Gaming Industry shifts more to F2P. Will TOR follow?

[Cancrizans]

The gaming industry shifted more towards F2P a couple of years ago already. They ran the numbers and realized they could dupe people with this business model that in the long run makes them pay a lot more for the same thing, using the illusion of choice and convenience.

[Apocalypsezero]

Because as someone posted earlier, Subscriptions only make up a percent of what Blizzard makes from World of Warcraft. The other percent comes from micro-transactions. Bioware, Blizzard, etc all exist to make money, not just entertain us and make enough to get by.

 

Well if that is true then it stands to reason BW/EA should stay P2P and add the optional monetary transactions as it seems to have worked so well for Blizzard.

[Jrovak]

Aion will be free to play with next expansion 3.0

as far as TORis concerned, If I have to shell dollars for expansion I wil go play Aion

I dont mind P2P but if Expansions are to be paid for on top of my 16$ a month I will cancel sub.

[TheLonelyTusken]

F2P, isn't that the universal code for "we're desperate and need to draw in new players"?

 

No, actually, that is a misconception. It is just a different business strategy, usually when subscribers wane a bit, they employ it to boost players, then they put in micro transactions. Small money transactions over the internet for content to stay competitive. So you will have to pay for raids and new battlegrounds, kinda like new maps in call of duty.

[Ujest]

Forgive my stupid question, but how companies make money on F2P model?

 

 

You want something from the game store you pay real cash for a game currency to spend at the in-game store for items you can use in-game. The average F2P player will spend more in a year than the cost of subscription. If done correctly, the "Store" will have little actual impact on the game mechanics of progression and so-called "Winning the game" or Pay to Win (P2W)

[JobuNabidabi]

Great discussion. The example I would like to share is Valve and TF2. Team Fortress 2 is "purchase the game, play online for free." From a consumer standpoint, the only other thing that would be better is free game free online play. Realistically, though, we all know it doesn't really work that way.

 

I think Valve puts out quality games, and they support and actually care about the community (of course one could argue, however, that this could, and often does, change over time).

 

When Valve opened up their store, I spent a good $150 on hats and other digital trinkets. I also bought a lot of games that were 70+% off. I didn't have to.

 

Point is, I personally respected Valve because they make good stuff, and it is a great value to me, as the consumer. I honestly wanted to support their company. I voted with my money, this is the business model I want to see survive.

 

Companies that have products and services that are THAT good will have consumers throwing money at them.

[Ebbikenezer]

Wait a MINUTE here!

 

This game isn't F2P?!?!?!?!?!

[Icebaron]

You guys are silly. This game isn't going F2P.

 

The hero engine probably can't handle micro transactions.

[Asuka]

No, F2P is never as good quality wise as P2p unless you have a hybrid in which case the people paying $15/mo for premium sub actually save more than those who play free and rely on the cash shop. IE the explansion I get free for having a sub, you pay $10 for for now having a sub etc...

[Jett-Rinn]

The only way it will happen is if WoW goes F2P and that is highly unlikely.

[DorkTrooper]

They ran the numbers and realized they could dupe people with this business model that in the long run makes them pay a lot more for the same thing, using the illusion of choice and convenience.

 

This is exactly why I don't understand how people in this thread could actually *want* F2P -- unless perhaps their account is already being paid for by someone else, so they don't realize what a ripoff F2P is.

[Raansu]

They would be smart to go F2P. I have friends that would play SWTOR and most likely subscribe but will not pick the game up solely due to having a box price. No amount of begging will get them to go spend $60 to buy the game when F2P is almost now an industry standard.

If DC Universe can get 1 million new users from going F2P, I bet Bioware/SWTOR could get 5 million easily.

 

It's not even close to being a standard... MMO's that go from P2P to F2P have all been terrible games that did it as a last ditch of desperation and even then only see a spike for a short time and go back to being bad games.

[origamikitsune]

F2P used to be P2AccessContent. It is shifting away from that.

 

Look at the model used by STO (Star Trek Online.) The game has gone F2P. You can buy new ships, trinkets, and even "Required" stuff in the Cryptic Store. However, they introduced a new in-game currency as well. This in-game currency can NOT be purchased in the real-money store, only achieved through CONTENT in game. It can, however, be sold in-game to players for credit in the real-money store, granting full access to the items in the real-money store for F2P players.

