i think we are all missing the point here.....P2P isnt going to die and neither will F2P and there is no need for something like that to happen there are tons of MMORPG's out here other are P2P others are F2P some of them might be crappy some of them have fresh features all im trying to say is that we have THE OPORTUNITY TO CHOOSE!!! we can choose to either play a f2p game or a p2p one and from my experience ive heard a lot of people crying about not having enough choices about all kinds of stuff and as far as the mmo industry is concerned we have enough pay styles so every1 should be happy.
BUT NO.....there are still people that want to a certain pay type to die simply because they dont like it.....and thats from both sides and im really sad and upset about this i mean how would a WoW player feel if his game that he/she had so much fun with died out simply because some of the f2p gamers hate p2p games and that goes for every1 in every mmorpg ur playing
ohhh. and before people start putting tags id like to say that ive been playing MMORPG's for 4-5 years now ive played WoW, Lotro (when it was a sub game) , GW , Fiesta Online , Runescape , Runes of Magic , and ive tried a lot of other games too And also ive never spent a single cent for the F2P ones all im trying to say is that u should be happy that u are able to choose
For the record, it still is a sub game. Just, as you said, you now have a CHOICE between that and an ala' carte model.
Other than that clarification, I agree 100%.
Also, for the record, I'm still keeping my sub to LotRO. It was worth a sub before, and I suspect it will be worth a sub, after.
It's a sub game with an extensive item mall about to be tacked onto it where none was before.
It will no longer be a pure sub game, and should not be classified as such.
I think games that dominate their field will still command subscription fees, because they are more stable and overall more profitable. Especially if they can soak players for a little extra with vanity cash sales.
Games that struggle to compete in the subscription market will be forced to step down a tier and give away their gameplay in order to attract more players. I think we will start to see the crash of this area with so many titles, the ease of migration since they cost nothing to start playing and then as these games struggle with the need to sell power as they age.
It is hard to tell what is going to happen in the coming years, but I think the boom we are seeing now that some columns here praise will be viewed as a graveyard in coming years where failed games go to die.
Recently Acclaim cancelled its entire F2P line up. Rather than waiting for a staff writer (ahem) to pick up on this I thought I would put it out there. When a P2P game goes hybrid P2P/F2P we get a fanfare of staff writers wanting to talk about what it means for the MMO industry. But when a F2P goes belly up, or as here a whole stable of F2P goes south we hear nothing about what this has to say for the industry. Here or on any other site.
F2P is not the saviour of MMO finances but until their noses are rubbed in it nobody in the industry wants to recognise that F2P is not the easy solution to financial problems that they hope it is. Yes P2P has problems but that has generated a willingness in the MMO industry to look for a saviour, F2P is not a saviour, there are no easy solutions to the problems MMO’s are in currently.
Most of these games were not premier F2P by all accounts, but DDO was hardly premier P2P and look at the trumpets that sounded on this site when one P2P MMO went to a hybrid P2P/F2P model.
I notice that these F2P games which are now cancelled all still appear on this sites games list with no mention of the fact they have folded. Surely such games need their own section, not part of the main game list. I am not suggesting that the forums are deleted just separated from games which are still live. Or do old F2P games never die on the game list? I then noticed that Asheron’s Call 2 is not there, it seems P2P games do get removed, perhaps for fairness it's best cancelled F2P ones are removed as well! You can still find the AC2 forums under the forums list, thats were F2P's that are not active should go as well.
As some bright spark always tries to use DDO, Lotro or GW as examples when talking about F2P I will just point out that DDO and Lotro use a hybrid P2P/F2P system, they are not just F2P. Guild Wars has a unique ‘pay for the box’ finance model, it is not F2P.
Do your research before posting this stuff.Accllaim has the company has folded their free to play games have not totally 9 dragons stil lives.2 moons is port of Korean game which is stil alive.TCOS has been mismanage horrible to extent that i don't even time to mention complete how much.
In your rush to say "Ha Free to play does not work" you didn't look at the small facts.Acclaim is dead because quite frankly the suck at what did.Most of games they have will live on,I feel sorry most for spellborn which had a chance to be a decent game before it was mismange badly.
i think we are all missing the point here.....P2P isnt going to die and neither will F2P and there is no need for something like that to happen there are tons of MMORPG's out here other are P2P others are F2P some of them might be crappy some of them have fresh features all im trying to say is that we have THE OPORTUNITY TO CHOOSE!!! we can choose to either play a f2p game or a p2p one and from my experience ive heard a lot of people crying about not having enough choices about all kinds of stuff and as far as the mmo industry is concerned we have enough pay styles so every1 should be happy.
BUT NO.....there are still people that want to a certain pay type to die simply because they dont like it.....and thats from both sides and im really sad and upset about this i mean how would a WoW player feel if his game that he/she had so much fun with died out simply because some of the f2p gamers hate p2p games and that goes for every1 in every mmorpg ur playing
ohhh. and before people start putting tags id like to say that ive been playing MMORPG's for 4-5 years now ive played WoW, Lotro (when it was a sub game) , GW , Fiesta Online , Runescape , Runes of Magic , and ive tried a lot of other games too And also ive never spent a single cent for the F2P ones all im trying to say is that u should be happy that u are able to choose
For the record, it still is a sub game. Just, as you said, you now have a CHOICE between that and an ala' carte model.
Other than that clarification, I agree 100%.
Also, for the record, I'm still keeping my sub to LotRO. It was worth a sub before, and I suspect it will be worth a sub, after.
