuse their community either by pay to win or by having a group of whales keeping the servers alive (or both) then the game shuts down if the whales stop spending that much money and all that money is wasted.
Lately i have been very strongly inclined towards the Buy to play model from GW2, and possibly a subscription option for extra perks for the subbers.
Generally speaking, free to play is where mediocre games go to slowly die.
Once the bloom of subs start to wither, FTP gives one last infusion of players that wouldn't have bought the game one last chance to play and, on the off hand chance, spend a little money on something that they wouldn't have under normal circumstances. The game already exists, why not throw open the gate to make a few extra bucks before flipping the switch off.
P2P games can potentially make more money than F2P but requires a audience over a certain size to stay to do so.SInce most modern MMORPGs are just the exact same formula with one or two tweaks or innovations or made to be very niche none have been able to do so and so turn to F2P.
The industry has taken this to mean that F2P is the future instead of actually putting the work in and being imaginative enough to win said audience because trying new thing has a element of risk.
Because when a p2p game goes ftp it is a last ditch effort to keep the ship afloat. These so called mmo's that launch P2P bleed subs after 90 days, they are not made to last, You have MMO's pre-wow that are still P2P EQ, XI etc. You know why they are still p2p? because they are real MMO's not an online single player rpg that loses apeal after 90 days. God I hope EQ Next delivers a real MMO game. But sadly I cant put to much faith in SOE.
Waiting for:EQ-Next, ArcheAge (not so much anymore) Now Playing: N/A Worst MMO: FFXIV Favorite MMO: FFXI
But I hear it tossed around a lot, that P2P games make more money and get more updates and are hence better. If this is true, why are almost all the P2P games going F2P? Do they just hate money?
They don't make more money they make more "consistent" money.
meaning it's easier to budget your game when you have a more solid idea as to how many subs you will have month to month. I imagine they have data that shows trends in sub gains and losses.
In a f2p you might make more money but it's all over the map. I also don't think f2p games spend more time making "better content" but making content that can be monetized.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
But I hear it tossed around a lot, that P2P games make more money and get more updates and are hence better. If this is true, why are almost all the P2P games going F2P? Do they just hate money?
They don't make more money they make more "consistent" money.
meaning it's easier to budget your game when you have a more solid idea as to how many subs you will have month to month. I imagine they have data that shows trends in sub gains and losses.
In a f2p you might make more money but it's all over the map. I also don't think f2p games spend more time making "better content" but making content that can be monetized.
The same goes for p2p, they don't spend time making content. They spend time, finding ways to draw out how long it takes you to burn their content by using lockout timers, RNG and gear based encounters aka rely entirely on gear and not player ability. With the added bonus that they take your money make more content supposedly, turn around and SELL you that content. Brilliant.
But I hear it tossed around a lot, that P2P games make more money and get more updates and are hence better. If this is true, why are almost all the P2P games going F2P? Do they just hate money?
They don't make more money they make more "consistent" money.
meaning it's easier to budget your game when you have a more solid idea as to how many subs you will have month to month. I imagine they have data that shows trends in sub gains and losses.
In a f2p you might make more money but it's all over the map. I also don't think f2p games spend more time making "better content" but making content that can be monetized.
The same goes for p2p, they don't spend time making content. They spend time, finding ways to draw out how long it takes you to burn their content by using lockout timers, RNG and gear based encounters aka rely entirely on gear and not player ability. With the added bonus that they take your money make more content supposedly, turn around and SELL you that content. Brilliant.
nah I don't agree.
they spend more time than should be acceptable to make content. The monthly fee is more about access to support the game and the company. They then sell you the expansion because these games do need money. The issue is that some players (and in some cases rightly so) start to wonder if those monthly fees are really worth it.
Of course they are going to put lockout timers on their encounters. f2p does this too.
And in a f2p you can conveniently pay a little extra to get those timers lowered.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
But I hear it tossed around a lot, that P2P games make more money and get more updates and are hence better. If this is true, why are almost all the P2P games going F2P? Do they just hate money?
They don't make more money they make more "consistent" money.
meaning it's easier to budget your game when you have a more solid idea as to how many subs you will have month to month. I imagine they have data that shows trends in sub gains and losses.
