It's Friday night, which would ordinarily mean a new episode of the Darth Hater SWTOR podcast to download. However, in an abrupt turn of events, unconfirmed but plausible rumors on reddit indicate there may never be another episode of the show.
Details are extremely sparse - all we know is that the site has not updated in 2013, including failure to cover this week's patch (normally a mainstay of their daily updates). The Reddit rumors indicate that most or all of the staff have been dismissed. Unless I missed it, there was no direct indication that the site was in trouble. However, the hosts did spend their presumptive final episode reflecting on both the game's first year of release and their experiences over the show's 3+ year run - suggesting that perhaps this possibility was somewhere on their minds.
We will probably never know enough information to determine whether stones should be thrown at the Curse network, which picked up the site in September 2011. I'd imagine that hosting the podcasts and images along with paying the staff cost Curse some amount of money, while advertising revenue was very likely down due to the game's limited success. It's a sad irony that, after spending a year covering layoffs of Bioware developers - many of whom the team got to know personally - the podcast crew may have gotten the same treatment. Even if Curse has future plans for the site, their failure to let the team say a proper farewell to the community they created is disappointing.
As a blogger who plays many games, I'm dependent on high quality sites and podcasts like Darth Hater to stay informed about day to day events. Beyond traveling to cover conventions at personal expense, the show made an unprecedented accomplishment - the coverage of SWTOR's launch came in episode number 105. I.e. they released over two years worth of weekly episodes about an MMO that had not yet released. Between the years of dedication and expense - and the reality that only an intellectual property like Star Wars could possible provide enough material to talk about for that long - this benchmark may never be surpassed.
Best wishes to the team, wherever you may wander, and many thanks for your years of hard work.
Early Impressions of TSW Post-Buy-To-Play
With its business model out of the way, I've given the Secret World another look. The game still has some rough edges - in particular a relatively steep learning curve. Given a bit more time (and a lot more out-of-game research), I'm starting to see the game's strengths - a story experience and the skill-collection minigame that serves as the class system. I'm also wondering that these strengths may not be well suited for longevity.
Learning Curve
My initial impressions of TSW pre-launch were not overly positive. Part of the issue is documentation. The game offers embedded YouTube video tutorials, but these often feel more promotional than instructional. Some of the challenges are due to ways in which TSW does things differently from other MMO's. A few examples:
The Story and World
Through a combination of art, sound, and writing, TSW presents a very distinctive world experience. You may or may not like their specific vision - in particular, I did not find the NPC's for two of the game's three factions in any way people that I wanted to be working for over any extended periods of time - but I definitely tip my hat to them for making the environment and feel of the game stand out.
That said, one quirk to the game is that most (all?) missions are repeatable. The quests are also non-linear, in that there are not enforced levels, or a specific order in which they must be completed. There are definite advantages to this approach, as it leaves the door open for players to replay content (either alone or to help friends), especially if they find they need more character advancement before they can forge onwards. The catch is that when you do quests in the "wrong" order and/or repeat too many quests just because they are conveniently located, you might try to pick up a piece of the story only to find that it is no longer challenging or rewarding due to your character's progression.
Collecting Skills
The skill system is another area with a major learning curve. The tutorial gives you a weapon with some basic skills and enough skill points to purchase a few more skills. This is a trap. Instead of advancing down the offered vertical path, you are supposed to immediately pick up a second weapon. Almost all DPS weapons generate free resources for both of your two skillsets, so you are really at a disadvantage in terms of character power and versatility if you fail to branch out.
This hurdle aside, the system is a fun skill collection minigame. I started with a sword - a somewhat tank-oriented weapon - and a pair of pistols. An early passive ability on one of the pistol trees turns unused pistol resources on mobs you kill into free passive healing. I'm experimenting with several other combinations, but at least I appear to have a better understanding of what you're aspiring towards in character builds.
As with other parts of the game, though,. one a caveat for the future: the problem with progression systems which allow you to pick which skill to get next is that you will (hopefully) get the skills you want first. Once you have something that works, it's always fun to tinker, but there is a risk that future upgrades will be less rewarding if you don't really need them.
Outlook
Overall, I certainly don't regret my purchase - all $15 of it. Thus far the game has been a fun and unique experience. That said, I can also see how longevity might be limited as players complete their main storylines and skill decks. This is by no means a unique challenge for TSW, but it might help explain part of the game's limited success under the old subscription model.
Learning Curve
My initial impressions of TSW pre-launch were not overly positive. Part of the issue is documentation. The game offers embedded YouTube video tutorials, but these often feel more promotional than instructional. Some of the challenges are due to ways in which TSW does things differently from other MMO's. A few examples:
 |
| Nicholas "Brevane" Brevane - named for a continent in the Rift expansion I have yet to play, and Templar resident of the Arcadia (RP) server |
- The text at character creation informs you that your first and last names are cosmetic and that your nickname is your unique character identifier. I spent a while beating my head against the system trying to generate nicknames that sounded like actual names and were not taken, only to find that most players in-game seem to be using nicknames that sound more like social media handles.
