Originally posted by apocoluster If the game is fun... I don't care how it is monetized. I can afford to sub and by extention I can whale with best of 'em. If by my reasonably low standards I'm having a good time. I'll pay what they are asking.
I do agree with you but the turning point is that if I know it is a monthly fee I probably won't try a game unless it looks to me like one of the best games. Wildstar as an example doesn't excite me but if they released with no subscription I might buy it and try it. Since they are charging monthly I will most likely just pass unless the word of mouth is amazing. What I don't want is to buy a game, just sort of like it and then not feel like it is worth spending more on and being done. At that point I threw away my money.
What on earth are you buying from the GW2 cash shop for that kind of money? Almost nothing in the cash shop is worth buying in that game. You can also buy gems with in game currency and it isn't even all that expensive. I mean I get not liking cash shops but GW2's certainly isn't a good example of a game with a bad cash shop.
I'm a big casher that has an addiction to spending in the cash shop and even I couldn't find anything to buy in GW2's cash shop a month ago beyond a few pocket change items. Did they change that and add some things? Cause tools you don't really need, clothes you can't wear in battle, skins that didn't seem too impressive (and were just skins that you'd have to replace eventually), and dinky little firework boxes just didn't seem worth shelling out RL money to me.
Bottom line is that in a crowded market there are no one size fits all solutions. There can't be, because everyone fighting for the same piece of pie is a sure fire recipie for reducing your chances of success. People will try lots of different ways to differentiate themselves from thier competition. Bussines model is probably one of the less important ways to do that...but it still is something that many games will try. If a publisher thinks the target audience for a particular product has a strong perference for a business model or that a model fits a particular product better then another, he may well pick that model.
Honestly there will be lots of failures REGARDLESS of business model chosen and probably a few because of it.
Many service industries work this way. Look at resteraunts or hotels or amusment attractions for examples. There are "all you can eat buffets" and "all inclusives" and "membership passes" right beside ala carte and "pay per ride", etc. All are trying to find different ways to attract and keep customers. The bottom line is that not all customers are the same, and not all have the same prefernces. What works for some will immediately drive away others.
I find it odd that nobody has just lowered their monthly fee instead of just going free to play. Charge $7 a month and you look like a huge bargain while still bringing in a monthly fee.
Originally posted by Rockniss As long as there continues to be a quality difference, subscription model needs no change. Outside of the amazing Gw2 buy to play and Swtor's model, f2p quality is way behind what sub games offer and even at that Swtor is way off the mark too. Current subs need fear not, and future subs need only deliver quality. If your game lacks quality you better just go f2p.
I agree with this except for the SWTOR portion. I think what they did with the F2P conversion was a blatant gutting and I refuse to play it. I have never played a MMO that I payed for only to have it go F2P later and take away stuff that I had when I purchased the game. They should have left a lot of the unlocks available for the people that had played the game before the conversion since we were paying customers at once.
I agree that quality can keep the subscription types viable but sadly in a flooded market it has become tough to differentiate yourself enough to hold onto players when they can easily go elsewhere. Also I think it is sad how developers have adapted the mindset that if you aren't retaining a million + then the ship is sinking and drastic changes need to be made. I personally do not agree with sub + box + expansions let alone throwing in cash shops, but I detest F2P and all of the bottlenecks that come with playing those games. I am sure I will find middle ground somewhere eventually but right now GW2 has offered the best bang for my buck even though I hardly play like I used to.
This is how I felt when LoTRO went FTP. Zones, and the quests within, that I had paid for with game purchase were taken away. SWTOR wasn't the first to do this to me.
I find it odd that nobody has just lowered their monthly fee instead of just going free to play. Charge $7 a month and you look like a huge bargain while still bringing in a monthly fee.
I really don't think there is a grey area with this. Honestly, I think that people will pay a subscription, or they won't. Let's consider WoW. Could they double their subscriptions by offering 50% off their subscription prices? Probably not. also, now whatever percentage increase you do manage to achieve, you've got to support, which means more staff. Even if you doubled your subscriber numbers, you'd actually be making less because you would have double the monthly overhead, with the same income.
For a game that's crappy to begin with, I just don't think it works. People simply won't pay for it.
Originally posted by Ender4 I find it odd that nobody has just lowered their monthly fee instead of just going free to play. Charge $7 a month and you look like a huge bargain while still bringing in a monthly fee.
F2P brings in way more than 15 bucks a month. Thats why its popular. Publishers want you to believe that its because they are making their game more accessible. Reality is that people spend more than 15 dollars a month on average for F2P cash shop games.
