Seems like alot of people want this game to become Free 2 Play. >.>

[Yellow]

It's funny how websites claim the 'P2P' era of games are over and 'F2P' is the future because of the downfall of SW:TOR.

Let's look at the actual problems of SW:TOR.

Take everything from WoW that you hate, and put it in a videogame. Then give it a star wars skin, do some voice overs, and bam.

You have SW:TOR.

The game failed because it was horrendously uninteresting and single player. It was definitely not a quality MMORPG. All of the bs hype just made it crash even harder.

It wasn't P2P that ruined that game.. as you'll see when it goes F2P it will still remain to be a boring game unless they pull a 'Final Fantasy XIV 2.0' and remake the whole damn thing.

SW:TOR was never a good game. Maybe on release it was pretty nice.. as it was a Star Wars game.. but after a while you just saw it to be a really really shallow WoW clone.

WoW clones are destined to not be extremely successful.. I mean most people have played WoW.. if we buy your product what makes you think we want to play WoW again?

:V

tl;dr

No matter what model you use, it really won't change that much if the game is terrible.

[Preypacer]

In order to be "the future", you'll have to introduce something pretty revolutionary, which none of the titles you've mentioned have done. In fact, they were pretty much carbon-copies of WOW with a few changes. 14 will be different, but I don't see it being genre-defining or "the future" of the genre. It's going to take a lot of pages out of Blizzard's book, only because they've pieced together a pretty solid formula for the genre.

The only foreseeable future for the MMO genre is the f2p model, but only because the market is just so over-saturated now. When XI came out there was no real competition until WOW came along. Its immediate success was a cue for developers to churn out one MMO after another. Inevitably, subscription-based gaming is detrimental to making money since the entire MMO playerbase is spread so thin. Most f2p games make tons more money on that model than they ever would have on a p2p model, and only because you've got chumps who'll pay for all sorts of items and perks.

There is a finite amount of people who can possibly play MMOs, that's true.

But what you have to keep in mind is that that every person in that finite number of people have all their own tastes, their own thresholds of what they will and won't pay, their own limits of what they can or can't afford, and so on.

It's been proven out over the course of more than a decade now that if people enjoy a game enough, they'll happily pay a subscription fee for it.

If someone doesn't like a game enough to play it, they're not going to play it. The payment model has little or nothing to do with that.

Consider this scenario. You see a game that doesn't interest you, but it's F2P with Cash Shop. Then you see another that does interest you, but it requires a subscription. If you were forced to pick one (which of course, you never are - games are always optional), which are you more likely to end up playing?

I'll put my bets on the sub-based one that does interest you. I'd do so even if it weren't forced, simply because I don't think there's anyone out there who truly voluntarily does something for "fun" that they don't enjoy doing or aren't interested in.

That same exact scenario applies to every single gamer out there. Some might have a lower bar of tolerance simply due to financial situations not allowing a monthly sub, but I'd bet they're still not going to automatically go play the F2P one. If a game doesn't spark your interest, it doesn't spark your interest.

How many free games do we see ad banners for all over the place? For MMOs, for FB-style games, etc. etc? Do we click and run to play all of those simply because they're free? Of course not. We pick and choose the ones we're interested in and ignore the rest.

A game is only competing for your dollar if it's something you'd be interested in playing to begin with. Otherwise you may barely even know it exists.

A sub-based game will fail now for exactly the same reason they've failed prior to F2P - Because the game wasn't good enough to enough people to warrant a sub-fee.

There's no indication that the payment model has anything to do with it.

TOR came out in a time when F2P was "all the rage" and no one believed subscriptions would be tolerated. They had over 1.2 lined up and ready to prove that belief wrong. They started losing players, of course. But that had nothing to do with the sub fee. It had everything to do with the gameplay being unsatisfactory to many people. There is no indication that the game being F2P would have been any different. People would still play it, they'd still burn through everything, they'd still get bored and leave. The only difference is that as a F2P MMO, every single person who left would still be considered an "active account" in EA/Bioware's PR. You can bet your dollar that will be the case when TOR makes the switch. Haven't played TOR since a month after it came out? Don't matter! You're still an "active account" as far as they're concerned!

If TOR had been a better game with more to offer, they'd have kept all those players, would have maintained an active paying playerbase, and you wouldn't have heard a peep from them about going F2P, because it wouldn't be necessary. Why bank on a "portion" of your player base paying you money when you have a guaranteed 100% of them doing so?