- Pressing the X button toggles a "sprint" ability that doubles as your mount-equivalent. There was a brief tooltip on this, but it did little to explain how it worked. It does not seem to be necessary to hold the button down to continue running - not sure how I got the idea that this was the case, but this happened - but the function does break when you enter combat.
- It's possible that I did not click on the correct Youtube link, but currently 100% of my understanding of the game's stat and gear systems comes from having read out of game guides. Gear is statted for tanking, damage, or healing, but some characters (especially solo) will want to take a more hybrid approach to their gear. On a related note, there was a tutorial on how to attach glyphs to gear, but I did not remember how to do this by the time I found non-tutorial gear I wanted to glyph.
- There is a buyback function for accidentally vendoring items, but I had to google to find out where it is hidden. (Answer: a nondescript button on the bottom of the "sell" panel of the vendor UI.)
The Story and World
Through a combination of art, sound, and writing, TSW presents a very distinctive world experience. You may or may not like their specific vision - in particular, I did not find the NPC's for two of the game's three factions in any way people that I wanted to be working for over any extended periods of time - but I definitely tip my hat to them for making the environment and feel of the game stand out.
That said, one quirk to the game is that most (all?) missions are repeatable. The quests are also non-linear, in that there are not enforced levels, or a specific order in which they must be completed. There are definite advantages to this approach, as it leaves the door open for players to replay content (either alone or to help friends), especially if they find they need more character advancement before they can forge onwards. The catch is that when you do quests in the "wrong" order and/or repeat too many quests just because they are conveniently located, you might try to pick up a piece of the story only to find that it is no longer challenging or rewarding due to your character's progression.
Collecting Skills
This hurdle aside, the system is a fun skill collection minigame. I started with a sword - a somewhat tank-oriented weapon - and a pair of pistols. An early passive ability on one of the pistol trees turns unused pistol resources on mobs you kill into free passive healing. I'm experimenting with several other combinations, but at least I appear to have a better understanding of what you're aspiring towards in character builds.
As with other parts of the game, though,. one a caveat for the future: the problem with progression systems which allow you to pick which skill to get next is that you will (hopefully) get the skills you want first. Once you have something that works, it's always fun to tinker, but there is a risk that future upgrades will be less rewarding if you don't really need them.
Outlook
Overall, I certainly don't regret my purchase - all $15 of it. Thus far the game has been a fun and unique experience. That said, I can also see how longevity might be limited as players complete their main storylines and skill decks. This is by no means a unique challenge for TSW, but it might help explain part of the game's limited success under the old subscription model.
Pet Battle Progression
In the process, I functionally completed the pre-Pandaria portion of the pet battle game. My pet collection currently stands at 340 unique pets and counting, including all but three of the pets that can be captured prior to the new expansion content - the overwhelming majority of these are green or blue quality. (The three stragglers are the Qiraji Guardling, which only spawns in summer, and two highly camped rare spawns, the Minfernal and the Scourged Whelpling.) I have beaten all of the trainers up to the Cataclysm era (including the new Darkmoon Faire pet master) and leveled my first half dozen pets to the max level of 25.
The real progression in the pet battle minigame is not just the highest level individual pet you can field, but also the overall diversity of your stable. In general, wild pet battles will occasionally throw in something you weren't expecting, and the NPC pet masters are especially likely hit you with tough line-ups. You can in principle tame and use whatever you find locally - indeed, a few of my pets are recent captures who started above level 20 - but you will likely need to catch and raise some pets to deal with high level pet battles.
That said, there are a few downsides to the system:
- Because this system was added to the game in its fourth expansion, players looking to jump right into Pandaria will need to spend a fair amount of time catching up before they can actually battle the pets in the expansion content. My approach - spending basically a month doing an extremely thorough world safari - is overkill, but the time is significant.
- Account-wide progress is a blessing and a curse. It is nice to be able to park alts in locations with rare spawns or account-level daily quests to re-battle the pet masters. Perhaps I would have burned out on this system if I had felt that I needed to regrind it on any alts. That said, short of creating a new account I will never have the option of starting over with a clean slate - any character I ever play will have all of these max level pets at their disposal.
- Competition for rare spawns in the world can be somewhat unfortunate. The two pets I just can't nab are constantly camped with multiple players at seemingly all hours of the day. Because only a fraction of spawns are the coveted rare quality (there are items to upgrade pets later, but these are rare and expensive), pet completionists are not intended to stop at just one. It's a bit jarring, because this level of competition does not occur anywhere else in WoW at the moment, so it's odd to see it rear its head in a minigame.
