Why Play, Why Pay?

A couple of thoughts on subs and F2P business and MMOs, today guest starring Tobold, Spinks and Raph Koster.

Tobold’s I Would be Happier with Free2Play

Spinks’ WoW Thought for the Day

Raph Koster’s F2P vs. Subs

I’ve long been a proponent of making WoW F2P and even offline or in W/JRPG format simply because subscriptions never offer me enough value for me to bother with them.

…and yet, I have a 60-day time card that I’ve had for almost a year and a half and a handful of 30-day time codes from the WoW VISA card I use for big purchases and emergencies.  I have the time codes (and one unscratched card), ready to use, already paid for, but the flubbernuggin’ time-limited monetization scheme still doesn’t feel like good value to me.  I don’t want to use those codes since I have too much going on to devote sufficient time to playing to get good value out of them.  Similarly, I have a Steam code for 30 days each of FFXI and RIFT, but I haven’t activated either of them.  They are paid for, ready to go, but I hate the idea of locking myself into a monogamous game experience just so I can squeeze the most out of it as I can before the time stops ticking.

I hate gaming on the clock.

…and on the other hand, I’ll happily sink a little time into the newly F2P Star Trek Online every morning sending my Duty Officers off on missions and maybe run a story arc mission in the evening.  The cost of activation is really low, so I go play when I feel like it.  I’m considering spending $15 or so to get a new ship that I would then be able to use whenever I darn well please for as long as the servers are live.  That’s value I’ll pay for.  That’s how I approach Wizard 101, too; I bought Crowns to unlock areas that I’ll get to someday, and in the meantime, I’ll play when I feel like it.  I’ve spent money on Puzzle Pirates for the same reason; I bought a ship that I can sail around and pirate with, but I don’t have to keep paying just to play on the occasions when I make the time for it.  I’d readily pay for a single purchase SWTOR.

Would that translate to WoW?  In my case, absolutely.  I’d log in and do a few quests here and there, and toss them money to unlock a dungeon or the ability to make a Dwarf Druid or make my own guild comprised entirely of my own characters without the need to recruit other players or some sort of service that lets me bypass some of the extremely poorly paced crafting curve.  I’m definitely not averse to giving Blizzard money, I just want to pay for things that offer me good value.  WoW is still a fun game to play, even with all its warts and weirdness.  As it stands, though, I can’t exactly send them a financial message about the parts that I care about, which is one of the weaknesses of the subscription model.

…I can, however, offer to sell my time codes.  Anyone?  Maybe trade for some titles on my Steam Wish List?  Oh, and I still have some coupons and COGS and World of Goo if anyone wants them.  Nobody took me up on the snowflake contest, so I’ll just throw them to the winds.  (Another interesting take on value, perhaps…)

Read Full Post »

Stupid SOPA

Ostensibly, the much-ballyhooed “SOPA” means “Stop Online Piracy Act”, but I prefer to think of it as “Sack Our Pathological Administrators”.  Not that such will happen, mind you, but one can dream.

As near as I can tell, SOPA is a thinly veiled statist control grab, all in the name of stopping piracy.  Guess what, guys?  Piracy can’t be stopped.  And no, the varied and vehement denizens of the internet don’t trust you with power.  To echo a famous pithy quip:

“Orwell’s 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual”

It does strike me as odd, though, these “going dark” protests.  The problem is that the U.S. government weasels want to control the internet, possibly censoring it, and the answer is to… take your ball and go home?  Effectively self-censor?  It seems like a weird message to send, but with big ol’ sites like Google and Wikipedia in on the action, at least it’s calling attention to the stupid potential policy.  (Though curiously making it a little harder to research said policy.  Again… odd.)  I do like XKCD’s take on it, found at this convenient link.  Sam and Fuzzy’s author comments briefly on it as well thisaway.  Shamus of Twenty Sided has a good article up on it, too, and I like the Rampant Coyote’s take.

As for me, well, I’m going to go work on Zomblobs!, which will be released as a Free to Play tabletop tactical wargame.  The ruleset will be free in PDF form, but you can buy nice printouts.  The PDFs will come with units, maps and tokens you can cut out and play with, or you can go buy models from my Shapeways store or maps from The Game Crafter.  Play a fully functional if vaguely unaesthetic version for free with a little elbow grease, or upgrade a bit to a nicer version for a little cash.  Seems simple to me.

