I'll have to disagree with you completely. As a player of every major MMO out there throughout the last decade and a half, as well as someone who has worked in the video game industry, I'll have to call you out on your estimates and process.
Firstly, it's highly unscientific and your "estimates" are more of an opinion than based on any actual facts. Secondly, the original article wasn't talking about the "hybrid" model as ESO is not planning on using that model. What we DO know, is that with the exception of EVE Online (which we do not know the specific number of North American subscribers), subscription numbers have been plummeting. Particularly looking at World of Warcraft in North America, which has lost millions of subscribers since its peak years ago.
Your chart on monetization flow is inaccurate. The number of players in "free-to-play" or hybrid games who do NOT subscribe are the vast majority. The way these companies are making their money is NOT by attracting new subscribers, but rather their staggered transactions for content. Most players are not happy paying $15 every month for content. The number of casual players has increased as the overall MMO player numbers have gone up throughout the last decade. This means people who don't feel they put in the time to justify a monthly subscription.
Games like The Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Rift are making paying for the content you use easier. MORE players are in the game making SMALLER transactions. This is the "high volume - low dollar" method that made fast food explode. You get millions of people stopping in (a majority of which are spending small amounts on the food they buy). Sure, you have people dropping $10 at McDonald's, but those people are few and far between. The situation in the MMO industry is similar. Small transactions by more players for overall increased revenue and player numbers.
I would agree with the stance of the Forbes article, considering the pattern in the recent years when games HAVE chosen to go with a subscription model. Most of the games you mentioned started off attempting to get the subscription-only model working, but eventually backtracked to the hybrid model themselves. The same will likely be true for ESO, unless they stubbornly refuse and buckle under the lack of revenue. While the Elder Scrolls series is a well-known and beloved one, so is The Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars. Major names and big budgets cannot guarantee success.
The trends indicate that both ESO and Wildstar will fall prey to the same pressure of previous recent MMO's, and there is no evidence to indicate otherwise. The information provided was mostly filled with unscientific guesses, without any actual evidence. Everyone is titled to their opinion, but you can't present guesses as facts. I can respect what your opinion is and the hopefulness of it, but we'll eventually know the outcome only after the fact.
To continue off of this diatribe, the points are moot anyway, as ESO WILL become a free to play eventually. Other than WoW, they all do.
My blog is a continuing story of what MMO's should be like.
That is just plain wrong. The emprical evidence - over a decade's worth of it - clearly demonstrates the complete opposite.
WoW, Eve, AC1, FFXI, DAoC, UO.. and some others I'm forgetting at the moment.. all have maintained subs for near or even over a decade already... despite not having "frequent content updates".
Other MMOs, such as AO, LoTRO, EQ1/EQ2, and so on... all maintained subs for a number of years... despite not having consistent content updates included in the sub fee. Many of those listed have gone hybrid, and maintain a sub option, which is still very popular among the players.
I said with a AAA budget. Nothing in your post contradicts my statement. What does every one of the games you list as still being sub only have in common? Tiny budgets by today's standards. Hell, other than WoW, most of the rest don't even have enough players to justify the expense of converting to Freemium. They are games on life support, left running only because the costs of doing so are minimal with the level of support they receive. (Eve being the only exception to that logic, it might do fine in a freemium transition.)
Nobody is saying there shouldn't be a sub option. In games that include it, it is consistently the best experience. I personally never play a game without subbing. But the data in the market is clear. With the amount of money they are spending to make these games, the amount of revenue they will get long term from staying exclusively subscription based is not sufficient to justify the investment. Given the unmitigated success of freemium conversions for major games that start to bleed subs, it is a question of when, not if. The best MMO made in the last decade might manage to last a year before going Freemium, but unless the developer decides life support or death are preferable to change, it will happen. It's not a quality issue, the market has fundamentally changed.
Originally posted by Quesa
You cannot state as fact that a subscription only system isn't viable while excluding the most successful MMO to date, which happens to be sub based. Eve Online is also a sub based and it's shown growth with nearly the same age as WoW.