It's a sub game with an extensive item mall about to be tacked onto it where none was before.
It will no longer be a pure sub game, and should not be classified as such.
when i said "when it was a sub game" i meant that there was no info on it about becoming a hybrid MMO with a cash shop and a choice of a sub which btw give u cash shop money every month (i would say F2P but it is not the common "F2P" MMOG which again isnt actually a F2P game but lets not go down that road :P ) and i have to admit Turbines cash shop is one of the best ive ever met cause ive also been playing D&DO so i have some personal experience AND i would like to thank you for your informative replies on this matter and i appreciate the fact that it was in a kind way and not an offensive one
My contention was not that F2P ‘does not work’ if you read my OP I am drawing attention to the difference in press that F2P and P2P get. When Tabula Rasa was cancelled it was the story of the year, when a whole stable of F2P games are cancelled it barely gets reported on gaming sites. The title ‘The Death of F2P’ simply reflected the sort of ridiculous headings we got when DDO went hybrid revenue model. The gaming industry has noticed that new MMO’s are struggling to get enough players at launch and keep a player base. They have mistakenly blamed this on the P2P revenue model and see F2P as the answer.
In reality it is the over abundance of MMO’s, their one format (WoW) gameplay and the explosion of other types of online play that is causing new MMO’s problems.
The hybrid models like in DDO and Lotro may be the way forward, I think it is too early to tell either way about those models yet. DDO seems to be doing well but there is a creeping influence of bad cash shop mentality, Lotro will launch with purchasable stat bonuses. It’s not the cash shop that’s the issue, it’s what you sell in it. But MMO history shows that once you have a cash shop eventually everything is up for grabs and achievement depends on who has the biggest credit card.
If some of those F2P MMO’s are still going fair enough, but the 2Moons on the game list was not the Korean version, our version has gone, so the 2moons on this sites Game’s List should be retired to the forums. I myself was sorry to see what happened to TCOS it had some great ideas. But remember TCOS went F2P to save it from folding and that did not help did it? It’s the idea that F2P is some sort of magic bullet that will solve MMO revenue problems that I am attacking here, clearly it is as often a bullet in the head to a MMO.
My contention was not that F2P ‘does not work’ if you read my OP I am drawing attention to the difference in press that F2P and P2P get. When Tabula Rasa was cancelled it was the story of the year, when a whole stable of F2P games are cancelled it barely gets reported on gaming sites.
I don't think it has anything to do with one being pay to play and the others being free to play.
It probably has more to do with the history of Tabula Rasa.
Think about it:
Made by a famouse game developer in the employ of NC Soft
had a long and convoluted development history
Released with issues
Cost a lot to make
It then closes and "bam" news.
As opposed to some free to play games with no news that I know of except they were closed.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
Originally posted by Tazlor Originally posted by randomt F2p is immoral and no one should support that model. When you have teams bragging about having an average of 50$ from each player.. when the majority of players play 0 or almost 0, this means they are extorting a very large amount out of those few people with pathological spending problems, and that's just wrong. It's more complicated than that, but if you think about it based on that, you might 'get' what I am trying to say. I think the F2P industry needs to be regulated.
so you're saying we need to make those people that spend thousands of dollars on F2P MMO's stop? umm...why? because you don't like it? to make F2P's fail? it's their money, if they want to spent it on a F2P game that's their choice.
Is it their choice?
It's more or less the same general type of psychological problem as "compulsive gambling".
What I hear here is: "I enjoy playing for free, therefore I don't care that the game is destroying people", more or less.
Well, I guess the world always needs some evil people to make decent people seem even better eh?
Did someone tell the OP that Acclaim was purchased by Playdom, a company that operates free to play games on Facebook?
I think the only reason Acclaim closed its games is because they were Acclaim and have never been profitable. Playdom purchased them for their billing and account management systems, and then cut away the dead weight known as the games that Acclaim had.
Recently Acclaim cancelled its entire F2P line up. Rather than waiting for a staff writer (ahem) to pick up on this I thought I would put it out there. When a P2P game goes hybrid P2P/F2P we get a fanfare of staff writers wanting to talk about what it means for the MMO industry. But when a F2P goes belly up, or as here a whole stable of F2P goes south we hear nothing about what this has to say for the industry. Here or on any other site.
F2P is not the saviour of MMO finances but until their noses are rubbed in it nobody in the industry wants to recognise that F2P is not the easy solution to financial problems that they hope it is. Yes P2P has problems but that has generated a willingness in the MMO industry to look for a saviour, F2P is not a saviour, there are no easy solutions to the problems MMO’s are in currently.
Most of these games were not premier F2P by all accounts, but DDO was hardly premier P2P and look at the trumpets that sounded on this site when one P2P MMO went to a hybrid P2P/F2P model.
I notice that these F2P games which are now cancelled all still appear on this sites games list with no mention of the fact they have folded. Surely such games need their own section, not part of the main game list. I am not suggesting that the forums are deleted just separated from games which are still live. Or do old F2P games never die on the game list? I then noticed that Asheron’s Call 2 is not there, it seems P2P games do get removed, perhaps for fairness it's best cancelled F2P ones are removed as well! You can still find the AC2 forums under the forums list, thats were F2P's that are not active should go as well.
As some bright spark always tries to use DDO, Lotro or GW as examples when talking about F2P I will just point out that DDO and Lotro use a hybrid P2P/F2P system, they are not just F2P. Guild Wars has a unique ‘pay for the box’ finance model, it is not F2P.
