Free to Play makes people spend more money with the game. There are people that end up spending more on a per month basis than they would on a sub.
[QUOTE=Ragekipz;44438831]Free to Play makes people spend more money with the game. There are people that end up spending more on a per month basis than they would on a sub.[/QUOTE]
F2P can either be done good or horrible wrong.
Lord of the Rings online is a good example on how to do it good, played it for over a year and in total i spent 30$ on some items like a horse for faster travel.
I like RuneScape's pay model. Free content, but if you want the full experience, pay up!
[QUOTE=Agoat;44441912]I like RuneScape's pay model. Free content, but if you want the full experience, pay up![/QUOTE]
Runescape would have been fine if they didn't cram the pay up message down your throat every 2 seconds
I actually like Lord of the Rings Online's set up. You can play it for free, a good bit of it too. If you want new content zones, you can buy them. If you want the full experience without buying all of the individual bits, you can just subscribe monthly. It's nice having both options.
I would pick subscription over f2p any day. There is something about f2p that cheapens my overall experience with the game.
[quote]"There’s nothing wrong with the subscription model,” began Georgeson in a chat with IGN. “I have personal opinions, which I’ll go ahead and share because I’m just that cocksure of myself."[/quote]
This is a great way to start an interview, especially on a touchy (for whatever reason) subject such as this. When you begin with a remark like this one, you protect yourself from criticism from those who disagree, you make those who already support you feel good, and you get a laugh from everybody.
As to the actual content of the article, I have to say that I agree to some extent. There are good ways and bad ways to do F2P, but there have always been good and bad game developers, so that shouldn't surprise anybody.
Really looking forward to seeing how Everquest Next turns out.
One cool thing is that the optional subscription model for the game is $14.99 but applies to all thier games and you get discounts when you buy more than one month. So paying monthly in EQ:N gives you premium subscription in planetside 2 as well.
Planetside 2's model is pretty decent. Sure items are generally too expensive but if you get them on sale then its not bad at all. I've spent a total of maybe $45 on the game and gotten 100+ hours out of it that never felt like a grind from since it launched. Thats much less than what forced-subscription MMO's would cost over a few months. The subscription is a decent deal too, but I likely won't subscribe again until the meta-game starts coming in and EQ:N comes out. Right now PS2 is a game I like to play between doing other things or between playing other games, rather than dedicating playtime to it. No point in subscribing when thats the case for me.
I perfer the F2P similar to Rift, with their moto "no tricks, no traps", everything is free if you buy the game, same with the expansion as well, you get extra benefits if you subscribed to patron status which gives you free xp potions every other day up to 7, you will also have access to summon your trainer for respecing or other things
I can understand where they're coming from here. Not everyone is willing to have to repeatedly pay to have access to a game, and even when you can buy 6 months of playtime it kind of forces an obligation on you to play since if you end up not playing as much as usual, like if you could only log on for an hour or so because of work and cooking dinner and doing laundry and all that important IRL stuff, you wouldn't get as much value out of it since your free time is highly limited.
[QUOTE]In this case, laying down a fistful of dollars to buy the whole thing ends up being more appealing to such folks since they don't have to buy months that they can't make the most of since they aren't kids or teens with large amounts of free time and fewer obligations to the world and themselves. After all, when you're young your parents usually do the laundry and cooking and stuff (exceptions are common though), leaving you with more time to play games and watch telly and ignore homework until it has to be due in on Monday.
And of course there's free to play wherein there's a much lower barrier to entry, which in itself makes it more accessible to kids since normally kids don't have a credit card and have to ask their parents to buy games for them, or go to the store and buy a copy with their own pocket money. It's also friendly to the aforementioned folks with little time on their hands since there's no subscription value to panic over, and they can easily drop in and play sight unseen without much risk of being "ripped off" in terms of money. That said there are some F2P games wherein the deck is stacked against you and make it so you need to pay to get a leg-up over the competition (or more appropriately level the playing field to match your peers/foes), but those are some of the worse examples of what F2P can be. Fairer models exist like selling cosmetics in a "pay to look fab" system, or selling boosters for folks who, as mentioned many times prior, do not have masses of time to sink into the game and want to get past the treadmill (angbadang™), which are still more ethical than being able to pay for a straight-up advantage over non-buyers.
Going back to the beef with the traditional subscription model, the main thing wrong with it is that the monthly subscription system means you pay for access to the game until a specified date, namely a number of months after you pay them, meaning your available playtime ticks down whether or not you are playing the game, which looking back does seem pretty exploitative and wasteful depending on how much time you have available. About a year or two ago I spoke about this problem, probably concerning Battlefield Heroes or maybe an upcoming MMO, and I entertained the concept of buying actual playtime as opposed to merely a couple of months of access, using a sort of gasoline comparison. As you drive your car uses up gas in the tank, but when the engine is off it doesn't, meaning when you next start up your car you still have the same amount of gas that you had when you last turned off the engine. In addition when you are low on gas you top up at a station to give you more miles before the next time you run low, and you never want to run out since you can't drive on an empty tank and it's harder to refuel when you can't get the car to the pumps (you usually need to bring a jerrycan to fill up and lug back to your car, unless you always have a filled can in the boot for when your engine runs out on a dark desert highway). Another example closer to home would be mobile phone credit, where you add credit to your phone and can talk on it as long as you have enough credit to pay the going rate (?? cents a minute or however it goes over in America), and you can top-up your phone credit at a newsagents when you are low or have run out.
