When you look on sites like Youtube or GameTrailers, you see what newer MMO players want.
The first question is:
"is this pay?" when someone answers "yes", the reply is something along the lines of "lol forget it then"
Kids now grow up with Xbox 360 network, PS3 network, Online Facebook games, F2P MMO.
They have NEVER paid for an online game, ever. They EXPECT it to be free, no, they DEMAND it. F2P isn't going to win because people here like it, it will win because random 16-year-old decided that they will only play F2P and B2P.
First the Xbox 360 requires a fee to play anything online. Second did you really just cite youtube comments as proof of your theory?
The 360 gives them access for every single game they buy, that's different.
And yes I cited Youtube, it's a good measure to see what the average non-MMO player thinks about MMO because people from all sorts of gaming backgrounds visit that site, unlike this site, which is full of people already playing MMO or who have in the past lol. This site is still too much into P2P compared to your average player who prefers F2P.
not yet!but when the datapipe between say china and america or eu gets big enough player will play directly in asia!it is already starting check aika ,all diff langage world wide yet we played all in the same game .so the day you got anglish only or french only or mandarin only server are counted,soon the datapipe will be nig enough that blizzard wont need a specific server in china same for insanelly good title like loong.lets face it title that do great elsewhere die very fast in other country that try to itemise!(localise )
i play loong awsomne game fair amount of player but it is version 1 something in china they are at 3.5 see the difference
some part of the game arent translated yet!but the game run smooth like butter even if server are in eu!
Datapipe is not a problem. Latency is. No matter how "big" datapipe will be you won't be able to decrease latency more.
Data is going thorugh fiber optic cables. So theoretical max is speed of light , 123 miles / s + have to add miliseconds you lose at routing points ,etc so even if you have business class line , at best you will get ~150 ms to Korea , to mainland China much more. But that is only theoretical becasue you will have many hop points so average user will get 200 ms + , with 300+ beign common.
If you in Eu that will be even more since distance is bigger.
So there are psychical boundaries and most games if have enough players try to keep separate servers in main regions of world for that reason.
First the Xbox 360 requires a fee to play anything online. Second did you really just cite youtube comments as proof of your theory?
The 360 gives them access for every single game they buy, that's different.
And yes I cited Youtube, it's a good measure to see what the average non-MMO player thinks about MMO because people from all sorts of gaming backgrounds visit that site, unlike this site, which is full of people already playing MMO or who have in the past lol. This site is still too much into P2P compared to your average player who prefers F2P.
It's a good measure to see there are plenty of views expressed, but it hardly shows much outside of that, every other comment is for one thing or the other, just like here. Besides I thought it was common knowledge the average MMO player/fan is an adult rather than "kids".
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
When you look on sites like Youtube or GameTrailers, you see what newer MMO players want.
The first question is:
"is this pay?" when someone answers "yes", the reply is something along the lines of "lol forget it then"
Kids now grow up with Xbox 360 network, PS3 network, Online Facebook games, F2P MMO.
They have NEVER paid for an online game, ever. They EXPECT it to be free, no, they DEMAND it. F2P isn't going to win because people here like it, it will win because random 16-year-old decided that they will only play F2P and B2P.
News for you. When first subscription based games came to market , it was unimaginable for most players to pay a monthly fee to play and most were saying "I have to pay every month? No way!". So sorry to break it for you but nothing changed in this matter.
Most gamers didnt want to pay in past , don't want to pay now and will not want to pay in future.
Short answer, no; there have been so many mediocre releases of late, that developers are switching to micro transactions hoping to bail out their investors.
In due course this scramble by every man and his dog playing with the MT model will fade away, because monthly subs are still the best revenue stream for GOOD mmo's with a healthy player base, and there are still plenty of mmo gamers more than happy to pay monthly subs for good content.
My Colour Is Vomit green, I puke on the tards with stupid colour sigs. My symbol is ,,!, O ,!,, My enemies are any prat with a colour sig, a meaningless personality test, or a pointless list of games and classes.
When you look on sites like Youtube or GameTrailers, you see what newer MMO players want.
The first question is:
"is this pay?" when someone answers "yes", the reply is something along the lines of "lol forget it then"
Kids now grow up with Xbox 360 network, PS3 network, Online Facebook games, F2P MMO.
They have NEVER paid for an online game, ever. They EXPECT it to be free, no, they DEMAND it. F2P isn't going to win because people here like it, it will win because random 16-year-old decided that they will only play F2P and B2P.
News for you. When first subscription based games came to market , it was unimaginable for most players to pay a monthly fee to play and most were saying "I have to pay every month? No way!". So sorry to break it for you but nothing changed in this matter.
Most gamers didnt want to pay in past , don't want to pay now and will not want to pay in future.
Nothing new. Move along.
What past are you talking about? When EQ came out it was one of the few online games you could play, people were willing to pay for it, just like people were willing to pay for email in the past. How many people still pay for email? There's your answer.
When you look on sites like Youtube or GameTrailers, you see what newer MMO players want.
The first question is:
"is this pay?" when someone answers "yes", the reply is something along the lines of "lol forget it then"
Kids now grow up with Xbox 360 network, PS3 network, Online Facebook games, F2P MMO.
They have NEVER paid for an online game, ever. They EXPECT it to be free, no, they DEMAND it. F2P isn't going to win because people here like it, it will win because random 16-year-old decided that they will only play F2P and B2P.
News for you. When first subscription based games came to market , it was unimaginable for most players to pay a monthly fee to play and most were saying "I have to pay every month? No way!". So sorry to break it for you but nothing changed in this matter.
Most gamers didnt want to pay in past , don't want to pay now and will not want to pay in future.
Nothing new. Move along.
Maintenance expenses are a lot cheaper and players have way more options. If people don't question why they're still paying $15 a month to a P2P MMO when a B2P AAA MMO comes to the market, there's something wrong with them.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it."-Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
What past are you talking about? When EQ came out it was one of the few online games you could play, people were willing to pay for it, just like people were willing to pay for email in the past. How many people still pay for email? There's your answer.
You should think on more than one point, or at least both sides of a point before you post. How does free e-mail pay for itself? I could care less about a Dew add here and there on a website. However I do not want Mt.dew adds all over the games I play. I've seen it before in AA, needless to say I stopped playing that game then and there. AVP trailers anyone? Yeah...
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Maintenance expenses are a lot cheaper and players have way more options. If people don't question why they're still paying $15 a month to a P2P MMO when a B2P AAA MMO comes to the market, there's something wrong with them.
That's not exactly a fair point, this is all dependant on how they make money for support, and continued development. If all support is handled by Ncsoft as an example, would it not still be subscriptions that are helping to pay for that? Worse yet Subs from people who aren't even playing that game.