It’s evidence of my mindset; create something that’s fun to play and offers great value, create a relationship of trust and goodwill, and hope that some kind souls are willing to chip in a few bucks for the experience.  I won’t be able to make a living off of the scope of what I’ll be offering (though Three Rings does with their games, notably Puzzle Pirates, and they have a similar philosophy), but I’ll still be offering something I consider to be valuable.  Giving, not controlling, sharing, not stealing.  …and perhaps sneakily, monetizing actual, tangible stuff rather than the digital parts of the game.  Sure, my work is copyrighted, but again, pirates can’t be stopped.  I prefer the carrot approach rather than trying to find a bigger stick.

Seems to be a better way for me to conduct my business.  I’m the sole proprietor of this site, Alpha Hex and Zomblobs!, so I’m going to do what I want with them, and that’s try to get as many people playing and having fun with them as I can.  I think I’ve made some fun games, and while I’m no Raph Koster, Klaus Teuber or Wil Wright, I’m just confident enough in these games to want to put my work out there for consumption and feedback.

Rally ho!

Read Full Post »

Twenty Thumpin

A little while back, I figured the new sub-level 20 “free” World of Warcraft to be a way to get a taste of the vaunted “endgame” of an MMO, since a level-capped free trial character is effectively progress-locked on the ol’ leveling treadmill.  Their only progress comes from gear hunting, reputation grinds, PvP honor grinding, collecting, achievements and other assorted busywork.  Since then, I’ve been playing intermittently with my new Dwarven Paladin, Thumpin.

Home is where the hearth is

Perhaps ironically, Thumpin’s best weapons have only rarely been maces.  He has gotten the most use out of axes, and indeed, his present weapon of choice is an axe; either the Cold Iron Pick or the Razor’s Edge.  It’s been fun having a Dwarf whose apparent “best in slot” two handed weapon is a mining pick.  It just feels so right.

Fish outta water

At any rate, perhaps half the time I’ve been playing this character has been when he’s at level 20.  I’ve been chasing incremental upgrades to his gear, some from quests, some from world drops, some from dungeons.  It’s been an interesting scavenger hunt, driven by the Wowhead database, inspired by Psynister’s “Trial Account Twinking” commentary.  It’s been interesting… but ultimately kinda, well… dumb.  I could never persist in the real“endgame” raiding scene.

PvP not so much, either

It’s all about the ends; finding the stuff that make my numbers go up.  I’m just not all that motivated or entertained by that quest (though I’ll readily concede that it’s a perfectly valid way to play, it just doesn’t do much for me).  The actual gameplay hasn’t been anything inherently different from just playing the game (including occasional dungeoneering as I usually do), except that it’s a bit more targeted now instead of just playing as the flow takes me.

Onna boat

One notable exception has been hunting for the “best in slot” Foreman’s Leggings.  It’s been pretty mindless, as they drop from one baddie hiding in an armpit of the pre-dungeon Deadmines.  That’s where I got the Cold Iron Pick (and a Petrified Shinbone and the Skeletal Gauntlets, several copies each, actually, as well as a fair dose of ore that the ghouls drop… a potentially viable alternative to mining, actually), but since the ‘Leggings only drop from one unique, semi-rare foe, it starts to feel like a quarter of Thumpin’s life has been in that little pocket of the world.  I gave it a good shot, I really did, but I can only do that for so long.

Freedom!

So, I’ve gone back to my world-traveling ways.  I’m making the rounds in Darnassus and Darkshore, then I’ll go to the Exodar and the neighboring islands.  I kinda want to get a Night Elf kitty to ride (hence the Darnassus tabard for reputation grinding in dungeons), as I love absurd mount/character mismatches.  I feel like I’m adventuring again, going where the action takes me, rather than hunting for numbers.  Of course, I’d rather be flying, but hey, free players can’t have it all, or so they say.

Not the same

I also almost wish I’d done this on a Role Playing realm, so I could really play the “one-eyed miner Dwarf” schtick to the hilt.  Then again, I have a lot of other games I’d rather play, so I’m really going to just leave Thumpin in limbo and imagine that he’s off, having grand adventures, making his way through the world with his pick in hand, belting out a hearty drinking song as he crushes skulls and collects ore.  What more does a Dwarf need?

Bring it.