New Year's Resolutions for 2013
My annual New Year's Resolution post is usually lengthy but not that insightful - half of the items are short term goals that get done soon afterwards and the other half are more pie-in-the sky things that don't happen at all. My year for 2012 can be summarized with two lines of facts:
- Prior to October: Level capped characters in seven different MMO's simultaneously, posting on the blog every 2-3 days (11-18 posts/month)
- Post-October: Level capped characters remain in only three MMO's due to expansions I have yet to catch up to, posting to the blog once or twice per week, +1 infant
I'm happy with this turn of events, but it does put realistic constraints on what I can aspire to in-game during the coming year. A few resolutions, which are more qualitative than specific:
Work on what I have
2012 wasn't all bad when it came to trying new things. I started and capped characters in STO and SWTOR, along with some very brief (often one-evening) visits to Aion, Tera, EQ1, and TSW. That said, it was a tough year to carve out time for anything new, and that does not figure to change in 2013.
I currently have what I need (access and game time as appropriate) for content I have yet to use in WoW, LOTRO, DCUO, TSW, DDO, STO, and SWTOR. I don't expect any of these titles to fold in 2013, but it really makes more sense to focus on my backlog at this point. I'm fine with my budget where it currently sits, but it's pointless to collect more stuff that I don't have time to play - the best sale price is still a waste if I don't use the content.
Learn when NOT to beat the business model
While my time is scarce, I do get enjoyment out of snagging a good bargain. Sometimes, when the payoff is high enough, it can make sense to grind in-game to "beat the business model".
For instance, according to SWTOR Spy's Cartel calculator, I have unlocked more than 10,000 Cartel Coins' worth of stuff by purchasing the relevant unlocks on the GTN for in-game credits. This would have cost me $80 in the cash shop, while species and inventory unlocks I picked up for alts during my last month of subscription time could potentially have cost another $40. I did spend a fair amount of extra time in game sending my companions on slicing missions and farming daily quests (which also awarded several high end pieces of gear for my main) to pay for all of these unlocks, but this was definitely a major payoff for my time.
Even so, cash shops are a reality of the market today, and I should really make better use of them. If an unlock is purely cosmetic, it makes sense to do without or set it aside as a reward for earning the credits in game. When it comes to exp potions and other things that affect the rate of advancement, it's worth asking whether the game is worth playing if it's worth paying to play it less. However, when an unlock actually impacts quality of life - e.g. not being able to harvest materials I encounter in the world because one of my crewskill slots is locked - it really makes more sense to pay a couple dollars and move on.
Focus on my perspective
This blog will celebrate its 1000th post early next year and its fifth birthday in the spring. While limited time has been the most immediate cause for my current drop in posts, the results are somewhat positive.
I don't view reporting the news as one of this blog's strengths. I will post immediate reactions sometimes, especially if I have an opinion I'm not seeing from other folks, but often the "breaking news" of the MMO world does not even come with enough detail to support in-depth analysis. Because I know that most of my posts will not be timely, I'm free to spend most of my limited time working on more of the big picture, such as trends that tie recent developments into past experiences.
I intentionally don't have a set format or schedule for the blog, because this is a hobby and I prefer flexibility to write what I want. That the schedule happens to support the kind of posts that I like to write is a happy coincidence.
Thanks to all of my readers, best wishes, and a happy new year!
2012 MMO Expenditures
I've been keeping detailed logs of my MMO spending for roughly two years now, and I elected to publish them for the first time last year. My experience probably isn't typical, as I spent a total of $275 on eight different MMO's in 2012, where most people probably stick to a smaller number of games. That said, two broad observations:
And now for the full ledger. My accounting practice is to bill purchases of content and cash store currency in the year they were paid for, but to bill game time in the year in which it is actually used. Titles are listed in chronological order.
World of Warcraft: $80 (+$60?) (+$35 to 2013)
I wrote an annual pass post-mortem when the year of game time I purchased through that promotion lapsed. The short form is that I don't regret the approximately $80 for ten months of game time that I used in 2012, but the $60 Diablo III purchase (which I'm not counting against my MMO budget because it isn't an MMO) that I made in order to get that deal was a bit of a fail.
One big difference between this and past expansion cycles was the early availability of holiday discounts on the brand new expansion. Through holiday sales and promos, I was able to snag the Pandaria box and a 6o day time card with which to play it for $35. (I have yet to use these things, so I'm counting them for next year.)
Rift: $10.72
As a brief recap, I had paid for the box at launch last year, ended the included month at level 36 or so, and leveled the rest of the way to the game's cap using Trion's frequent free retrial weekends. Just when I was thinking of coming back for a month, I ran into a firesale on game time cards - 90 days for less than a single month. Perhaps they were afraid they'd be stuck with unsold inventory if the game went free to play? In principle, I still have some time left, though I'd have to purchase the expansion - even if I did want to re-roll, I'd probably want access to the new souls.
Star Trek Online: $11.40
I went foraging for an old retail box of this game to snag one month's subscription time. This is useful because you get to keep any additional storage granted by being a subscriber at each rank (10 levels) tier. I also spent $5 on the smallest quantity of Cryptic points so I could purchase an early increase to my duty officer cap.