As a player who took much longer to warm to the idea of p2p I have to cosign the sentiment that accompanies the joy at games being released with f2p hybrid models. Simply put far too many companies have been able to attach a sub fee to an unworthy game simply by calling it an mmo. Games like AOC who after the tutorial many thought was so bare bones it looked like a different game and let's not forget the newest failure on the block STO which has the nerve to charge a MANDATORY sub fee and then puts no less than half of any new content released in a cash shop.
I don't think anyone's sentiment is really that F2P is the way to save the genre only that every other mmo that comes out does not justify charging a sub fee and by listening to the comments of "anti change" community members it's easy to see that without the word of others like myself and even the writers who praise change companies like Cryptic will just continue to fleece the populace because many of you have alreayd deemed this is a necessary business practice.
As far as the press given to f2p games and the closure of p2p games, f2p are a dime a dozen they come and go often with no mention of the game, hell rarely are games without a premium sub fee even featured on this site so why does that matter now? If it's something that bothers you maybe the articles about f2p games stand out more to you but as a person who could care less about anything other than getting good games I can assure you a vast majority of the press for this site goes to pay to play games and it shouldn't change just to accentuate your point.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
I think Scott hits upon a more important point. Alot of companies, or more importantly alot of Executives within companies, seem to believe in the "magic pixie dust of success" formula....and industry media tend to be particularly bad at hyping those beliefs. This is true regardless of industry, btw, you see it in plenty of places outside of the MMO industry (the Tech sector is notrious for it).
Executives look at a struggling company and say, All I have to do is do X (fill in whatever flavor of the month buzz-word you like) and we'll be wildly successfull...just like those other guys. Industry media tend to exascerbate this situation badly with a sound-chamber effect as well.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no one magic formula to success.....and shortcuts to success usualy don't work.
Success often takes alot of luck, good timing and hard work......and even then somtimes things don't work out.
F2P certainly CAN be successfull (as much as I hate to admit it)..... but JUST because you make your product F2P doesn't mean it WILL be successfull....any more then buying a lottery ticket means you WILL be a millionaire.
That's something companies (and industry press) need to remember.
F2p is immoral and no one should support that model.
When you have teams bragging about having an average of 50$ from each player.. when the majority of players play 0 or almost 0, this means they are extorting a very large amount out of those few people with pathological spending problems, and that's just wrong.
It's more complicated than that, but if you think about it based on that, you might 'get' what I am trying to say.
I think the F2P industry needs to be regulated.
so you're saying we need to make those people that spend thousands of dollars on F2P MMO's stop? umm...why? because you don't like it? to make F2P's fail? it's their money, if they want to spent it on a F2P game that's their choice.
Is it their choice?
It's more or less the same general type of psychological problem as "compulsive gambling".
What I hear here is: "I enjoy playing for free, therefore I don't care that the game is destroying people", more or less.
Well, I guess the world always needs some evil people to make decent people seem even better eh?
Umm then you are saying we are doing what people do by and large right, let people live there lives, you mention gambling how often do you see people standing outside of casino's preaching to people about how bad gambling is and that they shouldn't do it.
I agree compulsive gambling to the point where your life is falling apart around you is bad and I'll say the same thing about free to play mmo's when it becomes the epedemic that gambling is on society. Right now we may be able to find a handful if that of stories about a person mortgaging the home over free to play mmo's (by the way I've not seen one just know that some may be able to point out one or two) until then all this "f2p is the devil" talk is akin to the boy who cried wolf.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
F2p is immoral and no one should support that model.
When you have teams bragging about having an average of 50$ from each player.. when the majority of players play 0 or almost 0, this means they are extorting a very large amount out of those few people with pathological spending problems, and that's just wrong.
It's more complicated than that, but if you think about it based on that, you might 'get' what I am trying to say.
I think the F2P industry needs to be regulated.
so you're saying we need to make those people that spend thousands of dollars on F2P MMO's stop? umm...why? because you don't like it? to make F2P's fail? it's their money, if they want to spent it on a F2P game that's their choice.
Is it their choice?
It's more or less the same general type of psychological problem as "compulsive gambling".
What I hear here is: "I enjoy playing for free, therefore I don't care that the game is destroying people", more or less.
Well, I guess the world always needs some evil people to make decent people seem even better eh?
Your logic is flawed. People who spend compulsively has have support groups available to them just like gambling does. There is no regulations on gamling to stop a person from sinking every last cent they have at the black jack table. Compulsive spenders have a type of AAA just liking gamling,drinking,drugs. Everything a person does that is enjoyment is liable to become an addiction if it wasnt enjoyable they would never develope the addiction. So by you logic we should Regulate everything fun.... Because going to movies is fun and people can spend there rent money seeing avatar for the 100th time. Or going to disney world for the 9th time in a month. I understand your point that people will compulsively spend all of there money in the game and result in serious financial ruin but at some point people need to regulate themselfs.
Originally posted by Demonspirit8 Originally posted by randomt
Originally posted by Tazlor
Originally posted by randomt F2p is immoral and no one should support that model. When you have teams bragging about having an average of 50$ from each player.. when the majority of players play 0 or almost 0, this means they are extorting a very large amount out of those few people with pathological spending problems, and that's just wrong. It's more complicated than that, but if you think about it based on that, you might 'get' what I am trying to say. I think the F2P industry needs to be regulated.
so you're saying we need to make those people that spend thousands of dollars on F2P MMO's stop? umm...why? because you don't like it? to make F2P's fail? it's their money, if they want to spent it on a F2P game that's their choice.
