why would a person who has never worked on a f2p game in his life be narrating how f2p is doomed etc ?
lol
like get an interview or a article from someone who actually knows wtf f2p even means first
Only thing I would probably say to that is, this guy was working at bioware when SWTOR went f2p. He probably wasn't involved but in his position he probably had at least some direct knowledge of what's going on behind the scenes.
I know what model I prefer. Subscription models or in the least freemium models interest me the most. I hate cash shops and gacha even though I play them often.
But play and earn is still just an experiment to me. I know that some games are popular, but the thing is, you can't be as greedy in a play and earn environment or else you actually will collapse. Months before axie got hacked they were learning this first hand.
The hack was more of an excuse they could point to for a looking failure they now get to correct.
There are some awesome play and earn games I look forward to trying and a a couple on the market that have promise but it's not going to hit the mainstream soon. And even then it kind of falls into a specific free to play category.
Please stop, I see the neat little sidestep you are trying to do here.
It is play "to" earn; "and" is clearly not the correct rejoinder.
No use trying to make a shitty concept sound less offensive than it actually is.
If you are going to support the dark side at least own fully up to it.
There's a difference. I recommend you learn it.
What's next, Free "and" play?
Lulz, your agenda is obvious, to put lipstick on a pig, but please, share a few released examples of this free "and" earn concept in the MMORPG space.
Bet you can't.
Can you tell me the difference between "play to earn" and "play and earn?" Is play and earn really as simple as time=money? I originally thought the masked one had used "and" instead of "to" as an interchangeable rejoinder, but I guess I missed the "sidestep." What a devious little weasel. Google must have felt the same way because when I typed in "play and earn" it popped up a million play to earn results.
It's more like "Play to think you might earn but you don't"
It's not like Entropia hasn't been around for 19 years and very few players have ever made money playing it.
There's nothing new with this latest attempt to sell the gullible on the idea that they can make money by playing a game except for the new crypto trappings,
And you can bet your ass that a game designed from the ground up with the possibility of selling stuff for real money won't have any of the careless loopholes that allow gold sellers to do it in games that are not made with that in mind.
So tired of all this silly talk trying to make it seem like this is something new.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
So, this subject has gone around forever.
Originally, and going to name a game:
Ultima Online
The pay per month was for keeping servers running and devs in place for repairs and upgrades. It's the business model
Then, companies wanted more, and it evolved into the hellish landscape we have now.
IT was never a good idea. as long as people invest in it though, companies will keep throwing trash.
I think the article got it right overall. but the business models just need to change.
Damn. Looks like my prior message was lost in the MMORPG.COM editor hell.
Anyhow...
The point was that I see F2P is on it's last legs. The future however is NOT play to earn. At least not by itself. It's subscription.
Yup. Subscription.
But not the old sub for a single game model. Instead it will be sub to Xbox Gamepass, or some new Epic Games pass or SteamPass...
That could be. It's already been going on in varying forms.
Daybreak has All Access that includes a subscription to DCUO, EQ, EQII, and PlanetSide 2 for a price of $15/month, pretty good for anyone that enjoys at least two of the games.
F2P is the only good way to exist nowadays. But first you need a good game. Crappy games blaming their business model is just getting old as an excuse. Take Warframe for example. Fully f2p, zero pvp forcing content and a bunch of speedups if you pay. But you can get it all anyway without dishing out a dime. And how about LOL? Skins skins skins... Thats it. Fully f2p, played by millions.
Make a good game. Then think about a money sucking model.
Not all champs on lol are available, like Dota 2 is. Now if u wanna unlock every champ on lol... how much is that?
Why would you ever want to unlock every champ on LoL? Only an idiot would do that, nobody spends money on unlocking champs in LoL. To really learn a champ you need to put in a number of games… once learned you have enough coin to buy the next champ you want to play. There is never a need to spend money on buying champs, this is why the LoL model is one of the best.
You spend money on skins which gives you personalization but doesn’t negatively effect the game at all, it gives you no advantage in the game. It’s by far the best implementation of F2P.