Read Full Post »

20 is the New 85

In one way of looking at it, level 20 is the new “endgame” for the F2P slice of World of Warcraft.  Characters are locked at level 20, and progression past that point will be largely based on gear.  It’ll be an unholy grind of rerunning instances and plowing through the crafting system.  I have to wonder, though…

What is the highest GearScore you can attain?  What is the most difficult dungeon you can complete (solo or otherwise)?  What is the highest Achievement point total you can accumulate?  How many classes can you beat one-on-one?  How many Exploration Achievements can you get?  How many quests can you complete?  How much coin can you gather and how quickly?  How many unique pets can Hunters acquire and get screenshots with?  How far can you get from the newbie grounds, and where can you go without dying?  (Rogues and stealthy Druids might just win this one.)

Y’know, Blizzard might be missing a few tricks here.

Normalized PvP is one that I’ve always wished they had.  The heirloom era makes PvP balance worse at low levels (though twinking made sure it was never really balanced), but what if the system arbitrarily set character stats (including level within a certain band, say levels 11-19 get snapped to level 20 or the like for the duration of the PvP event) to something they decided was “balanced”?  Might we see more interesting PvP at lower levels?  The Arena is sort of normalized in that everyone just has the best gear, but what if there were an equivalent at level 20?  (And then 30, then 40 and so on…)

There are a handful of dungeons available to level 20 characters, and it’s a great learning opportunity to play those at an appropriate level for as long as it takes to learn your class, rather than counting on outleveling the content.  You’d have to learn to play a lot earlier than at the now-level-85 endgame.

What if there were full-on raids at level 20 that could therefore be played by characters stuck at level 20?  We might, just might, see players learning about raiding earlier and how to play their class, rather than outgear the game.  That might be a Good Thing.  Of course, I have other ideas about raids, too, but still, just thinking out loud here.  What if these pre-endgame raids were normalized like PvP?

How else might the level 20 cap actually be a good thing for players and the game?  I can’t help but think that there’s potential there to teach players what the vaunted “endgame” is all about a bit earlier than the, well… the endgame.

Of course, there are pros and cons to teaching about endgame habits early, but perhaps that’s a discussion for another time.

It’s also notable that with the trial restrictions on characters, they might be as close as possible to “purist” WoW play.  Yes, they don’t get the multiplayer experience very easily (alleviated somewhat by the Dungeon Finder, which works just fine for trial/Starter accounts), but neither do they find their play distorted by heirloom gear (leveling is too fast, waaaa!), fairy godmother alts or the severely disjointed market via the Auction House that winds up pricing copper ore and bars at one gold apiece.  That’s a pittance to level 85 characters, but a week’s wages for a low level character.

Starter characters also don’t get the guild experience, but with the new guild incentives, they aren’t the purely social animals of old anyway.  Oh, and sufficiently leveled guilds will also accelerate the leveling pace of low level characters.  The horror!

So maybe, just maybe, guildless and godmotherless is a nice purist way to play the game.  Leave the default UI on and don’t bother with addons, and get a feel for the game as Blizzard designed it, rather than what bitter veterans complain about through distorted glasses.

…that’s not to say the game won’t have problems, of course.  It will.  It’s just that if you learn to accept a game for what it is and see what’s there, rather than what you want to see, you might just learn something.

Read Full Post »

WoW F2P… Sorta

World of Warcraft finally steals the WarHammer Online “perpetual limited free trial” hook.

Too little, too late, says I.  The time to flank the F2P tide was a couple of years ago if not earlier.

It’s still probably a smart move.  It will be interesting to see what effects it has.

As for me and my house?  I’ll have a new baby Druid to play with when the itch strikes, and I don’t have to plunk down a sub for the privilege of picking up the game whenever I darn well please for a bit of sightseeing.  Oh, and I can patch the blasted thing without feeling like I’m wasting a couple of days of a month’s sub or firing up a new dummy trial.

…and I’d still pay for an offline version.

Read Full Post »

A Different Cataclysm

I’ve suggested it in a few comments recently on other blogs, and I’ve argued it for a while in one form or another, but I wanted to put a fine point on it for posterity.  Let’s not call this a prediction, since I don’t think Blizzard will do this (it’s potentially a lot of work and has a few wrinkles to iron out), but I’d recommend it.

The Cataclysm expansion is a perfect time for Blizzard to jump into the wider MMO market by diversifying their business model.  The recent trend of formerly subscription-only MMOs converting to item shop microtransaction business models isn’t a surprise, nor is it a move of desperation.  It’s realization that the MMO market is diversifying and maturing, and that the old ways of doing business aren’t going to work forever.