SWTOR: $70
I waited until patch 1.2, which was widely viewed as the patch that was going to finish all of the odds and ends that didn't get done in time for release. As a reward for my patience, I got the account key direct from EA for $40 instead of the list price of $60. (I also somehow qualified for the "loyalty" bonus minipet that was granted to current subscribers for sticking with the game during the early months, despite having shown up that week.) I subbed up for an additional month to get my first character to the level cap, and subbed up again just prior to the free to play relaunch in order to take advantage of some of the grandfathered perks former subscribers get.
EQ2 AND DCUO: $20
I don't remember exactly why I chose to throw $20 at a station cash sale sometime around April/May. Through a series of sales so aggressive that they forced all content and game time out of SOE's in-game stores for good, I ended up turning that $20 into the $40 Age of Discovery expansion and 6 months of subscription time in EQ2 (I forget the exact discount you get for six month subs, probably $75ish).
(I also snagged the three DCUO DLC packs I did not already own at the time of the "we are taking DLC out of the cash store because our marketing people have broken the payment model" final sale in August, but I think that was from the Station Cash leftover from last year.)
Setting aside the absurdity of how long it took SOE to notice this was going on, I'll be the first to admit that the status quo could not continue. EQ2 may also have finally tweaked its payment model to the point where paying on a non-subscription basis is worthwhile. That said, some of EQ2's recent expansions have been so thin that there really wasn't much more than a month's worth of entertainment that a solo player could carve out of them. It's hard to justify $50-60 for an expansion box plus either subscription time or unlocks if I'm going to get so little time out of them compared to all the other titles on this list - no wonder Smedley wants to get out of the content creation business.
LOTRO: $43
I paid $8 for a small Turbine Point bundle to snag the barter wallet upgrade. It is irritating that Turbine is so heavily focused on charging for fixes to longstanding design issues (in this case, their addiction to non-stacking character-bound token rewards), and I probably could have earned the Turbine points in game, but I decided solving this problem was worth the $8.
Then Turbine decided that the first expansion to player inventory since 2007 would be exclusive to the $70 Rohan expansion bundle for several months. Fortunately, Turbine can be counted on to discount expansions aggressively, so I just waited a few weeks and got the bags and whistles edition for 50% off, i.e. less than what people paid for the regular edition at launch. This bundle also included a fair number of Turbine points, which I will no doubt need to spend on unlocking basic UI improvements over the next year.
DDO: $25
Speaking of Turbine expansion discounts, I also snagged the DDO expansion for 50% off through a Steam sale. Apparently I was lacking in patience, as Turbine slashed the price further down to 75% off for Black Friday. I hadn't spent any real world money on this game since mid-2010 (albeit only playing the game sporadically during that window), I suppose a few extra bucks isn't the end of the world.
One could argue whether I actually needed this expansion in the first place, as I do not have any high level characters. The one thing that I have gotten a fair amount of use out of is one of the bonus throw-ins: a greater tome of learning. I generally don't favor paying for experience boosts, but this particular bonus actually changes the way that you play the game by adding a hefty bonus to each quest the first time you complete it (reset if you true reincarnate). This effectively removes the requirement to repeat midlevel content for exp. I'm happy to repeat DDO's content eventually, but I'd rather not do it immediately, and now I don't have to.
The Secret World: $15
I was poised to skip every single MMO that launched in 2012 until a last minute switch in payment model, followed by an Amazon sale offering the newly buy-to-play title for $15, made TSW too intriguing to pass up. I had initially passed on this title as much due to my crowded schedule and a few rough edges during my very brief visit to the beta as to anything on the game's merits (such as its subscription model).
The game-changer with the buy-to-play switch is not the amount of money, but rather the amount of time I would need to invest immediately to determine whether the product is worth future subscription payments. I've spent a few hours with the game so far and it does show some promise, especially as a secondary title. I can't see how my one-time payment suddenly props up the game's finances, but I suppose it couldn't hurt?
Grand Total: $275 (not counting DIII)
Subtotal for Content/Currency Purchases: $123 (includes $25 of the $40 SWTOR box price)
Subtotal for Game Time: $152
- Game time for specific two subscription titles - WoW and SWTOR (well, it was) - represents about half of my total ($125, counting the first $15 of the SWTOR box cost as payment for the first 30 days). This number is higher than it could have been due to the annual pass. Even so, my spending on these two games EACH nearly doubles the next highest item on my ledger.
- Setting aside those two subscription payments (WoW's was technically discounted), I did not pay full price for anything that I purchased this year - I'd estimate that I paid about half of the asking price overall. Some of these savings come from retailers looking to dump stock, but many of them were provided directly from the publishers. It's not accurate to look at all of this as lost revenue for the studios - some of the lower priority titles would not have made the cut at full price. Even so, sales are a reality of the business, and are going to be a factor for anyone looking to base their business model primarily on one-time buy-to-play transactions. As the number of games I play increases, it is easier and easier to wait for the sale before pulling the trigger, especially if there is any reason to be concerned about quality/polish.
And now for the full ledger. My accounting practice is to bill purchases of content and cash store currency in the year they were paid for, but to bill game time in the year in which it is actually used. Titles are listed in chronological order.
