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Is f2p the way to go for future mmorpg ?
Kaynos1972
Member Posts: 2,316
We see more and more mmorpg being released as free 2 play. Sony just announced that their new mmorpg, the agency will be free 2 play. We already know successful f2p games like Guild Wars. Arenanet already announced that Guld Wars 2 will also be free 2 play. Do you think in the future we will see more free 2 play mmorpg being released ? Obviously that marketing strategy is working. Do you think pay 2 play mmorpg are going to be the minority ?
Comments
I'm not sure but p2p mmos are already a minority.
But I doubt p2p model will became extinct. =]
To be honest, I don't understand that free 2 play strategy ... apparenrtly Guild Wars is making money out of their sales, imgine how much they could do if they were pay 2 play .. because for sure, most would pay to play it
now, free 2 play games are usually chineese or whatever else crappy games, and those will never be successfull in european/american countries
P2P games are already a minority of the market, however I believe they make the most money, at least per customer. Most pay2play games are better developed and have better quality all around than f2p games. They also attempt to have a world where everyone in the game world is equal.
On the other hand, f2p is another great market. It allows anyone to visit the world, but playing for free doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be fun, there will always be those players who buy from the item shop to gain an advantage over others, which is fine because thats how the pay system is based.
F2p games will probably never satisfy the "hardcore gamer" market, since players playing at least 20 hours a week probably are willing to spend 15 a month to play them and in general the f2p market is lacking in graphics and content compared to top of the line 15/mo games. However theres a market for both of the games to exist and I believe the f2p market will generate a bigger fanbase and when the f2p players can own their own creditcards they will move to the monthly fee mmo.
I think for a PC gamer the subscirption fee will always be the prefered mode. I believe that PC gamers are usually more of an adult crowd as opposed to the console which I would think appeals to a younger audience (this is just my opinion, I do not have any proof of this). As adult gamers I think that a consistent fee is very important as many adults already have a mortgage/rent payment, car payment, houshold fees like phone bills and internet bills, as well as many other costs and if you're lucky any additions to your savings.
Having a gaming bill that fluctuates will just add to an already difficult lifestyle.
I'm talking about the North America and Europe market here. I know pretty well that most asian mmo are free 2 play. What i want to know if this is going to become the norm here too ?
Devs have pretty much sealed the fate of MMOs by continuously making crap games. They sparked the interest of a large group of players but failed to deliver opening up the opportunity of the F2P market here. Free to play games are getting better and more inovative while MMO's are either the same (LotR) or worse then ever (most recently - Vanguard) Meanwhile every other MMO player base aside from WoW's is either shrinking or gone.
Free2play isn't what you guys think it is. Firstly show me a free 2 play game that has more features than a p2p game. Secondly free is a loose term when it comes to these games. It is more like a free trial of 99% of the game, however there is a catch. They make the game so grindy and tough to level to force people to pay for item mall stuff. Most big free to play games in korea make a ton of money because of our competetive nature. Everyone wants to get ahead and they pump more and more money into in game stuff, leaving non payers in the dust. Also the existence of premium items and features usually gimps a non payer tremendously. So yes you can play 99% of the game for free, pay nothing, but at the end of the road you'll get your butt kicked every why by people who pay, and are either forced to pay yourself or simply quit in agony.
Companies are jumping on the f2p model because they see its possibilities. You all know how addictive mmorpgs can be, well take the monthyl fee away and you have people paying 100s of dollars every month just to be better than everyone else. You may say wait, people do that anyways with the gold selling and powerleveling services. Yes that can help you get ahead. However it doesn't stop anyone from getting those things themselves. Anyone who played many f2p games knows that the end game belongs to the payers.
On Guild Wars, yes that is true free to play. However firstly it isn't a true mmorpg, more like a multiplayer game with a big graphical chatroom. However that is not the problem. Problem is with no subscirption fees and no item shop the game has to rely on the popularity of its expansions while pumping them out at a steady pace. Trust me, if Nightfall had failed the game would be dead by now.
P2P is the only way to ensure relative fairness in a game. Also if you had contact with f2p games you would notice how weak their customer service is. In most cases it is almost non-existant. It is very rare for a p2p game to get hacked, however alot of these f2p games are rife with hacking problems. Hell in many of them the second you get some uber premium items and someone notices you'll get hacked and lose it.