Also if they make a substantial profit off MT for adventure packs, and/or cosmetics, it's really not exactly 100% B2P.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
When you look on sites like Youtube or GameTrailers, you see what newer MMO players want.
The first question is:
"is this pay?" when someone answers "yes", the reply is something along the lines of "lol forget it then"
Kids now grow up with Xbox 360 network, PS3 network, Online Facebook games, F2P MMO.
They have NEVER paid for an online game, ever. They EXPECT it to be free, no, they DEMAND it. F2P isn't going to win because people here like it, it will win because random 16-year-old decided that they will only play F2P and B2P.
News for you. When first subscription based games came to market , it was unimaginable for most players to pay a monthly fee to play and most were saying "I have to pay every month? No way!". So sorry to break it for you but nothing changed in this matter.
Most gamers didnt want to pay in past , don't want to pay now and will not want to pay in future.
Nothing new. Move along.
Maintenance expenses are a lot cheaper and players have way more options. If people don't question why they're still paying $15 a month to a P2P MMO when a B2P AAA MMO comes to the market, there's something wrong with them.
Great job for judgining people really.
I could say the same that there is something wrong with people agreeing to have game designed around Item Shop and not around providing fun. With average player of f2p game still paying amount close or more than subscription.
Especially that mmorpg is one of cheapest entertaiment avabile in modern society.
Going to cinema once ,buying one book not to mention grabbing few drinks in bar will cost you more sometimes much more.
Besides my thing against F2P is not about money. It is about item shops and items in there and how impact then have on game. I would pay even more than current subscription to play a game without item shop.
I don't feel that something is wrong with me. Propably milions of users playing p2p games think same.
When you look on sites like Youtube or GameTrailers, you see what newer MMO players want.
The first question is:
"is this pay?" when someone answers "yes", the reply is something along the lines of "lol forget it then"
Kids now grow up with Xbox 360 network, PS3 network, Online Facebook games, F2P MMO.
They have NEVER paid for an online game, ever. They EXPECT it to be free, no, they DEMAND it. F2P isn't going to win because people here like it, it will win because random 16-year-old decided that they will only play F2P and B2P.
News for you. When first subscription based games came to market , it was unimaginable for most players to pay a monthly fee to play and most were saying "I have to pay every month? No way!". So sorry to break it for you but nothing changed in this matter.
Most gamers didnt want to pay in past , don't want to pay now and will not want to pay in future.
Nothing new. Move along.
What past are you talking about? When EQ came out it was one of the few online games you could play, people were willing to pay for it, just like people were willing to pay for email in the past. How many people still pay for email? There's your answer.
Willing to pay for it? I don't know exactly when EQ was released ,but I remember UO release and I believe it was around same time as EQ I maybe even earlier?
I was heavy into gaming then ,much more than atm. So I followed mailing groups, I knew alot of gamers personally in rl, I was going for every week compuiter bazars in my city (yeah in 97 there were thing like that). 95% + of GAMERS were actually suprised that there is a game that you have to pay monthly and not just buy box and "own it". So most of them were saying "no way" to paying subscription.
I don't know what country are you living in but in 97 in my country there were already few of free email service so actually very few people payed for it.
EDIT:checked EQ ,1999 in this year in my country were quite alot of free email services already.
Is it better than Guild Wars? -No? Then why are you paying a subsciption for it?
Weird, GW1 was my first MMO (Its an MMO GW fanboys) and once I played WoW I thought "I have no problem paying 15$ a month for the amount of content I am getting".
GW1 lasted a month and a half for me, WoW 4 years and only now am I getting bored of Azeroth.
Your comparison is flawed. GW1 didnt last you only a month and a half due to lack of content. If all you did all day every day for a month and a half is play GW then i doubt even with that you would be able to succesfully complete all the content available in the game. I played the game for 3 yrs before stopping and didnt complete everything. I then left for 4 years trying out other games both f2p and p2p. I have just recently restarted playing GW1 about a week ago and have been blown away by the amount of new content available that so far i havent paid a dime for. Honestly ive never seen any game come close to the amount of content that GW has. 95% of the games content is end game content as well. And there end game content doesnt consist of running the same instance for a month or 2 on a gear treadmill, so you can move onto the next of maybe a dozen instances for another month.
You may not have liked GW for whatever reason, but to claim it is due to lack of content is absurd, especially at this point.
You're confusing personal replayableity and preferances (I can't spell w/o Spell check) as content.
GW1 has about 10 gigs worth of content.
WoW is pushing it at 25 gigs.
WoW has an ass load of more content then Gw1 does no matter how you look at it. And (I believe) it is due to the money they make from subs that they are able to consistanly up-date the game with about 1-2 gigs every content patch.
Not saying GW1 does not have that much content, its just that to say it has as much as EQ2, WoW, or even RIft that is sitting at about 8 gigs, would simply mean you're wrong.
Im going to have to point out the absurdity of this comment by simply asking how much out of these games space on my HD's is graphics? How about game engine? UI? Unless your definition of content is purely HD space in which case the less optimized game engine will win. Horray for sloppy programming i guess if thats your defintion of content. Also the size of the client on your HD doesnt reflect the size of the game like it does in single player games. MMO's give you a client and the information not stored on your client is stored on the games server itself. Some games store more of the info on there server's, and some store more on your client.
When i spoke of content i was refering to it in terms of things to do that have a point in the game. Unless i was unsuccessful running an instance, i have never once had to rerun it in GW1 and yet i have not ran out of things to do in it. It isnt a rerun the same instance gear grind masquerading as content like WoW or WAR. The first time you run an instance, that is content, the next 20 times you run the same exact instance with no changes to it, isnt new content.
People keep comparing GW2's (B2P also) to WAR's PQ's (even though they each represent far more content than a WAR PQ due to different possible outcomes at every stage for more replayability/content). WAR had around 250 PQ's (of which you only got to experience half since they were divided between the 2 factions in the game), GW2 is boasting 1600+. My point is that the idea that sub games will always have more content because your giving them more money every month is not always the case. It should be, but it isnt.
My definition of content is things to do, or amount of things to do.
WoW has about 90 dungeons and raids, and roughly 9 Bgs and almost 10k quest.
The only solid number I was able to find on GW1 was 19 dungeons.
Now once agian, what has more content?
As far as GW2 dynamic events are concernd (Suck w/o spell check) I think 1.6k dynamic events arn't as impressive as they could have been had ANet not have gotten rid of traditional questing all together. The resorces that could have gone into making quest have been turned into dynamic events, all they did was change content and not add to it.
The GW dungeons you speak of were actually only the ones they released in there last expansion eye of the north, that doesnt count missions or quests. Missions are basically storyline dungeons themselves. 25 were released in the original game. 21 more released in factions. Another 24 released with nightfall. And the 19 you mention released in eye of the north. And then of course there is the 4 additional missions from the bonus mission pack. That leaves us with a total of 93 dungeons vs. your 90 for your pay $15 a month WoW.
