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Death of the F2P
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I don't make the rules, but yes, all three are MMOs. Dungeon Fighter Online is a lobby based MMO with shared towns. Pretty much on par with Neverwinter and Vindictus. I personally haven't played World of Tanks, but it is listed as a MMO on this site, so is Maple Story. Go look at the descriptions of the games on this site, both clearly say MMORPG. Maybe you should petition this site and pretty much everyone on the internet so that only WoW clones can be defined as MMORPGs.
Any further comebacks?
Complete bullshit,
FTP is the future. Look at POE, a hand full australian indy devs made a game that destroyed mighty blizzards D3. It would never come this far when it was not FTP.
Right now, the only mmo that Im willing to pay money for subs is WOW. Because I know what I get for it. I even quit FF14 , because of the subs.
Step in the arena and break the wall down
There is always surplus.
In a competitive market, the surplus is divided between the supply and demand. Not often equally, and most often the government has also taken a chunk, but still all parties receive some surplus. Either from paying less than their willingness, or selling for more than the cost, and finally stolen in the form of taxes (just including as point of fact not discussing).
In my example of a Perfectly Price Discriminating Monopoly, henceforth referred to as F2P, the consumer receives no surplus. Why? Because the consumer is allowed to only pay at their willingness.
Even though the volume of surplus is equivalent to a competitive market, the consumer is getting destroyed. Maybe not on an individual level, but as a whole they get exactly what they want, and nothing more. Whereas before anyone except those who were only willing to pay the subscription and not a single penny more, received exactly what they want. The rest? Well everyone who would pay plus one penny, would receive at least an extra pennies worth.
In the end it ALWAYS comes down to the individual consumer, and what they wish to consume, and at what cost. I believe in the competitive, what I will call the MMO-meta-market, there is room for lots and lots of smaller markets. Some hybrid, some F2P, some sub, all of them. Allowing the consumers to continue to consume what they wish. Those that find value in sub games will, sub. Those that want to pay less, will pay less. I have been both, and for almost a year now I have been neither.
Please don't lie.
I am part of the MMO industry, we track everything and use it. I sit behind closed doors all the time and are part of many discussions dealing with exactly this.
Your post has no bearing and doesn't even follow busines101 sense. Your profits come from accounts, you track accounts. Your profits come from enticing those accounts to spend money in your Free game. (That is where marketing comes in.)
Monetizing a game is not the only concern, the LIFE (duration of activity) of that monetization is critical.
Most Free to Play games make their profits based on the fact that people spend money on a game, that is designed to have a short life, with very little support after release (As the teams are already moving on to the next cash cow). So providing additional support, or content is pointless for their Marketing strategy, because NOBODY intends on playing a F2P game for years.
F2P mantra: Make your money, then provide lipservice and incentives to those who are whining to buy even more stuff.. all the while using that money to build the next Fruit Stand (TM).
We are talking about business models of games, and MMOs are games.
Mind if I ask for the source(s)?
I am not sure you understand how F2P works.
First, Marketting is used to bring in new accounts. This can be paid or unpaid, but the basic function of marketting in F2P is to get eyeballs on the prodcuct. Marketting is much cheaper for F2P, as it is easier to get a user to sign up for free, than to pay to sign up.
Second, F2P companies track accounts for two reasons, server load.. and marketting. Big numbers (no matter how irrelevant) always look better for marketting. However, no one in the F2P industry makes any money from accounts. They make money from buyers/spenders. You will see this in all the metrics ever published by F2P companies. Just check some of the public information.. and you will always see 'PAYING' users.
Most publishers expect to make revenue from a F2P title for 2-4 years. If it does not look like it will last that long, they will try not to launch it (which is why you see the games disapear before launch). The longer the game can sustain, the more money that they will make. There are F2P titles are now going on 10 years strong, with many others at the 5-6 year range.
With the advent of facebook, and competitive browser games there is now a long list of F2P strategy games that are designed to close/end every few months. However, the product is designed to last for years.
SoE made their decision and they're sticking with it, for better or for worse.
Once again, LoL is not an MMO.
Vanguard didn't fail because it was P2P, though. Vanguard failed because it was released unfinished, and just a total piece of garbage. SoE eventually got it, fixed it up, and made it F2P just so people would come back to play it.
In the end, I don't care if there is F2P, as long as there is a hybrid model in place. Let people play free all they want, and let me sub to avoid most of the hassle.
(PS: Don't talk about others having "small vision", when you've got tunnel vision yourself)