In a f2p you might make more money but it's all over the map. I also don't think f2p games spend more time making "better content" but making content that can be monetized.
The same goes for p2p, they don't spend time making content. They spend time, finding ways to draw out how long it takes you to burn their content by using lockout timers, RNG and gear based encounters aka rely entirely on gear and not player ability. With the added bonus that they take your money make more content supposedly, turn around and SELL you that content. Brilliant.
nah I don't agree.
they spend more time than should be acceptable to make content. The monthly fee is more about access to support the game and the company. They then sell you the expansion because these games do need money. The issue is that some players (and in some cases rightly so) start to wonder if those monthly fees are really worth it.
Of course they are going to put lockout timers on their encounters. f2p does this too.
And in a f2p you can conveniently pay a little extra to get those timers lowered.
You don't agree to agree, i don't expect you to agree.
My job is not to care what they do with the money, I pay money for content not to for something that should already come with the game for free. Most games/products offer support with it already built into the price of that game/product. I don't mind them selling expansion IF it wasn't for the fact that they charge you a monthly fee. Other games charge you monthly and give you the content for free. Other games like guild wars 2 have shown you can have decent support (I used decent because a lot detractors will bring in Ancedontal evidence to back up their claims) with only the price of the box.
The is no issue with "some" players. The reality is that a big chunk of the market is beginning to see that p2p doesn't offer anything other than access to your character that f2p or b2p doesn't offer. You might not like cash shop in f2p games but you don't have to buy it. I personally hate it when p2p have cash shop, but I tend to just not play p2p anymore to avoid it.
F2p put in lockout timers because they simply are copying p2p mechanics. F2p games still haven't found their identity as of yet, and p2p have had a 10+ year head start. ADDED: 1 week lockout timers and people buy that flimsy excuse that it is to prevent over farming.
Anyways, there isn't any real reason to have lockout timers that are long other than to act as a time gate which goes away with great with gear treadmill.
it's the bad p2p games that go f2p. not all of them.
lol. That's kind of a myopic view. I don't think Rift is a bad game, even if I don't play it. And I thought EVE sucked. Maybe I'm just a "bad" player? Statements like yours don't work.
Talk about myopic!!
Your whole comment is all about you!
EVE, WoW and DAOC are all great games, even after all these years they are still strong and still have a sub. So obviously you are not the voice of MMO gamers, nor do you represent the current trend.
The very existence of the games I just mentioned proves it.
To give example of game as old as DAOC doesn't make your point relevant for current times. P2P worked in past but it doesn't anymore. Also these games have paid for themselves many time over so they have no reason to go F2P.
And EVE like i mentionedvearlier sin't a pure P2P game since people can use PLEX to buy game time.
WOW in an anamoly and more of an exception than rule. If you want to prove to people that P2P model is still viable and successful you don't use exception as a proof.
Your missing the point
The current F2P games are no where near as successful as the games I mentioned. Game devs have to constantly churn out new games because players are not staying and most are not spending any money.
So obviously, the current trend needs to learn from the past. That's the point!
But I hear it tossed around a lot, that P2P games make more money and get more updates and are hence better. If this is true, why are almost all the P2P games going F2P? Do they just hate money?
They don't make more money they make more "consistent" money.
meaning it's easier to budget your game when you have a more solid idea as to how many subs you will have month to month. I imagine they have data that shows trends in sub gains and losses.
In a f2p you might make more money but it's all over the map. I also don't think f2p games spend more time making "better content" but making content that can be monetized.
The same goes for p2p, they don't spend time making content. They spend time, finding ways to draw out how long it takes you to burn their content by using lockout timers, RNG and gear based encounters aka rely entirely on gear and not player ability. With the added bonus that they take your money make more content supposedly, turn around and SELL you that content. Brilliant.
in WoW, it's extremely rare that a world first endboss in a new tier onh eroic mode come after more than 2 weeks since release. So where are these gear encounters that skill cant overcome ?
because you drag your feet 6 months on full raid schedule while the top guilds clear it in 2 hours, doesn't mean gear is all that matters. quite the opposite.
at one point I drew an analogy on my guild's forum in which I measured that for each hour of progression a world first guild does, my guild needs about one raidweek. Which is fine...we werent anywhere near that good. But point remains. gear is the least worry.
