Full translation of Yoshi interview, including his openness to F2P

[Wolf_Heartnet]

Then again, you have games like Rift and Star Wars. Even though people have been saying that yes, there is this change in the market, everything’s moving to free-to-play, they still – up until recently – were developing a system that would be subscription-based. Even though everyone is saying the industry is going free-to-play, they still were developing these huge games with subscriptions in mind. Again, we’re not saying that one is better than the other, that free-to-play is better than subscription or subscription is better than free-to-play. But for a large game on that scale, what’s most important – more important than making a lot of money – is making a stable income, a stable amount of money over a long period of time. And so to develop a large-scale MMO like this, you need to spend a lot of time with a lot of resources and a lot of staff to make this game.

To do that, you need a lot of money, and to get a lot of money to do that, you usually need investors to invest in your game. Because you’ve spent a lot of money on getting this game ready and borrowed a lot of money from these investors, when you release the game, the investors expect to see returns. If your game gets a lot of users and a lot of subscriptions right away, your investors will be happy and you can pay them. But what happens if you don’t hit that number right away? You have a bunch of staff members waiting to get paid. You have a bunch of investors waiting to get paid. You have a bunch of contents that needs to get made because you have to have updates, but you can’t do it because you don’t have enough money, because you didn’t hit that number you were aiming for. And so what do you have to do? One option to get instant money is free-to-play, or selling these items. To get that money so you can pay off your staff, pay off your investors, and start making new content, switching to free-to-play, selling items, and using that money is one way to do it.

So why didn’t Rift or EA with Star Wars do this from the beginning? Why didn’t they start with free-to-play? There’s a reason behind that. With free-to-play, because you’re selling these items, you’ll have months where you sell a bunch of stuff and you make a lot of money in that one month. But it’s all about what happens during that month. Next month, the person who maybe bought $100 worth of items in the last month could purchase nothing at all. You don’t know what you’re going to be getting, and because you don’t know what you’re going to be getting, you can’t plan ahead. You don’t know how much money is coming in. If you can’t plan ahead, then you can’t keep staff, because you don’t know if you’ll have enough money to pay the staff next month.

With a subscription base, if you get maybe 400,000 members, you know that you’re going to have the money from that monthly subscription for the next month. You also know that you’re going to have 400,000 this month, and it’s not going to go down to 200,000 users next month. That type of jump really doesn’t happen with a subscription model. So you know that you’re going to have a steady income. Because you have a steady income, you can plan ahead further. You can make sure you have staff members to create that new content. By creating new content, you’re making the players happy. If they know this game is going to keep creating new content, they’ll continue to pay their monthly subscription fees. So rather than going for the huge $100-million-a-month hit that you might get with the free-to-play model, having that steady income allows us to provide a better product to the players.

Not surprised, but....

“The main reason why we haven’t decided to take the free-to-play option is that, at the game’s original launch, it didn’t live up to expectations and it let down a lot of fans. We lost the trust of fans who had followed us across our 25-year history. We want to regain that trust and to deliver on past promises.

“One of the promises we originally stated was that we would release the game with a subscription model. Players will be able to play it 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days in the year if they paid a subscription fee.

Meaning if it goes F2P, it will have several limitations on how much time you can spend in the game which would probably mark the return of the exhaustion system that was in 1.0.

Either way, i take it that it is not a "mistake" and he is just lying to our faces. If it goes F2P, i'm out and this game does seem like its heading to F2P with all the lockouts and Shanda Games handlign the chinese version which is a F2P company i think? - Kinda like how TERA started with frogster.

[LordSaviour]

Increasing the item level is just one direction, though, we also need to increase the breadth of items available at each level, which we plan to address in the future.

Looks like he is opening the doors to Horizontal Item Progression.

[Nekodar]

Wow he's seriously trying to go from MMO hero to dishonest prick all in one day isnt he? Yeah this is probably the last developer I was trusting not to screw its paying customers over. This game goes F2P im done with SE, possibly even MMO's. Never paying for their games again just like EA and Ubisoft.

All he's saying is essentially that if 90% of the players want it to go F2P, he's not going to stand against them. Try reading the other things he said with regards to F2P as well, not only from this interview, but interviews from the past.

[Doo]

So sad, First cash shops then F2P.

I guess that's what the majority of mmo players want these days.

No time to play mmos: Free to play model, buy what you only have time for.
RMTers - Cash shops.

[Felis]

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 kind 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 US 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.

The whole part about the F2P part

I wounder if the additional retainers would cost 1$ each month like it was planned 2010?

[Zell]

And 90% of the "this is too easy I have nothing to do" posts in this forum are from players that had a 3 year head start.

Had a three year head start. All classes at 50. 5 crafting classes at 50, 2 gathering classes at 50. Beat all three primal extremes for the first time 2 weeks ago. Currently trying to kill Twintania. Getting her to 50%. I think the difficulty is perfect. Not too easy and not too hard. It offers a challenge. So yes, I am legacy but by no means do I feel that this game is a Monday only game. I'm getting my money's worth and I like the way the game is going, so long a it's not F2P.

[Shusio]

I dont know about the f2p. Personally I dont care as long they put in barriers to prevent ppl from just doing everything with no limit. Alot of ppl had this mentality when SWtOR when f2p with a sub if you wanted. If you was f2p you had to buy things to be able to wear certain gear or you could only run something x amount of times before you had to buy a pass. I can see micro-transactions becoming a bigger part of this game if it goes f2p.

[BlueMage]

He mentioned specifically that people only want to pay for the amount of time they play... could that not necessarily mean F2P as we know it but the potentially for a pay per hour type system? There are people who say "I quit because I only log in 3 hours a week to do Coil." I wonder if Yoshi is just expressing consideration for something like paying some reduced amount but only getting X hours of playtime that month.

[Swishytail]

I'll be gone without hesitation if this goes F2P, as will nearly all, or possibly all of my friends playing.

Don't do it, Yoshi.

[Zell]

He mentioned specifically that people only want to pay for the amount of time they play... could that not necessarily mean F2P as we know it but the potentially for a pay per hour type system? There are people who say "I quit because I only log in 3 hours a week to do Coil." I wonder if Yoshi is just expressing consideration for something like paying some reduced amount but only getting X hours of playtime that month.

I would be completely ok with that.... That's more the Chinese model. However, I think that and F2P discussion are two separate things.. so I really really have no idea where he was going with this.