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what benefit does a company have of making the game free (lotro)
mayebussa
Member Posts: 19
Most of you probably got the news letter from mmorpg this week...
this news letter mensioned that lotro became a ftp game in north america. Most continents will follow, i think. For us, as mmorpg players, this is a good thing to hear.
but my question is, what kind of profit does a company have of making their ptp game a ftp game? probably more players... but the monthly fee is a huge income for the company.
so what do you think about it..
Comments
I could probably write a book about all that but I won't. There are many reasons to do this but it comes out to massively expanding the player base, getting them hooked, and feeding them crack in the form of items and cosmetics in the store for real money.
Plus, once hooked you can still subscribe.
There is a smaller % of people who buy from a cash shop but if you expand the player base by 150% in making free plus sell adventure packs and expansions it ends up, done right, generating tons more revenue. Offering incremental purchases along with re-occuring sub fees from another % of players.
This has worked to revitalize DDO and they are hoping for the exact same success with LOTRO.
I didn't play LotRO before. Now I do. I'm probably going to spend some money on the adventure packs and such. Turbine has made money from me by offering a free product. The biggest difference now is that I get to play for a while to decide if they deserve it.
Important facts:
1. Free to Play games are poorly made.
2. Casuals are not all idiots, but idiots call themselves casuals.
3. Great solo and group content are not mutually exclusive, but they suffer when one is shoved into the mold of the other. The same is true of PvP and PvE.
4. Community is more important than you think.
Increased player base and micro-transactions.
It's a matter of ... is it better to have 5000 customers who pay $15.00 month ($75000) or 20000 customers who average $5.00/mo ($100000)? You do the math and add the extra hardware, bandwidth, support, etc and figure out which is likely to be the most profitable and you follow that route.
edit: Turbine has some questionable practices and at times makes me go WTF? with their design choices but they've got a GOOD handle on setting up an item shop to be profitable. DDO is a perfect example it went from ghost town to pretty populated and fun to play.
Shadus
Answer:
They're not free, they're just shifting the revenue model from subscription based to micro-transaction based.
The "Free" is marketing spin used to lure people to the game in hopes they'll get hooked and then bleed money via MT.
MMOs are a product.
MMO developers are a company whose bottomline is profits and/or maximizing shareholder wealth.
All products go through a "product life cycle" the average product life cycle of an mmo is getting shorter and shorter as the industry matures (just think about how often cellphones come out with a new model now).
Making a mmorpg f2p is a shift in business models in order to implement a new business strategy at the end of a product's life cycle. All companies incorporate a new strategy at every phase of a product's life cycle, this is simply a successful way of not only implementing a new strategy but extending the end of a product's life cycle for a longer period by rejuvenating the population, allowing a more detailed "demo" for potential customers, and stimulating revenues.
For some games I could question a strategy like this but with LOTRO I think a vast majority of the already paying players would and did continue their subs (I know I did) so basically they have just given themselves a whole new group of players to reach who had been out there but unwilling or unable to play the game and contribute to Turbines bottom line.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Yup, as other said just a different way to get paid.
Must be something wrong with the way people think:) they see a $15.00 a month and hesitate, but then they will turn around and spend 5 bucks here and 10 over there, and end up spending more in the end in smaller amounts ..blows my mind:)
Some who really do research may end up saving a few bucks by working the system, but the majority will spend more on F2P games than if they just bought the latest expansion and paid a couple months of subs.
In the end, guess it is up to the people and what the feel comfortable with. Me i will stick to subs, cash shops have a way of adding up if you are not very careful.
While Turbine hasn't necessarily shown a lot of great sense in MMO development in recent years, it appears they're market leaders when it comes to creating a hybrid P2P/Micro transaction model that is satisfactory to a broad player community.
Someday people will write dissertations on their impact on the MMORPG payment model landscape.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
There are a lot of flaws in those types of gamers thoughts.
Some see a $15 sub and think if they aren't playing 40 hours a month they're losing out (seriously I don't see how people can get if you play 3 hours for the whole month you are getting your money's worth).
Some people see $15 as an obligation and start thinking of what they'll be doing 6 months down the road, instead of simply paying for it while having fun and not paying for it when they stop having fun.