 

There is a healthy trade of real-money store credit and in-game currency.

 

The game's subscriber base has increased drastically since going to this F2P model, and the game is making bank. They continue to churn out new content on a regular basis using this model, and while the content isn't stellar (which IMO is why the game failed the P2P model), it is is very... Star Trek-ey.

 

So how do they make their money? People are lazy, and they bank on it. People don't want to do the leg work to get what they want, or they just have that much dispensable income and don't care, so they pay. Meanwhile a minority of the player base is able to enjoy the game at the longer, more drawn out pace and level progression to get the in-game currency and only buy what they need with real-money credit in the Cryptic Store.

 

Seems to work.

 

Will Bioware ever make the shift to F2P? Never say never, when it comes to an MMO, but not as long as they will make more money P2P. Keep in mind, what works in Asia, doesn't work in the US always. There is a cultural mentality against F2P that requires balancing, like in STO. In Asia, there isn't so much (IIRC, even most phones and net connections are pay-per-minute, or they used to be a few years ago - someone please correct me if I am wrong.)

[ZEROUMUS]

Reading this article has me somewhat afraid of what EA would do with TOR in the future.

 

Don't get me wrong, F2P probably makes more revenue for game companies and I totally get why companies would do it, but basically, when you play F2P MMOs, you have to Pay to stay competitive.

 

So is my fear misplaced or is there a small reason to have it?

 

 

We dropped by GDC 2012 Tuesday afternoon to complete our Press Registration and get the lay of the land. It’s a short trip – the Moscone Convention Center is literally 10 minutes from where we live.

 

The Game Developers Conference is the world’s largest and longest-running professionals-only game industry event. As the target audience is not the gaming public, the focus and feel of GDC is very different from other recent conferences that we attended, such as New York Comic Con back in October 2011. We didn’t see a single cosplayer. Most of the sessions are hosted by developers sharing their insights and experience with various properties or companies hawking their upcoming games, platforms, and tools.

 

When I attended GDC back in 2010, “Social” was the big buzzword as there was a lot of attention paid to the burgeoning Social Gaming market. Skimming this year’s schedule, “F2P” (Free-to-Play) and “Cross-Platform” are the hot keywords.

 

Why the shift in focus?

 

Let’s talk about F2P first. In a nutshell, the business model is to entice players to download and try your game and convert some of them to paying customers. The concept has been around for years and as the Internet’s infrastructure has matured, it has become an increasingly cost-efficient and viable distribution platform.

 

Most Social Games have been F2P from inception, as the games are very lightweight to download, require no separate (e.g. Facebook Apps / Games) or minimal (e.g. App Store) installation, and have viral incentives to encourage players to rope in their friends.

 

However, the traditional gaming markets, PC Gaming and Console Gaming, have their roots in physically-shipped boxed products and the games were – prior to a few years ago – impractical to distribute en masse online as the game downloads were huge relative to the average customer’s bandwidth. The costs of real-world distribution are significant.

 

The synergistic rise of high-speed Internet access by ISPs and the maturation of CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) has made it feasible and viable to distribute even large games over the Internet. E.g. everyone I know playing SWTOR, which launched 3 months ago, downloaded the 20GB game instead of waiting for installation discs. Contrast this to Blizzard’s The Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft just 5 years ago, where I dragged my wife with me to Target in the East Bay to stand in line with hundreds of other diehard WoW gamers at midnight to buy the game. (The game sold out about a dozen people after us, and there was a near nerd-riot LOL).

 

So the distribution side of making games F2P is there. But what about the monetization side? This in my opinion is the bigger challenge. How do you create a game that is sufficiently enjoyable without paying that it attracts and retains players, while still providing virtual goods and other perks that a fraction of the playerbase will gladly pay for? And how do you do this for massively-multiplayer games without creating a game that is essentially “Pay-to-Win”?

 

F2P is a bad word to the majority of MMORPG players, but that is mainly due to poor design and implementation rather than the concept being flawed itself. I’ve had both positive (Knight Online back in 2005-2006) and negative (Allods Online in 2010) experiences with F2P properties. Back in KO, one of my guildees, a pizza shop owner down in Brazil, was forking out hundreds of USD a month to maximize his enjoyment of the game, and I became a monthly sub ($15 USD) because it was worth it to me as a full-time working stiff who valued his free time.

 

The PC and Console Gaming industries have the benefit of watching what has worked with Social Games, which have proven that players will pay for convenience and for virtual goods, e.g. cosmetics / customization / in-game items, etc. Microtransactions FTW.

 

It’s only in recent years that some of the larger mainstream MMORPGs have transitioned to F2P, e.g. Turbine’s LOTRO and NCSoft’s Aion. Industry analysts and bloggers have been predicting the end of P2P (Pay-to-Play) games for a few years now, and while the industry is moving in that direction, P2P games are not dead yet – see EA/BioWare’s SWTOR and ArenaNet’s upoming Guild Wars 2 launch.

 

One huge reason why games are still P2P is that game developers need to recoup their sunk costs to reach product launch. E.g. the estimates for SWTOR have ranged anywhere from $100-200+MM USD. (The ironic thing: the most common complaint I’ve heard about SWTOR is the lack of endgame content or issue-free content. But hey we’re gamers and we’re never satisfied, amirite?).

 

And here’s the basic problem: how to make a P2P game scale its customer base over time. Having a hefty (e.g. $50 USD) price tag is a significant deterrent to acquiring new customers. Arguably no developer has figured it out aside from Blizzard with WoW, and even Blizzard started offering WoW to level 20 for free last summer.

 

As MMORPG developers sort out F2P, what I expect to happen is for the large-scale AAA-quality launches, e.g. the RIFTs’, SWTOR’s, and GW2′s, to be continue to be P2P at launch to recoup the sunk costs, and for those games to eventually transition to F2P but with mechanics that entice players to pay on a recurring (subscription) basis, expansion basis (GW / GW2), or microtransaction basis. We’ve already seen Trion Worlds offer new mounts (spider!) for a microtransaction even though the game is P2P and requires a monthly sub. This shift from P2P to F2P for a given game may be necessary to achieve a sustained net-gain of customers over time after the initial “burst” of customers at launch.

 

http://taugrim.com/2012/03/07/gdc-as-a-bellweather-the-industry-is-shifting-towards-f2p-and-cross-platform/

 

 

 

 

 

 

will EA stop being a garbage dump of the games making industry. Will EA stop being driven by executives and start being run by gamers.... thought not

[InfamousXIII]

F2P would really just cheapen the whole thing imo. F2P is pretty much a marketing scheme to draw in customers (buy one get one half price anyone?). Its fine for some games to do it FlyFF (almost pure casual gamerbase) and lately WoW (prior lvl 20 f2p) because its a money giant beginning to decline so blizz is milking their products to get the most out of it.

 

If your friends are too cheap to pay monthly subs and the cost for the game itself, yet turn around and buy 2 or 3 playstation games or come home with a psvita then theres a different problem entirely.

[Andryah]

F2P used to be P2AccessContent. It is shifting away from that.

 

Technically, WoW is P2AccessContent model since you can play for free to a certain level (20). Same for Rift. But nobody would actually consider these to be F2P games. LOTRO has made P2AccessContent very viable (for them and their players).

 

EVE went with Plex. You can buy Plex on the open market in game (price floats in the market), but someone had to buy the Plex for real world cash somewhere. A Plex gives you a month of game time. They have been doing it for years. However, EVE is pretty much a pay to play game.

 

I don't see any EA MMOs going F2P (no matter how it is designed) unless the 800 lb gorilla in the market goes that route first. They still have not done it with DAOC and if there was a game in the EA portfolio that would benefit, that's the one.

Edited March 8, 2012 by Andryah

[Andryah]

MMO's that go from P2P to F2P have all been terrible games that did it as a last ditch of desperation and even then only see a spike for a short time and go back to being bad games.

 

Turbine has done quite well on F2P though. I think it depends on the property and how they approach it. But I don't see EA going that route, unless they design a game from day 1 to be that model.

[ZEROUMUS]

depends on what kinda of cheap we are talking about. Someone complaining about a $15 per month sub as being expensive is totally on crack. mmos are some of the best bang for the entertainment buck around. I would personally pay way more for mmos if they could generate more content.

 

complaining about playing 2-8 games with $15 subs, now that could get a little pricey. personally... despite making good coin, i refuse to sub to more than 1 game. this makes it harder for me to move to a new game, it also makes it harder for me to re-visit old games to see if i like improvements to the game..

 

this is the the great thing about up-coming free to play games, i will be able to sample them all and decide which one i want to devote my attention too every month.

 

 

gamers have only so much time to really play 1 or 2 games.. the MMO marketplace has so much competition going on now that any barrier to subs is a 1 way ride to fail.

 

EA will never lever learn this lesson until they are will beyond the point of no return. for the rest of the REAL game scene, it is a future, coming to a MMO near you soon. i think even blizzard will do it to wow once they have a model for titan in place

Edited March 8, 2012 by ZEROUMUS

[Wolfeisberg]

You want something from the game store you pay real cash for a game currency to spend at the in-game store for items you can use in-game. The average F2P player will spend more in a year than the cost of subscription. If done correctly, the "Store" will have little actual impact on the game mechanics of progression and so-called "Winning the game" or Pay to Win (P2W)

 

False, as stated by Turbine and Perfect World. Both of those companies have stated that the average paying customer spends less then $10 per month. I really wish I would have saved the links to the article and the developer blog that I read a year ago or so, Perfect world stated that it is the industry standard that the average paying customer spends less then $10 per month.

[Wolfeisberg]

It's not even close to being a standard... MMO's that go from P2P to F2P have all been terrible games that did it as a last ditch of desperation and even then only see a spike for a short time and go back to being bad games.

 

Not all, LOTRO is still a quality game, and it didn't even need to go free to play to stay profitable.

[obi-joachim]

OFC not lol, atleast not within 6 years

[jarjarloves]

Has Warhammer Online gone to F2P yet? Arguably one of the worst launched MMO of our generation behind only Asheron's Call 2.

 

Has it gone F2P yet? If not then why would TOR ever go F2P... one of the most successful launches in gaming history (think subscriberships not bugs or people who are or going to quit)

 

I'm asking a serious question because i don't know. I would like to play Warhammer Online again... heard is was good now but don't want to pay $16 a month

 

Since I am still paying for my 7 WOW accounts plus 1 SWTOR account.

 

you forgot APB, Shadowsbane, Darkfall, AoC, Tabula Rasa and Anarchy Online. all of those had a worse launch then WAR.

 

but no TOR will not go F2P anytime soon. by soon i am thinking the next 5 years

Edited March 8, 2012 by jarjarloves

[Jett-Rinn]

False, as stated by Turbine and Perfect World. Both of those companies have stated that the average paying customer spends less then $10 per month. I really wish I would have saved the links to the article and the developer blog that I read a year ago or so, Perfect world stated that it is the industry standard that the average paying customer spends less then $10 per month.

 

Very true...I happen to know a few folks that work on the Runes Of magic dev team on the U.S. side of things; they have a ton of players but only a small minority of them actually spends any money...that forces the company to do everything on the super cheap side.

 

No way could TOR ever go F2P they would have to gut the VO and the frequent content updates just to stay alive.

[Ituhata]

Curious as to how F2P is popular, I know I won't bother paying for it if it's free. If its a P2W model I'll play till I can't do any more with what is given and I'll leave. I will not pay to be successful in a video game.

 

Then again, I'm one of those that are happy with 'monthly subscription/what you see is what you get' payment plans, and I'm not one of these tools who download countless ringtones apps and games for their phone that get added to the monthly bill either. But there seems to be alot of em so I guess it would be popular, if only among the countless tools that populate the Earth.

Edited March 8, 2012 by Ituhata

[Dkzero]

F2P is actually very profitable. I can see the whole genre going F2P in the future like China does.

 

Games that should've gone F2p and never did:

 

Planetside

EQ1 (guessing this is happening soon)

WoW

Warhammer

Aion

 

AION is already f2p in Europe and will be in the US come April-June. Warhammer is f2p tier 1. EQ1 is indeed going f2p very soon.

 

SWTOR will go f2p someday, hopefully sooner than later. The great thing about f2p is that the games are always jam-packed full of people to play with.

 

SWTOR is dying a quick death due to endless hutball matches and no lfg tool.