As much as people hate on WoW, the game was incredibly polished, the combat was tight and the animations where very smooth and seemed to work with the skills. They had an art style and ran with it, successfully. They had a massive amount of lore to use and they used it well. The writing was superb. The game was a masterpiece and set the standard for the next few years (Now we just get alpha/beta versions of games and a years worth of fixes) It's hard to have a semi-intelligent conversation with anyone who wasn't/isn't in awe of how well the game was polished out of the gate - save launch problems which are unpredictable.
As many have said before, which is why it's so surprising it has to be repeated, it doesn't matter how a game company chooses to charge for the game and whether it is sub or MTX based, it comes down to the quality of said game and it's entertainment value.
If anything, I think we should be excluding those games which quickly followed and seemingly attempted to emulate World of Warcraft's playstyle, UI and in-game systems. Those games are the outliers who attempted, in a way, to repackage and rebrand a current title.
We've seen better empirical evidence that MTX style revenue models have been used to save poorly made MMO's that were originally sub-based. This doesn't say anything about which model is better, what it does say is that the games that failed failed due to their gameplay or quality.
What you're doing is taking correlation and superimposing it as causation, which is an ever increasing flaw in most arguments today.
Easier argument first; my statement was about AAA games. That isn't Eve. A game with the budget of a TOR or ESO that only had Eve's numbers, even if they have seen steady growth, would have either converted to freemium or shut down inside of six months. When comparing things, it helps to compare things that are actually similar.
I understand from your post that you love WoW, and in the context of the fundamentally immature market it was released into, it was extremely impressive, lightyears beyond anything else available. Which is exactly why it was so successful, it was like a major league baseball team coming into a town that only had third rate little league squads. But let's be clear, it was mostly impressive because of how lacking the competition was, not because it was some masterpiece. They were a MLB team, but they were no Yankees. Compare pretty much any element in the game which it had in common with offline RPGs, and there were substantially better games released as much as ten years earlier. The only exception being the graphics, where offline games had only been better for a couple of years.
The issue here has absolutely nothing to do with quality. If WoW hadn't been released when it was, and the vanilla version were released today, it would be freemium within six months. The only thing which keeps the behemoth running on subs at this point is the people who are unwilling to give up a decade of time invested in the game.
What all you people who try to point to WoW's success to justify the subscription only model fail to take into account is the way the market has changed. When WoW came out, subscription was the norm. You subbed, or you didn't play MMOs. And the number of options in the market was tiny. Now, the number of options is huge, and almost everything that is more than half a year old has a free option. And there are several games which, by pre-WoW standards, are massive runaway successes. Very few rational people are going to stay subscribed to a game when they finished all of it's content, and there are a mountain of other games that they haven't finished yet. That only happens with extremely loyal customers, and that level of loyalty is hard to build in the amount of time it takes to finish the launch content in recent MMOs. It's not a quality issue, it's a quantity issue.
If the issue were quality, these games wouldn't be converting to freemium *after* most of their subscribers finish the content. They would be shutting the doors entirely because most of the subscribers wouldn't be bothering to finish the content.
The term/phrase "AAA game" is a marketing buzz word that people have been manipulated into thinking it means something but really is just that, a marketing buzz word. You might be able to correlate it with money spent on development but I suspect it has to do more with the expectations of revenue and membership. You cannot define a "AAA game" because it's entirely subjective which is why your comparison is flawed.
I do not "love" WoW and all you are doing is making the the conversation puerile and shoving opinions into categories which aid your biased viewpoint. If vanilla-WoW had been released today, it probably wouldn't have been well received, true, but the assertion is completely asinine considering the game was created for a market of 10 years ago for PC's of 10 years ago. We have factual information that WoW continues to sell and that evidence is seen by the fully priced sales of their expansions. They continuously update the systems and the next expansion will see an upgrade to the polygon count of the characters and likely many other aspects of the graphics. This expansion will sell very well and when it does, it's just another nail in the coffin of your argument. If any of that wasn't true and they were now using an MTX style revenue model, you might have an argument but as it stands, your argument isn't even a house of cards, it's a flat out ignorance to the real world.
