Tag Archives: f2p

A New Model

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As everyone seems to be reporting, The Secret World is going Buy to Play (pretty much the same business model as Guild Wars 2) and Trion has let some people go.  The former is somewhat expected, though most thought Free to Play was the way to go.  The latter is a bit more complicated due to Rise of Nations and doesn’t speak directly to Rift’s future but could be a sign.

So what’s left in the subscription realm?  EvE and WoW as the two benchmarks for sandbox and themeparks.  They can afford to charge due to their size and business models.  Rift is a sort-of-straggler here in that the product is arguably better than WoW yet needs more mass to really justify the subscription.

Any game that comes out from now on in either realm needs to be as good or better than EvE/WoW in order to justify any subscription price.  As much as I think Wildstar looks cool, there is zero way it can compete in a sub-model with WoW.  The Elder Scrolls Online is doomed for failure on that model.    The problem with that model is that you can’t easily take it apart and change to another after launch (SWTOR is a prime example), it needs to be core to the design phase.

As Tobold alludes, the traditional single player games are converging to the model of buy the base game, pay for DLC.  We’re well past the days of Horse Armor but DLC is here to stay and a very valid way to extend the life of a game.  The argument of “on-disk dlc” is going to be a fun one, or rather the difference between true DLC and game unlocks (a-la Street Fighter).  I would think though, that the market itself will decide on the correct path as there appears to be nothing worse than an angry gamer.  BioWare has learned this the hard way – see Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3 and TOR – where I’m certain the cost to fight the bad press has been in the hundreds of millions.

So single player games are coming to be more like MMOs in both financial and play models while MMOs are dropping the idea of a subscription for a more a-la carte model in order to pick apart pieces of the pie.  The danger here is that the concept of an MMO community is gone.  The odds of a game keeping any given player’s attention for more than 3 months (as is the case with single player games) is low.  If you were going to play something for longer, you probably already are.

Makes you wonder where the in-roads are for any new game.

Free Isn’t Without Cost

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I mentioned previously that I was horribad at Planetside 2.  My death to kill ratio was atrocious and I put it up to lack of skill/understanding.  Truth be told, I’ve never played a game that offered zero hand holding and simply dropped you in the middle of a death match.  I am certain that someone has botted a new account creation scheme just to farm new arrivals.  And that brings me to this post’s topic, F2P and bots.

When SWTOR went F2P and decided to have zero entry to the door, they basically said to the botters “come on in”. Without restrictions, they could potentially farm entire zones, flood the market and all sorts of economic destruction without any real repercussions.  BioWare was smart enough to realize this and essentially paralyzed the non-payers with a huge wall.  Though, if they buy but a single item, they still get a lot of access – enough to cause serious damage.

Diablo 3 is rife with botters and this is due to the low cost of entry.  You can get D3 for 20$ or less.  Gold has an absolute floor of 1.25$ per million, meaning you need to sell 25 million gold to break even on the RMAH.  I can assure you that this is no challenge as most bots can make > 1 million per hour with little effort.  So let’s say you’re a botter and you want to make money.  Buy 50 accounts.  Farm for 2 weeks (14 days), 12 hours a day.  You’ve made 7000$.  I could go on about this particular point, but suffice to say that the RMAH is the cause of massive inflation in D3 and an overall failure from a gaming perspective.  From a business perspective, Blizz makes a cut on every gold sold… so you know.

Planetside 2 has zero barriers to entry and zero barriers to play.  Every purchase is a convenience purchase (to level faster) and there’s no actual trade in-game, so the economy can’t break.  What does happen however is that players can cheat the system with hacking tools: aimbots, speed boosters, etc…  SOE can ban the players but the players can just as easily come back for the same experience.  Blocking IPs doesn’t work, proxies fix that.  Blocking hacking techniques doesn’t work either, they just build better tools.  SOE has a massive problem here, where the concept of “equal footing” is a key marker for the value of the game.  If a player doesn’t feel they have a fair chance at winning, why play?  With no barrier to access, anyone can hack their way to the top.  Even if they get banned, they can do it again with no cost but time.

F2P with no barrier is a risk.  An open-world persistent PvP game with next to no penalty for cheating is a disaster waiting to happen.

Let’s Get This Straight

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When you exchange money for something and it’s understood by both parties that you are getting a specific item, that’s a purchase.

When you exchange money for a chance at something, that’s called gambling.