Apparently Valve thinks a similar system is viable, to some extent, as evidenced by the way they do Experience Boosters in Dota 2, where you get a set number of minutes worth of bonus XP that are only used up during the match, so if you start out with 100 minutes of bonus XP, play a 45 minute match, then come back a month later, you still have about 55 minutes left on the booster, which is more economical than buying a 3 day lease on a better SMG and having it run out 3 days after you bought it (gee, thanks EA). From where I'm standing, I believe the pay-as-you-go model would probably make a good addition to the assortment of pay methods, though it can definitely still be abused by predatory business practices. Whilst the simplest and most ethical variety of PAYG would be buying hours and minutes that tick down as you're playing in the world, there is of course the World of Tanks variety involving "gold ammo", wherein you can buy superior forms of ammunition for your tank using Gold, which in turn is bought using real money. Even with gold ammo being an actual thing as opposed to a game designer's fever-nightmare (way worse than a fever dream but still imaginary), pay-as-you-go could, and can, be used ethically as opposed to leeching the "whales" and kids who lack the sense necessary to not be sucked in by the scam of essentially shooting money at people.
Come to think of it, a predecessor to pay-as-you-go did actually exist in the past, many decades ago in the age of the arcade cabinet, wherein you would insert quarters to start up the game and/or get extra continues. Back in those days there were games that didn't require you to own a console worth hundreds of dollars and $50 cartridges/cassettes/discs, so long as there was an arcade in your neighbourhood you would be able to pay a quarter or two for a single play, and whilst that'd eventually add up as you put in quarter after quarter and eventually end up having spent a large cumulative sum on that title after playing so many times, the barrier to entry was close to that of free-to-play in that you didn't need a credit card or a stack of Abraham Lincolns (from washing Dad's car) to play your favourite arcade hit. You could get into the games with pocket change alone even if it charged you re-entry if you messed up, which being a kid you likely would time after time in the early stages until your skills meant you wouldn't mess up as often, assuming you had the patience to stick with it.[/QUOTE]
Regardless, at the end of the day we are talking about MMOs here and I've ended up talking about all sorts of different monetization methods alongside it. So in conclusion, I believe that pay-as-you-go in MMOs would work way better than buying an entry license that has an inorganic expiry date, since you wouldn't need to play every single day to make the most of an inflexible lease and play massive many-hour sessions every day to the point where you end up with gaming fatigue and spend less times with the other games in your collection. It'd also encourage taking it in moderation and "staggering" your playtime so that you don't burn through a 24 hour allotment in a single weekend, and instead are able to indulge in at least a week or so of shorter sessions before you inevitably have to top up your clock, which in turn would save money. It'd still mean that "whales" would pay more, though, which is a problem since people who would binge on a PAYG MMO from dawn 'till dusk would be buying hours more often, and could be considered exploitative in a similar fashion to how cow-clickers make you wait for things to happen but allow you to pay for things to finish early. However the main distinction there is that cow-clickers are barely games at the best of times, whereas MMOs usually have actual content as opposed to just clicking resources and upgrading brick shithouses, and MMOs don't really force you to wait in that particular way.
I think Guild Wars 2's model is ideal. Pay for access once and then have a cash store with minor cosmetic stuff that is still available with in game currency. Because it's pay to play you get treated like a paying customer and you know that the gameplay mechanics are designed to the benefit of the player and aren't designed to try to get you to spend money with snail progression rates or advertisements. The cash shop will ideally provide enough money to keep the game profitable and receiving updates. Everybody wins.
The problem with subscription MMOs is they rely on hardcore playerbases who have a lot of time to devote to playing a single online game (which stereotypically equates to kids who live at home and adults who live at home) and they almost completely disregard the massive potential of the casual player market. The casual market doesn't want to play subscription based games because they're not going to be playing said games on a weekly basis all the time, sometimes not even monthly but they're still willing to pay for micro transactions.
I think it's not going to be long before ESO offers "F2P options" when they realize they're not making as much money as they thought would be or find that they've sucked up about as much as they can while facing a declining playerbase. They they'll no doubt offer some severely restricted F2P options like WoW does. In the meantime, however long it takes them to get to that point means they'll have already lost countless potential paying customers.
Wildstar works a little differently. They'll offer a system similar to EVE online where if you earn enough gold you can buy your subscription but that still won't hold appeal for casual gamers because you'll first have to buy a subscription for the game and then you'll have to grind your ass off to get to a point where you can constantly grind your ass off enough to keep earning an in-game subscription, all of which is completely counter to a casual playerbase.
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