As much as I hate to say this, the old cardinal rule still stands. While games like Dungeons and Dragons Online, Lord of the Rings, Champions Online, etc went free to play because of the prospect of making more money, there are plenty of products that are free because no one would pay for them otherwise. Dungeons and Dragons Online is about halfway in between, going free because not enough people were willing to get past the initial payment barrier to make the game profitable, but that has no stand on the game’s quality.
I thought about this because of my podcast subscription to Real Time with Bill Maher, a political talk show that airs on HBO, a premium channel. The audio podcast, on the other hand, is available for free on Itunes, and it will remain free because HBO puts less effort into maintaining it than I do with my press (mmofallout gmail) email. Episodes premiere on Friday and don’t make it to iTunes until maybe Monday or Tuesday, if we’re lucky. This week, I managed to download the episode on the following Friday because the files were not uploaded correctly and would not download all week. For a lot of episodes, the podcasts had random skipping, looping audio, and other random issues. For the first few episodes in the season, the episodes weren’t even being uploaded.
The audio issues have been going on since about 2008, according to reviews on iTunes’ app store, so it’s pretty clear that HBO just doesn’t care about the podcast. Yes, it’s free, but I’d be willing to pay the same subscription I have for my other podcasts (about $6-7 a month) if HBO would offer it and increase the quality, not forget to upload episodes, upload them the same day, keep the audio from cutting out, etc. In this stage, however, the quality of the podcast sucks, and I wouldn’t pay a cent to listen to it.
So I thought: What games are such low quality that I wouldn’t pay a dime for them, cash shop or not, and the first game I thought of was Earth Eternal. Now, Earth Eternal was a quaint game, but structurally it was World of Warcraft with everything stripped away except for vendoring trash and killing mobs for quests. That’s it, and that’s why the company crashed after just a few months of the game running. There was no reason to buy anything from the cash shop because the game was so shallow that you never felt compelled to spend money on it. It’s like when you were a kid and your “entrepreneur in training” friend would try to sell you his peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or that rock he found on the road that looked like Abraham Lincoln’s hat. It’s funny, until you realize he is completely serious. So you give him an Indian Brush Burn, eat the sandwich, and tell him to stop being such a dork.
I should clarify a bit on the quality aspect, as this doesn’t just apply to the quality of the goods. This is also why I become, and I’ll describe it as a few companies have referred to me, a “disrespectful ass” when I see some games coming out with subscriptions attached to them, and I poke fun at them for having no business sense or etiquette. To announce a shooter that has a subscription and is not Planetside (an open world MMO), you are turning that shotgun around and firing it directly into your feckless noggin. Sure, Global Agenda had a massive amount of initial sales, and when the time came for the subscriptions to renew that game’s population dropped like a drunk in a ball pit. I said the same thing when CitiesXL tried to charge a subscription for its not-really-massively-but-still-charged-as-such multiplayer system, and what happened? They shut it down. They then released a new edition of Cities late last year that featured no multiplayer. If it’s any consolation to people angered by Cities XL’s multiplayer, Monte Crisco as a company was killed off by Cities’ poor sales.
Call of Duty’s subscription might work when it comes out, but I’ll say the same thing for this as I do for MMOs: They ain’t World of Warcraft, and you ain’t Call of Duty. You have neither the built up userbase or the tenure in the gaming world to pull off a stunt where only 2% of the community can opt in and still make you millions of dollars a month.
I used Earth Eternal as my sole example because it’s the only game that came to mind writing this article. I’m sure most of you can think of games that are free because nobody would pay for them otherwise. The fact that Earth Eternal was bought gives me a lot of faith in the genre, however, because if Earth Eternal can find a buyer, any MMO not restricted by legal issues (Star Wars Galaxies by licensing, for instance) has a chance of being bought and reintroduced.
MMO Fallout 