I have made the example of music before. Before iTunes and the buy a song and instantly download it era, I would see people buy 4-5 CDs a year. Then once it was just 99 cents to download a song whenever you want, people ended up spending $100+ in a month buying songs. For some reason when something is in small amounts like iTunes songs, apps for your cell phone, a store in an MMO, people don't associate all of the purchases together. So they keep spending a dollar or two because it is just a dollar or two, instead of looking at the fact that it is X amount of money in a month. The moment that you set the amount it is for a month (with a subscription) some people just focus on that value and can't accept that it is a fair deal.
A couple years of people realizing they are spending tons of money in cash shops might lead them to realize the sub MMOs without cash shops are great deals. But they might also never make that realization and will instead just waste a ton of money in their lifetime. Some human brains are truly fascinating things.
Two reasons...
1. Remove initial purchase price increases the number of people that will try the game
2. Introduces a shop which can be used to further monetise players of the game
It isn't about turning it into a free to play game, it is about getting more people into the game who money can be made from and about getting more money than just the subscription fee out of people.
As others have pointed out, it isn't necessarily free. In the case of LOTRO, you can access limited portions of content for free. The goal is to attract a new customer into trying it out potentially beyond a standard X day trial with the promise that you could continue to play for free.
For the LOTRO hybrid model, you can stay F2P (limited to zones up to level 20 mobs), buy some of the Turbine Points (TPs) to gain access to additional goods and zones, or pay a subscription to gain all zones automatically (as well as a few other benefits). But now even the subscription-based players can now buy TPs to get some additional items (none game breaking, but reduces a hassle of spending the time in-game to get them).
Overall, the reason micro-transactions are becoming the big thing is the amazing success of games such as Farmville. On average (with a wide variance), people actually spend a bit more per month with micro-transactions than they spend on monthly fees. But there is something very attractive to people about the ability to choose specifically what they spend their money on rather than giving them everything for "one low monthly fee".
So, from your perspective, you are getting a deal by being able to play a game for "free" (possibly forgetting about all those little things you bought from time to time), and, from the company perspective, they are pulling in more money overall due to a combination of increased membership and the micro-transactions that noone claims to be making (but most actually do).
It's the Costco mind set of business. Volume = positive ROI.
Why do some Dollar stores do well? Volume.
Turbine practiced this with DDO, it was successful and beneficial for that title. What happens when you apply a successful model to a successful property? More success.
I am glad Turbine is doing this, I would be unhappy if everyone does this. I will always pay 15 bucks a month for a Quality online gaming experience. Crafting a MMO with a F2P mentality from the start affects many decisions all the way up the chain. Customer experience and game quality are often the casualties of those discussions.
I think to some degree the cost of these games are changing. In the past a large part of the cost was infrastructure and networks to maintain and run the game. However server costs are dropping, network costs are dropping. The cost of supporting one user playing the game has no doubt dropped significantly. Development however has gone up and most players expect updates and frequent enhancements in fact it is necessary to compete.
So volume is critical to support dev costs. So if they can get people to start playing the game and drive up the volume and use microtransactions to ease people into playing they will drive up their revenue even if the average per player is less. So new people can get in and play quite a bit for nothing, As they are hooked they start paying on a sliding scale. Sub players might also buy more and pay more. So in the end this provides a good low cost way to grow subs with little cost and lets players have more control over what they pay.
The ultimate goal is increasing revenue which gets used to add more stuff players might want to buy and to add more content to keep people who are hooked continueing to play.
All and all I think it is a great model and the way it is on LoTR actually seems pretty good. Better then most ftp setups.
---
Ethion
Hey...it's working too. I know of several people who are currently playing the F2P game telling me to try it out. One has already dropped $ on the game. That's $ he would NEVER have spent with LOTRO ever!!!
Honestly, I wish them success in the F2P version. I think it could be quite beneficial for them over time.
Personally if i didnt see a reason to play it while it was P2P there really isint much incentive for me to play it for free. I did get invited to the F2P beta and played it for a while told then what i thought and uninstalled it because to me it was the same experience and i didnt find it that entertaining the first time around. Anyway i hope that they are successful just more options for gamers to find their place in the MMO world to play and have fun.
See, I'm in the opposite boat. I wouldn't have paid a DIME for a lifetime sub to this game a year ago. I had NO interest in a midget and hobblet game and there is ZERO chance I'd have ever bought the flipping box copy of the game...however...with some friends of mine from other games trying this game out, and liking it, I WILL try it. One guy is already trying to convince me to pay $ for it.
So for me, in this case, making the game F2P was brilliant at trying to gain my $.
I am glad to see Turbine released 2 high quaity games to the free to play market. Because it will increased the competition to make better quality game. I have played both DDO and LOTRO while they were P2P, anyway, it is not so interesting anymore to play a long game like LOTRO or Aion .... FFX14. Currently, I am playing DDO Unlimited, whenever I want to play, I just log in and join a PUG, voila. No need to grind like no tomorrow.
And the best thing at playing DDO, there is no one selling gold, no one swearing in the game. No spam in chat channel. If you are tired of unlimited grinding in mmo, maybe DDO is for you.
Its not actually FTP. They give you a taste of the game for free but if you want to play the whole thing you gotta pay. Thats their benefit - new subs.
DDO's reveneue jumped 500%, sub DOUBLED, after going F2P.
That is what is expected of LOTRO.
Not entirely true for DDO. NOt sure about lotro yet.
In DDO you can concievably get EVERYTHING for free. But it would take a huge amount of grinding characters across all servers.
In the end it is more of an issue of fun and how much you think your time is worth. You can just to do favor runs over and over if you want.
Keep in mind DDO Store purchases usually apply to all servers. You can "purchase" the Vet status for a pretty small amount of in game earned favor. Vet status lets you start a character 4th level. You could easily get vet status. Then farm favor over and over across all servers (to get the extra free points for unlock certain amounts of favor per server).
All of this without paying a dime. Now I personally do not want to do this as it sounds like a huge grind that is not that fun in an RPG perspective.
But you can concievably achieve everything in DDO without ever paying a dime. I wouldn't really reccomend it though. Although I would reccomend the farm method up to a certain point if you are on a limited budget.
Ah yeah I stated how the paying part is wrong above, but also the second sentence is off as well.
DDO revenue went up bya factor of 5. DDO subs wnet up by a factor of 2.
Therefore they are getting more money from store purchases than from subs in general. While new subs is a clear benefit. Double is clearly quite significant.
Turbine is not doing this to get more subs per se. They are running a cash shop. It is the majority of their revenue now.
Personally I think the fact that their content updates are now things that are a smaller transaction and are forced to stand on their own two feet is a great thing.
But makes no mistake this is a cash shop with aggressive marketing. And their revenue numbers show which source of revenue is worth more money.
IMo F2P is the NEW WAVE idea to try and keep a game fro mdying.
SWG was the old way,the game was losing subs in a large way,so the developer SOE tried to incorporate change to save the dying game.Vanguard,same thing,LOTRO same thing,i am sure the yhave watched a steady decline in numbers and therefore need to make a move or the game will just die.
IMO the developer sees F2P as a sort of free trial,it encourages people to at least try the game,but what they don't realize is that there is a ton of free loaders who wil lnot pay no matter what.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
^This^. Pretty much it with LOTRO. You hit level 20 and you pretty much have to start paying in order to really do anything in game. It is an extended demo and NOT f2p. Yes, you hit the nail on the head.
Let's party like it is 1863!
You still get people to sub to the game (to get the "value" monthly allowance and inherent lifted restrictions that cripple the non-subscriber to LOTS of microtransactions), and you get them to "accept" a full scale cash shop with consumables, items that let you skip game mechanics (like trait rank ups, kinship/housing upkeep, xp modifiers).
It's a win-win for the developers, not so much for the consumer. There is something called free trials if you want to try a game before spending money on it.
For a declining or a nearly dead game it's even more effective.
I keep seeing these figures thrown around by those trying to justify the F2P move. Anyone have any numbers of what the population of DDO was before it went F2P? Double subs sounds like a lot but the lower the number before it doulbed the less impressive it gets. Same with the revenue. A 500% increase would be a lot if you were making a fortune to start with but again, the lower the base figure the less impressive it gets.
WOW isnt great because it has 12 million players. WOW has 12 million players because its great.