People use many games to justify that sub-models can and still do work, they don't use it to justify that sub-models are the only model that works. When you state, "Very few rational people are going to stay subscribed to a game when they finished all of it's content", I tend to agree with you but again, it depends on that persons goals or interests. Content is a huge part of a game and some games are good at keeping the content flowing to keep their players happy, WoW and other sub-based games who are successful have been able to keep this trend going. Along with your assertion, I'd say, "very few rational people will continue to play a game when they finished all of it's content". That's a more logical statement than stating it's mutually exclusive to sub-based games. Your statement implies that sub-modeled games are the only games which lose out on players finishing the game and that's an incorrect assertion.
You attempt to sever the ties between quality and quantity whereas it's both that are equally important in a game and it's member/subscriber base. You can't put out a quality game with no content and such is the same with a game with alot of stuff to do but with horrible quality. It's all linked.
The term/phrase "AAA game" is a marketing buzz word that people have been manipulated into thinking it means something but really is just that, a marketing buzz word. You might be able to correlate it with money spent on development but I suspect it has to do more with the expectations of revenue and membership. You cannot define a "AAA game" because it's entirely subjective which is why your comparison is flawed.
I do not "love" WoW and all you are doing is making the the conversation puerile and shoving opinions into categories which aid your biased viewpoint. If vanilla-WoW had been released today, it probably wouldn't have been well received, true, but the assertion is completely asinine considering the game was created for a market of 10 years ago for PC's of 10 years ago. We have factual information that WoW continues to sell and that evidence is seen by the fully priced sales of their expansions. They continuously update the systems and the next expansion will see an upgrade to the polygon count of the characters and likely many other aspects of the graphics. This expansion will sell very well and when it does, it's just another nail in the coffin of your argument. If any of that wasn't true and they were now using an MTX style revenue model, you might have an argument but as it stands, your argument isn't even a house of cards, it's a flat out ignorance to the real world.
People use many games to justify that sub-models can and still do work, they don't use it to justify that sub-models are the only model that works. When you state, "Very few rational people are going to stay subscribed to a game when they finished all of it's content", I tend to agree with you but again, it depends on that persons goals or interests. Content is a huge part of a game and some games are good at keeping the content flowing to keep their players happy, WoW and other sub-based games who are successful have been able to keep this trend going. Along with your assertion, I'd say, "very few rational people will continue to play a game when they finished all of it's content". That's a more logical statement than stating it's mutually exclusive to sub-based games. Your statement implies that sub-modeled games are the only games which lose out on players finishing the game and that's an incorrect assertion.
You attempt to sever the ties between quality and quantity whereas it's both that are equally important in a game and it's member/subscriber base. You can't put out a quality game with no content and such is the same with a game with alot of stuff to do but with horrible quality. It's all linked.
I don't consider AAA a buzzword. I consider it a description of a certain funding range. A game put together on a shoestring budget doesn't have to meet the same revenue goals as a game with tens or hundreds of millions invested. All I mean when I use the term is a game that has hefty expenses, and as such requires hefty revenues in order to reach profitability.
Your phrasing heavily implied that you loved WoW. "Masterpiece" is a huge stretch. And you can't use *one* example to establish something as true for an entire market, when every single other product in the market behaves in a fundamentally different fashion. WoW is an anomaly. That is not an opinion, it is a fact. There is no reason to believe WoW's level of success can be replicated without first replicating the market conditions that existed when WoW launched, and that isn't going to happen.
Speaking of facts, it is also a fact that, as a general rule, freemium games make more money per player than sub only games. It's not about a model being "good" or "bad," it's about money, and freemium tends to bring in more of it.
And you keep saying "and other sub-based games." Such as what? Other than WoW and EvE, which has such a tiny budget as to not even belong in the conversation, what games can you name that have been released for six months or more, still do not offer a free option, and are operating in something more than life support mode?
And the main difference between games the require a sub and those that do not, when it comes to finishing content, is the price of re-entry. Almost every player quits almost every game at some point. The question is whether you come back when new content is released. When a game has a free option, you can dip your toe in the water to see if the ways a game has changed and grown since you left appeal to you, and if they do, you can then re-sub. A lot of people, even if they were willing to pay the sub for a full launch product of new content, don't want to spend fifteen dollars just to stick their toe in and decide whether to come back.