I wrote an annual pass post-mortem when the year of game time I purchased through that promotion lapsed. The short form is that I don't regret the approximately $80 for ten months of game time that I used in 2012, but the $60 Diablo III purchase (which I'm not counting against my MMO budget because it isn't an MMO) that I made in order to get that deal was a bit of a fail.
One big difference between this and past expansion cycles was the early availability of holiday discounts on the brand new expansion. Through holiday sales and promos, I was able to snag the Pandaria box and a 6o day time card with which to play it for $35. (I have yet to use these things, so I'm counting them for next year.)
Rift: $10.72
As a brief recap, I had paid for the box at launch last year, ended the included month at level 36 or so, and leveled the rest of the way to the game's cap using Trion's frequent free retrial weekends. Just when I was thinking of coming back for a month, I ran into a firesale on game time cards - 90 days for less than a single month. Perhaps they were afraid they'd be stuck with unsold inventory if the game went free to play? In principle, I still have some time left, though I'd have to purchase the expansion - even if I did want to re-roll, I'd probably want access to the new souls.
Star Trek Online: $11.40
I went foraging for an old retail box of this game to snag one month's subscription time. This is useful because you get to keep any additional storage granted by being a subscriber at each rank (10 levels) tier. I also spent $5 on the smallest quantity of Cryptic points so I could purchase an early increase to my duty officer cap.
SWTOR: $70
I waited until patch 1.2, which was widely viewed as the patch that was going to finish all of the odds and ends that didn't get done in time for release. As a reward for my patience, I got the account key direct from EA for $40 instead of the list price of $60. (I also somehow qualified for the "loyalty" bonus minipet that was granted to current subscribers for sticking with the game during the early months, despite having shown up that week.) I subbed up for an additional month to get my first character to the level cap, and subbed up again just prior to the free to play relaunch in order to take advantage of some of the grandfathered perks former subscribers get.
EQ2 AND DCUO: $20
I don't remember exactly why I chose to throw $20 at a station cash sale sometime around April/May. Through a series of sales so aggressive that they forced all content and game time out of SOE's in-game stores for good, I ended up turning that $20 into the $40 Age of Discovery expansion and 6 months of subscription time in EQ2 (I forget the exact discount you get for six month subs, probably $75ish).
(I also snagged the three DCUO DLC packs I did not already own at the time of the "we are taking DLC out of the cash store because our marketing people have broken the payment model" final sale in August, but I think that was from the Station Cash leftover from last year.)
Setting aside the absurdity of how long it took SOE to notice this was going on, I'll be the first to admit that the status quo could not continue. EQ2 may also have finally tweaked its payment model to the point where paying on a non-subscription basis is worthwhile. That said, some of EQ2's recent expansions have been so thin that there really wasn't much more than a month's worth of entertainment that a solo player could carve out of them. It's hard to justify $50-60 for an expansion box plus either subscription time or unlocks if I'm going to get so little time out of them compared to all the other titles on this list - no wonder Smedley wants to get out of the content creation business.
LOTRO: $43
I paid $8 for a small Turbine Point bundle to snag the barter wallet upgrade. It is irritating that Turbine is so heavily focused on charging for fixes to longstanding design issues (in this case, their addiction to non-stacking character-bound token rewards), and I probably could have earned the Turbine points in game, but I decided solving this problem was worth the $8.
Then Turbine decided that the first expansion to player inventory since 2007 would be exclusive to the $70 Rohan expansion bundle for several months. Fortunately, Turbine can be counted on to discount expansions aggressively, so I just waited a few weeks and got the bags and whistles edition for 50% off, i.e. less than what people paid for the regular edition at launch. This bundle also included a fair number of Turbine points, which I will no doubt need to spend on unlocking basic UI improvements over the next year.
DDO: $25
Speaking of Turbine expansion discounts, I also snagged the DDO expansion for 50% off through a Steam sale. Apparently I was lacking in patience, as Turbine slashed the price further down to 75% off for Black Friday. I hadn't spent any real world money on this game since mid-2010 (albeit only playing the game sporadically during that window), I suppose a few extra bucks isn't the end of the world.
One could argue whether I actually needed this expansion in the first place, as I do not have any high level characters. The one thing that I have gotten a fair amount of use out of is one of the bonus throw-ins: a greater tome of learning. I generally don't favor paying for experience boosts, but this particular bonus actually changes the way that you play the game by adding a hefty bonus to each quest the first time you complete it (reset if you true reincarnate). This effectively removes the requirement to repeat midlevel content for exp. I'm happy to repeat DDO's content eventually, but I'd rather not do it immediately, and now I don't have to.
The Secret World: $15
I was poised to skip every single MMO that launched in 2012 until a last minute switch in payment model, followed by an Amazon sale offering the newly buy-to-play title for $15, made TSW too intriguing to pass up. I had initially passed on this title as much due to my crowded schedule and a few rough edges during my very brief visit to the beta as to anything on the game's merits (such as its subscription model).