To specify one negative feature of f2p is the size of the game world, most of the time it is extremely small compared to p2p games. Ever see the type of skills you get in many of them ? Not to mention if there's many it usually ends up turning out that 90% of them are useless. Forget balancing. I have encountered numerous f2p games where your character had a total of about 5 skills in the entire game.
In closing f2p is good for wasting time, but p2p is where the action is at for quality long term gaming.
F2P MMO's may sound better at first glance but like Airspell said, when you really think about it in the long run your still paying to play a game if you want to be powerful. At least for me, I've noticed that in F2P MMO's the community tends to have a more immature audiance, less content, and I somehow get the feeling the developers don't have much drive to create more content but with that there are exceptions to everything. Personally, I hope MMO's continue to have both F2P and P2P games in the market and I am confident that the MMO community will continue to play both as each has something different to offer consumers. To answer you question if F2P is the way of future MMORPG's, I'm confident to say that the MMO market will continue to produce both F2P and P2P games.
At least or me, I'm going to be more inclined to play P2P MMO's as they come out than the F2P alternatives.
The reason Free to Play MMOs outnumber Monthly Fee MMOs is because the Free to Play MMOs are not good enough to warrant a monthly fee.
Archlord and most recently Sword of the New World were forced to go Free to Play because they werent good enough to be monthly fee MMOs.
The fact is pretty much all Free to Play MMOs suck and if they were good then the publisher would be charging a monthly fee.
You get what you pay for.
Traditional MMOs are losing ground across the board. Tabula Rasa will not generate any mass appeal and will certainly not draw the numbers of players that games like GW, PW, SilkRoad and stuff like that do. AoC isn't going to make it, technical reasons are gonna be the undoing of that game, G&H is a mess and PotBS.....not sure.
I'm not a supporter of free to play but the P2P guys have pretty much f*cked things up and run off a good sized portion of players already. No one wants to pay for "kill 10 rats" and grinding in fields anymore. MMOs will need to evolve or die off.
A free to play with all the features of a P2P, PLUS. Perfect World.
http://www.perfectworld.com.my/features.asp
You guys are letting your opinions interfer with what is really going on in MMO's. The issue is P2P has NOT put out a decent game worth paying for in years, meanwhile F2P have been growng and improving.
Even big corporations like SOE are convinced that Free to play is absolutely the way to go for the future of the genre.
SOE is going Free to Play because the only game they publish thats worth $15 a month is EQ2.
Free to play games make more money... Because you have to buy each prenuim item in-game with real money... There is no fix rate so players could spend over hundreds of dollars at one time or just five dollars. With P2P it's a constat 10-15 dollars which does good to keep up servers and add new content.. only if they had enough players.
F2P brings more players and with more players means you might earn more money... Just got to find your audience.
Mustache is a cat
That has to go to the vet
Do your taxes now
A Korean developed SUPER GRIND wins a Korean award?! Shocking.SOE is going Free to Play because the only game they publish thats worth $15 a month is EQ2.
Because western MMO's don't have grinding, right? please. If SotNW is a "Super grind" then I don't even want to know what you consider EQ, EQ2 and many other western MMO's, because in SotNW, the cap level is reached in a month or so.
Also, SOE is planning F2p for games that are not even released yet, you have absolutely no idea if its worth 15$ a month or not.
I am not sure how will the future of f2p mmorpg will turn out, but for now, most of them are really bad
First, let's stand on the business' point of view. Maintaining a mmorpg is totally different from making a single player game or fps. Sure there will be some sort of high budget to produce the games, but a mmorpg will need to pay extra to maintain. You need to pay for maintaining the server, paying for the banditwidth that let's others go online. You will need to have a development team continous making new contents, fixing old bugs. That is why mmorpgs require a monthly fee. They simply can't sell you a game for 50 bucks and let you hop on their server to pay forever. sooner or later the money you pay for the box will goes into the budge of banditwith, and after that the companys will lose money instead of making them
So, my point is you need constant flow of income to maintain a mmorpg. So how does the f2p mmorpgs stay alive in the market?
