No Content For Station Cash
As Wilhelm's analysis notes, SOE is getting out of the business of allowing Station Cash to pay for anything that was previously worth paying for under the old subscription model - no expansions or other content and no subscription fees. They are fully entitled to do this. Indeed, it's puzzling that they are just now noticing that Station Cash sales were reducing the cost of their product - I'm pretty sure that February 2010's Sentinel's Fate expansion was available for Station Cash (after the one-week retail exclusive window). As Bhagpuss notes, they even managed to announce it properly and in advance. (On the downside, they just learned that lesson the hard way, but at least they learned it rather than repeat it.)
The last time I took part in a triple Station Cash sale, sometime around April, I was on the fence about whether to purchase $15 or $20 worth of credit. I elected the latter, rather than fund the stuff I wanted to purchase out of my existing balance - I figured that I would likely use the extra SC to pay for content or game time in either EQ2 or DCUO.
Having learned that this month is my last chance to spend the SC on content, I elected to call the $5 a relatively cheap reminder of what happens when you purchase more virtual currency than you have immediate plans to spend. I cut my losses and grabbed three DCUO DLC packs that I may not ever use, rather than continue to hold a SC balance that increasingly cannot be used to buy anything that I want.
Aggressive Marketing
As Spinks kindly noticed, just last week I was rambling about whether the DLC model for MMO's is actually sustainable. I'll be the first to concede that paying SOE $20 for all of the paid content they added to both of the two SOE games I played over the course of a year certainly does not fall into the sustainable category. That said, I'd have more sympathy for their desire to receive an honest day's pay for an honest day's work if it weren't for their own self-inflicted and self-described "aggressive" marketing practices.
The problem is that the cost of Station Cash item can vary by more than six-fold if you stack a triple station cash promotion with a 50% off sale and a Walmart-exclusive point card bonus. Players did not create that situation, and you don't see SOE similarly crying about the need to "protect the revenue they need to offset costs" of the mounts and vanity items they will continue to offer in the SC store for nominal prices that exceed $10 per item per character.
To preserve this "aggressive" regime, they are cutting off the ability to pay with store-bought cards. To my knowledge, EQ2's most recent expansion was not offered in retail stores (presumably due to the retail cut), so SC was one of the last avenues available for those who don't want to provide a company that got hacked last year with their credit cards. They're also removing a mechanism for price discrimination by players like myself who don't play enough to justify $220 annually in expansion and subscription fees but who would otherwise be happy to support the product. Given how thin this year's content is, I'll be hard pressed to justify yet another $40 expansion box - potentially the third in 20 months - this fall if I have to pay full price.
P.S. In a mostly unrelated story, Bioware's single player DLC division has some commentary on how successful the model is - the comments have a distinct feel that people who don't like it are out of luck because every single player game will be diverting content from the release game to paid DLC within five years.
PSA: SWTOR Racial Grandfathering
Details are presumably subject to change, but this week's SWTOR community Q&A has a previously un-answered tidbit about the game's free to play shift. Previously created characters will NOT be locked due to their species, though they will be subject to limits on character slots.
(We already knew that no classes would be restricted, so this appears to mean that you can have all of your old characters. I'd also be shocked if they did not offer character slots for sale to non-subscribers. While companies do want to preserve some incentives to subscribe, more slots means more characters, which should in principle mean more revenue, regardless of payment model.)
For players who have their eye on some of the non-human races, this is potentially a significant benefit to (re-)subscribing prior to the changeover and creating any characters that have been on your to-do list. (Personally, I plan to wait for the rumored August world event.) If you are considering trying the game in November and have your eye on a specific race, it might also be worth your while to download the newly unlimited free trial (through level 15) - no promises that these characters will also be grandfathered, but it would seem like spending effort to make sure they slam the door on the fingers of potential customers would be counterproductive.
(We already knew that no classes would be restricted, so this appears to mean that you can have all of your old characters. I'd also be shocked if they did not offer character slots for sale to non-subscribers. While companies do want to preserve some incentives to subscribe, more slots means more characters, which should in principle mean more revenue, regardless of payment model.)
