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"US free-to-play audience outnumbers pay-to-play 6 to 1"
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lol it's funny to me because a lot(not all) of "shitty" f2p games where once p2p. I can agree, F2P and yes even B2P can have less loyalty than P2P. F2P though has a lot more trolling in chats than B2P and P2P games though, least from my experience.
I still will never agree that paying box price plus a sub is needed for a great MMO, and it pushed me even further into that belief since the release of GW2(My opinion).
Also it irks me though I mean something clearly isn't right with P2P, if a lot of MMOs go from P2P to Freemium(Like F2P with P2P options). F2P attracts a lot but maybe not maintain that loyalty and for certain maturity as P2P/B2P mmos but then most just end up F2P.
The reason I don't like subs though is cause if I stop playing for say a month because I'm busy an then I feel like playin the next month but don't have much time on my hands I then have to pay 15 dollars just to get those few days lol.
Luckily I never had to do that and least one MMO was made for me, and some are moving towards the right payment model for me.
Even my dream MMO wouldn't have me slav...paying 15 dollars a month when the developers don't [need] it from me, if anything throw me a non p2w cash shop(GW2 comes to mind fuck the haters) and you might actually get 10 dollars and that's a huge maybe because then if you make it to where I can get cash shop items in game...that's even better.
I guess P2P games just do their P2P wrong same with F2P and B2P. Also note how I experienced some P2P MMOs, well never said I didn't have friens that play em. Though really the amount of friends I have that did P2P is decreasing, but however they don't do F2P at all.
I might get banned for this. - Rizel Star.
I'm not afraid to tell trolls what they [need] to hear, even if that means for me to have an forced absence afterwards.
P2P LOGIC = If it's P2P it means longevity, overall better game, and THE BEST SUPPORT EVER!!!!!(Which has been rinsed and repeated about a thousand times)
Common Sense Logic = P2P logic is no better than F2P Logic.
Ok so theres a larger market of players when you dont put a paywall up...rocket science?
Now if this wasnt typical f2p propeganda...you would see a like to something comparing paying players in p2p games vs f2p games...and i think you would see a slightly different picture.
I get it though...in a perfect world all games would be f2p so you all could moan and whine about the cash shop asking for money.
Also...am i a f2p player? ive played f2p games...does this make me a f2p or p2p player...because i play p2p games to....how did this magical study conducted by mystery people determine?
As someone who plays both i vastly prefer p2p...by a long shot...for many...many reasons ranging from community to level play field, to how developer effort seems to shift in what they spend time on between the two.
Oh yeah i see they used SWTOR as a metric...that game is NOT free to play...just has a long trial. Enjoy being excluded from endgame and hotbars if your free. Forget they always gotta game the data to get the results they want.
1. if you list GW1 as a F2P game, then GW2 would be your AAA F2P game release recently.
2. Box+Sub+Expac, then go F2P doesnt actually work as well as going F2P from the start if you target more than just western players. Nexon Co has become a giant off of F2P games, big enough they spent more money last year buying companies out and buying a stake into companies than most western companies make in all revenues. Worse yet, games that TURN F2P long after release always do so in a piss poor way that limits their new revenue. They always come with bad shops, and they retain a Sub model placing those players above F2P players...also making it a FREEMIUM, not really a F2P game. Either way, they dont make the kind of revenue as actual F2P games.
Its simple math.
if there are, say 40 million MMORPG players around the world. If you go F2P, you have 40 million potential customers. If you go P2P, you just lost those that will never pay a monthly fee AND those that are locked into a better game, as well as those that just plain dont want to pay to play two games at the same time.
Just plain makes no sense at all. Remove WoW from that list provided in the OP and you just removed over 50% of the P2P markets revenue...because P2P doesnt appeal overall any longer and it will make less sense to pay to play any game when there are so many F2P options out there now, and will be by the end of the year.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
Yep, its pure propaganda that Nexon somehow had over 400 million dollars last year to buyout several companies and buy a 15% stake in NCsoft.
No really, its propaganda, they print money. There is no revenue in F2P, so what if SoE, EA, Funcom and Turbine said Subscriptions are a thing of the past...pure, propaganda...and pay no mind to the massive amounts of companies popping up producing A to AAA F2P games this year.
They are not really doing it, its propaganda to get you to stop giving money to other companies and play theirs for free!
