Tag: Free to Play

Richard Bartle: "Free To Play Has A Half Life"


Slots

Richard Bartle is the creator of the first ever virtual world: MUD1. Bartle also believes that the free to play model has a half life, and will eventually fall out of favor with gamers. At a Develop conference in Brighton, Bartle stated that inherent qualities undermine the free to play model, despite it being a great revenue model right now.

“It will tail off because there is a fixed amount of people willing to spend enormous amounts of money, and there’s too much competition for those people.”

There is a heated debate on whether or not the bubble on free to play has burst. Check out more information at the link below.

(Source: Gamesindustry.biz)

Defiance Is Now Free To Play


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Defiance officially becomes free to play today. Patch 2.0, dubbed the NSFW patch, allows players to experience the entire Bay Area storyline for free, at least for PC gamers. Console gamers will have to wait until around July 15th to get their free gaming on. Free players will be limited to two character slots, two loadouts, a cap of 50 ark keys, and 35 inventory slots. The move also introduces the Paradis Patron subscription, which can be bought at the in-game store and includes store discounts and bonuses to loot, scrip, experience, and more.

You can find the entire list of updates here, as well as patch notes for today’s 2.0 update.

(Source: Defiance)

Defiance Switching To Free To Play


DLC5Unveil_Blog

Trion Worlds has announced that Defiance is shedding its box price and going completely free to play later this year. The PC version is set to make the switch on June 4th, with the PS3 version following on July 15th, and the Xbox360 changeover to come at a later date. New players will have access to the Bay area, including original endgame content and future missions for free. Players who pick up a copy of the game will receive a number of perks, including inventory space, ark keycodes, character slots, and more. Existing owners will also have these same perks.

More on this announcement in the coming weeks.

(Source: Trion press release)

Free to Play Drew $2.8 Billion In 2013


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Super Data Research is a group that provides market intelligence in the online, digital, and mobile games industry. The numbers for 2013 have been released, detailing the estimated sales for mobile, free to play, and subscription based titles. Free to play was dominated by Crossfire and League of Legends, bringing in a combination of nearly $1.6 billion.

Social games dropped 21% over last year, with the US hitting an average of $50 per paying user spent. Free to play games brought in $2.8 billion, an increase in total revenue despite a decrease in monthly active user count. Pay to play, on the other hand, brought in $1.1 billion in 2013, down nearly 20% from 2012.

Unsurprisingly, the top free to play earnings chart was dominated by the usual titles: World of Tanks, League of Legends, Lineage, World of Warcraft, The Old Republic, and Crossfire.

(Source: Super Data Research)

Pathfinder’s Backing Of Elder Scrolls Online


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Goblinworks CEO Ryan Dancey found himself in the news this week by penning an editorial defending The Elder Scrolls Online and the game’s planned subscription system. In the op-ed, Dancey states his belief that not only are subscriptions responsible for more than $100 million a year in the west, but that it is hard to imagine that the revenue from microtransactions even approaches 50% of that figure. Now Dancey’s figures are hardly scientific, but the overall point that he seems to be making is that the optimal route for MMOs (particularly Elder Scrolls Online) to take is to launch with a box price and subscription to recuperate development costs and then switch over to a system based in microtransactions with an optional subscription intact once it makes sense.

I remain convinced that the market is going to continue to support subscriptions for these games regardless of budget so long as the subscriptions are intelligently linked to a microtransaction model as well.  The evidence of ongoing success with that model seems incontrovertible and the implication that there are millions of people happily paying for game subscriptions shouldn’t be controversial to anyone who digs into the numbers.

Whether or not you agree with Dancey’s conclusion, the editorial is still a great read. Check it out at the link below.

(Source: MMORPG.com)

Pathfinder's Backing Of Elder Scrolls Online


2013-12-17_00007

Goblinworks CEO Ryan Dancey found himself in the news this week by penning an editorial defending The Elder Scrolls Online and the game’s planned subscription system. In the op-ed, Dancey states his belief that not only are subscriptions responsible for more than $100 million a year in the west, but that it is hard to imagine that the revenue from microtransactions even approaches 50% of that figure. Now Dancey’s figures are hardly scientific, but the overall point that he seems to be making is that the optimal route for MMOs (particularly Elder Scrolls Online) to take is to launch with a box price and subscription to recuperate development costs and then switch over to a system based in microtransactions with an optional subscription intact once it makes sense.

I remain convinced that the market is going to continue to support subscriptions for these games regardless of budget so long as the subscriptions are intelligently linked to a microtransaction model as well.  The evidence of ongoing success with that model seems incontrovertible and the implication that there are millions of people happily paying for game subscriptions shouldn’t be controversial to anyone who digs into the numbers.

Whether or not you agree with Dancey’s conclusion, the editorial is still a great read. Check it out at the link below.