And only 9 BG's? really? i was kind of expecting more from WoW in reguards to throwing pvp players some kind of bone. Our random team arena's alone have 13 different maps. Then there is codex arena, and the Hall of heroes has another 9 group pvp maps, And then of course there is Guild vs. Guild which uses one of the guilds hall's as its arena of which there are 16 types. Then there are alliance battles with another 5 maps, plus fort aspenwood and the jade quarry pvp maps. So basically 9 WoW BG's vs. 46 pvp maps in GW. So where is this $15 a month going for the competetive pvper? I mean sure you guys can have open world pvp, but that is just a gank fest, not competetive pvp. So much for PvP content.
Getting back to your statment about WoW's 10k quests. Im not going to claim here that in this case GW has more. 10k is a pretty obscene amount and with the fact that both games have Daily quests, bringing up quests in terms of numbers doesnt seem to make much sense since both games have been using dailies to put you on a never ending quest treadmill of which you can never complete. TBH while i dont think GW has more than or even 10k quests, given as how ive played the game for 3 yrs straight and still havent ran out, as they keep adding new ones in free updates, at this point im not concerned with content when its unreasonable for me to expect i would run out. You may choose to see that as a cop out on my end, but i look at it realistically. If a game has 10k quests for free or 20k quests to pay per month, im not going to spend money on the 20k quests when i will never get to go through even 10k.
Sure WoW probably has more quests but that is usually reguarded as the lesser content of an mmo as opposed to its pvp, storyline, dungeons/raids. Just seems to me that they should have contentrated more on there group activity a bit more instead of trying to figure out another way of shoehorning another "kill 10 of x and come back" quests. If that is what im expected to pay $15 a month for, then no thank you. If that is what passes for development money well spent than it wont be spent with my money.
I do want to bring up something else about the differnce in content you pay for though. When burning crusade came out, how much area did it add to the game world to explore? When factions came out, it doubled the size of the GW world. Same with Nightfall. The expansions added about as much new land mass to the game as was originally available. Tyria is currently 4 times the size it was when GW came out. How much bigger is azeroth's map now compared to when WoW's original release?
Seems like it and I hope The Old Republic never goes f2p. I'm really starting to dislike this f2p model because mmos that have the model seem nothing more than a walk-in mini mall. Who cares how gameplay is, as long as you buy my costume or potions for 10 bucks you are the #1 fan.
Maintenance expenses are a lot cheaper and players have way more options. If people don't question why they're still paying $15 a month to a P2P MMO when a B2P AAA MMO comes to the market, there's something wrong with them.
That's not exactly a fair point, this is all dependant on how they make money for support, and continued development. If all support is handled by Ncsoft as an example, would it not still be subscriptions that are helping to pay for that? Worse yet Subs from people who aren't even playing that game.
Also if they make a substantial profit off MT for adventure packs, and/or cosmetics, it's really not exactly 100% B2P.
I gotta ask. The idea of support keeps coming up in this thread. How much are we talking about here? We're talking about GMs to unstick you and people to answer the phones, right? That's what keeps coming up. Previously, people used the subscription cost to justify the bandwidth and servers and whatnot. Since that has been disproved (see my sig), is customer support the new justification? GW1 was making $19 million per quarter in its heyday, making significantly more money than City of Heroes over the same time frame. Aion is making $60 million per quarter. This is serious money. What I keep coming back to is that GW1 must have been profitable, it must have been seriously profitable or else GW2 would not have the same model. We're talking about profitable, here, not a labor of love that goes in the black just because NCSoft has its own support staff.
It's B2P if you can buy the box and then never HAVE to buy anything again. You can dust off your 5 year old copy of GW and be just as competitive as anybody else, they didn't even raise the level cap with expansions.
Originally posted by Sulaa
Great job for judgining people really.
I could say the same that there is something wrong with people agreeing to have game designed around Item Shop and not around providing fun. With average player of f2p game still paying amount close or more than subscription.
Especially that mmorpg is one of cheapest entertaiment avabile in modern society.
Going to cinema once ,buying one book not to mention grabbing few drinks in bar will cost you more sometimes much more.
Besides my thing against F2P is not about money. It is about item shops and items in there and how impact then have on game. I would pay even more than current subscription to play a game without item shop.
I don't feel that something is wrong with me. Propably milions of users playing p2p games think same.
I'm not even talking about Free to Play, I'm talking about GW1 and GW2's buy to play model with a vanity item shop. I'm saying that if someone can offer you exactly the same AAA MMO experience you're getting right now for a subscription, and instead of charging you a sub, they're charging only $60 upfront (and possibly adding content that is voluntary to buy as DLCs, or expansions which your P2P MMO also makes you charge for), then the B2P option is clearly better.
It's like, what if two equal P2P MMOs were coming out and one charged a $10 subscription and the other $15. You wouldn't say well, I'm going to pay the $15 because it's still cheaper than going to the movies, right? That would be silly. Well, what if one of those MMOs only charged $5, or $1, and still gave you the full experience? People would love it. So why is it so hard to comprehend that a MMO can survive and thrive and not charge a subscription at all, nor screw people in a cash shop or make them pay to win?
It's not judging to say that it would make no sense to me if someone continued to pay more for an equivalent product, and didn't even question why they were doing it.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it."-Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
I gotta ask. The idea of support keeps coming up in this thread. How much are we talking about here? We're talking about GMs to unstick you and people to answer the phones, right? That's what keeps coming up. Previously, people used the subscription cost to justify the bandwidth and servers and whatnot. Since that has been disproved (see my sig), is customer support the new justification? GW1 was making $19 million per quarter in its heyday, making significantly more money than City of Heroes over the same time frame. Aion is making $60 million per quarter. This is serious money. What I keep coming back to is that GW1 must have been profitable, it must have been seriously profitable or else GW2 would not have the same model. We're talking about profitable, here, not a labor of love that goes in the black just because NCSoft has its own support staff.
It's B2P if you can buy the box and then never HAVE to buy anything again. You can dust off your 5 year old copy of GW and be just as competitive as anybody else, they didn't even raise the level cap with expansions.
I gotta ask what does what you may have read before have to do with my opinion? Not to mention what I look at in terms of running an MMO service? Sorry if I threw a curve ball toward the other side of the issue it's not my fault you or others don't think about the whole issue.