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
and what p2p MMO are you getting what you pay for??...I played EQ for 5 years and probably paid over a grand and I sure as heck did not get equal value.....F2P has been a nice alternative
Dont bother, because if he ever told his parents that he paid for a game, to have to pay to be able to play it...he would quickly get a "Son, I am disapoint" face..and then try to explain that the saying doesnt mean if you pay more than what its worth, that it somehow magically becomes more valuable.
ask anyone that owns an Apple product.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
I am still waiting to hear of the AAA F2P game that launched. GW2, like GW1, is not a MMO to me (not a disscusion for this thread. Is there a game like WoW, Rift, Lotor, or any of the other major releases that launched as F2P?
Are we talking in theory? Is there a game that we can actual point to and say the content, support, and gameplay was XXX compared to sub games?
So far it seems like a long debate on what would be better without anything to reference. So if anyone can give me an actual F2P game that was not a conversion, would preciate it.
Yeah, no. SWTOR is like the lowest of the low in the F2P community for doing that (I personally consider it a P2W because of the fact that they lock your flipping hotbars). You'll find that most F2P players don't play games that exclude features like your hotbars unless you pay for them. If you look around more, you'll see the F2P universe of games is pretty similar in quality and much greater in quantity.
I played WoW up until WotLK, played RoM for 2 years and now Rift.
I am F2P player. I support games when I feel they deserve my money and I want the items enough.
I don't troll, and I don't take kindly to trolls.
And yet you are out-numbered 6 to 1.
Who cares about tight knit population when i can play with my friends anyway.
I do and will play F2P games ... as long as they are fun.
I'll take "Numbers pulled out of my ass for $300, Alex".
RANDOM FACT OF THE DAY:
Sheep outnumber lions 51628 to 1.
If you tried to play one of these FTP games with the same content - all the races, classes, zones and items you'd pay more.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/11/30/how-much-does-planetside-2-cost-if-you-buy-everything/
$702 to buy the existing PS2 items, and that doesn't include single use camo potions or 5 years of content upgrade.
The difference is minimal. The OP and the statistic he linked suggests a 6 to 1 difference. That is simply NOT TRUE. Why you would even argue this is baffling.
Whats insane is the F2P games that have a big emphasis on guild, clan, alliance, (insert random group), achievements and then all of the sudden, you get people not only spending that $702 dollars on themself but also on their friends and guildies. All of the sudden, they are spending thousands and sometime tens of thousands in a single month.
Just focusing on that. If you read the link you have there, and believe that Blizzard and EA are sharing their data with these yahoos, I have got a whole catalog of lovely bridges to sell you.
Read that content in your link: Every month we collect information from 350 game titles over 50 publishers.
I never knew there were 50 AAA MMO developers and they average 7 games a piece.
Even if these developers were actually sharing their information with this company (again, highly debateable), it's a bunch of Farmville vs Vampire Hunter Facebook games, not SOE and Turbine.
That makes no sense. Nobody ever goes out and buys access to everything in a F2P game. Nobody ever plays a P2P game in every way they possibly can, with every race and every class, and get every shiny piece of gear. It's an absolutely absurd comparison.
I played WoW up until WotLK, played RoM for 2 years and now Rift.
I am F2P player. I support games when I feel they deserve my money and I want the items enough.
I don't troll, and I don't take kindly to trolls.
There is a 6 to 1 difference in "audience". A bigger audience means a bigger potential to make more money. Going pay to play limits your player base by a lot. Going free to play can not only draw in many more players but it can potentially make more profit if it's done correctly. It's really not that hard to figure out.
If this wasn't the case then how come so many companies are going free to play? It's obviously a model that is working out. You wouldn't go free to play if there was less money invovled now would you?
Lol, I understand what you are saying. However, I think also the point to make from grimfall's post would be that P2P games simply do not have the price restriction, outside of the monthly fee. Once you pay that monthly fee, no matter how little or how much you work, you are on equal footing with everybody else and you never have to feel you are at a disadvantage becasue you aren't spending money in their web shop.
I know in a lot of free to play pvp games, you need to be spending a good amount of money if you want to stay as competitive as possible. In P2P, you just spend that 15 bucks a month and then rely on your time and skill to get you where you want to be.
If you believe Blizzard, EA, and smaller developers aren't sharing your data, let me welcome you to the era of Facebook where you can freely share your own data to others and tell them how many cows you e-milked today.
The study is not specifically stand-alone MMORPGs either, make note of that.
I'd imagine it includes smart phone applications and Facebook games alike.
I didn't generate this study nor do I claim to see this as the holy grail of all writing.
I played WoW up until WotLK, played RoM for 2 years and now Rift.
