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Why such limited business models
UgUgUg
Member UncommonPosts: 81
Human beings generally have a tendency to err towards extremes in everything they do in my opinion. In the case of MMOS it seems there are either relatively big subscriptions with complete access to everything or buy/free to play with cash shops, or in some cases big subscriptions and cash shops as well. In the end whichever way we pay our game suffers. Why cant we get a business model with some moderation
As we have seen with most sub models of recent times they end up going btp or ftp because a low game population with a sub or not cant be sustained. The ftp or btp game then relies on the cash shop and that doesn't seem to sustain a good turnover of substantial content which I would say is an expansion with about a fifth of the current world map added, as well as possible new races, professions, game mechanics and fixes, at least every 6 months. Often its once a year and it has to be paid separately from the big sub and cash shop anyway.
WIth GW2 we had the Living Story but as is obvious Anet couldn't sustain that as in Season 2 it was delivered less often with a little more substantial content in each part but I think a little less substantial content overall than Season 1. Now after denying expansions were in the works we have one coming but by the time that comes it may be another 3 to 4 months down the line from now and it will have to do us for at least the same time after its release again. Maybe longer. In between we get some festivities that are repeated every year.
Why cant MMO games companies and their financiers attempt to strike a balance with a small sub (such as £5 british that equals the cost of a fast food meal) to maintain more frequent substantial content updates, a cash shop for cosmetics to bolster this and a one off fee for each large new campaign expansion.
If it doesn't work at least you have tried but surely its better than going from a £11 uk british sub to being completely f2p, b2p with infrequent and unsubstantial content or a minor expansion to last another year?
Comments
Because moderation does not get you optimized profits?
It's the old saying "go big or go home."
RuneScape tried to stay as long as it could on just a $5 monthly subscription but that couldn't sustain regular engine upgrades and weekly content additions, and now you see $8 subs and microtransactions.
It is much harder to make any profit with paid MMO than with freemium one. I think you actually need high subscription host if you want to make it work. You can divide the community is three parts:
- the paying users
- the non-paying users
- the convertable users, that might spend the cash in game if they get involved in it after some time of playing it F2P
The paying community is very small, and most of them will not care if the subscription costs $5 or $10. They will complain a bit that it could be cheaper (no matter if its $10, $5 or $1/ month, they will complain) but most of them will still play and pay for it. The non-paying and the convertable users will not pay, no matter if its $1 or $10 / month.
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Some people will refuse to pay for a subscription game. Others will refuse to pay for an item mall game. If you try to have both a modest subscription and a modest item mall, you alienate both groups. That doesn't strike me as likely to be successful.
Which MMOs are you referring to? Most F2P offer some kind of premium and cash shop, so the middle ground you are looking for is there... or is your complaint that you want premium level to cost less?
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
Lol, the "frremium" is kinda a mix since they prefer to let you pay for both the monthly fees and buy stuff as well.
But yes, of course you can make a MMO with £5 sub. But you still need a better game than most F2P games to pull that off. And games like that tries to charge as much as they can.
Heck, Wow would still be very profitable even if it would have charged $5 a month since launch but why would they when people don't mind paying $15?
What it actually comes down to is:
The whales want to be #1. They want as big a power gap between them and normal players.
The subscribers want an even playfield. They do not want to be crushed under the heels of those paying more money.
The solution is to have servers with spending limits. Obviously the whales would NOT play on them, nor would the free players be able to play on them.
---
Normal servers where you can pay as much or as little as you like.
Servers where you need to pay $3 per month to play on it and the spending is capped at $100 per month.
Servers where you need to pay $10 per month to play on it and the spending is capped at $30 per month.
Now you have servers for the free and the whale, servers for those willing to pay a bit, or a bunch, and servers at a normal subscription level.
It's entirely possible a hybrid of F2P with low-cost subscription is a viable model.
But you picked the wrong type of genre (giant, expensive, risky games) to expect developers to want to take on even more risk with untried business models.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
There's a financial reality behind every game and gaming attempt. The money to develop a game simply must come from somewhere, and the people that fund the development want some kind of return on investment. There are precious few people who have a spare $30,000,000 (approximately Curt Schilling's personal investment into 38 Studios) they can put into an MMO development effort, and there's probably even fewer that would do so and expect to never see any kind of return on investment.