We feel liberated because we didnt have to spend a dime finding out how shitty some mmo was. Grats on being able to try a bunch of bad games for free I guess heh. That doesn't sound fun to me.
For me, no game is worth committing to a $200 per year payment or you lose access to it. Even if my vision of a "perfect" game isn't worth that to me. I don't mind spending $200 a year on a game, but I don't want that as a doormat I must cross to enter. No game has that value and I can't see the potential for one having that value no matter what it delivers.
Ten to fifteen years ago it was different. MMOs offered something in an environment that was new. We were gaming in a way we never had before. The approach was new and fairly costly all around. We were exploring gaming on an entirely new frontier. I didn't mind the cost of entry or maintenance at that time. Now times are different. The value has diminished for me.
The value might very well be less for you but games are more costly now then ever before.
What players don't seem to want to admit is that these games cost more to create and keep running than other games.
You might not want to pay the $200 per year but that isn't going to change the fact that paying a small fee for "the rest of the game's life" isn't going to work.
All "some gamers" want to do is pull out the "internet connection cost is lower than it was in early games ergo we should pay less".
find a game that costs, say, $100 million to make, figure out all those salaries, the fringe, the costs of just running the business until launch and then realize that all that money and more needs to be made for the years the game is supposed to be running. and "Providence help them" if they can't recoup costs just from the initial investment.
How many subs is that? If it's f2p then how many "hats" are they going to have to consistently sell in order to remain in the black?
No matter how you slice it, these games cost "x" amount of dollars to run every year. And whatever the minimum is will be the amount that MUST be made.
I venture to say that a simple $59.00 for a one shot purchase just isn't going to cut it.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
yea sure they cost more, wanna know why? Trying to make a game that fits all differing gaming tastes under the rainbow(many of witch mutually exclusive) in the same not so shiny package(because you wasted so much time effort just getting basic functionality in) that tends to drive the cost up a bit. I don't care what payment model you use
Pick a small handful of complimentary systems and focus and one could probably get twice the polish and a third the overhead = profit
As Gaffney said it once "it really makes sense to start as box+sub and switch to F2P later".
There will always be enough....people...to basically beta-test your game for 60+15/month for a few months - year.
F2P games have "open beta" pahse
P2P games have "paid beta" phase, after which those, ironically, go F2P
This seems to be what happens in the western market that P2P people ignore when pointing at the new mmos coming out subs as the games that will save the sub market.
Subs didn't just stop happening and all these games launched f2p. Most of them switched. There's nothing stopping any of these new games from switching a year or two in just like any other mmo that couldn't maintain a million subs did in the past.
The problem with subscriptions is that people can delay buying the game or buy it at the start and then unsub for a period of time and then when they return they will get any / all extra content.
Modern subscribers are freeloaders!
Subs were launched as a means to cover the high cost of providing networks. With limited exceptions (quest updates in AC, the odd live event in DAoC) the sub provided nothing else.
As network costs fell people started to demand more for their money: as noted above its about value not actual cost. And this led to content updates. And for a while this satisfied people.
Network costs fell further and games like GW were launched offering no sub at all. And then games like LoL which was not only f2p but fee to buy. Such games meant that a sub seemed to offer very little value indeed. For niche games there is / can be a connection between the players and the developers but for "main stream" games that doesn't exist. And with so many games to jump between subscribers can - and clearly do - freeload.
The "revival" of the subscription could have been written 2 years ago. SWTOR and TSW have decided to charge a sub. Sub based games are back .... didn't happen. As a subscription game SWTOR failed. Yet as F2P + F2B game it has, to date, done OK. (Average "equivalent sub revenue" in the first six months after going F2P being about c. 550k.)
The typical problem with F2P games however is that they van burnt bright but burn out quickly.
Going forward I think games have to adopt a combination of models. Abolish the monthly sub - it is no longer justified. Replace it by a 6-month or annual charge (a membership) so that companies don't have an open ended cost exposure. At a cost that is seen to offer better value. Charge for new content - purchased in a shop. A combined annual membership / xpacs deal could also be offered on the lines of B3 say. A clear commitment by the developer to provide updates rather than the current "give us your money and trust us" approach.
companies have to make money but to do this successfully they have to treat customers fairly.
The sub is not the problem. it's the 30-60$ box fee.
Drop that Mr/Ms. Developer. You said your product is amazing. I will happily pay for amazing. I wont pay for your 4-6 month upfront "digital box fee", wtf is that?
