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Next time you play an MMORPG with a Cash Shop
Snakex
Member UncommonPosts: 317
Next time you play an MMORPG with a Cash Shop,
I want you to look at the cash shop, be creative, and think how Each One of those items could have been implemented as:
Content or Incentive
I.E Quest rewards, Dungeon exclusives, Challenge modes, Raiding, Special Events, ect.
I want you to look at the cash shop, be creative, and think how Each One of those items could have been implemented as:
Content or Incentive
I.E Quest rewards, Dungeon exclusives, Challenge modes, Raiding, Special Events, ect.
Comments
Until that sickness is cured - most game designs will be tainted by the road to easy revenue, to some extent.
I posted this on another thread but I think it is relevant here.
It is true that more and more games will be using content that might have been offered via regular questing or through dungeon delves with your guild and friends.
It is also true that the average MMORPG player no longer wishes to pay a monthly subscription to any game. They have through the years of development of this trend been shying away from any form of payment that have caused this shift towards a cash shop. This has in my opinion caused the companies to come up with better ways to make money and realising what a lucrative alternative it is too they have embraced it wholeheartedly.
Every single step towards this cash shop was clearly in our hands the player. The greed or lack of greed in the cash shop is a culmination of years of complaints from players who no longer wanted to pay for games that they do not play daily. Complaining that the days I do not play in the month I subscribe is being wasted. Well here is the unhappy solution to the issue you created.
While we may never be able to put this genie back into the bottle it might now come a time for compromises and if you wish to continue to play this game make the kind of choices that minimize the effect of this payment model on your game. If you are unable to accept the changes and monetary scheme then it is time to leave the genre altogether or merely stay with the games that represent the best compromise in your eyes.
I definitely prefer the days of forced grouping and monetization (subs) models, was easier to budget for.
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Well, in the shorter term.
But suits tend to think in shorter terms, so it's a vicious cycle.
Game releases - and it might be great.
Suits are happy it sold well - and they're happy to finance "real content" while it's doing well. But then they notice that by adding trivial content to the cash shop, they can get away with less effort.
Then interest starts dwindling - and they start focusing on the cash shop content, because that's easy and it doesn't require much of a content team.
Eventually, there's not enough revenue for a big team - so "real content" all but stops, and they start relying exclusively on trivial content in the cash shop until the game runs on life support.
It's a cycle I've been a witness to for a very long time - and it gets tiresome.
They're not selling content in the cash shop.
GW2 is all but dead in terms of new content. I'm amazed they managed to release an expansion at all.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather buy an expansion than 10 pieces of armor for my character and a new mount.
Of course they could have implemented all those things for free and charged another way but the thing is that players have a far greater acceptance of mediocre games if they are labeled "free".
A great game will earn you loads of cash no matter how you charge for it (within reason) and for a great game I doubt F2P will earn you more then P2P. But you can run a F2P with just 1000 rich whales and 50K lechees that never pays a dime. A P2P game will need a couple of hundred K subs to be successful unless you really cut corners making it.
Now, if you have 10 milliom players paying a monthly fee that is hard to beat with F2P, there just isn't that many whales around to pay you 150M a month. The problem is that currently there isn't a single MMO good enough to get that number... Wow still have enough players to stay P2P though, I think their profits still would drop if they went F2P. That might change if the next expansions isn't really good though.
As I see it is the real problem that the MMOs just isn't good enough to get us more P2P games.
In fact, I think that's a fair deal.
Instead of being upset about them I have decided to see which games give the best compromises I can live with. Oh yeah and no action games for me though but even that seems to be something I have to learn to adapt to.
The real trick was convincing the gaming public that the cash shop is a consumer-friendly model - instead of the very, very developer-friendly model it has become. That's in the SHORT term.
The great irony and the great joke is that - in the longer term - the cash shop/F2P model is completely destructive to the entire genre, including both developers and consumers. Not unlike the capitalistic model in itself
I still laugh when I think about how GW2 developers tried to argue that their cash shop was the superior model - because the consumer would not have to pay a subscription.
That worked out great, didn't it
But why would i listen?
I simply just ignore cash shops. Why would i care if the items can be implemented as content or incentive? I am not a game designer. I am a gamer who is just out for some fun.
nah ..it is much easier to play free, and leave whenever (or if) there is a pay wall.
No budgeting is needed.
It's a very interesting dilemma. Currently the game I play fits the former model, and while I would rather pay a subscription to have everything free I cringe to think how much money I've thrown at subscriptions over the last 12 years. In the long run, I may be paying less for a buy once limited cash shop game.
Industry Games
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Sure, there will be some b2p MMO (or MMO hybrid) like The Division. Other than that, you probably should just play single player game if cash shop bothers you that much.
And B2P/p2p games are not guaranteed to have no cash shop. Even WOW has one.
But you know what? they don't do that anymore.
So the point is moot and no use crying over spilled milk.
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With pay to play/sub games, everyone has contributed to the support of the game. With F2P cash shop games, you are paying higher piecemeal prices so that you can both support the game and support non-paying players. If you buy a $60k BMW, you get that car for yourself. In the F2P cash shop version, you pay $100k for the same car, but someone else gets a stripped down version for free.
I don't really understand why I should want to pay for others to plays video games. Video games are not a necessity of life, if someone wants to play them, they should open their own wallet.
Next time some F2P freeloader tells you to go back to WoW in general chat, just remember, you're paying for them to be there. There is no free game, it's only free to the freeloaders who get to entertain themselves on your dime.
It is the nature of the mmo beast, damned if you do, damned if you don't.