I don’t have good data here, but here’s my anecdote
Exactly. You don't have good data. Anecdotal data is just cherry picking a case in point out of the air and pretending it's a growing or common scenario when you, self admittedly, don't have good data.
F2P isn't going anywhere any time soon. You would need a to see enough F2P games actually lose money to constitute a trend that other industry leaders stand up, take note, and change course. Fact of the matter is you have companies dumping large amounts of money into researching how to manipulate FTP practices to hit folks in their endorphin glands and produce addiction. That's how you get people spending thousands of dollars on Diablo Immortal and games like it. It doesn't matter that people's wallets got tired and they're starting to merge servers because they already made back their initial investment many times over. As long as they can figure out how to replicate that success, FTP will continue to be the dominant monetization model.
So, this subject has gone around forever.
Originally, and going to name a game:
Ultima Online
The pay per month was for keeping servers running and devs in place for repairs and upgrades. It's the business model
Then, companies wanted more, and it evolved into the hellish landscape we have now.
IT was never a good idea. as long as people invest in it though, companies will keep throwing trash.
I think the article got it right overall. but the business models just need to change.
Because all other factors have remained equal since Ultima Online was new and fresh such that $15/month then and now are equivalent in value.
Of course companies wanted more as monthly subscriptions are worth less. They have remained largely fixed despite the price of most things increasing, including the costs associated with earning their revenue.
The cost of subscriptions would have to greatly increase to provide value equivalent to that when Ultima Online was introduced. That isn't viable, so other ways had to be found to supplement their revenue.
In an oversaturated market with costs spiraling out of control the last thing to disappear will be F2P. All other forms raise a barrier of entry (box price, sub) and also create an artificial spending ceiling. Once you’ve bought it there are no other ways to get revenue from you and relentlessly churning out paid expansions on a yearly basis really isn’t a good alternative (looks at EQ and LotRO).
So no, it won’t disappear, on the contrary. They want everybody to play and have as much opportunities to spend, so F2P with cash shop, optional sub, battle passes, expansions and ‘special DLC’ to boot. And yes, that could, technically, be replaced by, say, a 200 bucks game with a 50 bucks sub but then you would limit your target audience so severely that it still wouldn’t make any sense.
Costs of game development have, on average, risen by roughly a 1000% over the last three decades, who do we think is paying for that if all of your game is still the same 60 dollar box price and 15 dollar sub?
/Cheers, Lahnmir
'the only way he could nail it any better is if he used a cross.'
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
Well - They are still looking for a model that works. Free to Play kind of works if it’s only cosmetics, but to make money - the cosmetics team will have to be as large as the regular dev. team - and make sure regular drops are drab and boring looking.
In Elder Scrolls online you lack the «eternal craftbag» + some minor experience bonus + access to «mini dlcs» . I would say Elder scrolls online is 100% playable as f2p
I forgot one other factor that Mark did not think over when predicting the doom of F2P, the cash shop models have increasingly gone over to gambling models. Gambling is addictive and players once hooked on that are not going anywhere. So, while I can see many players refusing to go down or getting fed up with F2P, the baulk won't and that will keep it alive though changing all the time. I wish most players would have my attitude to F2P and play them the very limited way like I have, but they don't, and this is just wishful thinking on his part.
Damn. Looks like my prior message was lost in the MMORPG.COM editor hell.
Anyhow...
The point was that I see F2P is on it's last legs. The future however is NOT play to earn. At least not by itself. It's subscription.
Yup. Subscription.
But not the old sub for a single game model. Instead it will be sub to Xbox Gamepass, or some new Epic Games pass or SteamPass...
That could be a game changer, a subscription for all plus any monetarization each game has in its cash shop. But then we will be playing all the games we do now with a subscription, that's a win as far as they are concerned. I can't tell you the exact terms, but a regular stream of income is seen as better than one of purchases, with the game pass model they get both.
why would a person who has never worked on a f2p game in his life be narrating how f2p is doomed etc ?
lol
like get an interview or a article from someone who actually knows wtf f2p even means first
Only thing I would probably say to that is, this guy was working at bioware when SWTOR went f2p. He probably wasn't involved but in his position he probably had at least some direct knowledge of what's going on behind the scenes.