The game-changer with the buy-to-play switch is not the amount of money, but rather the amount of time I would need to invest immediately to determine whether the product is worth future subscription payments. I've spent a few hours with the game so far and it does show some promise, especially as a secondary title. I can't see how my one-time payment suddenly props up the game's finances, but I suppose it couldn't hurt?
Grand Total: $275 (not counting DIII)
Subtotal for Content/Currency Purchases: $123 (includes $25 of the $40 SWTOR box price)
Subtotal for Game Time: $152
Everquest's $200 Legacy
"Our opinion is that today's MMOs, and I'd include ours in that mix, are stagnant and stuck in this model that we frankly helped create with EverQuest, where we put new content in the game, and they go through it at an incredibly fast rate because of sites like Thottbot and that kind of stuff," Smedley said." - SOE's John Smedley
Keen has some commentary up on Smedley's latest views, including his philosophy on business models. While the model of killing ten rats to loot and wear their stuff is indeed a core part of MMO's today, I'm wondering if a curious side effect of the old subscription model doesn't cast a larger shadow over the state of games today. With its monthly fees and expansions, Everquest and the other subscription games appears to have created an expectation amongst a significant segment of the market that the maximum they should be asked to pay is roughly $200/year (i.e. 12 months at $15 per and the occasional expansion).
Under the circumstances, we should have foreseen the downfall of the subscription model for all but the few games that still retain a quorum of the old MMO core. If you can't make more from your core, you must expand the market, and that means lowering entry barriers. I don't think it's a coincidence that core MMO players are now standing around wondering what happened to their sandboxes of old. By holding the line at $200, they voted against this model with their wallets.
The irony, though, is that Smedley may be wrong. It's one thing to bring in less dedicated players, but quite another to retain them in an increasingly crowded marketplace - why should I spend $15 for a cosmetic mount, when the same sum will grant me access to an entire different game? It's distinctly possible that the old core MMO player - the one who chooses the MMO for the community where their friends are playing rather than the one that is the current best game - is still the best option for stable revenue.
What portion of the churn and instability that we are currently seeing in the market comes out of increased reliance on players with fewer ties, who are more likely to churn out? How much of the drive for content - which Smedley now maintains is unsustainable - comes from the attempt to retain players who by their nature cannot be retained? I don't know how to answer these questions, but the bills do eventually need to be paid somehow.
SWTOR Pre-purchase Run Amok: You Should Have Bought Faster!
"Receive five (5) days of Early Access* if you Pre-Order by January 7, 2013 11:59PM CT // 5:59AM GMT!"It's currently December 18th, so that gives you three weeks to decide... on paying in full in advance for an expansion scheduled to release in "Spring 2013". As Syp notes, the fourth bullet point on why you should buy the expansion is that more information is "coming soon", so even Bioware acknowledges that relevant information for your purchasing decision is not yet available.
EDIT: Shintar notes in the comments that Bioware are NOT describing this as a "pre-purchase" in their marketing material. I think that is the more accurate description if they're charging your payment now and not offering refunds (except possibly where compelled by law), but please let me know if you find evidence to the contrary.
Technically speaking, the ad does NOT promise that people who pre-order after the deadline will not ALSO receive the early access. If so, it is merely badly misleading, trying to trick players into buying now through a false deadline. That's the good scenario. The bad scenario is that four months from now you log in and your guild is split into haves and have nots because some people failed to click buy fast enough.
Paid early access programs are ubiquitous for new MMO launches but rare for paid expansions - offhand, I recall one year where SOE gave retailers a one-week exclusive on an EQ2 expansion, in the process screwing over international players who could not physically obtain a box. There have been a few games that have temporarily shut off additional sales because their servers could not accommodate more customers. I know of no situation in which a live MMO with adequate server capacity has divided the community in order to teach them an object lesson that they should be paying in full for content before the details are released and months before it is ready.
Honestly, it makes so little sense that I'm assuming the marketing people are just lying through their teeth when they say there's a deadline in three weeks. Is that really where you want your relationship with your MMO provider to be? Is this a business practice you really want to support? If this really is a fair price for a quality product (which is possible - though unknown at this early date), did they need to resort to this type of strong-arm hard-sell?
Choosing SWTOR Alts
One of the quirks to SWTOR's new business model is that players who know roughly what their alts are going to be in the future can save some money by subbing up for one month, and using that time to start new characters.
- Species locks are not enforced retroactively, so you are free to create premium race characters and keep them after your subscription lapses. There is also the option to unlock races - including ones that cannot normally be used for all classes - using credits (either directly - for 1.5 million a piece, or for whatever the cash shop unlocks are selling for in your local GTN - as low as 400-600K on my server). Due to the credit cap, this is also a subscriber-only feature.