I am F2P player. I support games when I feel they deserve my money and I want the items enough.
I don't troll, and I don't take kindly to trolls.
ye ... guild wars 2 is buy 2 play. First you need to box to play it. Free to play is.. hey new game, register, download, play.
But you are right, they made damn a lot of money from me but we are not talking about how much money F2P makes right? I am talking that games that are B2P or P2P are in general better games because they can afford this model. F2P cant.
Anyways ..those 500-600 euros were spent mostly on legendaries and dyes, keys
after 1500 hours from release I managed to crafted my second legendary and I had no motivation to play anymore, zero 0. I didnt play guild wars 2 for month now. It is good mmorpg? HELL YEA. Why I dont play it? Because its too easy to have maxxed out characters. TOO easy. For me, perfect mmorpg must have HUGE character customization, progress and maxxing out character in term of gear must take LONG time, not weeks, but months or years.
100% of p2p players pay ( duh ). What % of f2p players pay ? It's potantial is whatever amount isn't paying right now.....
Just because someone hasn't payed doesn't mean the game will never add anything they might want. That's the big difference between the two. With 6 times ( and yes that's as good as a random number I wont argue that ) the number of people playing it's simply a matter if finding out what people will pay for.
P2P has to find a way to get people to play the game first. That's a much bigger hurtle to overcome. They also have to be able to keep them paying month to month or risk them writing the game off. F2p with it's more transient population doesn't have this issue as much. People come back to f2p games if they like them because there' s no commitment. Pay to play has to be worth spending money on them again before they'll return.
These are just some of the reasons why f2p is becoming so popular. I honestly don't see the point in arguing about it though. Both have a pretty solid market right now and it really comes down to the game more than anything. A good p2p game is going to keep it's people and make more money than a f2p game. It's also going to fail faster if it's bad. So I guess risk is another issue for p2p and development.
This thread feels like a confused mess when I read most of the replies. I'm going to try and phrase my thoughts about it here, and maybe detract from some of this back and forth.
First, there is no reason to think the F2P model is negative at all. I'll grant that many do it terribly, but I'll also grant that just as many (in such a way that one can compare the two genres these days) P2P games done terribly. Consider games like SWG, which completely shifted its entire game and all of its corresponding elements around at a whim multiple times. The thing it became was pretty far removed from the thing it was...which meant that the investment made by players was basically ignored in hopes of drawing new players, and the investment therein, to the game. Such a thing is AT LEAST as bad as a P2W game, in terms of how poorly in reflects the marketplace. You have risk in either case regarding what your money is buying you.
Truthfully, the real lesson here is that accessability needs to be the focus of a P2P game. The masses flock to F2P because it cost them nothing to try it and hate it. Given that MMO gaming is alive, now, in a purely digital world (by which I mean that most transactions are being done digitally, and without physical copies) there is no reason to burn box sales. Ditch the box, and offer free trial periods. Give em level 1-20 free. On top of that, allow them an xp boost for any friends they send invite codes to. Now what you've done is let them try it without worry, and then reward them for bringing pals along. The turnabout here is that, thanks to the accelerated xp gain, they hit the 20 wall faster...and do so with a handful of people at the same time. Now, odds are good that if the game is even remotely fun at least one of those people WILL start their monthly fee. This will feed the pack mentality of most people to want to pay RIGHT then as well, to keep up with their friends and keep playing together.
Assuming most people will at least try to get friends in on this for the free xp boost, you've created several small clusters of steady players that will be regulars in the game space. Since these clusters will be online reliably, they meet each other reliably. This forms the foundation of the solid community most MMO's need to maintain playerbases. You don't even need the first 20 levels to be content heavy, since most will have accelerated XP. You can shift the design focus to mid-end game. This allows for more development time spent on the things that actually define your game. With even the most minimal tools for player generated content, you've secured a year 1 stability. That often enough to warrant further development which, if done with wisdom, will include equal parts end game themepark and player generated content tools.
Instead of this, we have a market division that is really only rewarding to "milkers", F2P cash grabs, and "hypers", P2P hype fests that need massive interest to secure box sales that make up for inevitable player bleed once the hype busts. Very little smart business is being done here, and you can tell from the many corporate collaspses we've seen lately. How many studios have we lost? Not just run of the mill guys...I mean big names and large players going bust at every turn. This isn't because they are evolving with their market, its because they assumed the market would remain the same for longer than it has. The consumer has a tabled option of trying games long term for free. To compete, you have to approach that threshold more closely than the average P2P has been doing.