Quantity and quality are both important, I agree. But they are not the same thing, and many posters here treat them as if they are. I've lost count of the number of times I have seen someone try to argue that only games which lack quality go freemium. It is a nonsense argument. If a game were objectively lacking in quality, it either wouldn't go freemium at all, instead going straight to shut down, or it's attempt to go freemium would fail miserably and then it would shut down.
Content consumption will always outpace content creation. A game like WoW is somewhat insulated for new players in that respect, because it has had ten years to add content. A brand new game? No matter how good they are at adding content at a brisk pace, the average player is still going to run out of non-endgame activities well before the end of the first year. Given the number of games on the market, the likelihood that players will then leave is very high, and the more barriers there are to coming back, the less likely they are to ever return.
People who are sub players tend to prefer the sub experience, and generally if they are playing a game, they sub to it. Freemium is, logically speaking, a win/win scenario for these players. They can check back into a game periodically, with no cost, and if there isn't much there for them they can leave again, but if there is they can resub and get back into it. Well done freemium is a no lose proposition.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me.
Originally posted by Oldkye Just want to point out this chart is wrong the green is people who want to pay less than the subscription and the purple people who pay more, you can see this from your other chart take Wizard101. Out of 20,000,000 players only 1,000,000 are subscribers most people who pay more then the subscription fee "also" pay the subscription fee to get those benefits meaning the ones who pay more are less then 1,000,000.The way the chat is the more it costs the more people want to pay it at a rate approaching infinity which is silly lol the number of people who pay less is much greater then the number who pay more then the subscription fee.
You're reading the chart wrong. It is a variation of the standard "Demand Curve" chart. The green and purple areas represent revenue, not the number of people. The purple bit should be smaller than the green bit because less money is made from that portion of the customer base. It also doesn't include any actual numbers, and the numbers used would be assumptions anyway, so determining how accurate the chart is doesn't really make sense. It just represents an idea. If we made such a chart for an actual game with actual numbers, it would look very different, and would look different for each game represented in the chart.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I would like to point out that the arguement that F2P games offer an advantage over subs because they allow the user to take a break from playing and come back when they want to without losing any progress really is a bit of a red herring. I know of virtualy no subscription based games that make it impossible or even difficult for a user to reactivate a lapsed subscription when they want to or that delete or demote characters in an unrecoverable fashion for lapsed accounts. So I think that arguement can be safely taken off the table.
The thing that F2P does is allow the user to play, at a decreased user experience, for less then the cost of what a subscription to run them. Thus they can capture whatever group of individuals who would still pay something for the game but not the full subscription fee. There is also the initial barrier to entry factor (try before you buy) but subscription based games have mechanisms to mitigate that to a certain degree through the use of free trial offers.
I would like to point out that the arguement that F2P games offer an advantage over subs because they allow the user to take a break from playing and come back when they want to without losing any progress really is a bit of a red herring.
Who was arguing that? The closest argument I have seen is that freemium let's you log in to see if it is worth re-subbing rather than requiring you to re-sub just to take a look.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me.
I don't consider AAA a buzzword. I consider it a description of a certain funding range. A game put together on a shoestring budget doesn't have to meet the same revenue goals as a game with tens or hundreds of millions invested. All I mean when I use the term is a game that has hefty expenses, and as such requires hefty revenues in order to reach profitability.
Your phrasing heavily implied that you loved WoW. "Masterpiece" is a huge stretch. And you can't use *one* example to establish something as true for an entire market, when every single other product in the market behaves in a fundamentally different fashion. WoW is an anomaly. That is not an opinion, it is a fact. There is no reason to believe WoW's level of success can be replicated without first replicating the market conditions that existed when WoW launched, and that isn't going to happen.
Speaking of facts, it is also a fact that, as a general rule, freemium games make more money per player than sub only games. It's not about a model being "good" or "bad," it's about money, and freemium tends to bring in more of it.
And you keep saying "and other sub-based games." Such as what? Other than WoW and EvE, which has such a tiny budget as to not even belong in the conversation, what games can you name that have been released for six months or more, still do not offer a free option, and are operating in something more than life support mode?