I know what model I prefer. Subscription models or in the least freemium models interest me the most. I hate cash shops and gacha even though I play them often.
But play and earn is still just an experiment to me. I know that some games are popular, but the thing is, you can't be as greedy in a play and earn environment or else you actually will collapse. Months before axie got hacked they were learning this first hand.
The hack was more of an excuse they could point to for a looking failure they now get to correct.
There are some awesome play and earn games I look forward to trying and a a couple on the market that have promise but it's not going to hit the mainstream soon. And even then it kind of falls into a specific free to play category.
Please stop, I see the neat little sidestep you are trying to do here.
It is play "to" earn; "and" is clearly not the correct rejoinder.
No use trying to make a shitty concept sound less offensive than it actually is.
If you are going to support the dark side at least own fully up to it.
There's a difference. I recommend you learn it.
What's next, Free "and" play?
Lulz, your agenda is obvious, to put lipstick on a pig, but please, share a few released examples of this free "and" earn concept in the MMORPG space.
Bet you can't.
Can you tell me the difference between "play to earn" and "play and earn?" Is play and earn really as simple as time=money? I originally thought the masked one had used "and" instead of "to" as an interchangeable rejoinder, but I guess I missed the "sidestep." What a devious little weasel. Google must have felt the same way because when I typed in "play and earn" it popped up a million play to earn results.
Just tried the same experiment, not one single listing for play "and" earn was returned, but ad infinitum listing of play 2 earn was there.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I don't think free-to-play will go away as a business model, but I do believe that free-to-play with gambling-like elements will attract less players over time and as a consequence be less popular with developers.
I can imagine that playing games with purchases that give you something based on chance becomes tiresome at some point. The person realizes that these types of games are not a good use of their money for the level of satisfaction they provide. I think that's what the data suggests, that here are fewer players overall. Those who remain spend more, but eventually those players will churn too.
"Personally, I feel like (free to play monetization) is doomed to
collapse because – I don’t have good data here, but here’s my anecdote"
I confess I found it hard to keep reading after this; 'here's my broad, radical prediction for an entire industry based not on data but on something that happened to me this one time'
Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence, etc.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Authored 139 missions in VendettaOnline and 6 tracks in Distance
why would a person who has never worked on a f2p game in his life be narrating how f2p is doomed etc ?
lol
like get an interview or a article from someone who actually knows wtf f2p even means first
Only thing I would probably say to that is, this guy was working at bioware when SWTOR went f2p. He probably wasn't involved but in his position he probably had at least some direct knowledge of what's going on behind the scenes.
I know what model I prefer. Subscription models or in the least freemium models interest me the most. I hate cash shops and gacha even though I play them often.
But play and earn is still just an experiment to me. I know that some games are popular, but the thing is, you can't be as greedy in a play and earn environment or else you actually will collapse. Months before axie got hacked they were learning this first hand.
The hack was more of an excuse they could point to for a looking failure they now get to correct.
There are some awesome play and earn games I look forward to trying and a a couple on the market that have promise but it's not going to hit the mainstream soon. And even then it kind of falls into a specific free to play category.
Please stop, I see the neat little sidestep you are trying to do here.
It is play "to" earn; "and" is clearly not the correct rejoinder.
No use trying to make a shitty concept sound less offensive than it actually is.
If you are going to support the dark side at least own fully up to it.
There's a difference. I recommend you learn it.
What's next, Free "and" play?
Lulz, your agenda is obvious, to put lipstick on a pig, but please, share a few released examples of this free "and" earn concept in the MMORPG space.
Bet you can't.
Can you tell me the difference between "play to earn" and "play and earn?" Is play and earn really as simple as time=money? I originally thought the masked one had used "and" instead of "to" as an interchangeable rejoinder, but I guess I missed the "sidestep." What a devious little weasel. Google must have felt the same way because when I typed in "play and earn" it popped up a million play to earn results.
Just tried the same experiment, not one single listing for play "and" earn was returned, but ad infinitum listing of play 2 earn was there.
Maybe we should have used Duck Duck Go instead?
