Scaling And Novel Loot

Like many players, I have been quick to complain about the gear treadmill - how MMOs focus on the acquisition of gear that increases arbitrary stats by arbitrary amounts, only to have the increases canceled out by corresponding improvements in the stats of the enemy.  The story of class foci in EQ2 goes to show that the alternatives aren't that much easier.

Last year, I picked up two major upgrades that go beyond mere numbers - the bonus from my epic class weapon and a pair of boots that removed the cost from a key buff, allowing my buff-based class to cast 20% more buffs.  This week I logged in to find the same pair of boots missing the focus effect.

The boots when I got them

The problem, as I noted at the time, was that this bonus was so large that it became mandatory on future gear upgrades.  When April's patch increased the level cap, along with a full gear reset, SOE went in and added a generic class focus stat that effectively says "your class buff here" on every piece of gear you loot.  This was pretty much pointless, so the system got another overhaul in this month's patch.  Now the foci are an inherent part of your character, earned as you level, and there's correspondingly one fewer line of text on every piece of gear in the game.

The boots today, with the key effect moved to my class focus tab (the random stat buffs are doled out to replace a separate portion of the focus system, which was tossed because there was generally only one sensible choice)

In some ways, this is a win for players.  A key mechanic is available earlier in the level progression, and we have neither the irritating scenario of having to find groups for old content (still required for the epic weapon bonus, at least for now) nor the absurdity of having the same stat assumed to be on every piece of gear in the game.  That said, the major thing that made certain pieces of gear somewhat unique and desirable is gone, leaving only arbitrary quantities of arbitrary stats.

Players Cannot Win In the EA vs Zynga Lawsuit

As Scott Jennings notes, the stakes are high in the lawsuit between Electronic Arts and Zynga.  Relatively few MMORPG players are likely to find sympathy for the defendant given their reputation.  As the lawsuit notes, has previously been accused of grand theft intellectual property by smaller studios who could not stand toe to toe with the studio in a fight.  I haven't gone anywhere near either game, but Tobold called this coming two weeks out - given his prominence in the page rankings, I'm half surprised that his post is not exhibit A for the plaintiffs.

That said, consider for a minute the consequences.  User interfaces in the MMO world are not known for their originality - if you've played one hotbar-based MMO, you will find that the competition has intentionally designed their systems to reduce your learning curve when you take their product for a test drive.  All talk of "WoW clones" aside, is this really a bad thing for players?  These interfaces survive not just because they are familiar, but also because they work. 

In that context, I'm concerned about a massive company with massive numbers of lawyers establishing a precedent for killing games based on their similarity to a competing product.  The US system of permitting patents on abstract concepts has created an environment where companies can no longer create new devices without paying someone - either a competitor or someone who never intends to market a product - for broad patents on the concepts behind their inventions.   Small and independent developers face enough challenges without the potentially prohibitive costs of licensing concepts from the EA's, Activisions, and - yes - Zyngas of the world who can afford to litigate.

I realize that the iterative evolution of MMO's, the conduct that Zynga stands accused of, and the state of the rest of the US Intellectual Property system are potentially three distinct points.  I'd just like them to stay that way. 

Gameplay Trumps Business Model

The conventional wisdom in discussions about the future of the subscription MMO is that the continued success of World of Warcraft proves that players are willing to pay each and every month for a quality product.  I think the quality of the product and the experience ultimately trumps the business model, which is precisely WHY I'm not buying this theory. 

What if the truth is that every MMO that has succeeded under the subscription model has done so because that game - at the time - offered a compelling experience that was not available elsewhere?  Looking at MMO history through this model, have games succeeded DESPITE the monthly fee - because players had nowhere else to go to get that particular experience - and not because of it?  What portions of the conventional wisdom survive under this alternate model for events, and which fall by the wayside?   

Survivors of the Subscription Era
According to MMORPG.com's list of all games by business model, there simply aren't that many MMORPG's with a mandatory subscription fee left on the market.  Many are either abandoned veterans that aren't worth the money it would cost to relaunch them or newbies that have yet to prove they can last under a subscription model.  Setting aside the 9.1 million subscriber gorilla for a moment, let's look at the highlights:

• Eve Online: Poster child for this model, whether it's space piracy, corporation scheming, hardcore PVP, or fully player-driven wars for galactic domination, Eve always has offered something that no other game on the market attempts.
  
• Rift: Technically speaking, having a well-produced game that sets and meets achievable goals and therefore delivers the most consistent update schedule in the industry isn't part of the in-game experience. 
  
  What I'd suggest is unique - based on my experience playing the game and comparing it to the other quest-based MMO's on the market - is the focus on playing with other people.  Soloing in Rift is 100% feasible and supported, but it just feels flavorless compared to all the other solo quest MMO's.  By contrast, Trion has made it easier than any other game to join groups, and I've had more fun grouping - including while leveling and even healing PUG's - than any other recent MMO I've played. 
  
  (Incidentally, if I'm correct, Guild Wars 2 may be a bigger threat to Rift than WoW, since its content is closer to what Trion does well.) 
  
• Darkfall: I don't know exactly what their state of financial success is, as the game is currently charging a reduced monthly fee and no price to create an account.  Again, though, the game offers hardcore sandbox PVP of a kind that "mainstream" games run screaming from.
  
• FFXI: Another title where I'm not so informed about current success.  In the past, though, this game has been the rear-guard of numerous old school mechanics like harsh death penalties, lengthy travel, and grinding mobs to level, but without the PVP focus of other more sandbox-ish games.  (FFXIV is harder to gauge because it only began charging a fee recently.) 
  