Is it their choice? It's more or less the same general type of psychological problem as "compulsive gambling". What I hear here is: "I enjoy playing for free, therefore I don't care that the game is destroying people", more or less. Well, I guess the world always needs some evil people to make decent people seem even better eh?
Your logic is flawed. People who spend compulsively has have support groups available to them just like gambling does. There is no regulations on gamling to stop a person from sinking every last cent they have at the black jack table. Compulsive spenders have a type of AAA just liking gamling,drinking,drugs. Everything a person does that is enjoyment is liable to become an addiction if it wasnt enjoyable they would never develope the addiction. So by you logic we should Regulate everything fun.... Because going to movies is fun and people can spend there rent money seeing avatar for the 100th time. Or going to disney world for the 9th time in a month. I understand your point that people will compulsively spend all of there money in the game and result in serious financial ruin but at some point people need to regulate themselfs.
If some of those F2P MMO’s are still going fair enough, but the 2Moons on the game list was not the Korean version, our version has gone, so the 2moons on this sites Game’s List should be retired to the forums. I myself was sorry to see what happened to TCOS it had some great ideas. But remember TCOS went F2P to save it from folding and that did not help did it? It’s the idea that F2P is some sort of magic bullet that will solve MMO revenue problems that I am attacking here, clearly it is as often a bullet in the head to a MMO.
Are you going to compare Tabla rasa and its huge budget to 2 moons which is just a port of a very cheaply made game of course not and the coverage is not even going to be the same.It is not the payment plan it is game.WoW would be successful if it used B2P or F2P it is just a good game.
F2P is good choice for unstable game,P2P is good choice for stable games.You are correct it is not a magic bullet and TCOS was brought out to early and was build as P2P game items had little to no use that game which doom it as a cash shop game.Reality it would have been better as hybrid format or P2P.Also it has had stupid russian roulette combat system which made the game unnessary cofusing had they kept the controls simple the game would have done much better,It reminds of Mortal and lack of 3rd person view.Innovation for no reason is silly
You are right the more games on the market ,the more hard it will become for other games and plus with WoW hogging millions of paying customers it is very hard for game to compete.Think about TSW,ToR,WH40k,Rifts,Tera,FF,Dc Online all will probably be P2P plus Aion,WoW,Warhammer,Aoc,Darkfall,Eve all exisit for 14.99.Think about which is easier try to compete against those games or use a payment plan that allows people to pay when they can.
I think the best test is going to be EQ2,I hope it has a lot of success because a seprate server for P2P and F2P for the same game is interesting.It might be a good way to serve both types of people who buy games.
I don't think Acclaim's stable of games is a very good example or indication for the F2P genre as a whole.
They were honestly some of the worst mmo's i've played (and all I play are F2P's btw), looked bad and played bad, the gfx in them all weren't great but yet they would always run like crap, not to mention controlls for them were all pretty clunky, and also had some pretty ugly interface choices.
As a whole, they just felt.. well, cheap and dated.
Think what they did was just an attempt at a cashgrab, they saw how well F2P worked for some and decided to throw a few bucks at it thinking it would be easy money, and it probably was for a bit, but they weren't willing to invest anything substancial in order to continue making something worthwhile it seems.
Decided to take the money and quit while they were ahead I guess :P
Do your research before posting this stuff.Accllaim has the company has folded their free to play games have not totally 9 dragons stil lives.2 moons is port of Korean game which is stil alive.TCOS has been mismanage horrible to extent that i don't even time to mention complete how much.
In your rush to say "Ha Free to play does not work" you didn't look at the small facts.Acclaim is dead because quite frankly the suck at what did.Most of games they have will live on,I feel sorry most for spellborn which had a chance to be a decent game before it was mismange badly.
I find it ironic that someone tells someone else to "do his research" when the same applies to you. Acclaim is not hosting 9Dragon, 2Moons nor any of their other title. Yes they still exist for different continent (under another name for certain games) but that's it. TCOS was not mismanaged, Spellborn.inc went bankrupt in 2009 and sold their game to Korean Company who attempted to turn this MMO into a F2P. Sadly it failed. Meanwhile, Acclaim had been hosting TCOS for over a year FOR FREE (No CS, etc). They closed down TCOS shortly after Playdom acquired Acclaim.
DisneyEntertainement recently acquired Playdom who had acquired Acclaim, 3 months earlier. Playdom is a Facebook game developers, and have asked Acclaim to shut down their game and work as developers on Facebook games under Playdom.
And no, Acclaim did not suck at what it did, 2Moons alone had over 500,000 actives in 2007. A company that "sucked and mismanaged" would not even get 30k players. Research a bit before you post.
How about maple story, perfect world, or ROM. They are a few of the most profitable MMORPG ever made.
Alot of the F2P games your seeing are basically imports from chinese or koreans which are already making huge money. They are just importing to the western world to milk more money.
As long as that keeps happening, you'll keep seeing f2p games.
I do agree with Jaxsundane that we have had many poor MMO launches in the past two years. But is that the fault of the P2P revenue model? They should not have been released at that stage, the lack of content at launch is not a reason for them all to have launched as F2P. Poor management and overdone hype was the cocktail that produced those issues not the revenue model, but I can understand the anger at being expected to pay full price. Maybe they should have been released on a half normal sub rate?