A subscription price of £5 UK (roughly $7 US) would require about 358,000 subscribers each subscribing for 12 months just to pay back that one investor. This doesn't begin to touch the on-going costs (bandwidth, servers, people to maintain the servers, people to correct bugs, interest payments, cost of money, etc.). In the specific case of 38 Studios, they took a $75 million loan on top of the personal investments (including Curt Schilling, Todd McFarlane, and R.A. Salvatore), before defaulting on that loan and failing to meet payroll. Subsequently, the state of Rhode Island sued the company's principles.
There's a lot of responsibility incurred by making a game. Players have expectations for a quality game. But the financiers have expectations about protecting their investments. The difference between these two groups is that the financiers have legal recourse and the court systems to protect their interests.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
You do not even consider what I am actually proposing and the actual scenario that some games are released, bought, then played without a subscription and have lasted for years. The only problem is without a reliable income from a sub they dont have frequent substantial expansions. What I proposed is a buy it to play it business model with a minimal sub for ongoing content , a cash shop for extra income and a full price for a substantial expansion release. I did not at any time say give it away free and keep it going for nothing.
Guild Wars 2 has been running on a cosmetic cash shop thats not required since the game came out two and a half years ago and been bringing out content. Now its getting less substantial or much much less frequent content. I have played all that time and spent hardly anything on the game since I bought it. Rift, ESO all have went to buy/free to play. There are actually freemium models as other have suggested here.
What you just mentioned seems to be ignoring the actual core of the thread or the actual facts of the current business models.
Anyway the only things I can understand from this thread and agree with is the possibility that instead of appealing to a wide audience a small sub / cash shop game may alienate both sub users and free to play players and that some people want to pay nothing so they will never pay a sub of any size.
Right now though we have two extremes that seem to keep some people happy enough yet it winds up with most subbed games going free / buy to play so that business model doesn't seem to be working well. Free or buy to play games end up with much less support and expansion in the long run as the cash only shop model doesnt bring in enough cash, whilst the freemium models keep muddling along with large optional subs, and cash shops. The funny thing is all these business models seem to promise frequent updates and in the long run can't deliver. It seems to me a £5 sub game in which the sub can optionally be paid off with enough in game currency(for players with more time than real money) may be well worth experimenting with for a short time as well as keeping the cash shop and buy to play expansions in this business model.
There's a huge reason why the scenario you propose won't happen -- inflation. Companies started with the subscription model in 1999 with a base cost of $12 US, then advanced that cost to $15 US sometime around 2002-2004 (the time frame when DAoC, EQ2, WoW arrived on the scene). Cutting the price to $7 US in an era where there are fewer games with the populations of that era is financial suicide. Personnel costs have risen, as well as communications costs. About the only thing that has remained relatively static is the cost of an actual computer. But games (and player's expectations of games) have grown at an alarming pace. A game requires more data than ever to support more detailed graphics, better sounds, audio and other elements. Building and operating a game costs far more than in 2002 (when my aborted attempt at MMORPG development occurred). There's even staff requirements I never envisioned, with social media being such a large factor in the current marketplace. I might have attempted a bare-bones game with $10 million then. Today, I wouldn't even consider attempting a game with less than $50 million. Almost everything associated with games have been subject to inflation.
The idea of supplementing real world currency with game currency, as suggested, is never going to fly with investors. The few investors I approached in 2002 would have laughed at me if I even hinted that I would allow players to pay subscriptions with gold pieces earned in game. A person who has $15 to $100 US to spend every month for a game is unlikely to have enough money to get a lawsuit started. Rest assured, the guy that has loans $80+ million to a development company surely does.
Consider that in my initial post, I listed 358,000 players for a year as a necessary population to repay the base investment of $30 million, ignoring on-going costs (which are substantial). It is estimated that EQ1, at its peak, had somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 annual subscriptions, maximum. A game with a $30 million development budget had better be at least as popular as EQ1, just to pay the bills.
Bottom line: a major game will never be developed with the business model you are suggesting, as there would simply be no investment money behind it.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
F2P makes a LOT more money. Look at Archeage for example and how much money they pulled in from the alpha players. One alpha player spent more money then 1 person would spend in WOW for a year. If the game was moderated properly they would made soo much more money but that is another story entirely. There are games with thousands of people who have spent at least a thousand dollars each. Just doing the math That is 1 mil production from 1k players that can happen within 1 month. With the sub model it takes 1k players 5 years to spend that much money. There are f2p games that people have spent well over 10k in just for a set of gear. We should try a quick survey to see.