Maybe I should have preface this by saying I have not played WOW, cuz I am not a noob. I don't know why it takes 6 months for some people to complete an encounter or 2 weeks. I do know that any game that has a enrage mechanic which pretty much acts like a gear check aka DPS race which indirectly acts like a gear check.
When I mean player ability, a game shouldn't rely entirely on mastering rotations which from my understanding of WOW that is how it is (I coould be wrong, I am probably wrong). Back when I played aion, I remember walking into stormwing level 55 boss (before it got nerfed into the ground cuz nobody could beat it) a week after its release with Level 50 PvE gear (which essentially meant 1 screw up and you die) after 12 hours of dying we came up with a strategy and we won. What made the fight tough it wasn't a dps and avoid standing in fire, it punished you initially (until everybody got video of us killing it) if you did not pay attention to the environment. You had to avoid everything and timed when to attack the boss. You can make a boss tough, without resorting to gear check oops i meant enrage timer, but like I said I never played WOW so i don't know.
I will concede, F2P games are improving. It will probably continue to do so.
But I don't think it will ever match the quality of a subscription game, esp. a subscription game with a good target market, there's too much at risk for the F2P dev.
I've never really liked F2P games. I hate it when something happens and you get a prompt begging you to spend money. $15 a month is cheap. If you can't spend $15 a month on a game, you shouldn't be playing imho, you should get a 2nd job or something lol.
Its mostly because of how our brains work. A person is more likely to spend 15 over the course of a month than sign off on paying 15 every month. Actually, the numbers show we are more likely to spend WAY more in impulse sales than in planned sales, or debt. There is a really good series of posts from folks in the industry about this, lemme link one of the last ones I read. Its not directly about MMO games...but the design structures can be paralleled.
I'm sure plenty of you have read some of his stuff, so for many this is gonna be old news. But it does have bearing in this topic. The deal is that there isn't a lot of room for market overlap with pay to play. We, on average, aren't likely to keep several MMO's subscribed because we have time to think about the money lost each month and apply that to others ways it could be spent. We ARE likely to have several F2P games we toy around with, and if these games utilize those coercive tactics we (particularly those in the 18-25 demographic) are incredibly likely to spend as much, or more than, the aforementioned 15$. We might even play 3-5 different F2P games that, in turn, draw far more money out of us than we'd spend otherwise. I wouldn't, but I'm not the target demographic either (I am 30, with wife and kids and bills). I have a friend that lives as a testament to this, the XBLA game, Happy Wars, is a F2P model. Its fun, I played it. I even spent 10$ in its shop (after I had vested enough fun playtime to warrant it, thats my rule...I'll pay what I feel I have already earned in gametime) HE spent over 200$. In a monthly set up...he just paid for 19 other people that month if the sub fee had been 10$.
If 1000 people like him play...its enough to cover 20,000 players.
Thats 1/20 of your playerbase paying for the rest. 50,000/1 million. Assuming you held even that small fraction, at a million players you've made 10 million. That assumes that only your hard spenders pay. Many more will pay 1$ or 2$ that month if you monetize well. A very select few will spend MORE. Simply because of the tactics mentioned in that blog.
Its mostly because of how our brains work. A person is more likely to spend 15 over the course of a month than sign off on paying 15 every month. Actually, the numbers show we are more likely to spend WAY more in impulse sales than in planned sales, or debt. There is a really good series of posts from folks in the industry about this, lemme link one of the last ones I read. Its not directly about MMO games...but the design structures can be paralleled.
I'm sure plenty of you have read some of his stuff, so for many this is gonna be old news. But it does have bearing in this topic. The deal is that there isn't a lot of room for market overlap with pay to play. We, on average, aren't likely to keep several MMO's subscribed because we have time to think about the money lost each month and apply that to others ways it could be spent. We ARE likely to have several F2P games we toy around with, and if these games utilize those coercive tactics we (particularly those in the 18-25 demographic) are incredibly likely to spend as much, or more than, the aforementioned 15$. We might even play 3-5 different F2P games that, in turn, draw far more money out of us than we'd spend otherwise. I wouldn't, but I'm not the target demographic either (I am 30, with wife and kids and bills). I have a friend that lives as a testament to this, the XBLA game, Happy Wars, is a F2P model. Its fun, I played it. I even spent 10$ in its shop (after I had vested enough fun playtime to warrant it, thats my rule...I'll pay what I feel I have already earned in gametime) HE spent over 200$. In a monthly set up...he just paid for 19 other people that month if the sub fee had been 10$.