Just like many executives think making your MMO like WoW means you must have a success they now think making it F2P is a sure fire winner. Well look at where making a set of WoW clones has led us, into a cul-de-sac where new MMO’s can’t get players. Now they all seem to think a hybrid revenue model or a F2P one is the answer. There is no guaranteed answer, and the industry could be killed of by this simplistic thinking.
It will be interesting to see the headlines when EQ2 launches its F2P server. Population on the P2P server is low, you can guess the headlines: ‘F2P server Pwns P2P server’, the fact that 90% of those F2P players don’t invest a penny in the MMO will of course not be mentioned.
If a MMO makes the game list here I am regarding it as a MMO worthy of note. So its demise is worthy of note. APB did not even make it out of the door and we had a staff article about what went wrong. So a game like 2moons which had half a million players at one point is worthy of analysis, let alone the other 16 F2P’s which got the bullet.
I do agree with Jaxsundane that we have had many poor MMO launches in the past two years. But is that the fault of the P2P revenue model? They should not have been released at that stage, the lack of content at launch is not a reason for them all to have launched as F2P. Poor management and overdone hype was the cocktail that produced those issues not the revenue model, but I can understand the anger at being expected to pay full price. Maybe they should have been released on a half normal sub rate?
Just like many executives think making your MMO like WoW means you must have a success they now think making it F2P is a sure fire winner. Well look at where making a set of WoW clones has led us, into a cul-de-sac where new MMO’s can’t get players. Now they all seem to think a hybrid revenue model or a F2P one is the answer. There is no guaranteed answer, and the industry could be killed of by this simplistic thinking.
It will be interesting to see the headlines when EQ2 launches its F2P server. Population on the P2P server is low, you can guess the headlines: ‘F2P server Pwns P2P server’, the fact that 90% of those F2P players don’t invest a penny in the MMO will of course not be mentioned.
If a MMO makes the game list here I am regarding it as a MMO worthy of note. So its demise is worthy of note. APB did not even make it out of the door and we had a staff article about what went wrong. So a game like 2moons which had half a million players at one point is worthy of analysis, let alone the other 16 F2P’s which got the bullet.
It is like an Indie movie,They are not going to get covered when they do bad like a major hollywood movie .No matter how much i tell that you 2 moons is not dead it is alive in the form of Dekaron.The one thing i forgot to mention that Dekaron has been opperating in the US.With one small check of the site you can transfer 2 moons accounts to Deakron accounts.
It was my original point only spellborn of acclaim major games was dead and that was because the mishandle or mismanged.It is like Darkfall and Ryzom going to free to play payment does not work because how those games are made non item heavy mmo don't do well as f2p play.9 dragons and 2 moons are still alive,their web based games will be taken over by Playdom.Acclaim the company in this case is dead not the games except for Spellborn
As for coverage on this site,It is really hard to tell when a F2P dies,Spellborn could be brought back to life with one sale of a Korean company.Look at Mythos and Hellgate for example.P2P games like tabla rasa,Auto assult,the matrix have had more perement deaths.APB had fairly decent size budget had expections people knew about the game,If Rohan blood fued or Perfect world,Requiem goes down is not the same as Warhammer or AoC doing the samething.
Until this point they are no free to play games that have the budget of p2p games.When Lotor,Eq2,DDO and Gw2 struggle will get the stories that you want because these games are the equivalent of most p2p games it will be story.In most case they are so many games now that site and staff can't cover or don't realize when these games go belly up,I know this because i do whole lot of reading this site, Massively,WarCry,etc sometimes put out stories that happen weeks sometimes months back.
I think there's a difference between F2P and MT here. F2P usually means cash shop games, where you pay to win. Where as MT tends to (but not always) means pay for convenience (bags, mounts, swag, and etc). The problem with cash shop MMOs is that publishers get greedy and start adding items that not only make the game easier to play, but even remove items from the game itself to make it necessary to purchase said items. Acclaim's closure isn't the first, I can remember there being many more F2P/Cash-Shop MMOs than there are today just a year ago. I'm not sure that LOTRO and other like games can make the transition for the culture of the players surrounding them, but I think future titles could make it in an MT/hybrid model. So long as the developers don't get greedy and try to force players to buy the highest marked items in the shop. They need to learn to make the profit at the margins like all other businesses do.
Um, Acclaim did way more than MMG's. So saying its downfall is 100% pinned to F2p is a bit.....crazy.
But if you have a narrative, push it I guess.
---------- "Anyone posting on this forum is not an average user, and there for any opinions about the game are going to be overly critical compared to an average users opinions." - Me
"Hello person posting on a site specifically for MMO's in a thread on a sub forum specifically for a particular game talking about meta features and making comparisons to other titles in the genre, and their meta features.
Um, Acclaim did way more than MMG's. So saying its downfall is 100% pinned to F2p is a bit.....crazy.
But if you have a narrative, push it I guess.
It may be crazy, but it's completely true. If you look at their net gain after concentrating more and more on their F2P titles, you'll see it go down steadily.
They clearly stated, they had hundreds of thousands of players on their F2P titles, but something like only 5% actually spent any money in their cash shops (and ALL of their games attempted to the fullest to force you to pay for things from their cash shops in order to compete).
Acclaim was also one of the first MAJOR companies to push F2P, and was one of the 3 major F2P flagships showing it's "successful nature".
F2P is a crackpot business model, and we ALL knew it except for an acceptable few who are easily suckered into spending money for nothing .
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity: Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
Maybe I'm wrong but I've witnessed the opposite. That is more cash shop games or free to play games than subscription based games. The only real exception I see is AAA titles.