I was looking at my gaming history and, being a fan of subscription mmorpgs, I played quite a few over the last 13 years. That being said, I was surprised when I realized that in most cases I leapt to the next new one after playing the current one for about 18 months. It would seem that after a year and a half in most premium mmorpgs you can complete most content including end-game content and the game starts to lose its appeal to continue on.
18 months is a very long time to spend in a game for players who are online 5-7 days per week. It makes sense, then, that these sub games moving to a ftp model after a couple of years is really not about the sub model being outdated or no longer popular and more about developers trying to keep revenue coming in after their player base has exhausted most of the content.
Allods Online recently launched a subscription server, so we can watch that with interest to see how the world's first f2p-to-p2p conversion performs. My prediction on that one is it will not be very successful and Allods will continue to be the irrelevant-to-the-industry game that it is. So irrelevant that it wasn't even mentioned in this article.
Interesting. This is a pretty decent experiment that worth following. For about 1 year EQ2 offered separate F2P and P2P services. The P2P service was converted to F2P after their experiment. Same thing will probably happen to Allods.
I remember the days when the industry first started to make their "sales pitch" for the subscription model. Such info is hard to find these days, but you get a sense of what the subscription concept was about by reading this short explanation from EA/Mythic's UO knowledge base:
"Subscription fees are required for these online games as new content and game changes are being added on a regular basis."
In short, the original intent of the subscription, as it was sold to us, was to finance "new content and game changes." It was, in theory, a way to finance live teams and post-launch staff that would make the games better, richer or deeper. Sold that way, the subscription sounded like a good deal; "okay, we'll sell you $50 worth of game, but for the low price of $15 additional each month, we'll give you more game than the initial $50."
Sadly, however, that vision of what the subscription is, and what the subscription does, is only true in a few cases. Instead, the subscription became the way for publishers to maintain the game or make the game profitable. And if we wanted "new content and game changes," we'd have to pay on top of our subscriptions for things like expansions and content packs in the early 2000s.
No wonder people became sick of paying subscriptions...what do you really "get" for your subscription these days in the vast majority of titles? If it is like most subscription games, server access (which is, in terms of cost, far less than your $15 deserves), and not much else.
But if the subscription can get back to its original intent, to truly finance "new content and game changes," I don't think it would be unpopular. If you can get $15 worth of better game each month for your $15 sub fee each month, it's worth it. The problem is that you seldom get than amount of value added experience for the $15 paid.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
So games that are lacking in one way or another go F2P to attract who? Games that are lacking are doomed anyway, sooner than later.
When games have a real attraction for players due to the fact that the Devs of Said Game created something worthwhile then it only seems fair that we pay them for their efforts. I have always enjoyed "Pay to Play" games more than "Free to Play". I will even say that there isn't a free to play game that I have ever played that has held my interest for more than a very few weeks.
Free to play = Looser Game, second class and on the way out. Really, the only people that cant afford 10 or 15 bux a month for hours and hours and hours of entertainment value are people with survival problems anyway. Two people go to a 2 hour movie for entertainment and it costs 40 bux. You play an Online game for perhaps a conservative 40 hours a month for 15 bux and all of a sudden that is too much? Hey if you played the game for 6 months and somehow managed to extract all that the game offered and you played for 500 hours and it cost you 140 bux total for purchase and sub., why cant you see the entertainment value in that?
All I have ever seen are a bunch of whiners that rely on mom and dad for their subscriptions or college students that want something for free on their laptops or consoles.
I say let the Devs choose what player base they want to appeal to. Personally I like the "Pay to Play" players much better than the Free to Play console, riff-raff.
Comments
I do agree with you but the turning point is that if I know it is a monthly fee I probably won't try a game unless it looks to me like one of the best games. Wildstar as an example doesn't excite me but if they released with no subscription I might buy it and try it. Since they are charging monthly I will most likely just pass unless the word of mouth is amazing. What I don't want is to buy a game, just sort of like it and then not feel like it is worth spending more on and being done. At that point I threw away my money.
What on earth are you buying from the GW2 cash shop for that kind of money? Almost nothing in the cash shop is worth buying in that game. You can also buy gems with in game currency and it isn't even all that expensive. I mean I get not liking cash shops but GW2's certainly isn't a good example of a game with a bad cash shop.
I'm a big casher that has an addiction to spending in the cash shop and even I couldn't find anything to buy in GW2's cash shop a month ago beyond a few pocket change items. Did they change that and add some things? Cause tools you don't really need, clothes you can't wear in battle, skins that didn't seem too impressive (and were just skins that you'd have to replace eventually), and dinky little firework boxes just didn't seem worth shelling out RL money to me.