And the main difference between games the require a sub and those that do not, when it comes to finishing content, is the price of re-entry. Almost every player quits almost every game at some point. The question is whether you come back when new content is released. When a game has a free option, you can dip your toe in the water to see if the ways a game has changed and grown since you left appeal to you, and if they do, you can then re-sub. A lot of people, even if they were willing to pay the sub for a full launch product of new content, don't want to spend fifteen dollars just to stick their toe in and decide whether to come back.
Quantity and quality are both important, I agree. But they are not the same thing, and many posters here treat them as if they are. I've lost count of the number of times I have seen someone try to argue that only games which lack quality go freemium. It is a nonsense argument. If a game were objectively lacking in quality, it either wouldn't go freemium at all, instead going straight to shut down, or it's attempt to go freemium would fail miserably and then it would shut down.
Content consumption will always outpace content creation. A game like WoW is somewhat insulated for new players in that respect, because it has had ten years to add content. A brand new game? No matter how good they are at adding content at a brisk pace, the average player is still going to run out of non-endgame activities well before the end of the first year. Given the number of games on the market, the likelihood that players will then leave is very high, and the more barriers there are to coming back, the less likely they are to ever return.
People who are sub players tend to prefer the sub experience, and generally if they are playing a game, they sub to it. Freemium is, logically speaking, a win/win scenario for these players. They can check back into a game periodically, with no cost, and if there isn't much there for them they can leave again, but if there is they can resub and get back into it. Well done freemium is a no lose proposition.
That’s just it, AAA is a buzzword but adopted by others to describe a subjective definition, so it makes little sense to label games as an AAA title when it’s not definable and is different for everyone. When was the last time you saw an MMO under development that didn’t call itself a ‘AAA title’? Probably very few times.
Calling WoW a masterpiece isn’t a stretch at all it was ahead of its time, widely accepted and had more players than any other MMO. I’m not using WoW as a singular example of an entire markets behavior yet even if I was, it wouldn’t be as ludicrous as excluding it from your analysis all together which would be like discussing the smart phone revolution and ignoring iPhones. Market conditions are always changing and while your statistically never going to hit the same market conditions as when WoW was released, there will always be times when the market is ripe for another such event and HISTORY has proven this correct many times.
You can’t say “fact” then “as a general rule” in the same sentence, its completely contradictory. You also don’t have any facts on whether or not F2P brings in more than sub-based games. It’s conjecture and assumption based off of tax filings and ‘industry insiders’. The lead designer of WoW even commented that ‘it’s risky and there’s no guarantee it would make the situation any better’ and that ‘other games that made the switch saw player numbers increase substantially, but he doesn’t have data on how long that boost lasted or how profitable it ended up being for the long term’.
If I couldn’t name off anymore sub-based games that are running and we agreed upon what was meant as ‘successful’, what does that actually say? Does that mean sub-based models are dead or does it mean that publishers are hopping on the F2P/MTX train while it’s good? It’s important to note that nobody has factual numbers on subscriptions and the life of those subscriptions and the same goes for the ‘active player base’ of F2P/MTX players. It’s simple observation to see that a conversion from sub-based models to a F2P/MTX model has been used many times for games that have failed to put out quality products. We’ve seen this in games like SWTOR and RIFT.
I suppose it depends on what you believe as ‘pricey’. I can agree that it’s a small investment in either a sub fee or an expansion purchase but if the player gets out of that investment what he wants/needs then it’s not ‘pricey’ at all. If that investment was bad and shoving people to F2P/MTX games then we wouldn’t see these expansions selling millions of copies. Most games have trials that you can use to ‘dip your toe in’ without the investment. Those who played previous expansions in WoW know ‘essentially’ what they can expect. Additionally, you’re point would have more impact if it weren’t for the multi-million purchases of each expansion since the game was released.
F2P/MTX is logical for YOU and may not be for someone else. When you are saying, “they can check back into a game periodically, with no cost, and if there isn’t much there for them they can leave again” is one of the core weaknesses of a F2P/MTX model and something we don’t have real data on, outside assumptions.
Comments
To continue off of this diatribe, the points are moot anyway, as ESO WILL become a free to play eventually. Other than WoW, they all do.
My blog is a continuing story of what MMO's should be like.
