If you know someone who thinks that free to play games are not a successful venture, point their head towards Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online. And Lineage II, and Age of Conan, and Champions Online, and DC Universe, and City of Heroes, and Alganon, and Everquest II, and Pirates of the Burning Sea, and more. Sony, Turbine, NCSoft, and Funcom, and any other developer in between will gladly show you how much better their games performed after taking the big leap and changing monetary systems.
Free to play works by removing major roadblocks. Client price and subscription. The subscription sets precedent where the player then feels that they need to play $15 worth of the game every month, however that adds up is subjective. With free to play, the pay-as-you-go model allows for random breaks or momentary distractions when a new game comes out, without the moment of “well my account just got charged for another month.”
Like anything, free to play has its downsides, foremost the introduction of what I like to refer to as the professional (or perpetual, as I’ve also called them) freeloaders. These players make up the bulk of the posters you see demanding all content in a game be available for free, and clamoring that buy to play is the future of MMOs despite, as I’ve also pointed in the past, their only example being Guild Wars, NCSoft’s lowest income generator. Having a low commitment means bringing in a lot of people who are just as unwilling to commit. After all, the only thing the person stands to lose is the time they spent downloading the client.
The low barrier to entry also lays way for throwaway accounts, by gold farmers and griefers. Gold farmers register accounts in massive numbers to gather resources and spam the chat channels with their advertising, while griefers load up account after account to exploit bugs and harass players with no actual threat of punishment because they have no connection to the game to begin with. Children who have no method of obtaining money are also prime for free to play games, raising the odds of encountering a rather immature player (as seen above).
But if anything didn’t need reminding this year, it was that free to play brings in more players and revenue for the games that determined it the more favorable path to go down. Here’s to another year of things we already knew.
MMO Fallout 