f2p games like flyff or silkroad sells ingame items for real cash, and you know what? those games actually could make more money than p2p games since there will be a lot of people playing, but even more people pay for more than 20 bucks a month to obtain new items. If there is any reason why f2p games are the future, it isn't that no one will pay for p2p mmos, but that f2p mmos could make more money (other than those giants in mmo business like WoW). The downside? if you know how bad can gold farmers ruin a mmorpg, then this f2p sytem is a lot worse. At the end you will still need to pay for the game monthly to enjoy the game.
f2p games like guild wars use anohter method to get their monthly fee. Instead of getting their money from ingame store, they give you guys expansions~~ tata~. The average about a new expansion every 6 months, you guys can do the calculation. Besides, guildwar isn't a true mmorpg, so the banditwidth the company needs to spend on is a lot less than a true mmorpg.
future f2p games like agency? they will also need to sell ingame items and in game ads to make a profit
just remember, no one in the world besides Michael Jackson will spend millions so others can enjoy something for free. All of them wants profits at the end. So at the end all the f2p mmorpgs will need to get their money from somewhere. They will not let you enjoy the game for free or no one will be paying them
for now I rather play a p2p mmo than a f2p mmo as it would be more balance at the begining
Well I'll stake some middle ground - I think 'c2p' or cheap to play may be the preferred place to be.
The game cost upfront would mostly cover a lot of the game devel. A small monthly fee rather than $15 a month [man some at vivendi are getting their pockets lined with gold ...] is probably the "sweet spot" so to speak
Rationale ::
1) as noted purchase price of the game will with enough quantity sold pay for a lot of the dev cost
2) the playing field is getting crowded - very crowded - products that may seem superior may not reach a large enough subscriber base - a larger subscriber base can help sustain continued revenue growth for these companies
2a) by differentiating yourself with a quality product but at a lower recurring price you may increase said subscriber base
3) the more people coming into mmos are expecting more bang for their buck - so if you charge a bit less you dont have to offer them the entire world just a sliver of it
4) servers,bandwidth, support people, dev people working on patches/content upgrade dont' just grow on trees/come free so a small monthly fee covers those costs
5) people like cheap/free so the closer you can get to that model the better BUT with all trade-offs no one says you have to sink down to free - there is a sweet spot where people are willing to pay for what they get [or if they are idiots they are willing to pay $15 a month lol]
6) some of the f2p charge you for elite/higher quality items or other character enhancements on an item by item / feature by feature basis - for some this might work but for most people they dont want to have to be bothered with these details and still others may find it a 'cheapening' of the game experience. a low monthly fee makes for a level playing field and the 'expected' random items , grinds etc
ncsoft has gone to somewhat of this middle ground with dungeon runner, you see games like oblivion or snw going the route of buying items etc
i'd go back to playing eq2 if they would drop the price to $7 or $8 a month *shrug*
i am 'unsure' of the model being used on Hellgate:London - it may be another popular route in the future for mmos.
just my 2 cents x a recurring monthly fee,
xkey
xkey was here
@xkey
That's not an entirely bad approach, but perhaps you weren't looking through Torak's perspective of things... So far p2p generally means as:
PAY TO LOGIN EVERY MONTH
And that's before you have to do the usual routines of arriving to conclusive evidences on why you should force yourself to fork out for a 'process' (that's over debated, over argued and over analyzed by the same set of p2p apologists here) that's readily available from a mere online registration and a download from f2p titles?
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The more apt title for this thread should have been "will f2p stay in the future of MMORPGs" instead.
Runescape is gaining (if not maintaining a healthy 6 figures) 7 figures mark for its player pop count, how the hell is/was that possible?
The entire notion of a freeloading MMORPGs generation can outrightly kill innovations is utterly ridiculous and weak. Because simply, first off...there won't ever be a truly freeloading culture and number 2..for every one kid that freeloads and yet properly adds to the other paying players' experience (by being a good community member or as a worthy 'villain') spells longevity. The only differences is that this time, not every MMORPG dev or publisher shall have to do the near mandatory expenditures to operate to Blizzard's scales when it comes to the likes of WoW?
And yes, most p2p titles of late were retuned, 'fixed' and 'modded' to get around that WoW juggernaut. And voila...we get daily thread spams of usually less than educated rants and flame wars here in The Pub itself. Massive doesn't have to mean 9mill PER title.
