MMO Friday Fight Round 5: It's A Monetization Model Free For All | MMORPG.com

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MMO Friday Fight Round 5: It's A Monetization Model Free For All | MMORPG.com

For this week's Friday Fight, we are changing the format slightly. Mitch pits the three major monetization models against each other in a no-holds-barred cage match.

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Slapshot1188

Subs will always be the best IMHO. No Whales. Even playing field. No free loaders.

Tamanous

Slapshot1188 said:

Subs will always be the best IMHO. No Whales. Even playing field. No free loaders.

Although other factors are at play, it also fosters a closer server community which is an almost entirely lost concept in some mmos.

Asm0deus

Slapshot1188 said:

Subs will always be the best IMHO. No Whales. Even playing field. No free loaders.

The big problem is that lots of game and greedy companies do not follow these 3 monetizations but want to use all three to lesser or greater degrees and call it... GAAS and far too many gamers defend the stupid practices so...what to do.

Now maybe this has changed but I do think that the road Pax Dei is going for isnt it?

https://playpaxdei.com/en-us/news/information/where-we-stand-on-monetization
Game purchase B2P ~ a one-off initial purchase of the game.

Sub ~ a regular fee for maintaining active player status and in-game plot(s).

f2p cash shop ~ fully optional additional services added down the line. we’re also considering a Token (WoW) or PLEX (Eve Online) -like system.

Scot

Yes Asmodeus, Mitch has given us a snap shot in the timeline of monetarization which was long gone before five years ago.

Today MMOs are F2P or B2p games with an "optional" sub and cash shop. This is the most important point, that monetarization is constantly evolving and will continue to do so. We can see NFT's and crypto on the horizon, studios are milking players every which way they can.

cameltosis

Personally, I only play subscription-only MMOs (don't think any exist anymore) or completely free (i.e. emulators).


The reasons why I prefer sub-only:


1) Predictable costs - I like knowing exactly how much my game is gonna cost me.

2) Player Filter - a subscription acts like a filter on the community. Generally, only those players who genuinely want to be there are willing to pay the subscrption, so the community tends to be higher quality. Not always the case of course, there are always some bad apples, but overall it seems to be better.

3) Predictable income for devs - I expect the devs to continually update the game, and this seems like a predictable way to pay them for that work.




I liked the original promise of F2P - offering the start of the gaem for free, then cutting up the rest of the game into small chunks to sell to the players piece-meal, so that they could play and pay on their own timescale without the feeling of missing out if they couldn't play much. But, that original promise never seemed to materialise, it quickly turned into cash-shop nightmares.

KnightFalz

Purchase and subscription was the best model as the only road to profit under that is attracting and maintaining players. That makes the quality and quantity of the game the sole means to achieve ongoing success so was the only focus.

As soon as earning revenue was distanced from that by placing it in a cash shop the focus will drift toward making game decisions that will boost cash shop revenue, eventually to the point it will start to compromise the game experience without such purchases.