- Non-subscribers cannot mail credits, even within their own legacy. This is allegedly to deter credit farming on free accounts and more likely to make it harder for non-subscribers to get around the credit cap by shuttling credits to alts. (You can mail items - one at a time - to your alts and then try to auction them.) I typically spend around 100K credits setting up a new alt with legacy perks, such as mount access at level 10, entry level affection perks for companions, basic gifts, etc, and this option is not available without a way to send your alt the credits. (Note that you should check the GTN for mounts before buying one from a vendor. You may be able to find one of the more common options on sale for less than the 8,000 credits required to buy a standard mount from the vendor.)
- Nonsubscribers cannot purchase inventory upgrades using credits, only cartel coins (or GTN purchases of cartel coin unlocks, which will cost significantly more for your first few space increases). Personally, I don't find that I need more than 40-50 slots, YMMV.
- TEMPORARY: Currently, non-subscribers are capped from creating more than two characters on their entire account (i.e. NOT per server), but lapsed subscribers can access as many pre-existing characters as they have. It's somewhat inexplicable that Bioware launched free to play without implementing the item that lets you purchase more slots. Now they're going to have to spring the restrictions on people down the line. Note that this bullet will become moot when they do implement the character cap, at which point free players will have the two slots and preferred nonsubscribers will have six.
- Amargosa, female Rattataki Sith Sorcerer (caster DPS/healing): Purple force lightning aside, this advanced class is interesting in that it's a ranged DPS with regenerating energy that does not depend on how much energy you have remaining. All of the other ranged classes use a mechanic where how quickly your ammo/etc regenerates scales with how much you have spent. One downside - your initial companion appears to actively hate you, which I'm guessing could get old.
- Kalestra, female Mirialan Jedi Consular Shadow (stealth melee/tank): I chose to make this the tank because I think the Jedi ranged caster path - somehow miraculously finding the same sized debris to throw at foes with telekinesis - looks really stupid. On the downside, I didn't like the other melee class because of how quickly individual targets die in this game, so the consular could suffer the same flaw. Meanwhile, I was initially underwhelmed with all the rambling about the Jedi code on Tython, but the story picked up a bit as the planet's class story unfolds.
- Mirish, female Chiss Agent Operative (healer/ranged DPS): The agent is universally hailed as one of the best storylines, the starting companion is a relatively normal character, and there are a few interesting mechanics going on here including a ranged tree, a stealth melee tree, and full out heals. One question mark is whether I will start to find the cover mechanic irritating, as right now I seem somewhat limited if I don't have something to hide behind.
- Chulak, male Twilek Smuggler Gunslinger (ranged DPS): Almost an afterthought, but one of my favorite stories, with a very good Star Wars feel. I arguably should have flipped the advanced classes on this pairing, as I'm now lined up to have all three healing specs on the Empire and all three tank specs on the Republic, assuming I ever get that far. Oh well. One big downside, though, is that I'm really not all that fond of my starting companion, and apparently I'm stuck with him for a bit.
Information Access and Gaming Journalism
A recent "feature" article of dubious quality on SWTOR's new business model has prompted Scott Jennings to critique the state of gaming journalism. The situation has not changed much since his comments from four years ago regarding coverage of Tabula Rasa's collapse. I remember that post because I had planned to comment on it at the time but never got around to it. Apparently this is a week for dredging up years-old relics, so here are my thoughts.
When it comes to publicly available information and analysis, the professional gaming press sites are always at a disadvantage compared to the crowdsourced masses due to sheer force of manpower. The place where the media outlets have an advantage is in information provided directly from game developers/publishers. This serves a valuable function for the gaming public, but it also puts the gaming press in a very different position from those who cover politics or finance. When all the real information is coming from the people you are covering that - not the product placements or full-screen ads - inevitably affects the tone of the coverage.
It's not impossible to do real investigative journalism when it comes to online gaming - Unsubject's work to back up what many of us are thinking about Kickstarter with real numbers comes to mind. It's also unavoidably subjective because the information you'd really need to make a correct call is not public and will never become public. More often than not, you end up with something that looks more like my recent post about Turbine - the best speculation that can be cobbled together using old, vague, and limited data.
You could argue that gaming isn't actually important enough to deserve real journalism, but there is a real demand. Whether a company is actually going to deliver what they're telling the press they plan to deliver matters, because it affects purchasing decisions. When we get to the point where - even as my income has gone up to the point where I can reasonably afford as many games as I feel like playing - the default purchasing decision is "wait and see" for lack of information, it's the folks who made the product that doesn't get the sales or subscriptions it merited who are going to suffer.
When it comes to publicly available information and analysis, the professional gaming press sites are always at a disadvantage compared to the crowdsourced masses due to sheer force of manpower. The place where the media outlets have an advantage is in information provided directly from game developers/publishers. This serves a valuable function for the gaming public, but it also puts the gaming press in a very different position from those who cover politics or finance. When all the real information is coming from the people you are covering that - not the product placements or full-screen ads - inevitably affects the tone of the coverage.