• Warhammer Online: At the risk of kicking a game that's down, I'd suggest that this demonstrates the flipside of the model.  Things like solo quests, group dungeons, and instanced PVP warfronts would NOT have been enough to sustain a subscription game because there were alternatives with these features on the market in 2009.  The unique portion that they did attempt to provide - RVR - proved less than compelling due to incentive and population balance issues.  

I'm not going to try and rehash this analysis for the heyday of every MMO in history, but a cursory examination looks promising.  Everquest brought the Diku MUD model into 3D.   Dark Age of Camelot did the open PVP thing correctly, with a third faction to balance populations.  LOTRO, back when it was moderately successful while charging a mandatory subscription, combined solo-accessability with a far more immersive story experience than the competition had to offer in 2007.  Games that failed to catch on often have a reason - poor execution (e.g. Vanguard) or lack of differentiation (DCUO versus similar action-based gameplay in non-subscription console games, many of which are even online these days). 

What about WoW?
All of which brings us back to WoW and the conventional wisdom.  At its launch, WoW fit the model to a T - it was the only game on the market offering the virtual world experience to players who wanted to solo or otherwise shed the inflexibility inherent in past group-oriented MMO's.  Today, though, every game that launches is derided as a "WoW Clone".  What is this dinosaur still doing if a subscription game indeed cannot endure viable competition?

I would suggest that modern WoW offers two things that its contemporaries don't:

1. Critical Mass.  While diminished by years of attrition, Blizzard's game still has the largest playerbase.  The success of Facebook does not mean that any competing social network can succeed simply by fielding a better product because the userbase is part of the value of the product.  In some ways, Blizzard's game remains an easy consensus choice because they successfully support the major forms of gameplay - solo, group, raid, PVP - under one roof.
   
2. Production Values.  No other game has the luxury of two-year expansion cycles with multiple months of non-NDA'ed public testing.  Many MMO's struggle for the resources to support all the major playstyles and ultimately end up doing one or more poorly.  It's very possible to fault Blizzard's decisions, and the game does still have the occasional bug or rough edge, but it's hard to fault Blizzard's execution in comparison to the rest of the market.

Do these things really add up to a compelling game experience not available elsewhere?  Both have their downsides - the broad playerbase makes it harder to please everyone, while the long development cycles mean lengthy droughts with no new content.  These are certainly not as big of a revolution as introducing solo play to the genre - and perhaps that's a part of the game's slow but inexorable decline.  

Back to the big picture
If the bottom line is that the game, and not the business model, defines success, how have we arrived at the era of the free to play conversion?  Entry barriers and flexibility are almost certainly part of the story - it's hard to be so worthless not to be a bargain at some reduced price.  For some games, like DDO, it's possible to have such a low profile that the free to play relaunch is actually many gamers' first chance to make a first impression.  Moreover, in the early days of the F2P switchover perhaps payment model flexibility was unique enough to be a selling point.

Today, however, many of the games that appear to have failed to compete at the price-level of the monthly fee have all made the switch.  Still charging a fee may or may not be a dealbreaker, but it's harder to spin the lack of a fee as a selling point (especially if the "optional" fee is not so optional).  In that case, the real question going forward is: When will we see a major F2P relaunch fold?  Perhaps not so soon, since many of these titles are owned by larger developers who can keep the lights on relatively indefinitely, especially propped up with a cash shop.  Still, if I'm right this question will begin to loom large in the coming years, because there just aren't that many subscription titles left to fail to sustain the subscription model. 

The Impact of Retail on SWTOR

One of the odd quirks of the SWTOR story is where all the revenue went.  With over two million copies sold at full price during the first months, that's hypothetically well over $120 million in revenue, not counting copies sold beyond the first month.  We have no way of knowing what the churn rate was, but even an average of 1 million subscribers paying $90 each over the course of six months between January and July is another $90 million.  No one knows what it cost to make the game - EA previously denied that the rumored $300 million budget was true, but development continued and then the advertising campaign kicked in, and there were ongoing staffing costs (prompting the two rounds of layoffs), so who knows what EA's total outlay is.  Still, one would imagine that gross revenues that can be no lower than $210 million would have put a dent in it. 

The catch is who gets the $210 million.  The store doesn't put the box on their shelves and pay an employee to run the checkout line for free.  The distributor doesn't ship the boxes to the store for free.  The pressing plant doesn't make the DVD's and stuff em in boxes for free.  WoWhead doesn't run full border ads for games that compete with WoW for free. 

For console games - not a perfect analogy because the console maker collects roughly 20% off the top - figures that are routinely cited give less than 50% of the revenue to the developer and publisher (in this case the same corporation).  The numbers get much more favorable for direct downloads and recurring subscriptions, which is a big part of why studios like them, especially since they're often serving multiple gigabytes in patches to even the retail customers.  This, in turn, is why the high churn rate hurts the game's outlook so dramatically - one of the biggest benefits to the developer to having a monthly fee is that they get a much larger cut of that revenue compared to the initial box sales. 

In this context, it starts to make sense why EA is throwing around numbers of half a million subscribers - it's never been stated for precisely how long but presumably a few years - to break even on this game.  If they're keeping only half of that initial revenue, seeing box sales decline in both volume and pricing, and continuing to bleed hundreds of thousands of subscribers each quarter, it's going to take a long time for them to break even on even $300 million in total development plus marketing costs.  One wonders if the picture would have been different had they gone online only - but I suppose EA's console retail presence wouldn't have allowed them to try such a move.