There seems to be a very different reality on these forums than anywhere else on the planet. The title of this thread alone is testament to that.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Comments
It's a sub game with an extensive item mall about to be tacked onto it where none was before.
It will no longer be a pure sub game, and should not be classified as such.
I think games that dominate their field will still command subscription fees, because they are more stable and overall more profitable. Especially if they can soak players for a little extra with vanity cash sales.
Games that struggle to compete in the subscription market will be forced to step down a tier and give away their gameplay in order to attract more players. I think we will start to see the crash of this area with so many titles, the ease of migration since they cost nothing to start playing and then as these games struggle with the need to sell power as they age.
It is hard to tell what is going to happen in the coming years, but I think the boom we are seeing now that some columns here praise will be viewed as a graveyard in coming years where failed games go to die.
Do your research before posting this stuff.Accllaim has the company has folded their free to play games have not totally 9 dragons stil lives.2 moons is port of Korean game which is stil alive.TCOS has been mismanage horrible to extent that i don't even time to mention complete how much.
In your rush to say "Ha Free to play does not work" you didn't look at the small facts.Acclaim is dead because quite frankly the suck at what did.Most of games they have will live on,I feel sorry most for spellborn which had a chance to be a decent game before it was mismange badly.
when i said "when it was a sub game" i meant that there was no info on it about becoming a hybrid MMO with a cash shop and a choice of a sub which btw give u cash shop money every month (i would say F2P but it is not the common "F2P" MMOG which again isnt actually a F2P game but lets not go down that road :P ) and i have to admit Turbines cash shop is one of the best ive ever met cause ive also been playing D&DO so i have some personal experience AND i would like to thank you for your informative replies on this matter and i appreciate the fact that it was in a kind way and not an offensive one
My contention was not that F2P ‘does not work’ if you read my OP I am drawing attention to the difference in press that F2P and P2P get. When Tabula Rasa was cancelled it was the story of the year, when a whole stable of F2P games are cancelled it barely gets reported on gaming sites. The title ‘The Death of F2P’ simply reflected the sort of ridiculous headings we got when DDO went hybrid revenue model. The gaming industry has noticed that new MMO’s are struggling to get enough players at launch and keep a player base. They have mistakenly blamed this on the P2P revenue model and see F2P as the answer.
In reality it is the over abundance of MMO’s, their one format (WoW) gameplay and the explosion of other types of online play that is causing new MMO’s problems.
The hybrid models like in DDO and Lotro may be the way forward, I think it is too early to tell either way about those models yet. DDO seems to be doing well but there is a creeping influence of bad cash shop mentality, Lotro will launch with purchasable stat bonuses. It’s not the cash shop that’s the issue, it’s what you sell in it. But MMO history shows that once you have a cash shop eventually everything is up for grabs and achievement depends on who has the biggest credit card.
If some of those F2P MMO’s are still going fair enough, but the 2Moons on the game list was not the Korean version, our version has gone, so the 2moons on this sites Game’s List should be retired to the forums. I myself was sorry to see what happened to TCOS it had some great ideas. But remember TCOS went F2P to save it from folding and that did not help did it? It’s the idea that F2P is some sort of magic bullet that will solve MMO revenue problems that I am attacking here, clearly it is as often a bullet in the head to a MMO.
I don't think it has anything to do with one being pay to play and the others being free to play.
It probably has more to do with the history of Tabula Rasa.
Think about it:
Made by a famouse game developer in the employ of NC Soft
had a long and convoluted development history
Released with issues
Cost a lot to make
It then closes and "bam" news.
As opposed to some free to play games with no news that I know of except they were closed.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Is it their choice?
It's more or less the same general type of psychological problem as "compulsive gambling".
What I hear here is: "I enjoy playing for free, therefore I don't care that the game is destroying people", more or less.
Well, I guess the world always needs some evil people to make decent people seem even better eh?
Did someone tell the OP that Acclaim was purchased by Playdom, a company that operates free to play games on Facebook?
I think the only reason Acclaim closed its games is because they were Acclaim and have never been profitable. Playdom purchased them for their billing and account management systems, and then cut away the dead weight known as the games that Acclaim had.
As a player who took much longer to warm to the idea of p2p I have to cosign the sentiment that accompanies the joy at games being released with f2p hybrid models. Simply put far too many companies have been able to attach a sub fee to an unworthy game simply by calling it an mmo. Games like AOC who after the tutorial many thought was so bare bones it looked like a different game and let's not forget the newest failure on the block STO which has the nerve to charge a MANDATORY sub fee and then puts no less than half of any new content released in a cash shop.
I don't think anyone's sentiment is really that F2P is the way to save the genre only that every other mmo that comes out does not justify charging a sub fee and by listening to the comments of "anti change" community members it's easy to see that without the word of others like myself and even the writers who praise change companies like Cryptic will just continue to fleece the populace because many of you have alreayd deemed this is a necessary business practice.
As far as the press given to f2p games and the closure of p2p games, f2p are a dime a dozen they come and go often with no mention of the game, hell rarely are games without a premium sub fee even featured on this site so why does that matter now? If it's something that bothers you maybe the articles about f2p games stand out more to you but as a person who could care less about anything other than getting good games I can assure you a vast majority of the press for this site goes to pay to play games and it shouldn't change just to accentuate your point.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
The FTP is a lie!
