Having been unemployed now for the better part of a year, scrambling for odd jobs and attempting a career change, I’m more sensitive than ever to the cost of things. There are a great many rants that I could indulge in, but at the moment, I’m in a contemplative mood.
Y’see, payment models are part of these MMO games that I write about here and there. Syl has a new post up that’s tapping into a bit of the blogging hivemind, which is buzzing about money again. I’m of a mind that the subscription model is a very poor value for me, F2P is a bit better when it’s not annoyingly restrictive or weirdly monetized, and “buy and play” of Guild Wars and Wizard 101 is still my favorite model.
Thing is, what little gaming I do these days is either on my smartphone with something like Slingshot Braves (which I’m still not spending money on, though I’d like to, in a way) or Flight Rising on my PC. In the former, I’d probably pony up a few dollars if I could buy specific gear I want, and in the latter, I don’t mind advertisements as the monetization vector.
It makes me wonder… has an MMO toyed with advertisements in their major cities? As noted in Darths and Droids, of all places, games actually can benefit from some verisimilitude by having sloganeering or even advertisement in big cities. The setting has to make sense, of course, and advertising isn’t always really a big money maker, but it seems like something someone might have tried, or could have tried. The Secret World, or The Matrix Online, maybe.
Anyway, I certainly don’t begrudge devs their money. I have my own money problems, and won’t pay for something that doesn’t offer me good value, but, as with Humble Bundles, I’m OK with spending money on games. I’m not a whale, I’m a stingy consumer. Offer me something worth paying for, and I probably will. Try to manipulate me with stupid things like lockboxes, slot machines, subscriptions or other obvious ploys to get money with little effort, and I’ll just move on.
I believe Anarchy Online had adverts on vidscreens in the cities way back in, I think, 2002 or so. I remember watching a promotional video for a real-life heavy metal band on one.
It was discussed a lot in the early days as a possibility I seem to remember but the main problem seemed to be that, since the huge majority of MMOs at that time were fantasy-themed, it would be too difficult to integrate. It certainly would work in TSW though, especially since the world there is already full of advertising for fictional products.
It’s a funny thing about the money – many comments I’ve read against f2p lately make it sound as if it’s basically dirty and outrageous that devs would try and make money this way. Subscriptions aren’t questioned for a second because hey, devs gotta live right – but the moment it’s a system based on ‘manipulating you into micro transactions’, it’s essentially morally wrong.
I must have missed the train where they explain to you why devs aren’t allowed to make money in f2p games.
Indeed, there’s a weird blind spot there for subs. Sometimes it’s just people railing on what they think of as *worse* in the F2P games, and some of those schemes really can be skeevy, but there can be some pretty questionable decisions behind subs, too.