On DuckDuckGo, three of the top six results for "play and earn" were "play to earn", two where "play and earn" (one of which has basically that as the site's name), and one had a title of "Play And Earn, Not Play To Earn".
First, there will be plenty of "free to play" games that are really pay to win. These target people who can't or won't pay anything for games, as well as whales who are willing to pay quite a lot of money and expect to win as a result. The free players are basically someone for the whales to beat. That will remain around as a substantial niche, but it will be a niche. Apart from that and games with a free trial, "free to play" is mostly going to go away.
What is going to become far more prevalent is subscriptions that give you access to many games, not just one. This is roughly what we're seeing with the television market, where a bunch of different companies will give you access to a bunch of television shows and/or movies for $10/month or whatever. Computer games will head there for similar reasons. Xbox Game Pass already does something like this, but there will be a lot of competing services that do something similar.
Right now, the big barrier to this being more common is that there are so many different publishers. We're going to see publishers strike deals with each other where they agree that for $20/month or whatever, you get unlimited access to a bunch of games from a bunch of different publishers all in the same subscription. Quite a few MMORPGs will end up in one bundle or another, so in that sense, the unlimited access subscription will make a comeback.
This isn't going to be one universal subscription that gives you access to everything. One subscription might give you access to 10% of the games on the market or some such. That's going to be really a lot of games, and with different services focusing on different niches, there is likely to be some subscription service out there that only offers 5% or 10% of the games on the market, but half of the games that you want to play.
Launch day releases of AAA games will mostly be excluded from the subscription services. They know that they can get a lot of people to pay $50 for immediate access, and that's more than they'd get from being just one small part of a subscription. Rather, those will show up in one or more subscription services some months after launch.
This will end up in a situation where a typical gamer gets access to everything he wants to play for $50/month or $100/month or some such through some combination of subscriptions. The reason that it will end up there is that that is more money than most gamers pay for games today.
But right now, spending $100/month only gets you access to a few new games per month. In the new model, you'll be spending more, but you'll also be getting more, with the ability to easily try dozens of new games per month before settling on the few that you actually like. You'll have unlimited access to nearly everything that you care about, with only the exception of pay to win games and recently launched AAA games.
Comments
Can you tell me the difference between "play to earn" and "play and earn?" Is play and earn really as simple as time=money? I originally thought the masked one had used "and" instead of "to" as an interchangeable rejoinder, but I guess I missed the "sidestep." What a devious little weasel.
Anyhow...
The point was that I see F2P is on it's last legs. The future however is NOT play to earn. At least not by itself. It's subscription.
Yup. Subscription.
But not the old sub for a single game model. Instead it will be sub to Xbox Gamepass, or some new Epic Games pass or SteamPass...
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
It's not like Entropia hasn't been around for 19 years and very few players have ever made money playing it.
There's nothing new with this latest attempt to sell the gullible on the idea that they can make money by playing a game except for the new crypto trappings,
And you can bet your ass that a game designed from the ground up with the possibility of selling stuff for real money won't have any of the careless loopholes that allow gold sellers to do it in games that are not made with that in mind.
So tired of all this silly talk trying to make it seem like this is something new.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
2nd that.
Originally, and going to name a game:
Ultima Online
The pay per month was for keeping servers running and devs in place for repairs and upgrades. It's the business model
Then, companies wanted more, and it evolved into the hellish landscape we have now.
IT was never a good idea. as long as people invest in it though, companies will keep throwing trash.
I think the article got it right overall. but the business models just need to change.
That could be. It's already been going on in varying forms.
Daybreak has All Access that includes a subscription to DCUO, EQ, EQII, and PlanetSide 2 for a price of $15/month, pretty good for anyone that enjoys at least two of the games.
You spend money on skins which gives you personalization but doesn’t negatively effect the game at all, it gives you no advantage in the game. It’s by far the best implementation of F2P.
Exactly. You don't have good data. Anecdotal data is just cherry picking a case in point out of the air and pretending it's a growing or common scenario when you, self admittedly, don't have good data.
F2P isn't going anywhere any time soon. You would need a to see enough F2P games actually lose money to constitute a trend that other industry leaders stand up, take note, and change course. Fact of the matter is you have companies dumping large amounts of money into researching how to manipulate FTP practices to hit folks in their endorphin glands and produce addiction. That's how you get people spending thousands of dollars on Diablo Immortal and games like it. It doesn't matter that people's wallets got tired and they're starting to merge servers because they already made back their initial investment many times over. As long as they can figure out how to replicate that success, FTP will continue to be the dominant monetization model.
Because all other factors have remained equal since Ultima Online was new and fresh such that $15/month then and now are equivalent in value.
Of course companies wanted more as monthly subscriptions are worth less. They have remained largely fixed despite the price of most things increasing, including the costs associated with earning their revenue.
The cost of subscriptions would have to greatly increase to provide value equivalent to that when Ultima Online was introduced. That isn't viable, so other ways had to be found to supplement their revenue.
So no, it won’t disappear, on the contrary. They want everybody to play and have as much opportunities to spend, so F2P with cash shop, optional sub, battle passes, expansions and ‘special DLC’ to boot. And yes, that could, technically, be replaced by, say, a 200 bucks game with a 50 bucks sub but then you would limit your target audience so severely that it still wouldn’t make any sense.
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
Maybe we should have used Duck Duck Go instead?
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I can imagine that playing games with purchases that give you something based on chance becomes tiresome at some point. The person realizes that these types of games are not a good use of their money for the level of satisfaction they provide. I think that's what the data suggests, that here are fewer players overall. Those who remain spend more, but eventually those players will churn too.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
My first F2P game was "Awesome it's free!" then "Oh no it's not......."
More seriously, it is not chronological such as
- 1st game I pay
- 2nd game I pay less
- 3rd game I don't pay
Believing F2P will fail for following such a pattern is non-sense.
For me the reason to pay has always been a tension between temptation and wallet saving not any kind of trend erosion.
The OW2 battle pass will not see my money, but BDO got me by several hundreds...
Arm-twister-games will get their money only if they satisfy the customer in a way or another.
PS: BDO is a F2P game in disguise.
First, there will be plenty of "free to play" games that are really pay to win. These target people who can't or won't pay anything for games, as well as whales who are willing to pay quite a lot of money and expect to win as a result. The free players are basically someone for the whales to beat. That will remain around as a substantial niche, but it will be a niche. Apart from that and games with a free trial, "free to play" is mostly going to go away.
What is going to become far more prevalent is subscriptions that give you access to many games, not just one. This is roughly what we're seeing with the television market, where a bunch of different companies will give you access to a bunch of television shows and/or movies for $10/month or whatever. Computer games will head there for similar reasons. Xbox Game Pass already does something like this, but there will be a lot of competing services that do something similar.
Right now, the big barrier to this being more common is that there are so many different publishers. We're going to see publishers strike deals with each other where they agree that for $20/month or whatever, you get unlimited access to a bunch of games from a bunch of different publishers all in the same subscription. Quite a few MMORPGs will end up in one bundle or another, so in that sense, the unlimited access subscription will make a comeback.
This isn't going to be one universal subscription that gives you access to everything. One subscription might give you access to 10% of the games on the market or some such. That's going to be really a lot of games, and with different services focusing on different niches, there is likely to be some subscription service out there that only offers 5% or 10% of the games on the market, but half of the games that you want to play.
Launch day releases of AAA games will mostly be excluded from the subscription services. They know that they can get a lot of people to pay $50 for immediate access, and that's more than they'd get from being just one small part of a subscription. Rather, those will show up in one or more subscription services some months after launch.
This will end up in a situation where a typical gamer gets access to everything he wants to play for $50/month or $100/month or some such through some combination of subscriptions. The reason that it will end up there is that that is more money than most gamers pay for games today.
But right now, spending $100/month only gets you access to a few new games per month. In the new model, you'll be spending more, but you'll also be getting more, with the ability to easily try dozens of new games per month before settling on the few that you actually like. You'll have unlimited access to nearly everything that you care about, with only the exception of pay to win games and recently launched AAA games.