I think Scott hits upon a more important point. Alot of companies, or more importantly alot of Executives within companies, seem to believe in the "magic pixie dust of success" formula....and industry media tend to be particularly bad at hyping those beliefs. This is true regardless of industry, btw, you see it in plenty of places outside of the MMO industry (the Tech sector is notrious for it).
Executives look at a struggling company and say, All I have to do is do X (fill in whatever flavor of the month buzz-word you like) and we'll be wildly successfull...just like those other guys. Industry media tend to exascerbate this situation badly with a sound-chamber effect as well.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no one magic formula to success.....and shortcuts to success usualy don't work.
Success often takes alot of luck, good timing and hard work......and even then somtimes things don't work out.
F2P certainly CAN be successfull (as much as I hate to admit it)..... but JUST because you make your product F2P doesn't mean it WILL be successfull....any more then buying a lottery ticket means you WILL be a millionaire.
That's something companies (and industry press) need to remember.
Umm then you are saying we are doing what people do by and large right, let people live there lives, you mention gambling how often do you see people standing outside of casino's preaching to people about how bad gambling is and that they shouldn't do it.
I agree compulsive gambling to the point where your life is falling apart around you is bad and I'll say the same thing about free to play mmo's when it becomes the epedemic that gambling is on society. Right now we may be able to find a handful if that of stories about a person mortgaging the home over free to play mmo's (by the way I've not seen one just know that some may be able to point out one or two) until then all this "f2p is the devil" talk is akin to the boy who cried wolf.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Your logic is flawed. People who spend compulsively has have support groups available to them just like gambling does. There is no regulations on gamling to stop a person from sinking every last cent they have at the black jack table. Compulsive spenders have a type of AAA just liking gamling,drinking,drugs. Everything a person does that is enjoyment is liable to become an addiction if it wasnt enjoyable they would never develope the addiction. So by you logic we should Regulate everything fun.... Because going to movies is fun and people can spend there rent money seeing avatar for the 100th time. Or going to disney world for the 9th time in a month. I understand your point that people will compulsively spend all of there money in the game and result in serious financial ruin but at some point people need to regulate themselfs.
so you're saying we need to make those people that spend thousands of dollars on F2P MMO's stop? umm...why? because you don't like it? to make F2P's fail? it's their money, if they want to spent it on a F2P game that's their choice.
Is it their choice?
It's more or less the same general type of psychological problem as "compulsive gambling".
What I hear here is: "I enjoy playing for free, therefore I don't care that the game is destroying people", more or less.
Well, I guess the world always needs some evil people to make decent people seem even better eh?
Your logic is flawed. People who spend compulsively has have support groups available to them just like gambling does. There is no regulations on gamling to stop a person from sinking every last cent they have at the black jack table. Compulsive spenders have a type of AAA just liking gamling,drinking,drugs. Everything a person does that is enjoyment is liable to become an addiction if it wasnt enjoyable they would never develope the addiction. So by you logic we should Regulate everything fun.... Because going to movies is fun and people can spend there rent money seeing avatar for the 100th time. Or going to disney world for the 9th time in a month. I understand your point that people will compulsively spend all of there money in the game and result in serious financial ruin but at some point people need to regulate themselfs.
Oh yeah, can't wait for food coupons
Are you going to compare Tabla rasa and its huge budget to 2 moons which is just a port of a very cheaply made game of course not and the coverage is not even going to be the same.It is not the payment plan it is game.WoW would be successful if it used B2P or F2P it is just a good game.
F2P is good choice for unstable game,P2P is good choice for stable games.You are correct it is not a magic bullet and TCOS was brought out to early and was build as P2P game items had little to no use that game which doom it as a cash shop game.Reality it would have been better as hybrid format or P2P.Also it has had stupid russian roulette combat system which made the game unnessary cofusing had they kept the controls simple the game would have done much better,It reminds of Mortal and lack of 3rd person view.Innovation for no reason is silly
You are right the more games on the market ,the more hard it will become for other games and plus with WoW hogging millions of paying customers it is very hard for game to compete.Think about TSW,ToR,WH40k,Rifts,Tera,FF,Dc Online all will probably be P2P plus Aion,WoW,Warhammer,Aoc,Darkfall,Eve all exisit for 14.99.Think about which is easier try to compete against those games or use a payment plan that allows people to pay when they can.
I think the best test is going to be EQ2,I hope it has a lot of success because a seprate server for P2P and F2P for the same game is interesting.It might be a good way to serve both types of people who buy games.
I don't think Acclaim's stable of games is a very good example or indication for the F2P genre as a whole.
They were honestly some of the worst mmo's i've played (and all I play are F2P's btw), looked bad and played bad, the gfx in them all weren't great but yet they would always run like crap, not to mention controlls for them were all pretty clunky, and also had some pretty ugly interface choices.
As a whole, they just felt.. well, cheap and dated.
Think what they did was just an attempt at a cashgrab, they saw how well F2P worked for some and decided to throw a few bucks at it thinking it would be easy money, and it probably was for a bit, but they weren't willing to invest anything substancial in order to continue making something worthwhile it seems.
Decided to take the money and quit while they were ahead I guess :P
I find it ironic that someone tells someone else to "do his research" when the same applies to you. Acclaim is not hosting 9Dragon, 2Moons nor any of their other title. Yes they still exist for different continent (under another name for certain games) but that's it. TCOS was not mismanaged, Spellborn.inc went bankrupt in 2009 and sold their game to Korean Company who attempted to turn this MMO into a F2P. Sadly it failed. Meanwhile, Acclaim had been hosting TCOS for over a year FOR FREE (No CS, etc). They closed down TCOS shortly after Playdom acquired Acclaim.