World of Warcraft is a bastion of subscription gaming, a behemoth that operates by its own rules, seemingly independant of the overall market.  Be that as it may, ignoring customers served by the so-called “free to play” or F2P games is effectively conceding strategic ground in the larger market.  It’s often suggested that converting WoW to one of these F2P critters may well not be more profitable for Blizzard, so it’s not likely.  I’m not convinced of that, but even conceding that as a given, as someone recently noted (Bhagpuss, I think, but please forgive me for remembering incorrectly if not), companies don’t always make moves for immediate profit.  Sometimes it’s about claiming market share or positioning themselves for future projects. *

* This is one counterpoint to my recommendation, actually.  Blizzard might be angling for the wider market with their next big MMO project.  Since that’s likely not imminent, though, I’m setting that aside, because the market is changing now, and Blizzard is oddly reticent to keep pace.

With that in mind, the release of Cataclysm provides a perfect excuse both in lore and in business to make a significant change to the WoW business plan.  What better time to break up the world than when a dragon is doing it for you?

Specifically, I would recommend that they take the Old World of Warcraft (the content from level 1 to 60, sometimes called “vanilla” WoW) and break it off into its own product, literally breaking the game into pieces.  They should then sell this like Guild Wars, as a single purchase that can then be played in perpetuity.  They should then keep the “live” Cataclysm-era world going for subscribers.  Players can upgrade from the Old World to the Live World, but not migrate backwards (maybe with some restrictions to keep gold sellers down, like no money migration).

This could neatly corner the F2P market by outflanking the other big movers in the field, including EQ2X, LOTRO, DDO and even GW and GW2, while still providing the subscriber experience that current users are accustomed to.

There are problems, to be sure.  There’s the possible need for two dev teams and consequent potential for divergent evolution.  There’s the need for new servers and the potential to confuse customers (who apparently don’t know how to spend their own money, the filthy proletariats).  There’s the likelihood of subbers just playing around in the Single Purchase Old World and losing some part of the WoW money pump.  There’s the banshee chorus of haters and fanboys who would proclaim the doom of Blizzard for deigning to let those people play the game.  There’s the work necessary to make things actually work.  There’s the question of what to let current players do.  (I’d suggest that anyone wanting to go to the Old World can do so, but it would be a complete reboot; everyone starts from scratch.  Current subbers who want to sidegrade can start new characters on the Old World servers like anyone else, without needing to purchase the game again.  They would have to pay a sub to play in the CAT era on CAT servers, but could play in the Old World without a hiccup, just starting over on the new servers.)  There is risk involved, as even WoW may not be able to function in its own shadow.  (But that’s a concern for their new MMO, too.)

Still, the timing is right for such a move, a grab at owning the best of both worlds.  In retrospect, perhaps, this will be obviously wrong, depending on whatever they do with their next MMO, but for now, looking at the market and the state of WoW, I’d say it’s an obvious move, and a smart one.  (This is, of course, totally ignoring the larger question of whether or not more WoW domination of the market is good for the players.  I think that could be argued either way, though, so maybe I’ll save that for an exercise later.)  There’s even room for more mutations, like true “classic” servers and private, gated communities for discerning customers, but one step at a time…

Of course details would need to be ironed out, and suits would need to be convinced.  Kotick would need to be bribed or something.  I’m convinced it’s not an intractible problem, though, and this may be the best time for such an earth-shattering, industry-shaking… cataclysmic business move.

…though I must admit, if it didn’t prove to sell well, just like if Blizzard’s new MMO doesn’t do well, leaving WoW as the clear aberration that I think it is, well… I’d laugh.

Read Full Post »

Acronymicon: F2P

Ostensibly, “F2P” is an acronym for “Free to Play”.

In practice, the term can cover a couple of different types of MMOs that don’t monetize via subscriptions.

On one hand are the Item Shop games, say, Runes of Magic, Allods Online or Puzzle Pirates.  RoM and AO are post-WoW DIKUMMOs (PWDMMORPGs?), but Puzzle Pirates is an entirely different animal that uses a microtransaction dual currency system.  RoM and AO have taken heat for goofy pricing and design that spurs purchases, some of it rightly so, some of it ill-informed and incompetently reasoned.  Noting that Puzzle Pirates functions quite nicely as an Item Shop game, might I take another moment to note that while business and game design are inextricably linked, incompetence in one need not mean the other is equally busted?

