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WildStar Dev Journals: Free-to-Play and You
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
WildStar Dev Journals: Free-to-Play and You
Greetings MMORPG.com readers! I’m Mike Donatelli, Product Director for Carbine Studios’ WildStar. We are less than a week away from a major moment in our game’s history as we’ll be switching over to a free-to-play business model on September 29. The decision to change business models was not a light one, and we put a lot of thought and debate into when, why and how we were going to do it.
Post edited by SBFord on
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I am somewhat sad to see the things they are changing. The game was excellent, it was the lack of content, and then the further slowing down of content patches and cancelling of holiday events that drove me away. Put plainly, why pay for no content? Luckily now we won't have to pay anymore, but without content at max that provides a reasonable pace of progression(people feel like they are making regular progress) people will just get bored and leave. In fact that cut off will probably be sooner since you aren't tied to a subscription making you feel like you need to get your money's worth.
I am sure I will be playing again, whether I stay or not will be up to Carbine and their ability to deliver a rewarding experience.
My first encounter with free-2-play was when LotRO converted (2010ish?). Their rational was that a lot of potential players are put off playing the game because of the ongoing monthly subscription. They either didn't find it worth the money, or could afford it every month, or didn't have enough time each month to justify the subscription.
So, the free-2-play conversion of lotro was not about making the game free, but about providing an alternative method of paying for the game so that the customer could pay what they could afford. This meant first release of f2p, the shop was 90% game content and 10% cosmetics.
Personally, I thought that was a great approach. You get the first 4 zones (roughly 20 levels free), after which you had to start buying additional content, almost like buying lots of DLC. Seemed very fair to me, it allowed you to pay on a timescale that you wanted without committing to anything long term.
LotRO really feels like an exception though. All f2p games seem to offer the whole core experience for free, but screws you over on everything else, either nickle-and-diming you to unlock more features (e.g. removing gold caps, unlocking tool bars etc) or charging a lot for consumables and cosmetics. It just feels wrong to play those games - the developers are making money off your misery, rather than making money off the content they spent years developing.
If I ever developed a f2p MMO, the payment would be something like this:
Subscription = £10 per month
Over a year, a subscriber pays £120.
So, you need to develop enough content each year so that a f2p player would have to spend £120 to get access to the same content as a subscriber.
E.g. if your game had 30 zones, 2 endgame instance clusters (3-5 dungeons / raids per cluster) plus pvp and you'd targetted 18 months from release to first expansion.
Subscriber = 18 x £10 = £180
F2P = first five zones free
Therefore 25 zones, 2 pve instance clusters plus pvp needs to cost £180 or more to make it "fair".
Lets charge £5 per zone (£125), £15 per instance cluster (£155) and £30 for pvp (£185).
In this way, a subscriber gets access to everything for roughly the same price as a F2P player would have to pay, but if they are a quick player or quit earlier, they save money. The F2P player can pick and choose which features they want access to and can pay on a timescale that suits them (e.g. spend £50 christmas money unlocking more content).
I just cant help feeling that this sort of system (obviously adjust prices to something more suitable) would remove a hell of a lot of the bad feelings surrounding f2p and keep things a lot simpler.
Dude. Read your own freakin' forums. There's a 13 page thread telling you that the PLAT (gold pffft) costs are totally out of line. Oh and that shiny new rune extraction feature which is pretty much required to extract certain rare sets is SERVICE TOKEN ONLY.
Huh, guess by your own definition it's Pay To Win.
That being said, the subscription probably held back the majority of people who were interested. This game is alot of fun, and its story line and progression is all very fun. Alot of trouble happened when you had the learn2play issues that pushed them into making the game to easy from the original model, and when a game makes that kind of large scale change it makes people feel unsure about a developers goals. They need to stick to their guns, and people will learn to play or find farmville more their speed.
Very interesting setup for your would-be F2P model. It's very fair, giving pretty equal consideration to both F2P'ers and subbers. And that's why you'll likely never see anything like it. LoTRO's "content a la carte" approach (or similar setups) are about as close as you'll get)
The F2P model is attractive to developers/publishers - ironically - not because it benefits players more, but because it benefits themselves more. There are two long-established precedents upon which F2P is based...
1. People will, and have, spend far more for "convenience" or "power" (when available) than they will on a sub fee alone. Over a decade of eBaying and other RMT activities in numerous MMOs demonstrate this unequivocally. They spend $15 on a monthly sub, then $50 or more a month on items, characters, power-leveling, gold, etc. It was only a matter of time 'til developers/publishers started to see this as money being left on the table, rather than a detriment to the game, and started looking for a way to tap into it themselves... Their solution was Cash Shops.
2. F2P with Cash Shops generate potentially far more than a flat sub-fee will. Again, consider the example of someone who spends $15 on a sub fee, then $50, or more, on convenience/gold/leveling, etc afterward. If I told you "Hey, drop your sub fee and give up that $15 a month.. and you have the potential to still come out $35 ahead"... are you going to pass that up? Now, consider some people will readily spend into the hundreds each month. And you begin to see the appeal.
On top of all that, many Cash Shops, and the games built around them, employ very underhanded and shady tactics to make purchases seem more attractive, if not necessary for certain types of players. Want to ensure people are going to buy more xp potions? Slow down the xp rate. Want to ensure people are going to spend money on mounts? Make sure the ones you're selling are faster than any you can get in the game, and make other navigation options very limited and/or expensive. Want to move more health pots? Make mobs hit harder and make sure the HP pots that drop in-game quickly become inadequate for survivability, while making the ones available in the cash shop much more potent and effective. Want to sell more inventory space? Make it limited to begin with, and then make sure you drop a *ton* of crap people have to carry around for quests, gift packs which "spawn" even more items to fill up space... and so on. The entire game is built around being just inconvenient/slow/tedious enough to make purchasing cash shop items seem like a worthwhile deal.
And of course, because it's "only" $5 here and there.... it doesn't seem like that much. I mean at least you're not paying a sub fee right? Until, at the end of the month, a person can find they're spending far more than a monthly sub. Yet, somehow they'll still justify it as being more worthwhile... "because they chose to spend it". They're playing the same amount of time a month, are spending more than they would on a sub... but say it's a "better deal". So, that's the other aspect... people will often find ways to rationalize their actions to themselves (and others), because they don't want to be "wrong".
Developers/Publishers know this is the case. They know how people tend to act/react, and they know how to manipulate and influence those actions/reactions. And that is at the core of what F2P MMOs are built around.
There's so much to unwrap with F2P/Cash Shop, how they're designed, and all the sneaky crap they pull to prey on human behavior and its many quirks. Of course, its fans will never admit it and will always try to argue that it's somehow superior to the sub fee (where you pay a flat sub fee and have access to all the content, with only time investment being required beyond that). Again we're talking about people who will argue that if they spend, say 20 hours a month playing a MMO, regardless of how they're paying for it, that somehow it's better to spend $50 on a cash shop, than $15 on a flat monthly fee. And they will argue that point 'til they're blue in the face, and insist that their math adds up, and they are right. This is why cash shops succeed.
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