Bottom line is that in a crowded market there are no one size fits all solutions. There can't be, because everyone fighting for the same piece of pie is a sure fire recipie for reducing your chances of success. People will try lots of different ways to differentiate themselves from thier competition. Bussines model is probably one of the less important ways to do that...but it still is something that many games will try. If a publisher thinks the target audience for a particular product has a strong perference for a business model or that a model fits a particular product better then another, he may well pick that model.
Honestly there will be lots of failures REGARDLESS of business model chosen and probably a few because of it.
Many service industries work this way. Look at resteraunts or hotels or amusment attractions for examples. There are "all you can eat buffets" and "all inclusives" and "membership passes" right beside ala carte and "pay per ride", etc. All are trying to find different ways to attract and keep customers. The bottom line is that not all customers are the same, and not all have the same prefernces. What works for some will immediately drive away others.
I find it odd that nobody has just lowered their monthly fee instead of just going free to play. Charge $7 a month and you look like a huge bargain while still bringing in a monthly fee.
This is how I felt when LoTRO went FTP. Zones, and the quests within, that I had paid for with game purchase were taken away. SWTOR wasn't the first to do this to me.
I really don't think there is a grey area with this. Honestly, I think that people will pay a subscription, or they won't. Let's consider WoW. Could they double their subscriptions by offering 50% off their subscription prices? Probably not. also, now whatever percentage increase you do manage to achieve, you've got to support, which means more staff. Even if you doubled your subscriber numbers, you'd actually be making less because you would have double the monthly overhead, with the same income.
For a game that's crappy to begin with, I just don't think it works. People simply won't pay for it.
Crazkanuk
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F2P brings in way more than 15 bucks a month. Thats why its popular. Publishers want you to believe that its because they are making their game more accessible. Reality is that people spend more than 15 dollars a month on average for F2P cash shop games.
We feel liberated because we didnt have to spend a dime finding out how shitty some mmo was. Grats on being able to try a bunch of bad games for free I guess heh. That doesn't sound fun to me.
The value might very well be less for you but games are more costly now then ever before.
What players don't seem to want to admit is that these games cost more to create and keep running than other games.
You might not want to pay the $200 per year but that isn't going to change the fact that paying a small fee for "the rest of the game's life" isn't going to work.
All "some gamers" want to do is pull out the "internet connection cost is lower than it was in early games ergo we should pay less".
find a game that costs, say, $100 million to make, figure out all those salaries, the fringe, the costs of just running the business until launch and then realize that all that money and more needs to be made for the years the game is supposed to be running. and "Providence help them" if they can't recoup costs just from the initial investment.
How many subs is that? If it's f2p then how many "hats" are they going to have to consistently sell in order to remain in the black?
No matter how you slice it, these games cost "x" amount of dollars to run every year. And whatever the minimum is will be the amount that MUST be made.
I venture to say that a simple $59.00 for a one shot purchase just isn't going to cut it.
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
As Gaffney said it once "it really makes sense to start as box+sub and switch to F2P later".
There will always be enough....people...to basically beta-test your game for 60+15/month for a few months - year.
F2P games have "open beta" pahse
P2P games have "paid beta" phase, after which those, ironically, go F2P
yea sure they cost more, wanna know why? Trying to make a game that fits all differing gaming tastes under the rainbow(many of witch mutually exclusive) in the same not so shiny package(because you wasted so much time effort just getting basic functionality in) that tends to drive the cost up a bit. I don't care what payment model you use
Pick a small handful of complimentary systems and focus and one could probably get twice the polish and a third the overhead = profit
This seems to be what happens in the western market that P2P people ignore when pointing at the new mmos coming out subs as the games that will save the sub market.
Subs didn't just stop happening and all these games launched f2p. Most of them switched. There's nothing stopping any of these new games from switching a year or two in just like any other mmo that couldn't maintain a million subs did in the past.
The problem with subscriptions is that people can delay buying the game or buy it at the start and then unsub for a period of time and then when they return they will get any / all extra content.
Modern subscribers are freeloaders!
Subs were launched as a means to cover the high cost of providing networks. With limited exceptions (quest updates in AC, the odd live event in DAoC) the sub provided nothing else.
As network costs fell people started to demand more for their money: as noted above its about value not actual cost. And this led to content updates. And for a while this satisfied people.
Network costs fell further and games like GW were launched offering no sub at all. And then games like LoL which was not only f2p but fee to buy. Such games meant that a sub seemed to offer very little value indeed. For niche games there is / can be a connection between the players and the developers but for "main stream" games that doesn't exist. And with so many games to jump between subscribers can - and clearly do - freeload.