On the other hand, there are Subscriptionless games that monetize by selling content and convenience.  Look to Guild Wars, DDO and Wizard 101 for this sort of game design.  Content is sold with perpetual access, and players need not continue to pay a subscription.  These games tend to be constructed differently from the Item Shop games, earning money most like offline games of yore, by providing a valuable experience out of the box.

Also of note are the hybrid games.

Wizard 101 allows for subscriptions, content purchases and item shop purchases.  It monetizes all sorts of demand and lets all sorts of players play together, hopping servers willy-nilly almost at will.  It’s a beautiful game that plays extremely well, carving out its own identity with unique game mechanics and quirky writing.  The Harry Potterish feel is almost certainly part of the appeal, but it really is a solid game under the hood.

Puzzle Pirates has microtransaction servers and subscription servers.  Players cannot change server, and their economies are largely unique.  Doubloons (the microtransaction currency in their brilliant dual currency system) are tied to the account, not a server, and so may be spent on any “green” (microtransaction) server, but “blue” (sub) and “green” servers are isolated.  Still, players can play on any server, and can find one to suit their finances.

I think there is a critical distinction to be drawn between Item Shop games and Subscriptionless games.  I’ve argued for selling content instead of time for a while now, and I firmly come down in the Subscriptionless camp.  Whether this is sold in large bites like Guild Wars or smaller bites like Wizard 101 or DDO, it doesn’t matter much, but there is a clear difference between this model and the Item Shop model.  RoM and AO and their kind walk a line between selling stuff that’s useful and selling stuff that breaks the game, between impulse purchases and wallet-busting stupidity.

Both games can rightfully be presented as “Free to Play”, inasmuch as the acronym itself really only suggests that there is no subscription.  (Though it is a curious thing when a product is defined by what it lacks rather than what it has or is…)  We really have misnomers on top of misnomers abound in the MMO market, so this is no surprise, but it isn’t useful to take something like Allods Online’s messed up Item Shop (or your favorite game used as an example of the apocalypse) and paint an entire swath of games with a disdainful “F2P” epithet.  Games need to be taken on their own merits, balanced against their monetary and time costs, and evaluated for fun.  Blind prejudice against games roughly defined by a marketing acronym that doesn’t have consistent meaning doesn’t really help anything.

Read Full Post »

F2P YPP DDO

…and now I can’t get Y2K or YMCA out of my mind.  Bleh.

Anyway, Gamasutra has a pair of articles up that piqued my interest:

Puzzle Pirates Revenue Specifics

and

Dungeons and Dragons Online goes Free to Play

I’m sure that proponents and detractors can make up their own arguments at this point, but I’ll chime in and note that Puzzle Pirates is one of only three MMOs that I’ve spent money on (the others being Wizard 101 and Guild Wars), and that this move for DDO might just mean I go check it out.  If they have a reasonable scheme on the back end to capture some revenue, they might just be the fourth.

(And if SWTOR and Jumpgate Evolution have non-sub options, they might be fifth and sixth…)

Updated:  Raph Koster has a blurb up on another Gamasutra article here:

Free to Play MMOs

Good stuff.  Raph actually is neck deep in this sort of thing, what with Metaplace and all.  It’s a good read.

Update 2, more data from a War Cry interview:

More on DDO F2P

Update 3, more from the devs on why they are changing things up.  Notable among reasons cited are the changing demographics, and the need for shorter session gaming, and the restrictive binary system of subscriptions (in or out).  Someone gets it, and this is heartening to hear from the devs, since it’s part of what I’ve argued for a while now:

Why DDO went F2P

Read Full Post »

What He Said

It’s heartening to see others writing the same sort of arguments that I’d make.  Maybe it’s a shared delusion, but I really do think that the MMO market is poised for some interesting tectonic shifts in the relatively near future.  It’s the simple maturation of a market, despite the old generation doing all they can to maintain the status quo.

Spouse Aggro: F2P

Spouse Aggro: Mabinogi

Viva la revolution indeed.  At least this one just has digital blood in the imaginary streets.  I’m not looking forward to the pain involved in the awakening of the real world… but that’s another article.

Read Full Post »

World of Warcraft: Ticket to Ride

World of Warcraft has been compared to a theme park before.  The static world, colorful presentation and “gaming on rails” all lead to easy comparisons.  I won’t belabor those elements, since it’s enough for the sake of this article to frame the game in a theme park comparison.

No, what’s important to me at this point is the cost to the patron, and how the analogy can be used to illustrate the concept of microtransactions.

Read Full Post »