ARR is a savior!Follow

It isn't false. List all F2P games that started as F2P that had numerous expansion packs and continual 'expansions' without forcing you to pay for some 'access item' in order to properly utilize?

F2P games doesn't have to deliver content like P2P games do, you're not paying them unless you utilize the cash shop, so why should they pump out fast content for you?



Honestly, from what I seen lurking official forums you tend to do this whenever someone brings up any instance of FFXI in any positive manner, so I don't think he did anything wrong, just doing what you tend to.

Edited, Feb 9th 2014 8:49am by Theonehio

Edited, Feb 9th 2014 8:49am by Theonehio

Yes, now keep going. It's been a good read thus far.

And in the case of XI, prior to XIV's development we know P2P can sustain itself even with 450-660k players or less. I mean, look at now...they're on a skeleton crew because of ARR yet pumping out more unique content than ARR can ever dream of and both are P2P.

F2P generally brings in more players and makes more money through the cash shop, so it's not necessarily better, it's more convenient as they say.

Here's what you need to understand... When you cut into someone else discussion that's already ongoing, you should at least have and idea what they're discussing.

Which payment model you prefer isn't relevant. What's relevant is WHY you prefer it. People keep saying that F2P restricts gameplay, but I've shown an example of how it doesn't in TERA and others with experience in other games have chimed in as well.



I don't have a problem with lockouts and gating. I never said or implied that I did anywhere in this thread or any other. Everyone expected to have to pay a lot of money for housing in XIV, but nearly everyone agrees that the expected 3 month wait was excessive.



As I've stated numerous times, I play TERA. It's a F2P game with a cash shop. You can download the client for free and play, you can purchase a physical copy or you can subscribe. There are no pay-walls in TERA. You can purchase an XP bonus from the cash shop, but these can also be purchased using in-game currency and are given away upon reaching certain levels. It's completely optional because you can still access these bonuses without paying a dime.

I challenge you. Download the free client and try the game. When you log in on your first character you'll notice that there is a shiny gift box in your inventory. When you open it, you'll receive various goodies that will aid you in questing. Among these goodies are the same XP scrolls you'd find in the cash shop or on the auction. You also get another box that you can open at a higher level which contains, you guessed it... more free XP scrolls.

EM realizes that(as is the case with most MMOs) most of the content is concentrated at endgame. They give you free scrolls to facilitate you getting to endgame to experience that content. You would have a point with the wall if this wasn't an option for everyone, but even players who don't pay anything receive these scrolls for free and can buy them without real money.


The problem here is people generalizing about all F2P games when not all F2P games line up with that generalization.

You don't like pay-walls. Great. Neither do I, but I play a F2P game with no pay-walls so your generalization doesn't apply to it. There might be a hundred reasons you don't like TERA. The art design, the combat system, the questing mechanics, ect. ect. Even though we might disagree because we have different preferences, you can't use pay-wall as a valid reason to dislike TERA because pay-walls don't exist. Capeesh?


Edited, Feb 9th 2014 4:52pm by FilthMcNasty

Yes clearly despite Limsa's ward 1 being flooded with houses now and other districts in the works while Gridania and Ul'dah see moderate activity. I guess all those FCs that have achieved this impossible feat that they weren't supposed to be able to kind of discredits this little tirade. You're finally reaching that point where you've been out of the FFXIV loop for a while now and don't seem to know what's going on.

Besides, the only person seemingly missing the point is you. Why are you using one specific example to discredit a person's statement when we are talking about a subset of the MMO genre?

You don't play GW2? So...you're less experienced with F2P than I thought originally. Would you mind speaking of any other F2P games you've had some experience with? I would really like to know.



Barring your ability to pull some examples out of your rear in the F2P MMO genre, I agree.



As for people thinking that GW2 somehow doesn't apply to the F2P genre, it gave me a good chuckle.

IF F2P had a successful game to use as a demonstration of success, I'd hope you would pick GW2. But even then, I'd like you to list some simple statistics for me because, quite frankly, F2P MMOs are notorious for either lack of statistics or listing ones that do not really give you the full picture.

It's natural for a P2P to release statistics and not need to elaborate due to the nature of how the system works. However, when a F2P MMO tells me they have 1.5 million registered users, I think, "Wow. This tells me nothing."