The term/phrase "AAA game" is a marketing buzz word that people have been manipulated into thinking it means something but really is just that, a marketing buzz word. You might be able to correlate it with money spent on development but I suspect it has to do more with the expectations of revenue and membership. You cannot define a "AAA game" because it's entirely subjective which is why your comparison is flawed.
I do not "love" WoW and all you are doing is making the the conversation puerile and shoving opinions into categories which aid your biased viewpoint. If vanilla-WoW had been released today, it probably wouldn't have been well received, true, but the assertion is completely asinine considering the game was created for a market of 10 years ago for PC's of 10 years ago. We have factual information that WoW continues to sell and that evidence is seen by the fully priced sales of their expansions. They continuously update the systems and the next expansion will see an upgrade to the polygon count of the characters and likely many other aspects of the graphics. This expansion will sell very well and when it does, it's just another nail in the coffin of your argument. If any of that wasn't true and they were now using an MTX style revenue model, you might have an argument but as it stands, your argument isn't even a house of cards, it's a flat out ignorance to the real world.
People use many games to justify that sub-models can and still do work, they don't use it to justify that sub-models are the only model that works. When you state, "Very few rational people are going to stay subscribed to a game when they finished all of it's content", I tend to agree with you but again, it depends on that persons goals or interests. Content is a huge part of a game and some games are good at keeping the content flowing to keep their players happy, WoW and other sub-based games who are successful have been able to keep this trend going. Along with your assertion, I'd say, "very few rational people will continue to play a game when they finished all of it's content". That's a more logical statement than stating it's mutually exclusive to sub-based games. Your statement implies that sub-modeled games are the only games which lose out on players finishing the game and that's an incorrect assertion.
You attempt to sever the ties between quality and quantity whereas it's both that are equally important in a game and it's member/subscriber base. You can't put out a quality game with no content and such is the same with a game with alot of stuff to do but with horrible quality. It's all linked.
I don't consider AAA a buzzword. I consider it a description of a certain funding range. A game put together on a shoestring budget doesn't have to meet the same revenue goals as a game with tens or hundreds of millions invested. All I mean when I use the term is a game that has hefty expenses, and as such requires hefty revenues in order to reach profitability.
Your phrasing heavily implied that you loved WoW. "Masterpiece" is a huge stretch. And you can't use *one* example to establish something as true for an entire market, when every single other product in the market behaves in a fundamentally different fashion. WoW is an anomaly. That is not an opinion, it is a fact. There is no reason to believe WoW's level of success can be replicated without first replicating the market conditions that existed when WoW launched, and that isn't going to happen.
Speaking of facts, it is also a fact that, as a general rule, freemium games make more money per player than sub only games. It's not about a model being "good" or "bad," it's about money, and freemium tends to bring in more of it.
And you keep saying "and other sub-based games." Such as what? Other than WoW and EvE, which has such a tiny budget as to not even belong in the conversation, what games can you name that have been released for six months or more, still do not offer a free option, and are operating in something more than life support mode?
And the main difference between games the require a sub and those that do not, when it comes to finishing content, is the price of re-entry. Almost every player quits almost every game at some point. The question is whether you come back when new content is released. When a game has a free option, you can dip your toe in the water to see if the ways a game has changed and grown since you left appeal to you, and if they do, you can then re-sub. A lot of people, even if they were willing to pay the sub for a full launch product of new content, don't want to spend fifteen dollars just to stick their toe in and decide whether to come back.
Quantity and quality are both important, I agree. But they are not the same thing, and many posters here treat them as if they are. I've lost count of the number of times I have seen someone try to argue that only games which lack quality go freemium. It is a nonsense argument. If a game were objectively lacking in quality, it either wouldn't go freemium at all, instead going straight to shut down, or it's attempt to go freemium would fail miserably and then it would shut down.
Content consumption will always outpace content creation. A game like WoW is somewhat insulated for new players in that respect, because it has had ten years to add content. A brand new game? No matter how good they are at adding content at a brisk pace, the average player is still going to run out of non-endgame activities well before the end of the first year. Given the number of games on the market, the likelihood that players will then leave is very high, and the more barriers there are to coming back, the less likely they are to ever return.