DisneyEntertainement recently acquired Playdom who had acquired Acclaim, 3 months earlier. Playdom is a Facebook game developers, and have asked Acclaim to shut down their game and work as developers on Facebook games under Playdom.
And no, Acclaim did not suck at what it did, 2Moons alone had over 500,000 actives in 2007. A company that "sucked and mismanaged" would not even get 30k players. Research a bit before you post.
How about maple story, perfect world, or ROM. They are a few of the most profitable MMORPG ever made.
Alot of the F2P games your seeing are basically imports from chinese or koreans which are already making huge money. They are just importing to the western world to milk more money.
As long as that keeps happening, you'll keep seeing f2p games.
I do agree with Jaxsundane that we have had many poor MMO launches in the past two years. But is that the fault of the P2P revenue model? They should not have been released at that stage, the lack of content at launch is not a reason for them all to have launched as F2P. Poor management and overdone hype was the cocktail that produced those issues not the revenue model, but I can understand the anger at being expected to pay full price. Maybe they should have been released on a half normal sub rate?
Just like many executives think making your MMO like WoW means you must have a success they now think making it F2P is a sure fire winner. Well look at where making a set of WoW clones has led us, into a cul-de-sac where new MMO’s can’t get players. Now they all seem to think a hybrid revenue model or a F2P one is the answer. There is no guaranteed answer, and the industry could be killed of by this simplistic thinking.
It will be interesting to see the headlines when EQ2 launches its F2P server. Population on the P2P server is low, you can guess the headlines: ‘F2P server Pwns P2P server’, the fact that 90% of those F2P players don’t invest a penny in the MMO will of course not be mentioned.
If a MMO makes the game list here I am regarding it as a MMO worthy of note. So its demise is worthy of note. APB did not even make it out of the door and we had a staff article about what went wrong. So a game like 2moons which had half a million players at one point is worthy of analysis, let alone the other 16 F2P’s which got the bullet.
f2p is the only future mmorpg world has there is no doubt about it!
It is like an Indie movie,They are not going to get covered when they do bad like a major hollywood movie .No matter how much i tell that you 2 moons is not dead it is alive in the form of Dekaron.The one thing i forgot to mention that Dekaron has been opperating in the US.With one small check of the site you can transfer 2 moons accounts to Deakron accounts.
http://dekaron.gamehi.com/
It was my original point only spellborn of acclaim major games was dead and that was because the mishandle or mismanged.It is like Darkfall and Ryzom going to free to play payment does not work because how those games are made non item heavy mmo don't do well as f2p play.9 dragons and 2 moons are still alive,their web based games will be taken over by Playdom.Acclaim the company in this case is dead not the games except for Spellborn
As for coverage on this site,It is really hard to tell when a F2P dies,Spellborn could be brought back to life with one sale of a Korean company.Look at Mythos and Hellgate for example.P2P games like tabla rasa,Auto assult,the matrix have had more perement deaths.APB had fairly decent size budget had expections people knew about the game,If Rohan blood fued or Perfect world,Requiem goes down is not the same as Warhammer or AoC doing the samething.
Until this point they are no free to play games that have the budget of p2p games.When Lotor,Eq2,DDO and Gw2 struggle will get the stories that you want because these games are the equivalent of most p2p games it will be story.In most case they are so many games now that site and staff can't cover or don't realize when these games go belly up,I know this because i do whole lot of reading this site, Massively,WarCry,etc sometimes put out stories that happen weeks sometimes months back.
I think there's a difference between F2P and MT here. F2P usually means cash shop games, where you pay to win. Where as MT tends to (but not always) means pay for convenience (bags, mounts, swag, and etc). The problem with cash shop MMOs is that publishers get greedy and start adding items that not only make the game easier to play, but even remove items from the game itself to make it necessary to purchase said items. Acclaim's closure isn't the first, I can remember there being many more F2P/Cash-Shop MMOs than there are today just a year ago. I'm not sure that LOTRO and other like games can make the transition for the culture of the players surrounding them, but I think future titles could make it in an MT/hybrid model. So long as the developers don't get greedy and try to force players to buy the highest marked items in the shop. They need to learn to make the profit at the margins like all other businesses do.
Um, Acclaim did way more than MMG's. So saying its downfall is 100% pinned to F2p is a bit.....crazy.
But if you have a narrative, push it I guess.
----------
"Anyone posting on this forum is not an average user, and there for any opinions about the game are going to be overly critical compared to an average users opinions." - Me
"No, your wrong.." - Random user #123
"Hello person posting on a site specifically for MMO's in a thread on a sub forum specifically for a particular game talking about meta features and making comparisons to other titles in the genre, and their meta features.
How are you?" -Me
It may be crazy, but it's completely true. If you look at their net gain after concentrating more and more on their F2P titles, you'll see it go down steadily.
They clearly stated, they had hundreds of thousands of players on their F2P titles, but something like only 5% actually spent any money in their cash shops (and ALL of their games attempted to the fullest to force you to pay for things from their cash shops in order to compete).
Acclaim was also one of the first MAJOR companies to push F2P, and was one of the 3 major F2P flagships showing it's "successful nature".
F2P is a crackpot business model, and we ALL knew it except for an acceptable few who are easily suckered into spending money for nothing
.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
There seems to be a very different reality on these forums than anywhere else on the planet. The title of this thread alone is testament to that.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre