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Which MMORPGs Have the Best Monetization? | MMORPG.com
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Which MMORPGs Have the Best Monetization? | MMORPG.com
Monetization in MMORPGs has always been a slippery slope, especially after the rise of free-to-play titles in the gaming industry. We look at the most popular MMOs out now, analyze their monetization and discuss what ideal monetization could look like.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
Most games followed this model originally. EQ, Vanilla WoW, SWToR, DAoC all followed this monetization model. Then gamers got cheap. $15 a month was just too damn much to pay for entertainment and the move to FTP began. Then studios responded by doing their research and finding out how to make FTP addictive on par with gambling. Now you have loot boxes, gacha, FOMO, and P2W and the studios are making money hand over fist. They'll never give the whole game away for a paltry $15 per month. That's way too cheap. Good job, gamers! We really showed them!
See this: Free-to-play - Wikipedia
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I believe all modern and/or “AAA” cash shops are, by nature, greedy cash-grabs. We might want to believe that it could help keep a good game alive, offering more and more content, but that’s probably a small fraction of the potential (and unrealistic) benefit.
These products are commercialized and the passion is obviously gone; the methodology appears to be the production of a minimum viable product with maximum possible profit - they seem to all boil down to a series of exploit mechanisms in a science fiction setting. They’re not products as a result of true care - so current and upcoming offerings simply cannot be trusted.
We (all of us) have to pay to play, absolutely, but we should not have to pay to enjoy the play. If the game offers an online, multiplayer feature then it needs to be paid for by the players up front of with a subscription - that’s a cost to the development and publishing teams. Development, upgrades, maintenance, and online services are heavy costs, so these organizations should simply charge a fair rate for the game and allow players to play everything out in their entirety.
Buy to Play with Subscription: This is life. If players want to enjoy a game, its upkeep, new content, and its constant online services then they pay for the title and subscribe to pay the online fee. Yes, this is a financial “check” in-and-of itself, but it’s the right one as compared to what the alternatives have produced in the last 20 years.
Pay for cosmetics: This is a wedge between the player and full enjoyment, even if not in the ability to progress. When games provide a venue for players to out-flex one another because of their financial status then the game has done something critically wrong - besides annihilating immersion.
Pay for expansions: Players absolutely SHOULD pay for the addition of significant new content.
Pay for Loot Boxes/Superior Gear/Consumables/Features: Absolutely not.
Pay for Character Advancement: No. There are more simple alternatives. If a player has beaten the main campaign and are at least “x” in level, the player should have access to an easy, optional level boost for a new alternate character, free-of-charge.
Pay for Services: Limited. Transferring a player from one world to another, if it requires manual intervention, could be a paid service. Otherwise, it should be free and staged behind a 30-to-90-day limitation. This goes for name/account changes a well. Otherwise, resetting your gender and/or look should be an in-game option for a modest in-game fee (not paid w/ real money).
Much of this is merely brushing on the topic, but the offerings today honestly make me feel ill; I couldn’t be more disappointed in the unmerciful volume of ever-expanding exploits we have to deal with in our daily lives; gaming shouldn’t be at the forefront of their innovation.
1. Pay-to-play, no cash shop. Everything is earned with in-game things.
2. Pay-to-play with purely cosmetic cash shop. Explanation: "cosmetic" means "providing zero bonuses to in-game actvities".
3. Buy-to-play with pay-to-play after purchase, no cash shop.
4.Buy-to-play with pay-to-play after purchase, cosmetic cash shop.
5. Free to play with asking for donations. No cash shop
6. Free to play with cosmetic cash shop
7. Free to play with game-influencing cash shop.
8. Buy-to-play
9. Buy-to-play/with or without sub, but with game influencing cash shop
10. pay to play with game influencing cash shop
...
10715283. NFT, "pay to earn" scam.
Side note: lootboxes should be banned from every single game. RNG too.
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Guild wars 2 is a close 2nd.
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Same with Star Wars Galaxies, which is why I still main that as my primary MMO honestly.
I love that most gamers liked the 15$ sub stuff. I believe it's true, I also believe in the case of mmos, majority is not the goal (listened to, believed)
15$ a month was too damn much for us poor folk, so what happened was they made 20% free, carve your arms off for the rest.
Free to play, I love it and hate it. I WANT to pay money, because paying money generally means the /bad mmo stuff doesn't happen. But people are so cheap (I'm uber cheap but I have a tiny iota of vision) they can't see free doesn't mean free. It does, but a healthy dose of people will not see free as free when they pay for things that aren't normal in an mmo/sub. That are normal in Singleplayer game. Things that used to be part of the game packages are now ..addons, because people PAY for them. WE payed already (for our games) but for the most part why pay AGAIN....
I feel if the game is FREE, the game is FREE. Customization of that game might cost money. Skins, textures, sounds, doesn't matter, base is free.
Pay to play, or sub, ALL is included outside promotional skins and customization. Anything less is...........
World of Warcraft, Darkfall Online, Darkfall Unholy Wars, EVE Online, Final Fantasy XI, Final Fantasy XIV, SWTOR and so on. All of them having P2P with a box purchase, which in my opinion is the far superior model for all parties except the CEO.
Main thing I disagree with is here - "We have transitioned from a subscription era to free-to-play games with countless avenues for monetization."
The move has been to one were MMOs use every method they can to make revenue and that will just increase. It is not a matter of picking a revenue strategy, it is a matter of putting as much icing on the big revenue cake as they can get away with.
What came first the chicken or the egg?
The fact F2P was predominant in the Far East and slowly came over to the West tells its own story. MMORPG players here were very against F2P, but there was a massively (sorry) larger gaming community that wanted no subscription. They were not playing because there was a subscription and studios here picked up on that. I am sure many of you can remember the years of excuses and weasel words we had to justify the slow move to F2P.
Of course for the studios it was not really about F2P (in itself a weasel word) it was about the cash shop and the potentially hugely larger player base. It is somewhat more complex a picture, for example most subscription fans had concerns about the subs going up, the MMORPG fans were not bystanders to all this, but the driver was the studios.
Whilst I don't doubt for one second that the studios did catch onto/create a potential market, without us buying into their products under a F2P model, it wouldn't be so predominant in the field.
The driver may have been the studios but we were quite happy to pay the fare and go along for the ride.
Oh and to answer the original question, box and subscription only (I would be lying if I said I haven't played F2P games in the past however)
Buy to play
Monthly Fee (pretty much mandatory if you actually want to play the game)
Paid DLC packs
Paid Expansion packs
Paid gambling boxes (massive chunk of cosmetics here, being sold on the gamble for FOMO)
Paid microtransations outside of gambling boxes
Paid skill progression and skips
I'll never understand how the community can more or less agree that paid level boosts are bad for these sorts of games but is completely okay with ESO having compartmentalized the level boost in the form of buying skill point sets separated by zone. Similarly I don't get how mobile game monetization is loathed by gamers but we're cool with Zenimax using a mobile game-esque paid system to skip time-gated stat raises like mount speed.
The greed here is absolutely egregious and its always hand-waved away because the world of Nirn has such compelling draw. Seriously take a step back and objectively look at its monetization and consider how it'd fair in any other intellectual property.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
Is it really, though? When the same/similar monetization systems are present in other games - say ones from asian countries with anime cartoon graphics - the general consensus among the community is that its "pay to win" and "garbage." The in-game currency isn't free if you're paying $15 for it, even if it's included as a bonus with the rest of the subscription benefits.
Remove the loot boxes and ESO is decent. Not great, but decent. At least there are no direct P2W items like the Uber Sword of Doom in the cash shop. From what I understand, most of the asian games have actual P2W items, and people spend a lot of money on them.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
This is absolutely pay-to-win. You are paying real money to skip game content to more quickly get a gameplay advantage in some way over other players who aren't paying. It doesn't really matter if you're paying for a P2W sword or a collection of found map skill points if it translates to real money = skipping grind for bigger stat point ingame.