If 1000 people like him play...its enough to cover 20,000 players.
Thats 1/20 of your playerbase paying for the rest. 50,000/1 million. Assuming you held even that small fraction, at a million players you've made 10 million. That assumes that only your hard spenders pay. Many more will pay 1$ or 2$ that month if you monetize well. A very select few will spend MORE. Simply because of the tactics mentioned in that blog.
Thank you. I know it's profitable. I know it's coming.
The question is why are you guys okay with it.
So will the tiers/rankings of players one day be divided by how much money they spent?
Comments
2010 Lotro goes F2P.
2011 Turbine CEO gives a presentation about how successful their business model is.
Yet, why have the players seen less content updates since the game went F2P? And where are all these F2P players at endgame level? Does Turbine not want to invest in their successful game anymore? Or is the business transition not so successful as originally thought?
I am very curious how this is for other games.
It's hard to leave money sitting on the table. Every one of us consumers is a potential pile of money to catch.
If you cast a wide net to catch as many of us as possible, then for each of us, you either catch us or you don't. Those you miss because the price was too high, you get nothing from. Those you catch, you only get what you charged, nothing more.
Cash shops give a publisher the ability to look at each potential customer individually and attempt to extract the maximum amount of cash that customer is willing to pay for the game. If you can keep the marginal cost of a person logging into your servers close to zero, then there is no reason to restrict access. You want to bring the whole world onto your grid and start running metrics and experiments on what exactly provokes them to open their wallet.
For established games, the subscription fee generates a steady income and you risk losing income from people who are suspicious of cash shops as it slides into the game. For new games coming into a competitive market or games that are declining anyway, alienation is not as much of a risk.
At the same time, traditional box sale games are coming towards the same cash shop model from the opposite direction - DLC packs are getting smaller and cheaper. But in the end, it's all about getting rich metrics on what triggers players to buy these small additions.
Thus the cash shop is where game developers who understand in-game player motivation and behaviour meet marketting departments who understand out-of-game consumer behaviour. United, they obtain the maximum possible payout per customer ... so long as they remember to create a game and as long as the subset of customers who reject cash shops on sight is small and marginalized.
(opinion only, based on interviews I've seen, but not to be mistaken for actual knowledge)
If you ask me, the F2P was a decision by "marketing experts", you know, these 17-22 years old studied people that hardly had sex but know it all better.
Followed by that new principle, the market got flooded with F2P crap games, cash shops and whatever milking mechanix could be played out.
Well, they forgot the game itself with all these milking attempts, we joined countless F2P titles and all had one thing in common: they all been shit.
Ofcause we noticed that and many players turned back to the old but gold P2P games, nice you mentioned Eve.
Free to play is a market cash milking mechanic, you 14.- bucks a month aint been enuff, look how we all got fooled by SWTOR and people STILL PLAY IT. Its not over, they are still flooding the market with lousy games, promising the heaven on earth and deliver only new ways how they can get your money.
And by all this, noone noticed, that Monsanto is buying up all non-GMO seed companies.
Life itself is a bitch.
Sub game make more money at release. F2P games make more money long term. So games release as P2P, then go F2P to maximize the money made.
I suppose it's possible for a F2P game to make a bunch of money at release too, but we haven't really had a good example of it.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
To give example of game as old as DAOC doesn't make your point relevant for current times. P2P worked in past but it doesn't anymore. Also these games have paid for themselves many time over so they have no reason to go F2P.
And EVE like i mentionedvearlier sin't a pure P2P game since people can use PLEX to buy game time.
WOW in an anamoly and more of an exception than rule. If you want to prove to people that P2P model is still viable and successful you don't use exception as a proof.
"The problem is that the hardcore folks always want the same thing: 'We want exactly what you gave us before, but it has to be completely different.'
