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At what point did cash shops become acceptable in P2P mmorpgs?
Calintz333
Member UncommonPosts: 1,193
I'm just wondering if during my brief hiatus from mmorpgs (i..e, 2008-2012) something happened where it suddenly became okay to add a "cosmetic" cash shop to a pay to play game.
I see this happening more and more with several subscription games including WoW and FFXIV.
This is my hypothesis - please correct me if I'm wrong. The new generation of kids who have grown up playing on ipads and smart phones are so used to seeing microtransactions online now that they have simply become an accepted norm in all forms. Be them in full retail box single player games (i.e., Assassins Creed Unity, SSX), or pay to play mmorpgs. To these younger games there never was a time where games didn't have microtransactions. The idea that a game would just put all the cash shop "cosmetic" or "convenience" items in an in game NPC vendor for in game currency is foreign to them. Thus this creates a new gaming reality where in Pay to play mmos — as well as even single player games now — it is perfectly normal to have these sorts of things.
That is my hypothesis, but what do you all think?
Do you believe this is the first step in a future where subscription fee + full blown cash shop is the norm?
Comments
Cash shops were added to P2P games about 2009/10, the same time that DDO made the first P2P/F2P conversion. It became mainstream with the WoW sparkle pony debacle, where they made over $10M in the first few hours. This is all prior to the rise of of ipads (ver 1 2010, ver 2 2011).
This was a change in the market in response to lack of satisfaction in P2P games. F2P was becoming mainstream due to P2P bait and switch tactics. Cash shops were added to P2P games to tap into the demand for extra services that were making F2P competitive. There was not a rise in development cost for the existing products, but this extra revenue did allow for that rise in future products (i.e. estimates of revenue went up, so they felt that they could spend more in development).
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
LOL. You sound like an old man. It is not the first step it has been here for a while. You might as well ask if this Internet thing is just a fad.
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I think that they become 'ok' when waaaaaaayyyyy back people started selling virtual items for cash and developers had to start combating real world trading, spending time and resources in order to stem the tide of commerce that was developing around their games.
Then one day some beleaguered dev or administrator or copy boy said "what are we doing? We are expending all this effort to stop online trading and yet there is no end in site. Obviously there is a market for this stuff and since game development is getting more expensive we can either continue to fight it or get in on the action".
And so they did.
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while i agree with your comment, it should only apply in unrestricted F2P mmos.
If im playing a hybrid freemium and i have to spend money unlocking limitations instead of buying what i want, i stop playing the game and dont support it. Im OK if they offer a one time purchase of a permanent limit unlock, but i wont support what Swtor does where i have to constantly pay to unlock restrictions (they call it permits) to do certain content. No ty.
Also, if im playing a P2P only game and they start taking content from the game and adding it to a cash shop, then i stop playing and dont support them anymore. If there is a shop in a p2p then as long as they dont reduce the amount of content that is part of the sub in favor of more cash shop items out of greed then its fine. That is the only reason i dont care much about the WoW cash shop. I dont use it, plus the coolest mounts and pets (IMO) are all available just by playing. Unlike other companies that put all the good stuff in the cash shop and leave the crap generic stuff to everyone else regardless of subscription status.
I am unsure, but in my mind, it started when WoW introduced their "Celestial Steed" through a cash shop and players bought it by the millions. Of course, they tagged it to a charity, but WoW made millions themselves on the thing.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
People have forgotten the basic of the market: supply and demand. It does not matter what any individual wants, it only matters what the market is willing to pay for.
If person A is going to STOP paying their $15 per month because of a cash shop, but people B-K are willing to pay their $15 per month, plus $5 per month in the cash shop then this is a huge net gain, and it is in the business best interest to lose players, but make more money. The only way to prevent this type of scenario is for Player A to pay $60 per month to make it not worthwhile for the business to support the change.
Players (like me) that prefer to pay once a month and not worry about it anymore (putting the card away) are fucked.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
They are no longer about "exploring what may be possible for the medium" but rather "what can we make the most money off of?"
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
subscriptions are not acceptable!
what pisses me off the most is ubisoft releasing games that are not finished!
you buy a unfinished product and you have to wait till they patch it,they should be ashamed of themselves.
from soft,the dark souls games are perfect on release they only patch it later to balance the game if players think some spells or weapons are OP.
