Thayos wrote:
All he says that's "troll worthy" is that he's not anti-F2P, but he never said he was to begin with... I think that's an assumption some people made because of his preference for P2P.
Yoshida seemed very against the idea of going free to play in the past.
Quote:
That’s why you see a lot of companies that chose the subscription model, that wanted to do what we were doing, but were forced to free-to-play. They didn’t go to free-to-play by choice, because if that was the case, they would have gone free-to-play at the beginning. They’d develop it for free-to-play, not full subscription, instead of being forced to go free-to-play. We hear a lot of people saying, “Star Wars is free-to-play now, it’s great!†But then you ask them if they’re playing free-to-play Star Wars and they say, “No, not really playing it.†Everyone talks about how great it is that it went free-to-play, but then you ask around and really, there aren’t that many people who are playing it since it’s gone free-to-play. If you spend all that money on a game ,release it, and it’s filled with bugs and you don’t have enough time to do your updates, people will leave. Players need that new content. Not being able to provide it is fatal. If they were able to produce as much content as players wanted, then people would have stayed there. We don’t really believe it’s a problem with the business model. It’s how that’s handled.
Assuming this isn't a horribly botched translation, Yoshida is really, really negative about subscription games going free to play. The quote I underlined isn't vague and doesn't leave much room for multiple interpretations. These games went free to play not by choice, but because they were forced to. If this weren't the case, they would have been free to play from the beginning, in Yoshida's opinion. The entire paragraph has a pretty negative tone toward free to play games in general.
Now just recently, we see quotes like this.
Quote:
If there are particular elements which are strongly customizable, F2P works well for those cases so that players can pay to instantly expand their experience. I think that's why the choice was made for those types of games. It's important that the business model for the game is selected based on the kind of experience that you want to provide. It could be a positive change for a game to move from subscription based to F2P as long as the change is based on the users' needs rather than trying to turn an unprofitable game around.
If there's an impression that I'm determined to stick to a subscription service, that's a mistake.
In the interview from last year, there was no mention that going free to play could be a positive change for Rift or SWTOR. Nothing about user's needs. They tried to do a subscription service, and they were forced free to play. We don't see Yoshida talking about the possibility of his own game going free to play in the same light as he did when he was talking about other games. Understandably, because he needs to maintain good PR for his own game and company, but it doesn't prevent readers from reading through the lines and finding that the views he presents to the public can be quite different based on factors such as time or circumstance.