People who are sub players tend to prefer the sub experience, and generally if they are playing a game, they sub to it. Freemium is, logically speaking, a win/win scenario for these players. They can check back into a game periodically, with no cost, and if there isn't much there for them they can leave again, but if there is they can resub and get back into it. Well done freemium is a no lose proposition.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
You're reading the chart wrong. It is a variation of the standard "Demand Curve" chart. The green and purple areas represent revenue, not the number of people. The purple bit should be smaller than the green bit because less money is made from that portion of the customer base. It also doesn't include any actual numbers, and the numbers used would be assumptions anyway, so determining how accurate the chart is doesn't really make sense. It just represents an idea. If we made such a chart for an actual game with actual numbers, it would look very different, and would look different for each game represented in the chart.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I would like to point out that the arguement that F2P games offer an advantage over subs because they allow the user to take a break from playing and come back when they want to without losing any progress really is a bit of a red herring. I know of virtualy no subscription based games that make it impossible or even difficult for a user to reactivate a lapsed subscription when they want to or that delete or demote characters in an unrecoverable fashion for lapsed accounts. So I think that arguement can be safely taken off the table.
The thing that F2P does is allow the user to play, at a decreased user experience, for less then the cost of what a subscription to run them. Thus they can capture whatever group of individuals who would still pay something for the game but not the full subscription fee. There is also the initial barrier to entry factor (try before you buy) but subscription based games have mechanisms to mitigate that to a certain degree through the use of free trial offers.
Who was arguing that? The closest argument I have seen is that freemium let's you log in to see if it is worth re-subbing rather than requiring you to re-sub just to take a look.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
That’s just it, AAA is a buzzword but adopted by others to describe a subjective definition, so it makes little sense to label games as an AAA title when it’s not definable and is different for everyone. When was the last time you saw an MMO under development that didn’t call itself a ‘AAA title’? Probably very few times.
Calling WoW a masterpiece isn’t a stretch at all it was ahead of its time, widely accepted and had more players than any other MMO. I’m not using WoW as a singular example of an entire markets behavior yet even if I was, it wouldn’t be as ludicrous as excluding it from your analysis all together which would be like discussing the smart phone revolution and ignoring iPhones. Market conditions are always changing and while your statistically never going to hit the same market conditions as when WoW was released, there will always be times when the market is ripe for another such event and HISTORY has proven this correct many times.
You can’t say “fact” then “as a general rule” in the same sentence, its completely contradictory. You also don’t have any facts on whether or not F2P brings in more than sub-based games. It’s conjecture and assumption based off of tax filings and ‘industry insiders’. The lead designer of WoW even commented that ‘it’s risky and there’s no guarantee it would make the situation any better’ and that ‘other games that made the switch saw player numbers increase substantially, but he doesn’t have data on how long that boost lasted or how profitable it ended up being for the long term’.
If I couldn’t name off anymore sub-based games that are running and we agreed upon what was meant as ‘successful’, what does that actually say? Does that mean sub-based models are dead or does it mean that publishers are hopping on the F2P/MTX train while it’s good? It’s important to note that nobody has factual numbers on subscriptions and the life of those subscriptions and the same goes for the ‘active player base’ of F2P/MTX players. It’s simple observation to see that a conversion from sub-based models to a F2P/MTX model has been used many times for games that have failed to put out quality products. We’ve seen this in games like SWTOR and RIFT.
I suppose it depends on what you believe as ‘pricey’. I can agree that it’s a small investment in either a sub fee or an expansion purchase but if the player gets out of that investment what he wants/needs then it’s not ‘pricey’ at all. If that investment was bad and shoving people to F2P/MTX games then we wouldn’t see these expansions selling millions of copies. Most games have trials that you can use to ‘dip your toe in’ without the investment. Those who played previous expansions in WoW know ‘essentially’ what they can expect. Additionally, you’re point would have more impact if it weren’t for the multi-million purchases of each expansion since the game was released.
F2P/MTX is logical for YOU and may not be for someone else. When you are saying, “they can check back into a game periodically, with no cost, and if there isn’t much there for them they can leave again” is one of the core weaknesses of a F2P/MTX model and something we don’t have real data on, outside assumptions.