-Jesse Schell
"Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid."
-Luke McKinney
WoW has an upfront box cost, a subscription cost, a cash shop (for which they have added a minigame), a cross-promotion to give away their auction house game (D3) and links with their CCG game. To say that it is a subsciption game is oversimplifying their revenue stream a little.
There is some truth in the statement that P2P makes more money than F2P.... but the devil is in the details.
P2P makes more money, per person, than F2P. F2P makes more money, per paying customer, than P2P. In a P2P game, every customer is paying, so the earnings per person is higher. In F2P, only a small amount of players are paying, but there is more revenue generated per paying customer.
The reality is that most western F2P games are in fact hybrids, that make most of their income from subscriptions. In fact, for the F2P market in the west, subscription is the single most common method of payment. This has been the case for over 10 years. Subscription is very popular in the west, even for F2P.
Does anyone know of any publically available data on this for an MMOs?
I've seen lots of data from small mobile apps (example) where there tends to be essentially a power law distribution to spending and would expect something similar in MMOs. But I'm wondering if the overall participation rate is higher in MMOs than in smaller games.
p2p dont make more money (only WoW does...for obvious reasons, so far). They are all going f2p because they are making more money that way.
I dont support subscriptions but if the game is worth it i will pay the sub (nothing after WoW is worth 15 /mo TO ME personally). I personally prefer B2P like GW2, to me thats the best model ever. But i do have to aknowledge that both B2P and P2P are more transparent with the community and make their money in a cleaner way. Full Free to play tend to abuse their community either by pay to win or by having a group of whales keeping the servers alive (or both) then the game shuts down if the whales stop spending that much money and all that money is wasted.
Lately i have been very strongly inclined towards the Buy to play model from GW2, and possibly a subscription option for extra perks for the subbers.
Generally speaking, free to play is where mediocre games go to slowly die.
Once the bloom of subs start to wither, FTP gives one last infusion of players that wouldn't have bought the game one last chance to play and, on the off hand chance, spend a little money on something that they wouldn't have under normal circumstances. The game already exists, why not throw open the gate to make a few extra bucks before flipping the switch off.
P2P games can potentially make more money than F2P but requires a audience over a certain size to stay to do so.SInce most modern MMORPGs are just the exact same formula with one or two tweaks or innovations or made to be very niche none have been able to do so and so turn to F2P.
The industry has taken this to mean that F2P is the future instead of actually putting the work in and being imaginative enough to win said audience because trying new thing has a element of risk.
Waiting for:EQ-Next, ArcheAge (not so much anymore)
Now Playing: N/A
Worst MMO: FFXIV
Favorite MMO: FFXI
They don't make more money they make more "consistent" money.
meaning it's easier to budget your game when you have a more solid idea as to how many subs you will have month to month. I imagine they have data that shows trends in sub gains and losses.
In a f2p you might make more money but it's all over the map. I also don't think f2p games spend more time making "better content" but making content that can be monetized.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
The same goes for p2p, they don't spend time making content. They spend time, finding ways to draw out how long it takes you to burn their content by using lockout timers, RNG and gear based encounters aka rely entirely on gear and not player ability. With the added bonus that they take your money make more content supposedly, turn around and SELL you that content. Brilliant.
nah I don't agree.
they spend more time than should be acceptable to make content. The monthly fee is more about access to support the game and the company. They then sell you the expansion because these games do need money. The issue is that some players (and in some cases rightly so) start to wonder if those monthly fees are really worth it.
Of course they are going to put lockout timers on their encounters. f2p does this too.
And in a f2p you can conveniently pay a little extra to get those timers lowered.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
If fine dinner makes more money, why are there so many fast food restaurant?
Actually no, sub game don't make more money, neither does f2p.
The reason is there is a market for both.
You don't agree to agree, i don't expect you to agree.
My job is not to care what they do with the money, I pay money for content not to for something that should already come with the game for free. Most games/products offer support with it already built into the price of that game/product. I don't mind them selling expansion IF it wasn't for the fact that they charge you a monthly fee. Other games charge you monthly and give you the content for free. Other games like guild wars 2 have shown you can have decent support (I used decent because a lot detractors will bring in Ancedontal evidence to back up their claims) with only the price of the box.
