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Why do they even try or bother with P2P, why not make it B2P at release. Most likely all of the new mmorpgs that are P2P will go over to B2P or F2P in a few months. No one wants to pay monthly for a game, there's a few who would but those are a minority and the majority wins every time and still developers want P2P. For what reason?
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Maybe B2P isn't as profitable as was hoped.
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It is about maximizing revenue.
Initial purchase requirements are about getting as much up front as possible, before they see the game. This is classic P2P, and it is driven by marketting hype.
Monthly Subs are about getting as much as possible from limited content. Content takes time to make, and if you are a thempark game, players consume the content, then leave. Sure, you can put in a lot of artificial time sinks, but this only makes the monthly sub more viable, as you are just trying to get their money before they realize that there is nothing to do, and get bored.
An initial purchase price + monthly sub is a great way to maximize profit for games that are PVE/Thempark based. This is how they try to get as much money as possble out of the content that they have created. This usually works for a while, then if they can not create content fast enough, they convert to F2P (and still push monthly subs). If that doesnt work, they retool for more player based content, and monetize with microtransactions.
It is all about what the strengths/weakness of the game are.
First, there is already a long post about this.
Second, "No one want to pay monthly for a game... those who do are a minority."??? are you serious? You are just going to outright ignore the payment method of the most popular MMORPG out there right now?
I must be one of the minorities then, because I do not like Free to Play games, nor Buy to Play games. "Free to Play" and "Buy to play" are just propaganda anyways. It could also be spun as: "Free to play" - no entry fee to play the game, but requires some type of monetary expense to be fully functional. "Buy to Play" - very high entry fee that combines the initial sale with a lifetime subscription fee.
You have to be very naïve to believe that companies are not out to make money. How they get you to spend money, and how they hide it from you, is what makes their marketing schemes work, or not work. OP, you have fallen victim to good marketing, and have been lead to believe that one particular method of PAYING for a service is superior to another. In the end you are still paying, and that is really what this whole gaming service is all about.
+1 Excellent post.
Trion created new content for Rift very fast and still they went F2P. I doubt it has anything to do with that, the only thing in my mind is people don't want to pay a monthly fee to play a game. WoW has lost 4-6 million players over a few years, it had 12 million as most and now it's down to 6-8 millions.
You won't make a decent profit with P2P, B2P is the best way and F2P is good for stupid developers who already released their game as P2P and then convert to F2P.
Business model aside, Which of the games released after 2004 has been been a game you want to keep playing for months if not years? None really.
As i have said in other threads i will say it again. WoW have built up a strong community since many years back when mmorpgs were new, except ultima online and everquest etc which wasn't really popular and had little attention. Over time WoW was the only "good" mmorpg, for many years and people were ok with a subscription because there weren't really any F2P AAA mmorpgs out there to play. WoW had 12 million subscribers as most, now they are down to 6-8 millions and those numbers has been slowly reduced over a few years and are still going down.
better question
why did you make another thread when there's a topic that's already many pages long on the EXACT SAME TOPIC in which you have posted in.
seriously this should be a reportable offense.
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1. Money grab, western companies know there are still millions of suckers to take advantage of which they have to do because they don't know any other way. Sure wont make a lot of money going the quality route due to corporations having their hands in the making of the games.
2. Stuck in the past.
3. Too blind to see why Asian companies make more money with F2P than they ever could so they don't bother to do anything but a half-assed job.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
Because F2P money might be slowing down?
I always had the feeling that this scenario would play out:
Player A starts playing F2P MMO 1. He spends $400 in the cash shop cause he likes the game at the moment. He gets bored, moves on after a couple months.
Player A starts playing F2P MMO 2. He spends $100 each month for a year because he wants certain perks/gold/whatever. He gets bored and moves on.
Player A starts playing F2P MMO 3. He spends $600 for a collectors edition and some extras from the shop. He gets bored and moves on.
Player A looks at his bank account and says, "Wait I spent that much money on games I don't even like anymore?" And stops buying stuff in cash shops.
F2P has been trending for a couple years now, the MMO community has been fleeced and a lot of those whales aren't necessarily rich guys, they're just in debt guys now. And people are realizing that they've spent more than they would have with a sub and are not buying as much. I think it's a plausible theory and game companies don't make decisions like these out of the blue, I have a feeling that market data is showing a slow down in cash shop spending.
Developers who chose B2P and F2P want people to play their games and Developers who chose P2P don't really care if anyone play their game. More players will play a game that's F2P or B2P if it has quality content.
Would you make something you're really proud of and only want 500 to admire it?
Or do you want 5 million to admire your work?
Aion is P2P(Asia markets) came after 2004 and makes more money than any western MMO currently except WoW. GW2 last quarter was equal to Aion acording to NC, thanks to royalties.