I didn't really know if your poll was supposed to be monthly expenditures, annual expenditures or lifetime-to-date expenditures. In any of those cases, my vote of 50-100 is accurate. I spent 3x $20 cards for PWE one time in 2013.
I expect that the vast majority of similar votes will be towards the low-end of your scale.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Write a game, package it in a box, put a price on it, and stock it at a retailer.
Consumer buys the game, gets only what is in the box and any future bug fixes, free to play as long as there is hardware capable of running it.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
The only business model we should have ever accepted.
Now you basically *lease* games because what's in the box isn't the whole game, they portion it out over time. There are hidden fees everywhere to justify playing the game and with every patch, the game is changed so that you can NEVER replay it as it was when you originally bought it.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
All business models now follow this to one degree or another.
Personally I prefer the old way of doing things, but apparently everyone likes to lease software.
Expansions are SEPARATE from the original game... you have to buy them do you not? It might as well be treated as a new game. Moot point.
Bug fixes are something that the developer is OBLIGATED to provide. The price of the game covers such costs. And since they are only OBLIGATED to provide you with what came in the box plus bug fixes, there is not increased cost. They had to budget for this before the original game shipped. Again moot point.
Many game companies have hosted their multiplayer games online for free. Some even allow public servers to run the game. Many of these games have been operating like this for many many years. You justify paying more because they dangle hardware/bandwidth/customer support in your face. You pay for internet, you pay for hardware, you have to support your setup... seems to me you're already spending money on the most critical part of the equation... they don't provide you with a machine, they don't cover your internet costs, and if your machine goes on the fritz, they aren't there to fix it for you.
So really you're argument is all about content updates... if it was in the box when you bought it, then updates would be moot. If you want updates, buy the expansion. That's what an expansion is supposed to be. New stuff! If the game only had 2 dungeons, so be it. They can either make bigger games or sell us smaller ones. There is no doling out content to lure you to play a game you already paid for and then charging you for it to boot.
So if you think $15 a month times all the subscribers of WoW, plus everyone who bought the game is necessary to keep the servers running, then I suggest you get used to paying out the ass for something that costs easily much less. Don't forget they still charge you for things most other games do for free... but it's okay, they give you content updates.
I do NOT want HUB gaming,i actually want noob zones to be replayed and REASO nto go back and play them.FFX it was one of the few grouping games that had you go back and replay ALL a LOT and that isa win win for gamer's and the game.
I don't like games that have such shallow designs,you play some content idea then it is gone,just like that happy meal.
A RPG is suppose to be living out a plausible characters life within a game.If you treat a game lie ka bunch of mini games then it is NOT a RPG,it is just a weak mix idea of content randomly tossed together.An example would be if you were some Legendary Warrior in Fantasy times,would he enter an area then think ok i finished this zone time to move on and i'll never come back here again?No it is silly that is NOT how a RPG should work,this is what happens when developers just copy BAD ideas from other games.
All i ask is ANY developer that slaps a MMO +RPG tag on their game,design it that way,quit making mixed bag of nothing games then tagging it mmorpg to make more sales.That is ALL i ever ask,then as long as the game caters to it's title i really don't care how it does it.
What i see in game design most of the time is like EA Sports making a Basketball game that has car races around the outer court and gambling casinos in the middle,it would look dumb and out of place and would have NOTHING to do with a sports basketball game.However this is exactly what devs are doing with their MMOrpg's making a mess of game design.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
its because marketing and payment model focus on demographics if gw2 ran b2p, cashshop, and $7 dollar sub...it would
a) not had nearly as many box sales because a large percentage of the player base refuse to pay anything after the inital box
b) not had nearly as many box sales because another percentage is willing to pay occasionally in the cash shop but not a subscription
c) not had nearly as many box sales because another percentage of players don't like to pay sub and cash shop
d) content has very little to do with payment model. there was less content in season 2 because the bulk of the team was working on the expansion. companies don't increase their development on month to month content regardless of profits. look at WoW they went almost a full year without a significant update before the WoD launch.
GW2 gambled with the living story instead of expansions and it failed to be optimal that is all, and chances are we will see regular expansions from anet in the future...more in line with GW1