(Source: MMORPG.com)

Lessons From 2013 #5: Free To Ignore


vanguard

Today’s lesson from 2013 is all about free to play or as I’ve taken to calling it, free to ignore. The very same developers who designed free to play to advertise to the gamer bouncing around from title to title are now finding that their customers are in and out in the blink of an eye. In a way, free to play was a great method of knocking the low hanging fruit from the development tree. Gamers now have the ability to download a game, realize that it isn’t worth their time, and leave it behind without a single cent lost. When a game goes free to play, developers are quick to trumpet how their population increased by five hundred billion percent, only for the PR department to go strangely silent when, after about a month, most of those new players have already moved on.

Free to play was once the bastion for lower-tier games and indies, and then the big industry folks moved in and did what they do best, knock everyone out of business including themselves. Heroes in the Sky, Age of Empires, the Mummy Online, Fusionfall, Battleforge, RaiderZ (in most territories), Kartuga, Prius Online, Dungeon Fighter Online, Dragonball Online, Sevencore, Wrath of Heroes, Hellgate: Global (in Japan), The Old Republic (Asia Pacific), Family Guy Online, and Glitch, and that’s just a small list of games from the past twelve months. Then look at the games merging servers: Rift, Neverwinter, Age of Wushu, Age of Conan, Vanguard, The Old Republic, and that again is a small list of AAA titles from the past year. The system has been turned on its head so much that now free to play games are partially converting to subscription models! Dogs and cats are living in harmony, put all of your money in gold and bury it in the backyard, the world is coming to an end!

When adding this topic to my list of lessons, I asked myself “I’ve harped on this subject more times than I can count. Why bring it up yet again?” The best answer I can come up with is because out of all of the items on this list, this is almost guaranteed to not just be a problem next year, it will be bigger. Like lemmings, completely oblivious to the growing pile of dead bodies around them, developers of all sizes and budgets continue to throw their hat into the ring with the outdated and inaccurate belief that free to play is a treasure-trove of easy money with no effort because games like Team Fortress 2 and League of Legends are extremely popular. These are the same developers who blew up the subscription market by trying to beat World of Warcraft and subsequently shut down because, regardless of profit margin, they couldn’t make their target of a billion subscribers.

Imagine how much better off this industry would be if developers would only set a goal of carving their own section of the market, rather than those who took an everything or nothing approach.

Free To Play Is Not Coming To World of Warcraft


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With Blizzard’s latest quarterly report showing another drop in subscribers for World of Warcraft, the internet is once again asking the age old question: Will the game go free to play? If you have to ask, the answer is no. Blizzard’s Production Director J Allen Brack stated to Eurogamer:

“We would have to rework the game pretty significantly in order to make it free-to-play. It’s not something we’re currently considering.”

That sounds familiar for some reason. Blizzard opened its convention with the announcement of the next expansion pack, Warlords of Draenor, where players will travel back in time to the Warcraft RTS era.

(Source: Eurogamer)

ArcheAge Russia's Free To Play Borders Pay To Win


archeage

ArcheAge in Russia is making its way down free to play lane, and according to an announcement by Mail.ru, plans to offer even more for free than its Korean counterpart. Russian players will be able to level all the way up to end-game without paying a single ruble, and will have access to building houses and farms. Players who want to pony up some cash will be able to buy premium access which, at $10, features faster labor points recovery, 20% experience and 50% drop rate increases, and a stipend of Arc, the ArcheAge currency used on a mostly cosmetic cash shop. Arcs can be obtained in-game without spending anything.

Where ArcheAge is dipping its toes into alleged pay to win is in the ability to purchase labor points. Labor points are most easily compared to the energy from social games. Gathering and crafting costs labor points from your finite pool, which regenerates over time. The announcement has drawn ire from players who believe that the presence of labor points in the cash shop will unbalance the game’s economy.

(Source: MMO Cast)

ArcheAge Russia’s Free To Play Borders Pay To Win


archeage

ArcheAge in Russia is making its way down free to play lane, and according to an announcement by Mail.ru, plans to offer even more for free than its Korean counterpart. Russian players will be able to level all the way up to end-game without paying a single ruble, and will have access to building houses and farms. Players who want to pony up some cash will be able to buy premium access which, at $10, features faster labor points recovery, 20% experience and 50% drop rate increases, and a stipend of Arc, the ArcheAge currency used on a mostly cosmetic cash shop. Arcs can be obtained in-game without spending anything.

Where ArcheAge is dipping its toes into alleged pay to win is in the ability to purchase labor points. Labor points are most easily compared to the energy from social games. Gathering and crafting costs labor points from your finite pool, which regenerates over time. The announcement has drawn ire from players who believe that the presence of labor points in the cash shop will unbalance the game’s economy.

(Source: MMO Cast)