There's a huge flaw with your line of reasoning. Money talks and most companies have finite amounts of it, you know? Servers and bandwidth are not free. Dedicating staff to a project that does not rake in revenue is a pretty big waste of resources.

Without a cash shop, a F2P MMO's fate rests upon the initial purchase and their advertisement division. Even with a cash shop, you are not guaranteed anything UNLESS you gate content behind it like GW2.

When you look at both models in terms of finances, a P2P will win almost every time provided the development team expends their resources in an intelligent manner. You have money to maintain the servers/purchase new ones, to invest on future expansion packs, and pay staff to work on actual content patches. On top of this, most P2P MMOs still can implement cash shops via server transfers/character aesthetics/collectable items that do not give in-game advantages, furthering their ability to acquire money and reinvest it.

If you'd like to talk about an ideal world, the door is in the other direction. F2P games, in general, are pretty successful. F2P MMOs, on the other hand, are doomed for failure due to limited resources. They exist in large droves, now, because the likelihood of producing WoW Jr. is very slim.

When you ask a company if they want to make a potential investment on a game to compete with another game on the market that has had a huge monopoly for years using their model (WoW) or go with a model where the turnover rate is high and no game seems to have any monopoly on the market, the obvious answer is the later. Knowing the approximate time for turnover and the maximum amount of money the average person will spend on your cash shop, you can easily calculate revenue produced and decide whether it is viable or not.

This is exactly the opposite of what I described above. F2Ps are not popular, as of this time, because of their huge success...they are popular because companies lack either the resources or creativity to produce something to rival the current monopoly figure.

Edited, Feb 10th 2014 12:21pm by HitomeOfBismarck

I think all the "try before you buy" kiddies have left now, leaving only the people who are willing to invest money in the game playing.

I think Penny Arcade summed it up best for me.

Regarding swtor, I trust Yoshi-P's market research over a few data points for which we have no context.

That game had failed pretty hard by the time it went F2P... I am sure that making it F2P was a huge boost in $. There are no real conclusions to be drawn from that stat. But Yoshi-P has a point about how meaningless F2P player stats are. I mean, I still have my active GW2 account, but only because it's free -- I haven't logged in to play for many months now. By the same note, I know several people who have GW2 accounts and characters, but they also lost interest in the game long ago.

With a P2P game, you're either a subscriber or you're not.

Also, I know GW2 is technically B2P, but B2P and F2P are virtually identical from a player's perspective (the cost of software is extremely inconsequential if you're a working adult). The point is, once gameplay starts, you're paying as you go vs paying a flat fee beforehand. That's why I lump GW2 in with F2P, and that's why many gamers refer to it as F2P.

Funny comic, Cat!


Edited, Feb 10th 2014 9:00am by Thayos

[EDIT]

This ended up really long, so here's the TL;DR:

Development budgets do not increase linearly with population/revenue numbers, because adding more manpower to a project like an MMO will very quickly become damaging to content production, not helpful. The team is going to remain at a point as is manageable, and that number is not much higher for a 10 million player subscriber game as it is for a 1 million player one. The end result is that the quality and rapidity of updates is, more or less, constant once you hit a certain revenue level.

Which is my issue with the F2P argument being made. IF that game is sustaining the revenue needed to sustain the management team and offer profits that the company deems acceptable, than that game will be getting (literally) the exact same amount of development investment as a subscription game. And that development is going to be focused on content that makes the game healthier. Yes, part of that will involve players spending money, but because a minority of players won't be spending IRL money (and everyone hates being sold to), the content is going to have just as much a focus on being fun, and deep, and enjoyable as a subscription game.

Obviously a company wishes it could sustain a large-enough subscription base to make it worth it. Why wouldn't they? Once they hit their development cap, the only rising costs for rising population are systems operation. That makes the rise in population wildly profitable.

But it's much better to have 250k subscribers and 1.5 million people spending $8 a month than it is to have 500k subscribers spending $15 a month. Your development budget stays the same, but your revenue goes up.

SpoilerAnd to give you a major counter to that, every time I log into TOR, the populations of zones is very high and there are a ton of people available to run heroic quests with. During the launch craze, you saw 120-200 people per zone (far less at the very top, since the game was obviously bottom-heavy at the time).

