Thanks for opening up this thread Thayos. From the looks of it the game is going to change from a P2P business model to a P2P + Cash Shop business model; for now. I'm going to break this response into 2 major parts. The first one is what I posted over at MMORPG.com (which highlights all of the questions and answers and topics) that pertains to the P2P and/or F2P model from the Dengeki interview as well as the Famitsu article. The second post is going to cover the current landscape of the Westernâ„¢ MMORPG genre that exclusively uses the P2P business model.
Original article can be found here:
http://dengekionline.com/elem/000/000/824/824505/ Translation can be found here:
http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/120472-March-19th-Dengenki-Online-Article?p=6061123&viewfull=1#post6061123 A Realm Reborn has familiar aspects to WoW? Yoshida: Absolutely. People who are familiar with WoW will recognize a lot of the systems in A Realm Reborn, but there are many players in Japan who are not familiar with them and may question their implementation. That's one of the differences that we see between North American and Japanese players. However, we have about a half and half split for people who are happy with the current degree of difficulty and people who think it's too difficult. The difficulty of WoW has dropped considerably, but the people who loved the time when WoW was difficult are the people who like the difficulty in A Realm Reborn.
As far as the monthly billing goes, people are becoming more pragmatic and they're only willing to pay for the things that they want to use. What that means to monthly billing is that there are players who would rather pay based on the amount of time they play in a particular month, after they've played. There used to be no debate about this, since monthly billing was the only standard for MMORPGs, but now F2P is a consideration. We see this desire for players who would rather buy items especially in North America. By the way, based on the number of planned users, what's your goal for the total global number of concurrent connections? Yoshida: Since Shanda Games is operating the Chinese version, it's hard to say, but they have different goals that we have compared to Japan. However, we shouldn't just be talking about the number of simultaneous connections.
In South Korea and China, F2P online games have been gaining a lot of momentum, and many users are only playing for the free period. We are taking this seriously, but it's one reason why the number of simultaneous connections may not be a measure of the success of the game. Do you think it's good to have two different billing systems for a MMORPG (F2P and subscription)? Yoshida: I don't think F2P is necessarily a bad thing, it's just one option. Talking about MMORPGs in general, there were a number of MMORPGs that launched around 2005, and almost all of them were subscription based. The thought was that this would guarantee profit from the start, and the development team wanted to depend on a stable number of users and a stable income. With the F2P model, employment is unstable, since what you sell in one month doesn't necessarily predict the next month's profits. This makes developers uneasy and makes it hard to create a roadmap for the game. It's important that content is provided reliably over time, and you need a development team and a steady income to do that.
To have stable sales for a MMORPG, you have to keep development going. After all, you need to keep providing content with updates and people need to be entertained by that content to want to keep playing. With a F2P game, though, you're not getting money from the content, but just from selling items. So then to make a lot of content you have to make a lot of items, which isn't necessarily linked to the players' enjoyment of the game. Rather than having 100% content update, then, you'd have to dedicate, say, 30% of that to items created to make money. Then it goes back to the ultimate question of what are our goals for the game in the first place.
The development of a MMORPG requires an incredible investment. It takes a lot of money raised from investors, and if you don't get the number of users you planned for at the start of your subscription service, the investors might immediately go into panic mode trying to figure out how to increase profit. These games might be forced to go F2P so that they can use the revenue to return the money to their investors.
There are many users now who don't like the idea of being bound to a game for a long time. I feel that way myself, so that I can stop at any point. I think this model works well for these kinds of games where you play for a long time overall but only play a little at a time. These aren't MMOs, but F2P works well for games like "World of Tanks" and "League of Legends."
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.<<< Do you have a response to the example users you gave in the U.S. who are interested in buying items? Yoshida: We hope to offer some items for sale, but nothing that will affect game balance.
It seems that a lot of users are interested in sales of Fantasia (the item to change your character model), so how about that? Yoshida: We're going to be talking about that in the LIVE producer letter on the 21st. Also, we're planning to introduce the ability to purchase an additional service which increases the number of available retainers. It'll be even more valuable with the additional retainer systems available with the patch which will make retainers more useful than ever.
Famitsu posted this article yesterday which includes this slide that talks about the F2P option.
http://www.famitsu.com/news/201403/20050235.html http://www.famitsu.com/images/000/050/235/l_532a6ebc8b1cc.jpg