This proliferation of lockboxes that can only be opened by exchanging real money is gambling. I know the US prohibits online gambling as it’s the easiest way to launder money. I am astounded that companies that offer this feature, without an in-game option, haven’t yet been brought to court.

I’ve studied enough math to know that gambling is a tax on the mathematically inept. If you gamble TO make money, you’re delusional (or a prodigy and lucky). If you gamble as a passtime, with the same budget as others (say a round of golf), then that’s quite a bit different. Sadly, there are more in the first bucket than the second.

Little fact for you. The odds of winning that $500 million PowerBall were higher than getting killed by a vending machine trying to coax the chips out.

What A Dollar Gets You

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Syp has a good post on the F2P change for SWTOR.  The main argument is against the two main models of F2P – one that lets people play for free with add-ons paid for cash and another that provides huge restrictions and essentially works as a limited trial.

Rohan has a nice breakdown of the F2P components that bears repeating, where the main ones include:

  • Box
  • Access
  • Content
  • Cosmetic
  • Convenience
  • Power

The box is simple, access too.  Content can be pieced out, as Turbine does pretty well with DDO and LOTRO.  Cosmetic is the way for most Cryptic games, including most super hero variants.  Convenience speeds up portions of the game that are clearly tedious.  Faster mounts, bigger bags, experience potions et al.  Power is the most controversial but the most prominent in the F2P world of Asia.

TOR is clearly using Access, Cosmetic and Convenience as the main drivers for cash.  Content is simply much too expensive for TOR to sell piecemeal, what with the full voice over costs and high production values.  Power isn’t an option either as the pusback on this model in western games can destroy a game.

You are paying for access to raids and PvP and whatnot but the general agreement is that these portions are a much better value in other games.  The convenience issue is an interesting one.  There is no real challenge in TOR, at any given point.  1-50 can be completed, if slowly, for absolutely zero dollars.  For 20$, much less than anyone would pay for a box copy of a AAA single player game, gets you enough unlocks to may the game very playable.

Once you hit level 50 though, then it’s much less about convenience or access.  Nearly every single aspect of the game at that point is locked behind cash doors.  You need to pay to do anything, use the AH, truly craft or customize your character.  Heck, you need to pay to equip items.

Right now, you can buy KOTOR2 for 10$ (on sale for half for a few days), a game dating from nearly 8 years ago or you can pay 0 dollars for KOTOR3 that’s 1 year old.  If you only wanted the Single Player experience, I would say “good deal”.  If you’re looking for the social experience, I would say that the F2P option isn’t an option at all, subscription is the only way to go.

This essentially means that TOR is offering a free trial from 1-50, with the option to buy perks along the way.  Once you hit 50 though, it’s a subscription game like any other.

Oh, It's a Wave Alright

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Massively has a post on a recent meeting of the minds in regards to F2P.  Cryptic (Champions Online, Star Trek), Riot (League of Legends) and EA (SWTOR) all have a bit to say, though the focus is on the first and last in that list.

I learned that Craig Zinkievich is now the COO of Cryptic.  I remember him from the STO days of beta and launch.  He quit when they went F2P then came back a few months later.  Any comments that Craig puts out, I tend to take with a grain of salt.  He’s a solid dev, smart head on his shoulders but sometimes it seems like he lacks an understanding of the genre.  A forest for the trees type of guy.  Anyways.

Craig’s point that SWTOR was the last great hope for subscription games rings hollow.  I’ve said it about 100 times now but SWTOR failed because of lack of incentive to pay 15$ a month to play.  Once you reached level 50, there was simply nothing to do of value past the first week.  I don’t get why Craig can’t see this as it’s the exact same reason STO went F2P.  If you provide people value for their money, they will pay.  WoW, Rift and EvE are only 3 of the examples needed to push this point across.

EA has a good line that basically says F2P competition is good for gamers as it increases the quality of games within the pool.  While I agree with the comment in spirit, this is so massively not true it’s hard to contain my morning coffee.  If this were true, then there wouldn’t be any Prada purse knockoffs and Wal-Mart wouldn’t be around.  Competition doesn’t increase overall quality, it decreases it to absurd levels.  You might have an outlier with a great product but the mass is still garbage.  The only time this comment is true is when competition breaks a monopoly.  The iPhone smart phone monopoly and the web browser monopoly are great examples.  F2P is currently a massive sea of garbage.  Finding anything of quality is more of a measure of luck than content.  Hello Zynga?

F2P is not the wave of the future; it is simply a “new” monetization platform.  Are the design decisions for SWTOR going to be different now than they were before?  No, it’s still a MMORPG themepark-a-palooza.  There are still raids, PvP, dailies and all that junk.  Instead, they will nickel and dime you through that content.  It’s simple math.  They need money to operate.  How they get that money is up to them.

The difference between a F2P model and a subscription model is in the return on investment. (ROI)  A sub model has to wait many years to get all the cash back.  SWTOR could have waited 3 years and started printing money but the ROI requirement from investors was to get the cash faster.  F2P can make all their money back in the first 2 months (many Asian models are based on this as is Zynga) by gouging players who will pay MORE than 15$ per month.  Of course, that initial blip of cash disappears after your game hits month 3.  Guild Wars 2 will be showing that off pretty quickly I bet.

Payment Models

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There’s a lot of talk about payment models lately.  Syncaine clearly has a disdain for the model.  Tobold is taking a development perspective. Rohan sees a systematic divide.  Syp just wants to play without paying.

At the fundamental level, it takes money to run a service.  The actual cost of that is dependent on the technology, people and process and therefore varies greatly from game to game.  We can assume that it costs less to run Rift than it does EvE – for various reasons.  When a game company offers a “free” service, they still have to charge people for something.

Rohan’s breakdown of payment methods strikes a cord with me.  Not all F2P (or sub games) are set up the same way.  Each has a different gating model and revenue generating possibilities.  While WoW is a sub model, the sparkle-pony sale generated somewhere in the region of 30 million dollars.  In such a fashion, you can break down the service offerings for each game.

The debate is less about the payment models and more about the perceived cost/benefit of spending money.  Is 15$ spent on WoW worth more than 15$ spent on Rift?  What would 15$ get me in F2P-TOR?  As I’ve mentioned a few times now, TOR is offering KOTOR3 for free.  Anything to do with the MMO portion is set up behind a pay wall.  This makes sense as the economy is at risk if all of a sudden the barrier to entry is nil.  Someone mentioned that Slicing is a net positive in cash flow.  Imagine setting up 100 accounts to bot slicing.  It would cost you the PC power (minimal) and you’d have a cash generating machine with nothing to stop it.  D3 has this problem, in another sort, but the devs actually take a cut of the cash sales, so they secretly endorse it.

Let’s add a bit of contrast here.  I spend 15$ after a hockey game with the guys having a beer.  I play hockey 2-3 times a week.  I get a cup of coffee every day, well over 15$ a month.  There are plenty of activities that I do that cost way more than 15$ per month and in actual fact, other than my internet access fee, I don’t have a better deal available to me.

From a business perspective, piecing out content makes sense.  You can easily point out where the best bang for the buck is.  People buy a lot of monocles?  Build more.  No one is buying dungeons?  Build less.  What should be free and what should cost money?

From a dev perspective, this segregation of systems adds overall complexity.  You can longer integrate systems as you can’t assume that the player has access.  The XBOX360 launched with an optional hard drive, meaning devs couldn’t assume players could save content.  You need to have a solid understanding of your foundation material.  Anything built on that cannot be dependent on another built component.

From a player perspective, we’re in an age of options.  Being able to pay for the options you want and not for the others is simply the way things will work from now on.  This adds complexities, depending on the division.  What if your friends don’t have the same content you do?  What if the content is packaged in such a way that it isn’t attractive (pay per use model, gambling model)?

This is far from a simple issue, as most bloggers can attest to.  As long as the dev is making money to sustain operations and make some profit for improvements and the players are content, then you can have success.  In the end though, it’s the player’s money and they get to decide where to put it.

 

Knight of the Old Republic Free

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See what I did there?  We’re a couple months away from SWTOR going F2P but we have more info about it now!

You get absolutely everything good about the game for free.  The story, the classes, the companions, the art.  You get what is arguably the best Star Wars game in 10 years for absolutely zero dollars.

What you do pay for is the MMO portion, the part that is pretty bad.  You pay for quick travel, you pay for purple item, you pay for bag space, you pay for crafting, you pay for PvP, you pay for dungeons, you pay for raids.  We don’t know how much, but it’s more than zero.

There’s still missing details on what exactly gets unlocked for the P2P players.  I personally cannot see why people would pay cash for a great game with crappy MMO components piece meal.  Either people will sub or they will play for free.  Hopefully we get more details down the road.

That being said, for anyone who has not had the change, KOTOR3 will be launching in a couple months.  FOR FREE.