As far as I can remember, SOE was the first with the EQ2 gold, character and item exchange back in 2005. Although I can't remember when exactly WOW first sold mounts in their shop - they might have been first.
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People work, institutions want to be successful and money is how we do it. We could trade chickens or wood but at this stage in the game that's just awkward.
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success of microtransactions is because of whales, you have a few players paying thousands of dollars every week
there was this story on the news of a woman who spent her whole salary on candy crush
Everquest 1 now has cash shop and P2P, the reason is because of 3 or so people, who spend thousands of dollars in a matter of weeks on Legends of Norrath cards to get all the mounts. That was all SoE needed to see to implement the cash shop.
For me, those people have ruined a lot about MMO. I refuse to play MMO with cash shops.
What MMOs are you playiing currently? I'm not aware of too many that don't have some form of cash shop.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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I like that explanation but in all honesty I think there's a simpler explanation, especially in the case of WoW:
" HEY!.. Looks like these gaming nerds were actually willing to consistently cough up 15 bucks a month.
Let's see if we can milk these pimple-faced twats just a little bit more."
In case you were wondering, that's the conversation that probably took place at Blizzard.
What the hell are you playing then? I suggest you get yourself a time machine and go back to 2001.
Anyone complaining about cash shops are nuts. There is no one forcing you to pay anything in most cash shops. P2P games have cash shops with nonsense you don't really need. People are willing to pay $20 for a mount in WoW? Good for them and good for Blizzard for making more money on their product! This is how business works.
Pretty simple answer, staying competitive. While the "hardcore gamers" among us will cry and scream all they can about free-to-play games the fact is that they are extremely popular and extremely successful because they offer the customer other ways to spend their money then just a monthly sub. It's so popular now that players even expect sub games to have some form of vanity shop or extra services available for real money.
Why on Earth would you close off an entire revenue stream when players are more then willing to pay into it? You'd have to be brainless or filled with such nostalgic pride that you would refuse to make easy money from people who want to buy more things from you. Do you honestly expect them to do so just so they don't offend what is now a tiny fraction of players.
You're reading way too into it. To properly explain this a history lesson is in order:
Cash shops in P2P games happened a few years after WoW come onto the MMO stage (~2007/2008). Before WoW, MMOs were basically a niche genre. Most people believed they were only played by nerds living in their mother's basement, and there were maybe a million or so players total across all games at the time. Then WoW happened, and BAM we had 10-100+ million people who now acknowledged MMOs as a real thing.
Lots of people took notice of this, and wanted a piece of the pie. They saw a genre basically explode into this huge deal practically overnight, and assumed that now meant there was tons of room for others to get in on the action. The reality was mixed. WoW did open the doors for a lot more ambitious MMO budgets, but it also had a suffocating affect on the genre longterm. Back then subscriptions were the dominant payment model, and noone really had to deal w/ the reality that as a result every game was competing for player's wallet space.
This usually meant that WoW won, and so began the trend of burnout MMOs / WoW-clones. Many studios were trying to find a way to get some of that success WoW achieved, and started looking for other ways to make revenue / increase what they were already getting. It was also around this time that F2P started to become an option. However, it was still this new 'crazy' idea, and most people were far too scared to attempt it. It was too risky, and they didn't believe it would actually work. So they went the safe route, and started adding cash shops to subscription model games.
Some gamers protested this, but many just ignored them and went on playing the games like normal sub games. As a result they are still around in sub games today. However, after a few games successfully adopted the F2P model (most notably Turbine w/ DDO and later LotRO), F2P started to gain tracted, and now we are where we are today.
At the point when you guys kept paying your subscriptions regardless of the shit you were thrown at xD
Examples are plenty
I think it started before then. I recall buying Rift off Amazon and logging in seeing everyone riding on turtle mounts. So I looked it up, it was from the delux edition "upgrade" for 10 bucks.
Everquest 2 was probably the first game doing this, I remember the Wow fans laughing and then Wow started to sell stuff 6 months later.
And yes, it sucks completely, the reason to pay monthly fees is so you get access to the entire game.
F2P games who have monthly subscriptions suck as much though.