No game since 2004 delivered a SOLID and GOOD experience. So i doubt those games would have survived with any other payment model.
Does not make the only real payment model obsolete. Just gotta stick it onto a good game. There is hope we get one of those games in this century,... in the past 13 years nothing good came up as far as i am concerned.
MMOs finally replaced social interaction, forced grouping and standing in a line while talking to eachother.
Now we have forced soloing, forced questing and everyone is the hero, without ever having to talk to anyone else. The evolution of multiplayer is here! We won,... right?
Aion is F2P now.
Trion added content as quickly as they could for Rift. This is why they made the bold statment that they were never going F2P. However, they could not cover the cost of this, as it was just too expensive to keep pushing out content, and they didnt make enough back. They realized this, and started shifting the focus to player based content... which is not monetized as well via subs. Once they were comforatable with the amount of content that they had for the players, they made the big shift from sub, to microtrans.
B2P is only viable if you have the right formula:
1. Player based content to keep them busy.
2. No intent to add more content or Intend to sell more content when added. Content creation cheap/fast enough to maintain.
B2P is classic P2P at its best. It is the direct sale of content, then move on to the next content, and repeat. It is a good model, and works well with player driven content (sandbox, pvp, etc). However, it creates high risk, and gaps in income. Many find this too risky, and prefer to do the same thing with F2P, as they get steady income, and can adjust on the fly.
F2P is a failed experiment, get over it already.
The players have spoken, we are getting our pay model back.
There are lots of reasons the P2P model is better.
For me its the community. This model weeds out the kiddies and many griefers, hackers who are not willing to pay money just to mess with you.
F2P games however, attract all of those types, and I'm so glad I wont be seeing them in ESO![:) :)](https://forums.mmorpg.com/resources/emoji/smile.png)
NA/EU are not Asian markets. Aion makes over $5 million USD a month thanks to P2P in east.
because P2P is simply better.. no stupid cash shops..
Perpetuum? Granted that's a small indie project with modest goals for success.
I am not sure you are drawing the right conclusion about why those games went F2P. I have no doubt that if a game is going to survive as P2P in this market as anything other than indie niche (I.E. Perpetuum) it needs to be best in class for what it does. EVE and WoW are best in class as the games they are designed to be (even if a lot of people don't like what those games are) although I think WoW has lot sight of that which is why their sub numbers are dropping.
My point is it's not so much that a game can't survive P2P in this markets it's that a game has to do what it does very well if it's going to expect people to dedicate a sub cost to it. Obviously the developers of FF XIV, TSO, and Wildstar believe their game is best in class at what it does.
I guess a second option is to bring in a new market segment to your game that doesn't currently play MMO's. I think that's what FF and TSO are aiming at which I don't know if that's going to work out as well as they are hoping. I just don't see a lot of new to MMO's game players willing to pay a monthly sub left but who knows, I'm not a marketing company.
Wildstar in my opinion is firmly aiming at the disenfranchised WoW, Rift, EQ2, etc. group/raid player. Again I have no idea if that's going to work out for them or not. I think it would have had a much bigger chance with no cash shop at all but that's my personal opinion.
I could be mistaken but didnt we just last week had some posts regarding GW2 and the money it made in the last quarter?
If i remember correctly the money it made was equal to around 500k players paying a monthly sub.
If you have a quality game i dont think you would have a problem to get a sub base of 500k+.
Sure you would not be able to use marketing tools like GW2 claiming to be the fastest selling MMO ever (while ignoring that its one of the few AAA mmos that did not launch as P2P) but you would have a set amount of income which you can use to improve the game over its lifespan instead of always having to wait and see how many people fell into the cash shop trap.
Now do not get me wrong i am not trying to diss GW2 here it has its fan base and that's cool and all but if i would be a developer i would go P2P as well i much rather have 500k loyal players who are willing to pay for my product than 3mil players and over half of them are leeching of and not paying a cent.(don't ask for prove of the 1.5mil players not paying a cent i have none just figured the game would make more money if all players would spend money is all)
Don't worry. Sub-only MMO is in decline. Most MMOs will be either B2P or f2P.
Inflamestwo, F2P only refers to entry fee to a particular game. Same as Buy to Play. Many games had a "box fee" to get into a game, but with the advent of digital distribution, most companies have realized that they do not need to charge for box fees as long as people continually give them money in other ways. Hence "Free to Play".
Other companies realized that the trend in players is that they play for very short periods of time, and then move on to another game... so the monthly fee and the cash shops will not make em as much money as before... so instead, they played all their profits up front in the initial entry fee and called this "Buy to Play".
Regardless of how they do it, either frontloading, or back loading, they are still getting your money, and that is all they care about.