The is no issue with "some" players. The reality is that a big chunk of the market is beginning to see that p2p doesn't offer anything other than access to your character that f2p or b2p doesn't offer. You might not like cash shop in f2p games but you don't have to buy it. I personally hate it when p2p have cash shop, but I tend to just not play p2p anymore to avoid it.
F2p put in lockout timers because they simply are copying p2p mechanics. F2p games still haven't found their identity as of yet, and p2p have had a 10+ year head start. ADDED: 1 week lockout timers and people buy that flimsy excuse that it is to prevent over farming.
Anyways, there isn't any real reason to have lockout timers that are long other than to act as a time gate which goes away with great with gear treadmill.
All p2p games besides eve, ff11 and wow have gone f2p.
Your missing the point
The current F2P games are no where near as successful as the games I mentioned. Game devs have to constantly churn out new games because players are not staying and most are not spending any money.
So obviously, the current trend needs to learn from the past. That's the point!
Maybe I should have preface this by saying I have not played WOW, cuz I am not a noob. I don't know why it takes 6 months for some people to complete an encounter or 2 weeks. I do know that any game that has a enrage mechanic which pretty much acts like a gear check aka DPS race which indirectly acts like a gear check.
When I mean player ability, a game shouldn't rely entirely on mastering rotations which from my understanding of WOW that is how it is (I coould be wrong, I am probably wrong). Back when I played aion, I remember walking into stormwing level 55 boss (before it got nerfed into the ground cuz nobody could beat it) a week after its release with Level 50 PvE gear (which essentially meant 1 screw up and you die) after 12 hours of dying we came up with a strategy and we won. What made the fight tough it wasn't a dps and avoid standing in fire, it punished you initially (until everybody got video of us killing it) if you did not pay attention to the environment. You had to avoid everything and timed when to attack the boss. You can make a boss tough, without resorting to gear check oops i meant enrage timer, but like I said I never played WOW so i don't know.
I will concede, F2P games are improving. It will probably continue to do so.
But I don't think it will ever match the quality of a subscription game, esp. a subscription game with a good target market, there's too much at risk for the F2P dev.
Its mostly because of how our brains work. A person is more likely to spend 15 over the course of a month than sign off on paying 15 every month. Actually, the numbers show we are more likely to spend WAY more in impulse sales than in planned sales, or debt. There is a really good series of posts from folks in the industry about this, lemme link one of the last ones I read. Its not directly about MMO games...but the design structures can be paralleled.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/194933/The_Top_F2P_Monetization_Tricks.php
I'm sure plenty of you have read some of his stuff, so for many this is gonna be old news. But it does have bearing in this topic. The deal is that there isn't a lot of room for market overlap with pay to play. We, on average, aren't likely to keep several MMO's subscribed because we have time to think about the money lost each month and apply that to others ways it could be spent. We ARE likely to have several F2P games we toy around with, and if these games utilize those coercive tactics we (particularly those in the 18-25 demographic) are incredibly likely to spend as much, or more than, the aforementioned 15$. We might even play 3-5 different F2P games that, in turn, draw far more money out of us than we'd spend otherwise. I wouldn't, but I'm not the target demographic either (I am 30, with wife and kids and bills). I have a friend that lives as a testament to this, the XBLA game, Happy Wars, is a F2P model. Its fun, I played it. I even spent 10$ in its shop (after I had vested enough fun playtime to warrant it, thats my rule...I'll pay what I feel I have already earned in gametime) HE spent over 200$. In a monthly set up...he just paid for 19 other people that month if the sub fee had been 10$.
If 1000 people like him play...its enough to cover 20,000 players.
Thats 1/20 of your playerbase paying for the rest. 50,000/1 million. Assuming you held even that small fraction, at a million players you've made 10 million. That assumes that only your hard spenders pay. Many more will pay 1$ or 2$ that month if you monetize well. A very select few will spend MORE. Simply because of the tactics mentioned in that blog.
Thank you. I know it's profitable. I know it's coming.
The question is why are you guys okay with it.
So will the tiers/rankings of players one day be divided by how much money they spent?