This goes back to the bit in my previous post about F2P MMO companies never differentiating between "active accounts", and "actively played accounts" in their numbers. One example of the deceptive BS that goes on behind the scenes with F2P. So much of that payment model relies on smoke, mirrors and deception, that I'm amazed more people don't catch on to it.

[Starlord]

...Right.
Well, on the subject, people call a game a "clone" when it has most of the features, visuals, or playstyle of another game without significant changes to justify their interest.
That's why you see people getting annoyed on Steam Greenlight whenever they see a game in the style of minecraft that looks and plays a lot like it.

Meh, I was trolling I haven't done it in awhile, I understand "clone" is just a "term" people use in the MMO world ^.^.

[Sephrick]

So it seems we're all in agreement. We want XIV to go buy to play with no sub fees!

[Starlord]

So it seems we're all in agreement. We want XIV to go buy to play with no sub fees!

Not sure if serious....

[yoshikwalla]

People are preferring f2p because that's the current trend. And trends in the MMO industry happen very seldom, unfortunately. The current trend is that a pay-to-play MMORPG will come out, fail because it didn't want to be an original flower but instead one of the weeds in Bobby Kotick's hellguarden, and then go free-to-play because the developers and producers decided not to work on making the game better but instead re-release the same game in f2p format under a cash shop. In other words, free-to-play is that card in-hand that developers use the most because they're too lazy to actually come up with a solution in regards to making their unoriginal wow-clone a game that's even close to remotely being enjoyable.

So yes, people will get used to big-budgeted WoW-clones going down the same path to f2p mediocrity and come to terms with it. Does that make it the only option? No. People aren't preferring it as much as expecting it. We don't have our Richard Garriots anymore. Instead, people with solid ideas that are good for the industry and those who have created the backbone for the industry have instead made the devilspine for the corporate dumbasses who don't know a good game if it Deus Ex'd them in the face.

Every single time someone says f2p is the way to go I point them to Eve Online. Why is that game not f2p? Because the developers keep the game fun for their subscribers (even though fun is completely subjective to that accounting simulator).

The fact is, we don't have a development team that's stupid enough to consider f2p because instead of going that route, they remade the entire game. F2p is a last straw that Square Enix isn't at yet, nor will it ever be if the game keeps going in this route. If the game is fun, people will invest. And so far, we've invested enough time to make the game even better. You can't say the same for f2p games that don't really improve over time.

You can't put a price tag on fun. But you can sure as hell invest in it.

[Sephrick]

Not sure if serious....

I'm so serious Hearh Ledger called to inquire about my current level of seriousness.


On topic, though, I just hope they don't go the XI route with expansions. That left a sour taste for me.

I don't mind a monthly sub. I don't even mind having to pay for an expansion box. But so help me, the expansion better be complete and in the box this time around. It was robbery in XI selling us a box then taking two years to complete the development of even the storyline of the expansion.

F2P usually is meh. B2P can be great if budgeted properly. But P2P does have a bar set pretty high these days.

The reality is, MMOs have to compete with all games now. And ontop of that they have to prove that they have about $150 worth of value each year. It may not be much to most of us, but it's still enough to change the way people judge a game.

There are so many cheaper alternatives out there to compete and cooperate with friends and strangers across the globe.

These modern MMOs are essentially failing to answer one fundamental question; why is your game worth so much more?

And it's not that consumers have to play these games. But it's the companies making them that decide to try and pull in more than the typical MMO crowd.

I think that's why these games tend to fall flat on their face. They're going too big too soon. If anything I think XIV may prove that P2P is viable with a different style of development.

The genre is in desperate need of innovation, but they're all trying to compete with AAA shooters and action games while trying to appease a hardcore crowd that wants things to remain as archaic as possible all while being judged on a different set of standards.

tl;dr: If MMO makers want more than the typical MMO crowd, then they're going to have to innovate in some way. Whether that innovation is through the cost of playing or gameplay, only time will tell.

[neorei]

http://my.mmosite.com/289425/blog/it...lm_reborn.html

read that. in matter in fact someone make a thread about it lol

[Norack]

http://my.mmosite.com/289425/blog/it...lm_reborn.html

Only read about first paragraph because it said couple months after FFXIV's release it went F2P, which is not true. It became a subscription game that was free to play. F2P speaks of a business model that makes the initial subscription free , how ever almost anything after that costs money for example premium content, new gear, etc... FFXIV during its free subscription period was free, but it wasn't F2P. Because it wasn't trying to get any extra revenue by the use of cash shops or premium content etc...

[FF4ever]

Im good with current setup, F2P Will Onry bring "micro trans", i dont mind funding SE dev's for good content creation.