Now, you tend to see see 80-120 a zone for your faction. Only the odd worlds that are really, really short for one of the factions (like Quesh, which Republic characters only hit for about a level, maybe 2, of content). And if you hit endgame and want to keep playing, you are probably going to sub (so you can run operations).

I'm personally not going to touch a testimony like Yoshi's with a 10-foot pole, because this is a business and he's going to say what is most marketable for his business, right now. SE has decided to use a subscription model, so the talk from their developers is going to be all about how good that model is for the game, and how the other model sucks.

Shockingly, this is the inverse of what a F2P developer would be saying.

There was an interview with a dev responsible for the Baldur's Gate ipad adaption on Kotaku earlier this month where he was honestly arguing that $15 for an ios rerelease was a good thing, because the market was flooded with crappy $1 games. He's not wrong - the market IS flooded, but that doesn't necessarily do anything to support their price point, nor does it suggest you can't easily find affordable, high-quality mobile games.

If FFXIV goes F2P, their language is going to instantly switch to how advantageous that is for players, and how it'll enable them to design content specifically for their players who want it, etc.

As someone else said, the biggest single factor for which payment model a game is going to use isn't going to be about content generation, it's going to be about sustainable player bases relative to content production.

Here's the thing - when your game has 10 million players, you don't actually spit out content any faster than if it had 1 million.

I'm going to repeat that.

Here's the thing - when your game has 10 million players, you don't actually spit out content any faster than if it had 1 million.

Your budget might go up some, you might get a few more developers. But in general, the limit to content updates is time, not budget. Large development teams are difficult to handle and monitor, specifically when you're rolling out patches nonstop. You DON'T want your development team to grow too large, so you can't just speed up content development by adding people. So more money isn't necessarily going to be a huge factor once you hit your sweet spot with team size. The time it takes to appropriately test content becomes your biggest factor.

So when you have 1 million players, you'll roll out a major content update once every 3 months. When you have 10 million, you'll roll out a major content update once every 3 months.

And when all those players are paying a subscription, your profits SORE under that model. You DO end up with a much bigger budget in other areas, specifically content moderation (particularly if you have forums), systems stability, etc. Marketing is a really big one.

But, in general, you're loving that model, because your investment in the game is exponentially returned. It's awesome for the company, but in the end, the experience for the player is relatively unchanged. There are just 10x the servers now, that's about it.

So what happens when companies aren't getting those high populations they want to bring in that profit, they invest the same amount of money into the game under a F2P model, which brings them a much larger population of players under a different payment mechanism. The specific population where this becomes preferable depends on the specifics of their particular model, but the point is that they're making money.

SWTOR didn't "crash." It was making money before it went F2P. It went F2P because they stood to make MORE money under a system that increased the population of paying individuals, rather than adhere to a system that had a population of ONLY paying individuals that was far smaller.

Let me put it this way. Say you have a $15 subscription game, and it has a population of 500k. You decide that this isn't really the best bang for the buck, and you go F2P. Your population sores up to 5 million, and 5% of those players end up subscribing (either because they already did, or because they were really enjoying the game, and wanted unlimited access to things like other races, medical probes, etc.)

Well, now you have 250,000 subscribers bringing in constant revenue, plus 4.5 million people actively participating in an RMT-credit based economy. The end result of which is that you end up with an additional 1.2 million people spending an average of $8 a month on in-game cosmetic stuff (either for themselves, or to sell for credits). The end result is a higher profit level for the exact same amount of work from the development end.

This is what's driving me insane. For some crazy reason, you people are assuming that there's some kind of linear progression between revenue and development budgets. There isn't.

Edited, Feb 10th 2014 12:32pm by idiggory

Like I said, I literally don't care if people like or dislike something. That's 100% personal preference. I find it really, really weird that people would have some kind of vendetta against either system such that they can't enjoy it, but that's their problem, not mine.

My only point is that the assumption that a developer cannot/will not produce the same quality and quantity of content in a F2P system as in a P2P system is absolutely wrong, as it's based on an assumption that the amount of money reinvested into development is somehow linear with revenue, and it absolutely isn't.

Reinvested into the company, sure. It was AMAZING for the WoW brand to have 12 million players - it let Blizzard launch all kinds of brand-based projects with that funding.