For players who have their eye on some of the non-human races, this is potentially a significant benefit to (re-)subscribing prior to the changeover and creating any characters that have been on your to-do list. (Personally, I plan to wait for the rumored August world event.) If you are considering trying the game in November and have your eye on a specific race, it might also be worth your while to download the newly unlimited free trial (through level 15) - no promises that these characters will also be grandfathered, but it would seem like spending effort to make sure they slam the door on the fingers of potential customers would be counterproductive.
A Reset Too Far
The last time EQ2 raised its level cap, back in 2010's The Sentinel's Fate (TSF) expansion, SOE provided only two overland zones for an increase of ten levels - the previous ten-level increase had added four overland zones. This resulted in some absurd quest design, in which one hub awards nine quest completes for killing seven mobs just to hand out more quest exp. Even with this extreme measure, players were level 90 within hours of the expansion launch. The irony was that TSF had a variety of factions and repeatable quests solo players could have used to earn reputation. It would have been a far better expansion with a smaller cap increase (2-5) and a faction curve that allowed solo players to continue leveling as they worked on daily quests.
(Last year's Destiny of Velious expansion did not raise the cap, despite adding two overland zones, and, again, offered robust endgame daily quest options. This expansion too could have come with a few levels that continue into the daily quest grind.)
The game's current cap increase - two levels - came with a single overland zone. This should have been fine, except for a minor problem - an aggressive gear reset obsoleted every single piece of content that existed in the game prior to the current patch (other than an extreme hard-mode raid that was only marginally more rewarding than current, easier content). As a result, all the factions I failed to complete last expansion are no longer worthwhile. In their place is a single daily quest - once per day I can do a single dungeon (assisted by my mercenary) in exchange for a piece of random level 92 gear. There are some other repeatable quests in the new zone, but these are pretty much pointless, as there are no factions or items associated with them - effectively, you're just grinding exp.
There are some things I can do to speed the journey along. I have some veteran reward potions stashed away, I probably still earn non-zero amounts of exp from last expansions' content (even if I no longer need the rewards), and I can always betray and/or mentor down. (Or even group.) That said, it does seem unusually wasteful to cast aside so much content, with so little to take its place.
Can We Monetize MMO's Via DLC?
"The use of a free-to-play monetization model requires careful placement of your best content, what I call "carrots," on the other side of payment opportunities that I call "gates.""We've had a week to process the bombshell of SWTOR's sudden (albeit in development through November) planned change in business model. Many of us, myself included, have thrown out roughly the same ideas about how the game's solo leveling story content was its best feature, while its endgame appears to be failing to retain players.
- "Game monetization expert Ramin Shokrizade", writing for Gamasutra
For the sake of argument, I will assume Mr. Shokrizade means that Bioware should have monetized access to the story missions, which he calls the "best parts" of the game. I was fumbling around the same suggestion a few months ago in light of rumors about a potential added fee for the game's forthcoming new planet - this seemed inconsistent with a subscription model, and I had assumed that they would not take the subscription off the table so early. Could selling access to content throughout the game - perhaps on a planet by planet basis similar to LOTRO's model - really have doubled or tripled Bioware's revenues?
I'm not convinced for a number of reasons.
- It would be hard to justify the $60 fee for the box if very little of the content were included. While retail definitely ate a chunk of this revenue, we know that over two million copies were sold. That's a lot of microtransactions.
- Just as charging the monthly fee rewards players for finishing early, charging by the planet rewards players for skipping optional content or quitting outright if they're not loving the story. Offering up opportunities to quit every few levels might not be in the developers' best interest, especially if you run into players like myself who struggle to find a class with both a good story and fun mechanics.
- The real issue, though, is development costs. Say that Bioware could have sold the base game with just the Act I stories but no subscription for the full $60 and charged some amount of money per planet per class thereafter. This doesn't add up to much more than the revenue they get from their single player offerings and paid DLC, which cost much less to develop. Further, adding more planets in the future may well be cost prohibitive (a theory that I suppose we are about to test).
Meanwhile, for all the hype concerning the performance of Turbine's approach to free to play, which is roughly what we're discussing here, there are some signs that Turbine may be struggling with the sustainability issue. We are seeing both point bundles and expansions bundled into larger and more expensive packages, while more and more power is added for sale in the store. That said, if the answer really is that we can't have games like SWTOR because there is no way to make them commercially viable, that's a pretty big disappointment for the future.
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