The "revival" of the subscription could have been written 2 years ago. SWTOR and TSW have decided to charge a sub. Sub based games are back .... didn't happen. As a subscription game SWTOR failed. Yet as F2P + F2B game it has, to date, done OK. (Average "equivalent sub revenue" in the first six months after going F2P being about c. 550k.)
The typical problem with F2P games however is that they van burnt bright but burn out quickly.
Going forward I think games have to adopt a combination of models. Abolish the monthly sub - it is no longer justified. Replace it by a 6-month or annual charge (a membership) so that companies don't have an open ended cost exposure. At a cost that is seen to offer better value. Charge for new content - purchased in a shop. A combined annual membership / xpacs deal could also be offered on the lines of B3 say. A clear commitment by the developer to provide updates rather than the current "give us your money and trust us" approach.
companies have to make money but to do this successfully they have to treat customers fairly.
The sub is not the problem. it's the 30-60$ box fee.
Drop that Mr/Ms. Developer. You said your product is amazing. I will happily pay for amazing. I wont pay for your 4-6 month upfront "digital box fee", wtf is that?
I was looking at my gaming history and, being a fan of subscription mmorpgs, I played quite a few over the last 13 years. That being said, I was surprised when I realized that in most cases I leapt to the next new one after playing the current one for about 18 months. It would seem that after a year and a half in most premium mmorpgs you can complete most content including end-game content and the game starts to lose its appeal to continue on.
18 months is a very long time to spend in a game for players who are online 5-7 days per week. It makes sense, then, that these sub games moving to a ftp model after a couple of years is really not about the sub model being outdated or no longer popular and more about developers trying to keep revenue coming in after their player base has exhausted most of the content.
Interesting. This is a pretty decent experiment that worth following. For about 1 year EQ2 offered separate F2P and P2P services. The P2P service was converted to F2P after their experiment. Same thing will probably happen to Allods.
I remember the days when the industry first started to make their "sales pitch" for the subscription model. Such info is hard to find these days, but you get a sense of what the subscription concept was about by reading this short explanation from EA/Mythic's UO knowledge base:
"Subscription fees are required for these online games as new content and game changes are being added on a regular basis."
In short, the original intent of the subscription, as it was sold to us, was to finance "new content and game changes." It was, in theory, a way to finance live teams and post-launch staff that would make the games better, richer or deeper. Sold that way, the subscription sounded like a good deal; "okay, we'll sell you $50 worth of game, but for the low price of $15 additional each month, we'll give you more game than the initial $50."
Sadly, however, that vision of what the subscription is, and what the subscription does, is only true in a few cases. Instead, the subscription became the way for publishers to maintain the game or make the game profitable. And if we wanted "new content and game changes," we'd have to pay on top of our subscriptions for things like expansions and content packs in the early 2000s.
No wonder people became sick of paying subscriptions...what do you really "get" for your subscription these days in the vast majority of titles? If it is like most subscription games, server access (which is, in terms of cost, far less than your $15 deserves), and not much else.
But if the subscription can get back to its original intent, to truly finance "new content and game changes," I don't think it would be unpopular. If you can get $15 worth of better game each month for your $15 sub fee each month, it's worth it. The problem is that you seldom get than amount of value added experience for the $15 paid.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
So games that are lacking in one way or another go F2P to attract who? Games that are lacking are doomed anyway, sooner than later.
When games have a real attraction for players due to the fact that the Devs of Said Game created something worthwhile then it only seems fair that we pay them for their efforts. I have always enjoyed "Pay to Play" games more than "Free to Play". I will even say that there isn't a free to play game that I have ever played that has held my interest for more than a very few weeks.
Free to play = Looser Game, second class and on the way out. Really, the only people that cant afford 10 or 15 bux a month for hours and hours and hours of entertainment value are people with survival problems anyway. Two people go to a 2 hour movie for entertainment and it costs 40 bux. You play an Online game for perhaps a conservative 40 hours a month for 15 bux and all of a sudden that is too much? Hey if you played the game for 6 months and somehow managed to extract all that the game offered and you played for 500 hours and it cost you 140 bux total for purchase and sub., why cant you see the entertainment value in that?
All I have ever seen are a bunch of whiners that rely on mom and dad for their subscriptions or college students that want something for free on their laptops or consoles.
I say let the Devs choose what player base they want to appeal to. Personally I like the "Pay to Play" players much better than the Free to Play console, riff-raff.