But that's the point. The revenue of those players wasn't going back into the game, it was going back into the brand (meaning, more stuff for fans to buy).

That's a decent trade-off if you're like me and will buy EU books. It's not doing anything for you, if you're just looking to play your MMO.

I don't have a vendetta against F2P games; otherwise, I wouldn't have been so excited/hopeful about GW2. I totally launched myself into that game, hoping that would be my next primary MMO (for me, MMOs are like books... I really only enjoy focusing on one at a time). Unfortunately, the game fell short. My biggest problem with the game was the lack of meaningful content additions; beyond that, I didn't like the cash shop element, the lack of community within the game or the lack of identity between classes. So, it wasn't just one thing... but after months of playing, my dislike of the cash shop system (and the constant feeling of being urged to buy from it) never changed.

Arguments could be made (and even bolstered by the design trends of older F2P games) that the "thin" content was the result of the F2P model... but, even had the content updates been more substantial, I still would have disliked the cash shop element. Would I have continued playing the game, had the content been beefier? Possibly... but I still wouldn't have liked the cash shop element of the game.

(In all fairness, the only other F2P game I've played beyond beta was Everquest 2 (after it went F2P, of course)... but I don't even like to mention that in current discussions, because I'm certain that newer F2P games aren't as brazen with "UPGRADE TO AN EPIC PAID PLAN NOW!!!" messages flashing across your screen every five minutes. EDIT: I also played GW1 somewhat substantially, but I don't remember that game having any kind of cash shop at all... but I only played GW1 because the wife played it... I wasn't impressed at all with the overall quality of the game.)

On the other hand, when I play FFXIV (P2P), I don't even think about the game's payment model. I plug in my credit card when creating my account, and that's it. How much I'm paying each month just fades into the background. It's a small, monthly line on my bank statement that I never need to look at... and that's just the way I like it. This isn't because I'm a better person, or more watchful of my money, or any crap like that... heck, I've spent a lot more on my FFXIV subscription than I ever did in the GW2 cash shop (zero). It's purely a matter of personal taste, and what "feels" right for me as a consumer.



Edited, Feb 10th 2014 10:20am by Thayos

Funny thing about Yoshi's SWtoR comments... that they were made after the comments about the success of SWtoR's F2P. "Oh, nobody is playing it". 2 million + nobodies



Principle. I have a completely different mindset when approaching F2P vs P2P. A subscription fee says to me "This content is worth x amount of money for 30 days" whereas with F2P you're left to decide how much you value the entertainment on your own.

I don't sub to XIV in part because of the housing gaff I noted above. I couldn't care less about housing but because it was poorly implemented, I second guess SE's ability to add features properly.

Consider this...

One of my 'working adult' jobs a while back was being a server at a steakhouse. It's common for restaurant servers to add on a gratuity(tip tacked on to their check in advance) for tables of 8 or more. Many of the wait staff had the mentality that their service didn't matter because regardless of how well or how poorly they did, they were guaranteed their 15%. I don't like that and I never added a gratuity to a table. It should be left up to people who are receiving service to determine how much they value it based on your performance.

Maybe it's the mentality I had as a server carrying over, but it speaks volumes when you work without guaranteed income. I was never guaranteed to make any money at all, but it almost always resulted in making more. I had motivation to go above and beyond for my customers rather than slack because I could fall back on guaranteed income. This is the reason why I thought Yoshi's comments were a little off and in my opinion, a large part of why F2P games are doing so well these days.


Edited, Feb 10th 2014 2:09pm by FilthMcNasty

Wat?

Waaaat?

*EDIT* for clarity
@Thayos
Sorry but none of this makes sense to me. You'd rather spend more money to not have to think about spending money.... OK. I completely understand wanting to set up a recurring payment and not be bothered to 'feed the meter' so to speak, but both SWtoR and TERA have subscription options. P2P model in an F2P game? Check.

@svlyons
There is no required amount to pay. You 'donate' whatever you feel based on the value that you get from the game. An avid PvP only gamer might toss $10, but someone who enjoys both PvP and PvE aspects might buy more because they feel it's worth more. Counting to 12? Hardmode



Edited, Feb 10th 2014 4:25pm by FilthMcNasty