I've heard Strains quote before as well, all he talked about were server costs, because that was the context in which he was speaking. Him saying they don't have to worry about that, is not saying no one out there does, nor that there are not other things other companies have to consider.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I believe there will be room for both. f2P done right could be good. It's a great system for people who want to control what they spend or play limited time. The notion however the p2p is a scam is silly. Everyone knows the deal with it. There's no secrets that when you stop paying it stops. Funny how things become a scam when other people don't like them. b2P would be ideal and I know a lot of people point to gw and gw2 coming. I think you just have to hope that companies that may bring b2p games will have the resources to produce a good b2p.
It's not a scam because people don't like them, it's a scam because it's a ripoff. Look at this chart someone compiled from NCSoft reports. As far as I can tell, this is income and it's in millions of Korean Won, which would mean that 20000 is approximately 19 million dollars. Look at the revenue here. Aion hit 3.5 million subscribers in May 2009 apparently, and it's bringing in 40, 60 or 90 million per quarter (between 13 and 30 mil per month), and that's just one game. Even Guild Wars, which has no subscription, only a vanity cash shop and hasn't put out new content since 2007 is still bringing in 2-3 million per quarter.
Btw, we also know from their report that bandwidth for ALL their games is a combined 2.7 million per quarter. Guild Wars alone would pay for that.
Still don't see the scam part. They state a fee, people either agree to pay it or not. I think the problem is people are subbing into crappy games. I'd feel ripped off I guess as well if I paid a sub for a substandard game. Anyway I respect your point of view.
Short answer, no; there have been so many mediocre releases of late, that developers are switching to micro transactions hoping to bail out their investors.
In due course this scramble by every man and his dog playing with the MT model will fade away, because monthly subs are still the best revenue stream for GOOD mmo's with a healthy player base, and there are still plenty of mmo gamers more than happy to pay monthly subs for good content.
Maybe I'm just being cynical, but these mediocre releases might just be the way MMOs are. I'd bet that even GW2 and SWTOR will not have the same retention rates as older MMOs. The "healthy player base" just might be a thing of the past, for the vast majority of MMOs. That means that subscriptions are not going to cover whatever bills they need to pay as well as an item shop could, be it support, bandwidth, or content updates.
People are going back and forth in this thread about whether MMOs need money for upkeep, and I don't think that even matters. They CAN make money from players, so of course they will keep trying, whether they really need to, or not. Ideally, putting some of that revenue back into the game, one way or another, but that's beside the point.
Instead of depending on subs, they should be thinking about how to get money from the vast majority of players, who only stick around for a month or two. Not only that, but those players might stay (and pay) for longer, if there weren't a subscription involved, forcing them to decide if they're dedicated enough to the game to warrant paying it month after month. Juggling multiple MMOs would be a lot more viable too, if it weren't always a question of whether you really want to subscribe again or not. This would likely mean a persistently healthier playerbase.
I think it is an obsolete system, and will likely continue to get worse. It's just a matter of time before the industry figures it out.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
When you look on sites like Youtube or GameTrailers, you see what newer MMO players want.
The first question is:
"is this pay?" when someone answers "yes", the reply is something along the lines of "lol forget it then"
Kids now grow up with Xbox 360 network, PS3 network, Online Facebook games, F2P MMO.
They have NEVER paid for an online game, ever. They EXPECT it to be free, no, they DEMAND it. F2P isn't going to win because people here like it, it will win because random 16-year-old decided that they will only play F2P and B2P.
I find this funny because I was just saying the same thing to a friend the other day. It really makes me feel like an old dinosaur at the age of 29.
"Back in my day!" "You young whippersnappers" "I had to walk 100 miles in -50 degree blizzards" "Today's stuff is crap" "It's not made like it used to" and the like etc etc.
Anyone know of any good retirement homes?
Seriously though, I still think these hybrid f2p games(all f2p games really) should also offer a p2p server where everything in the cash shop is instead bought with in game currency. Get the best of both worlds! There's no reason to be so polarizing.
Edit: Oh yeah and not just f2p but p2p should come offering f2p too. It's free marketing and I think they'd be very happy with the outcome of that... you, unless they're afraid their game is crap and isn't worth anything other than a quick and cheap smash and grab.
We really need separate forums for every newly launched game. There can be the anti-<MMO> one and there can be the 'what general discussion should be' one. All the lamenting can happen together where each can find solace in like minded can't-move-on-ers leaving the rest of us to actually move forward and discuss meaningful and relevant topics.
Is it better than Guild Wars? -No? Then why are you paying a subsciption for it?
Weird, GW1 was my first MMO (Its an MMO GW fanboys) and once I played WoW I thought "I have no problem paying 15$ a month for the amount of content I am getting".
GW1 lasted a month and a half for me, WoW 4 years and only now am I getting bored of Azeroth.
Your comparison is flawed. GW1 didnt last you only a month and a half due to lack of content. If all you did all day every day for a month and a half is play GW then i doubt even with that you would be able to succesfully complete all the content available in the game. I played the game for 3 yrs before stopping and didnt complete everything. I then left for 4 years trying out other games both f2p and p2p. I have just recently restarted playing GW1 about a week ago and have been blown away by the amount of new content available that so far i havent paid a dime for. Honestly ive never seen any game come close to the amount of content that GW has. 95% of the games content is end game content as well. And there end game content doesnt consist of running the same instance for a month or 2 on a gear treadmill, so you can move onto the next of maybe a dozen instances for another month.
You may not have liked GW for whatever reason, but to claim it is due to lack of content is absurd, especially at this point.
You're confusing personal replayableity and preferances (I can't spell w/o Spell check) as content.
GW1 has about 10 gigs worth of content.
WoW is pushing it at 25 gigs.
WoW has an ass load of more content then Gw1 does no matter how you look at it. And (I believe) it is due to the money they make from subs that they are able to consistanly up-date the game with about 1-2 gigs every content patch.
Not saying GW1 does not have that much content, its just that to say it has as much as EQ2, WoW, or even RIft that is sitting at about 8 gigs, would simply mean you're wrong.
Im going to have to point out the absurdity of this comment by simply asking how much out of these games space on my HD's is graphics? How about game engine? UI? Unless your definition of content is purely HD space in which case the less optimized game engine will win. Horray for sloppy programming i guess if thats your defintion of content. Also the size of the client on your HD doesnt reflect the size of the game like it does in single player games. MMO's give you a client and the information not stored on your client is stored on the games server itself. Some games store more of the info on there server's, and some store more on your client.
When i spoke of content i was refering to it in terms of things to do that have a point in the game. Unless i was unsuccessful running an instance, i have never once had to rerun it in GW1 and yet i have not ran out of things to do in it. It isnt a rerun the same instance gear grind masquerading as content like WoW or WAR. The first time you run an instance, that is content, the next 20 times you run the same exact instance with no changes to it, isnt new content.
People keep comparing GW2's (B2P also) to WAR's PQ's (even though they each represent far more content than a WAR PQ due to different possible outcomes at every stage for more replayability/content). WAR had around 250 PQ's (of which you only got to experience half since they were divided between the 2 factions in the game), GW2 is boasting 1600+. My point is that the idea that sub games will always have more content because your giving them more money every month is not always the case. It should be, but it isnt.
My definition of content is things to do, or amount of things to do.
WoW has about 90 dungeons and raids, and roughly 9 Bgs and almost 10k quest.
The only solid number I was able to find on GW1 was 19 dungeons.
Now once agian, what has more content?
As far as GW2 dynamic events are concernd (Suck w/o spell check) I think 1.6k dynamic events arn't as impressive as they could have been had ANet not have gotten rid of traditional questing all together. The resorces that could have gone into making quest have been turned into dynamic events, all they did was change content and not add to it.
The GW dungeons you speak of were actually only the ones they released in there last expansion eye of the north, that doesnt count missions or quests. Missions are basically storyline dungeons themselves. 25 were released in the original game. 21 more released in factions. Another 24 released with nightfall. And the 19 you mention released in eye of the north. And then of course there is the 4 additional missions from the bonus mission pack. That leaves us with a total of 93 dungeons vs. your 90 for your pay $15 a month WoW.
I went to GW wiki and counted the missions by hand and got way less then 93, I would like to see where you got your numbers.
And only 9 BG's? really? i was kind of expecting more from WoW in reguards to throwing pvp players some kind of bone. Our random team arena's alone have 13 different maps. Then there is codex arena, and the Hall of heroes has another 9 group pvp maps, And then of course there is Guild vs. Guild which uses one of the guilds hall's as its arena of which there are 16 types. Then there are alliance battles with another 5 maps, plus fort aspenwood and the jade quarry pvp maps. So basically 9 WoW BG's vs. 46 pvp maps in GW. So where is this $15 a month going for the competetive pvper? I mean sure you guys can have open world pvp, but that is just a gank fest, not competetive pvp. So much for PvP content.
In my experiance GW1 primary focus was PvP so ofcorse they would have more PvP maps.
Getting back to your statment about WoW's 10k quests. Im not going to claim here that in this case GW has more. 10k is a pretty obscene amount and with the fact that both games have Daily quests, bringing up quests in terms of numbers doesnt seem to make much sense since both games have been using dailies to put you on a never ending quest treadmill of which you can never complete. TBH while i dont think GW has more than or even 10k quests, given as how ive played the game for 3 yrs straight and still havent ran out, as they keep adding new ones in free updates, at this point im not concerned with content when its unreasonable for me to expect i would run out. You may choose to see that as a cop out on my end, but i look at it realistically. If a game has 10k quests for free or 20k quests to pay per month, im not going to spend money on the 20k quests when i will never get to go through even 10k.
Sure WoW probably has more quests but that is usually reguarded as the lesser content of an mmo as opposed to its pvp, storyline, dungeons/raids. Just seems to me that they should have contentrated more on there group activity a bit more instead of trying to figure out another way of shoehorning another "kill 10 of x and come back" quests. If that is what im expected to pay $15 a month for, then no thank you. If that is what passes for development money well spent than it wont be spent with my money.
I do want to bring up something else about the differnce in content you pay for though. When burning crusade came out, how much area did it add to the game world to explore? When factions came out, it doubled the size of the GW world. Same with Nightfall. The expansions added about as much new land mass to the game as was originally available. Tyria is currently 4 times the size it was when GW came out. How much bigger is azeroth's map now compared to when WoW's original release?
The original WoW world was about 80 square miles.
Also you keep forget about what I said about consisant up-dates, GW1 does not have consisant up-dates that WoW gets.
Hell the last x-pac was almost four years ago, if they are making such a huge profit then they would have released more.
All this talk about GW makes me want to re load the game lol.
"We’re guessing you’re wondering what we’re wondering: Why mess with success? It's not as though Guild Wars isn’t a financial triumph, despite its unusual business model... "
(I'm sorry, I just have to underline the word triumph here.)
The reason they stopped making the game was because they couldn't do the things they wanted to do with the engine that they had and so they decided to build GW2. Not because it wasn't profitable.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it."-Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
I don't think so. I think that games/devs are just cutting a lot of corners these days, and most of them aren't worth the $15 a month fee...
Give me a fun MMO that i don't feel like i have already played a few times over with some minor tweaking, and I personally would pay them $20 a month, and would consider up to $25
"We’re guessing you’re wondering what we’re wondering: Why mess with success? It's not as though Guild Wars isn’t a financial triumph, despite its unusual business model... "
(I'm sorry, I just have to underline the word triumph here.)
The reason they stopped making the game was because they couldn't do the things they wanted to do with the engine that they had and so they decided to build GW2. Not because it wasn't profitable.
Thats a rather pathetic excuse in my book.
And still doesn't explane why they didn't add in the things that they wanted to do and could with the current engine.
Is it better than Guild Wars? -No? Then why are you paying a subsciption for it?
Weird, GW1 was my first MMO (Its an MMO GW fanboys) and once I played WoW I thought "I have no problem paying 15$ a month for the amount of content I am getting".
GW1 lasted a month and a half for me, WoW 4 years and only now am I getting bored of Azeroth.
Your comparison is flawed. GW1 didnt last you only a month and a half due to lack of content. If all you did all day every day for a month and a half is play GW then i doubt even with that you would be able to succesfully complete all the content available in the game. I played the game for 3 yrs before stopping and didnt complete everything. I then left for 4 years trying out other games both f2p and p2p. I have just recently restarted playing GW1 about a week ago and have been blown away by the amount of new content available that so far i havent paid a dime for. Honestly ive never seen any game come close to the amount of content that GW has. 95% of the games content is end game content as well. And there end game content doesnt consist of running the same instance for a month or 2 on a gear treadmill, so you can move onto the next of maybe a dozen instances for another month.
You may not have liked GW for whatever reason, but to claim it is due to lack of content is absurd, especially at this point.
You're confusing personal replayableity and preferances (I can't spell w/o Spell check) as content.
GW1 has about 10 gigs worth of content.
WoW is pushing it at 25 gigs.
WoW has an ass load of more content then Gw1 does no matter how you look at it. And (I believe) it is due to the money they make from subs that they are able to consistanly up-date the game with about 1-2 gigs every content patch.
Not saying GW1 does not have that much content, its just that to say it has as much as EQ2, WoW, or even RIft that is sitting at about 8 gigs, would simply mean you're wrong.
Im going to have to point out the absurdity of this comment by simply asking how much out of these games space on my HD's is graphics? How about game engine? UI? Unless your definition of content is purely HD space in which case the less optimized game engine will win. Horray for sloppy programming i guess if thats your defintion of content. Also the size of the client on your HD doesnt reflect the size of the game like it does in single player games. MMO's give you a client and the information not stored on your client is stored on the games server itself. Some games store more of the info on there server's, and some store more on your client.
When i spoke of content i was refering to it in terms of things to do that have a point in the game. Unless i was unsuccessful running an instance, i have never once had to rerun it in GW1 and yet i have not ran out of things to do in it. It isnt a rerun the same instance gear grind masquerading as content like WoW or WAR. The first time you run an instance, that is content, the next 20 times you run the same exact instance with no changes to it, isnt new content.
People keep comparing GW2's (B2P also) to WAR's PQ's (even though they each represent far more content than a WAR PQ due to different possible outcomes at every stage for more replayability/content). WAR had around 250 PQ's (of which you only got to experience half since they were divided between the 2 factions in the game), GW2 is boasting 1600+. My point is that the idea that sub games will always have more content because your giving them more money every month is not always the case. It should be, but it isnt.
My definition of content is things to do, or amount of things to do.
WoW has about 90 dungeons and raids, and roughly 9 Bgs and almost 10k quest.
The only solid number I was able to find on GW1 was 19 dungeons.
Now once agian, what has more content?
As far as GW2 dynamic events are concernd (Suck w/o spell check) I think 1.6k dynamic events arn't as impressive as they could have been had ANet not have gotten rid of traditional questing all together. The resorces that could have gone into making quest have been turned into dynamic events, all they did was change content and not add to it.
The GW dungeons you speak of were actually only the ones they released in there last expansion eye of the north, that doesnt count missions or quests. Missions are basically storyline dungeons themselves. 25 were released in the original game. 21 more released in factions. Another 24 released with nightfall. And the 19 you mention released in eye of the north. And then of course there is the 4 additional missions from the bonus mission pack. That leaves us with a total of 93 dungeons vs. your 90 for your pay $15 a month WoW.
I went to GW wiki and counted the missions by hand and got way less then 93, I would like to see where you got your numbers.
And only 9 BG's? really? i was kind of expecting more from WoW in reguards to throwing pvp players some kind of bone. Our random team arena's alone have 13 different maps. Then there is codex arena, and the Hall of heroes has another 9 group pvp maps, And then of course there is Guild vs. Guild which uses one of the guilds hall's as its arena of which there are 16 types. Then there are alliance battles with another 5 maps, plus fort aspenwood and the jade quarry pvp maps. So basically 9 WoW BG's vs. 46 pvp maps in GW. So where is this $15 a month going for the competetive pvper? I mean sure you guys can have open world pvp, but that is just a gank fest, not competetive pvp. So much for PvP content.
In my experiance GW1 primary focus was PvP so ofcorse they would have more PvP maps.
Getting back to your statment about WoW's 10k quests. Im not going to claim here that in this case GW has more. 10k is a pretty obscene amount and with the fact that both games have Daily quests, bringing up quests in terms of numbers doesnt seem to make much sense since both games have been using dailies to put you on a never ending quest treadmill of which you can never complete. TBH while i dont think GW has more than or even 10k quests, given as how ive played the game for 3 yrs straight and still havent ran out, as they keep adding new ones in free updates, at this point im not concerned with content when its unreasonable for me to expect i would run out. You may choose to see that as a cop out on my end, but i look at it realistically. If a game has 10k quests for free or 20k quests to pay per month, im not going to spend money on the 20k quests when i will never get to go through even 10k.
Sure WoW probably has more quests but that is usually reguarded as the lesser content of an mmo as opposed to its pvp, storyline, dungeons/raids. Just seems to me that they should have contentrated more on there group activity a bit more instead of trying to figure out another way of shoehorning another "kill 10 of x and come back" quests. If that is what im expected to pay $15 a month for, then no thank you. If that is what passes for development money well spent than it wont be spent with my money.
I do want to bring up something else about the differnce in content you pay for though. When burning crusade came out, how much area did it add to the game world to explore? When factions came out, it doubled the size of the GW world. Same with Nightfall. The expansions added about as much new land mass to the game as was originally available. Tyria is currently 4 times the size it was when GW came out. How much bigger is azeroth's map now compared to when WoW's original release?
The original WoW world was about 80 square miles.
Also you keep forget about what I said about consisant up-dates, GW1 does not have consisant up-dates that WoW gets.
Hell the last x-pac was almost four years ago, if they are making such a huge profit then they would have released more.
All this talk about GW makes me want to re load the game lol.
My numbers on missions actually came from my game map, however the guild wars wiki you mention does seem to have the same amount listed throughout the various campaighns, just in some cases where you have divergent paths in storyline, they list them as # with a letter designation to show the storyline options you have the first run through.
My point about the game size was revolving more around how large the amount of content you get with paid expansions. Rather than throw you an relative australia size island land mass on to your map with the expansions, GW would double the world size with every paid expansion. Though 80 square miles was the original game, how much relative to that amount has since been added?
Your point about updates is wrong. GW has been continuing to add updates to its game without charging customers for paid expansions. They have holiday events all the time, for free. They added the sorrows furnace area for free even during the time when they were still making expansions (6 months after release of original game). And then the current Guild Wars Beyond content they have been adding lately. For more information on continued FREE updates: http://www.guildwars.com/gameplay/developer_updates/
And still doesn't explane why they didn't add in the things that they wanted to do and could with the current engine.
Because the vast majority of their team is working on GW2?
If Blizzard had decided they would rather concentrate on WoW2, and moved all their staff over to it, you wouldn't be seeing a whole lot of updates out of WoW.
While Arenanet WAS concentrating on GW1, more content was coming out at a ridiculous rate. Look at how short the time period is between GW: Prophecies and EotN.
I think mainly the larger companies will stick with the subscription model initially.Once their MMO reaches an older age they will convert to the free to play model.
Comments
The 360 gives them access for every single game they buy, that's different.
And yes I cited Youtube, it's a good measure to see what the average non-MMO player thinks about MMO because people from all sorts of gaming backgrounds visit that site, unlike this site, which is full of people already playing MMO or who have in the past lol. This site is still too much into P2P compared to your average player who prefers F2P.
Datapipe is not a problem. Latency is. No matter how "big" datapipe will be you won't be able to decrease latency more.
Data is going thorugh fiber optic cables. So theoretical max is speed of light , 123 miles / s + have to add miliseconds you lose at routing points ,etc so even if you have business class line , at best you will get ~150 ms to Korea , to mainland China much more. But that is only theoretical becasue you will have many hop points so average user will get 200 ms + , with 300+ beign common.
If you in Eu that will be even more since distance is bigger.
So there are psychical boundaries and most games if have enough players try to keep separate servers in main regions of world for that reason.
It's a good measure to see there are plenty of views expressed, but it hardly shows much outside of that, every other comment is for one thing or the other, just like here. Besides I thought it was common knowledge the average MMO player/fan is an adult rather than "kids".
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
News for you. When first subscription based games came to market , it was unimaginable for most players to pay a monthly fee to play and most were saying "I have to pay every month? No way!". So sorry to break it for you but nothing changed in this matter.
Most gamers didnt want to pay in past , don't want to pay now and will not want to pay in future.
Nothing new. Move along.
Short answer, no; there have been so many mediocre releases of late, that developers are switching to micro transactions hoping to bail out their investors.
In due course this scramble by every man and his dog playing with the MT model will fade away, because monthly subs are still the best revenue stream for GOOD mmo's with a healthy player base, and there are still plenty of mmo gamers more than happy to pay monthly subs for good content.
My Colour Is Vomit green, I puke on the tards with stupid colour sigs. My symbol is ,,!, O ,!,, My enemies are any prat with a colour sig, a meaningless personality test, or a pointless list of games and classes.
Regards Hexcaliber
What past are you talking about? When EQ came out it was one of the few online games you could play, people were willing to pay for it, just like people were willing to pay for email in the past. How many people still pay for email? There's your answer.
Maintenance expenses are a lot cheaper and players have way more options. If people don't question why they're still paying $15 a month to a P2P MMO when a B2P AAA MMO comes to the market, there's something wrong with them.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
You should think on more than one point, or at least both sides of a point before you post. How does free e-mail pay for itself? I could care less about a Dew add here and there on a website. However I do not want Mt.dew adds all over the games I play. I've seen it before in AA, needless to say I stopped playing that game then and there. AVP trailers anyone? Yeah...
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
That's not exactly a fair point, this is all dependant on how they make money for support, and continued development. If all support is handled by Ncsoft as an example, would it not still be subscriptions that are helping to pay for that? Worse yet Subs from people who aren't even playing that game.
Also if they make a substantial profit off MT for adventure packs, and/or cosmetics, it's really not exactly 100% B2P.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Great job for judgining people really.
I could say the same that there is something wrong with people agreeing to have game designed around Item Shop and not around providing fun. With average player of f2p game still paying amount close or more than subscription.
Especially that mmorpg is one of cheapest entertaiment avabile in modern society.
Going to cinema once ,buying one book not to mention grabbing few drinks in bar will cost you more sometimes much more.
Besides my thing against F2P is not about money. It is about item shops and items in there and how impact then have on game. I would pay even more than current subscription to play a game without item shop.
I don't feel that something is wrong with me. Propably milions of users playing p2p games think same.
Willing to pay for it? I don't know exactly when EQ was released ,but I remember UO release and I believe it was around same time as EQ I maybe even earlier?
I was heavy into gaming then ,much more than atm. So I followed mailing groups, I knew alot of gamers personally in rl, I was going for every week compuiter bazars in my city (yeah in 97 there were thing like that). 95% + of GAMERS were actually suprised that there is a game that you have to pay monthly and not just buy box and "own it". So most of them were saying "no way" to paying subscription.
I don't know what country are you living in but in 97 in my country there were already few of free email service so actually very few people payed for it.
EDIT:checked EQ ,1999 in this year in my country were quite alot of free email services already.
The GW dungeons you speak of were actually only the ones they released in there last expansion eye of the north, that doesnt count missions or quests. Missions are basically storyline dungeons themselves. 25 were released in the original game. 21 more released in factions. Another 24 released with nightfall. And the 19 you mention released in eye of the north. And then of course there is the 4 additional missions from the bonus mission pack. That leaves us with a total of 93 dungeons vs. your 90 for your pay $15 a month WoW.
And only 9 BG's? really? i was kind of expecting more from WoW in reguards to throwing pvp players some kind of bone. Our random team arena's alone have 13 different maps. Then there is codex arena, and the Hall of heroes has another 9 group pvp maps, And then of course there is Guild vs. Guild which uses one of the guilds hall's as its arena of which there are 16 types. Then there are alliance battles with another 5 maps, plus fort aspenwood and the jade quarry pvp maps. So basically 9 WoW BG's vs. 46 pvp maps in GW. So where is this $15 a month going for the competetive pvper? I mean sure you guys can have open world pvp, but that is just a gank fest, not competetive pvp. So much for PvP content.
Getting back to your statment about WoW's 10k quests. Im not going to claim here that in this case GW has more. 10k is a pretty obscene amount and with the fact that both games have Daily quests, bringing up quests in terms of numbers doesnt seem to make much sense since both games have been using dailies to put you on a never ending quest treadmill of which you can never complete. TBH while i dont think GW has more than or even 10k quests, given as how ive played the game for 3 yrs straight and still havent ran out, as they keep adding new ones in free updates, at this point im not concerned with content when its unreasonable for me to expect i would run out. You may choose to see that as a cop out on my end, but i look at it realistically. If a game has 10k quests for free or 20k quests to pay per month, im not going to spend money on the 20k quests when i will never get to go through even 10k.
Sure WoW probably has more quests but that is usually reguarded as the lesser content of an mmo as opposed to its pvp, storyline, dungeons/raids. Just seems to me that they should have contentrated more on there group activity a bit more instead of trying to figure out another way of shoehorning another "kill 10 of x and come back" quests. If that is what im expected to pay $15 a month for, then no thank you. If that is what passes for development money well spent than it wont be spent with my money.
I do want to bring up something else about the differnce in content you pay for though. When burning crusade came out, how much area did it add to the game world to explore? When factions came out, it doubled the size of the GW world. Same with Nightfall. The expansions added about as much new land mass to the game as was originally available. Tyria is currently 4 times the size it was when GW came out. How much bigger is azeroth's map now compared to when WoW's original release?
Seems like it and I hope The Old Republic never goes f2p. I'm really starting to dislike this f2p model because mmos that have the model seem nothing more than a walk-in mini mall. Who cares how gameplay is, as long as you buy my costume or potions for 10 bucks you are the #1 fan.
I gotta ask. The idea of support keeps coming up in this thread. How much are we talking about here? We're talking about GMs to unstick you and people to answer the phones, right? That's what keeps coming up. Previously, people used the subscription cost to justify the bandwidth and servers and whatnot. Since that has been disproved (see my sig), is customer support the new justification? GW1 was making $19 million per quarter in its heyday, making significantly more money than City of Heroes over the same time frame. Aion is making $60 million per quarter. This is serious money. What I keep coming back to is that GW1 must have been profitable, it must have been seriously profitable or else GW2 would not have the same model. We're talking about profitable, here, not a labor of love that goes in the black just because NCSoft has its own support staff.
It's B2P if you can buy the box and then never HAVE to buy anything again. You can dust off your 5 year old copy of GW and be just as competitive as anybody else, they didn't even raise the level cap with expansions.
I'm not even talking about Free to Play, I'm talking about GW1 and GW2's buy to play model with a vanity item shop. I'm saying that if someone can offer you exactly the same AAA MMO experience you're getting right now for a subscription, and instead of charging you a sub, they're charging only $60 upfront (and possibly adding content that is voluntary to buy as DLCs, or expansions which your P2P MMO also makes you charge for), then the B2P option is clearly better.
It's like, what if two equal P2P MMOs were coming out and one charged a $10 subscription and the other $15. You wouldn't say well, I'm going to pay the $15 because it's still cheaper than going to the movies, right? That would be silly. Well, what if one of those MMOs only charged $5, or $1, and still gave you the full experience? People would love it. So why is it so hard to comprehend that a MMO can survive and thrive and not charge a subscription at all, nor screw people in a cash shop or make them pay to win?
It's not judging to say that it would make no sense to me if someone continued to pay more for an equivalent product, and didn't even question why they were doing it.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
I gotta ask what does what you may have read before have to do with my opinion? Not to mention what I look at in terms of running an MMO service? Sorry if I threw a curve ball toward the other side of the issue it's not my fault you or others don't think about the whole issue.
I've heard Strains quote before as well, all he talked about were server costs, because that was the context in which he was speaking. Him saying they don't have to worry about that, is not saying no one out there does, nor that there are not other things other companies have to consider.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
It's not a scam because people don't like them, it's a scam because it's a ripoff. Look at this chart someone compiled from NCSoft reports. As far as I can tell, this is income and it's in millions of Korean Won, which would mean that 20000 is approximately 19 million dollars. Look at the revenue here. Aion hit 3.5 million subscribers in May 2009 apparently, and it's bringing in 40, 60 or 90 million per quarter (between 13 and 30 mil per month), and that's just one game. Even Guild Wars, which has no subscription, only a vanity cash shop and hasn't put out new content since 2007 is still bringing in 2-3 million per quarter.
Btw, we also know from their report that bandwidth for ALL their games is a combined 2.7 million per quarter. Guild Wars alone would pay for that.
Still don't see the scam part. They state a fee, people either agree to pay it or not. I think the problem is people are subbing into crappy games. I'd feel ripped off I guess as well if I paid a sub for a substandard game. Anyway I respect your point of view.Maybe I'm just being cynical, but these mediocre releases might just be the way MMOs are. I'd bet that even GW2 and SWTOR will not have the same retention rates as older MMOs. The "healthy player base" just might be a thing of the past, for the vast majority of MMOs. That means that subscriptions are not going to cover whatever bills they need to pay as well as an item shop could, be it support, bandwidth, or content updates.
People are going back and forth in this thread about whether MMOs need money for upkeep, and I don't think that even matters. They CAN make money from players, so of course they will keep trying, whether they really need to, or not. Ideally, putting some of that revenue back into the game, one way or another, but that's beside the point.
Instead of depending on subs, they should be thinking about how to get money from the vast majority of players, who only stick around for a month or two. Not only that, but those players might stay (and pay) for longer, if there weren't a subscription involved, forcing them to decide if they're dedicated enough to the game to warrant paying it month after month. Juggling multiple MMOs would be a lot more viable too, if it weren't always a question of whether you really want to subscribe again or not. This would likely mean a persistently healthier playerbase.
I think it is an obsolete system, and will likely continue to get worse. It's just a matter of time before the industry figures it out.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
I find this funny because I was just saying the same thing to a friend the other day. It really makes me feel like an old dinosaur at the age of 29.
"Back in my day!" "You young whippersnappers" "I had to walk 100 miles in -50 degree blizzards" "Today's stuff is crap" "It's not made like it used to" and the like etc etc.
Anyone know of any good retirement homes?
Seriously though, I still think these hybrid f2p games(all f2p games really) should also offer a p2p server where everything in the cash shop is instead bought with in game currency. Get the best of both worlds! There's no reason to be so polarizing.
Edit: Oh yeah and not just f2p but p2p should come offering f2p too. It's free marketing and I think they'd be very happy with the outcome of that... you, unless they're afraid their game is crap and isn't worth anything other than a quick and cheap smash and grab.
We really need separate forums for every newly launched game. There can be the anti-<MMO> one and there can be the 'what general discussion should be' one. All the lamenting can happen together where each can find solace in like minded can't-move-on-ers leaving the rest of us to actually move forward and discuss meaningful and relevant topics.
Also you keep forget about what I said about consisant up-dates, GW1 does not have consisant up-dates that WoW gets.
Hell the last x-pac was almost four years ago, if they are making such a huge profit then they would have released more.
All this talk about GW makes me want to re load the game lol.
Read this, especially the section about why it was cancelled.
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_Utopia
"We’re guessing you’re wondering what we’re wondering: Why mess with success? It's not as though Guild Wars isn’t a financial triumph, despite its unusual business model... "
(I'm sorry, I just have to underline the word triumph here.)
The reason they stopped making the game was because they couldn't do the things they wanted to do with the engine that they had and so they decided to build GW2. Not because it wasn't profitable.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
I don't think so. I think that games/devs are just cutting a lot of corners these days, and most of them aren't worth the $15 a month fee...
Give me a fun MMO that i don't feel like i have already played a few times over with some minor tweaking, and I personally would pay them $20 a month, and would consider up to $25
Thats a rather pathetic excuse in my book.
And still doesn't explane why they didn't add in the things that they wanted to do and could with the current engine.
My numbers on missions actually came from my game map, however the guild wars wiki you mention does seem to have the same amount listed throughout the various campaighns, just in some cases where you have divergent paths in storyline, they list them as # with a letter designation to show the storyline options you have the first run through.
My point about the game size was revolving more around how large the amount of content you get with paid expansions. Rather than throw you an relative australia size island land mass on to your map with the expansions, GW would double the world size with every paid expansion. Though 80 square miles was the original game, how much relative to that amount has since been added?
Your point about updates is wrong. GW has been continuing to add updates to its game without charging customers for paid expansions. They have holiday events all the time, for free. They added the sorrows furnace area for free even during the time when they were still making expansions (6 months after release of original game). And then the current Guild Wars Beyond content they have been adding lately. For more information on continued FREE updates: http://www.guildwars.com/gameplay/developer_updates/
Because the vast majority of their team is working on GW2?
If Blizzard had decided they would rather concentrate on WoW2, and moved all their staff over to it, you wouldn't be seeing a whole lot of updates out of WoW.
While Arenanet WAS concentrating on GW1, more content was coming out at a ridiculous rate. Look at how short the time period is between GW: Prophecies and EotN.
I think mainly the larger companies will stick with the subscription model initially.Once their MMO reaches an older age they will convert to the free to play model.