The MMORPG industry needs an inflection/correction point and f2p is what that can do exactly that.
Paying through myself just to whine, complain and criticize for an exercise in futility in implementations is just so 5 years ago....
Risk Your Life 1 & 2 was probably one of the more ill prepared MMORPG, for a definitive lock-in of high level PvP to crippling dependence on item mall gears. That's not to say that the part outrightly diminishes what I consider as one of the world's 'fastest' WASD ctrls around in a MMORPG, more open non-safe zones and player centered skills system as you can pick, throw or multi class any as you go. For a Korean production, RYL had stayed long enough to appeal to its fans even though it went through the usual p2p -> f2p progression. Further evidences such as the mushrooming effects of numerous emulators out there and near daily introductions of private shards, doesn't seem to stop the current international publishers such as the one linked above and CiB Malaysia from prepping with newer expansions still?
Silkroad Online, celebrated for all the world's most infested bot fest extraordinaires, now runs up to not 1but 20 game servers, just recently launched the European race patch with Arabs coming later. Joymax expands this year into the Middle East markets by appointing regional sales agents to facilitate the related micro transactions. And yes all this, even with all the grind and botters' assaults combined.
Perfect World of China had managed to achieve 500,000 players concurrency (across ALL versions to be clear) at a point, even with NON game affecting items available from their item mall. And they're making forays into South East Asian markets by internationalizing the Malaysian version (soon) and localizing the Vietnam and Taiwan player bases.
Flagship Studios of Hellgate:London's soon to be fame are working on Mythos, a casually inclined f2p title. They're taking this beta stage currently as an acid test for their network infrastructure for HG:L. Mythos is probably the 1st in line "work in progress NOW" f2p title from a Western outfit, compared to numerous other 'announcements' or older progressions.
Shadowbane is doing just fine after its p2p-f2p progression and running strong with a 200-300k player base. New contents/patch had just recently been added and there's a proper test server for the current testers' assessments and inputs.
And game depth wise, I don't think anyone can argue with Anarchy Online. Yeah that link works really,
even after all these years, go check it out.
So to say all of the above had managed to do what they did, without justifiable levels of quality is just nonsensical.
I didn't post "facts". I posted stuff that you have to play through to see what I mean. You wanna throw out a statistically tight debate, please feel free to do so and cite the necessary 'trustworthy' sources, while not forgetting to prove the quantitative facts of profits to innovations' returns. And gather the necessary wits to expect us the players to actually believe these compilation of facts, which is amazing really?Considering that there's lesser devs these days that's willing to let players in about their dev logs, let alone be upfront about "oh here's the median ceiling of profits that we need to hit, to spend on bla bla bla"?
All those billions went into so-called graphics and that ill prepared dx10 propagandas, to fuel hardware sales that fits the reqs for Windows Vista. Last time I checked Call of Juarez is NOT an MMO...And ahh...who can forget Vanguard, oh the warm feeling...
Or we can choose to still pay and make an idiot out of ourselves.
I refuse to play "free to play" item mall games. A game where I have to pay for every item to compete in the game is ridiculous. I'd rather pay 15$ and be on the level with everyone instead paying for every little thing. These aren't real free games, Guild Wars is the only one that can actually brag that
I highly doubt that. If you ask around on any GW forum about why people like GW so much and why they bought it, the number one answer is: 'No monthly fees'.
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Playing: Final Fantasy Online: ARR, Destiny
Most memorable games for me: UO, GW1, LoTRO
I concur... everyone I knew liked it because it was free...
MMOs played (In order of how much I've liked them): Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, Vanguard, City of Villains / Heroes, Guild Wars, Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa, Anarchy Online, Ryzom, Final Fantasy XI, Matrix Online, RF Online, Rappelz, Hero Online, Roma Victor
Cheers.
Chaos.
Take a deep drink of your demon Lad, tonight we tangle with the fire in the gut.
no, the community in F2P will always suck. I.E 12 yr olds galore
Even big corporations like SOE are convinced that Free to play is absolutely the way to go for the future of the genre.
50 million dollars and nothing to show for it sadly Gameloading. They spent most of that budget on making clothing as detailed as possible :P If that game is the best Korea has to offer than I can honestly say they have absolutely no taste in gaming.