It's not impossible to do real investigative journalism when it comes to online gaming - Unsubject's work to back up what many of us are thinking about Kickstarter with real numbers comes to mind. It's also unavoidably subjective because the information you'd really need to make a correct call is not public and will never become public. More often than not, you end up with something that looks more like my recent post about Turbine - the best speculation that can be cobbled together using old, vague, and limited data.
You could argue that gaming isn't actually important enough to deserve real journalism, but there is a real demand. Whether a company is actually going to deliver what they're telling the press they plan to deliver matters, because it affects purchasing decisions. When we get to the point where - even as my income has gone up to the point where I can reasonably afford as many games as I feel like playing - the default purchasing decision is "wait and see" for lack of information, it's the folks who made the product that doesn't get the sales or subscriptions it merited who are going to suffer.
Examining SWTOR's endgame
When I first hit level 50 in SWTOR, I was in no hurry to try the "elder game". My leveling path went solely through solo story content - I don't believe I joined a single group - and I was not in the mood to make the transition to grinding dungeons and farming daily quests. Having returned, I have been pleasantly surprised to find the game well-designed and executed.
However, given how much progress I made in a single month, I can see why Bioware is touchy about calling its max-level content the "endgame". SWTOR's high production value story-driven content is especially vulnerable to growing stale with repetition, and its incentive curve is already buckling under the pressure of how to accomodate new players.
Grouping for An Assassin
My immediate incentive to jump into SWTOR's group content was the addition of the HK-51 assassin droid in last month's patch 1.5. Though NPC companions are only used while solo - they take up a slot that is almost certainly better filled with a human player in max level content - the quest to obtain this new companion has multiple steps that require group content. Worse, two of the steps that basically require a second player occur in special instances that are specific to this questline. With no incentive to ever repeat this content in the future, I rushed out to complete them ASAP for fear that it would no longer be possible to find players who still needed them.
Setting aside the issue of whether players will ever be able to complete this quest chain in the future, Bioware got what they wanted. I claimed the free level 50 starter gear from the mission terminal (at the time, there was only PVP gear, but now you can supplement this with some PVE stuff), respecced my character into the DPS tree that sounded easier to play, and jumped into the hard mode flashpoint queue.
The first few groups got a lousy deal with such a green newbie. When solo players complained that this arc required groups, many players responded by arguing that grouping should be required for something in a MMORPG. I'd be curious how many of those players would have changed their minds and concluded that they would rather not have had me taking up a slot in their party. The good news is that the learning curve settled down eventually, I enjoyed the flashpoint game enough to continue beyond the required two hard mode runs, and eventually I picked up enough gear - and perhaps experience - to vaguely carry my weight.
Incentives ahead, but short-lived?
Your first few group zones at max level in an MMORPG are generally pretty rewarding, as everything is an upgrade. After running around a dozen hard mode flashpoints - each of the eight options once, and a few repeats - my character has left behind almost all of the endgame starter gear. Most of my Tionese gear (the PVE starter set - I actually bought this stuff with dungeon tokens, but players now receive it for free) has since been handed down to my companions, while I'm wearing mostly Columi stuff (originally found in the easy mode of the game's first raids), and a few pieces from the next tiers up.
Unfortunately for the game's longevity, very few outright upgrades remain for me in flashpoint content. A few pesky drops aside, most of the upgrades that I can still obtain come from the "black hole commendation" vendor. Like WoW, SWTOR hands out raid quality gear as an incentive to keep players running the flashpoints (and also at least some daily quests). I could see this getting old really quickly given how much non-skippable story dialog happens in the flashpoints.
The other goal I've been pursuing are cold hard credits. On a good day, I pull down several hundred thousand credits, which I've been able to use to purchase a variety of stuff - legacy perks, and F2P unlocks to use when my subscription expires. This too has a limit, especially for the non-subscriber with the strict limits on currency.
Overall, it was a fun month, and perhaps there's another month or so worth of stuff to do at some point, but this endgame does not feel sufficiently robust to continue for month after month. Perhaps it should have been no surprise that the game's subscriber retention suffered as it did.
However, given how much progress I made in a single month, I can see why Bioware is touchy about calling its max-level content the "endgame". SWTOR's high production value story-driven content is especially vulnerable to growing stale with repetition, and its incentive curve is already buckling under the pressure of how to accomodate new players.
Grouping for An Assassin
 |
| The HK-51 companion has some interesting design. The droid is a specialized DPS beast designed to chew through the stronger mobs in daily quests - for each five mobs HK-51 damages, he can open the next fight by one-shotting a "strong" level mob, which can save a lot of time and danger. |
Setting aside the issue of whether players will ever be able to complete this quest chain in the future, Bioware got what they wanted. I claimed the free level 50 starter gear from the mission terminal (at the time, there was only PVP gear, but now you can supplement this with some PVE stuff), respecced my character into the DPS tree that sounded easier to play, and jumped into the hard mode flashpoint queue.
The first few groups got a lousy deal with such a green newbie. When solo players complained that this arc required groups, many players responded by arguing that grouping should be required for something in a MMORPG. I'd be curious how many of those players would have changed their minds and concluded that they would rather not have had me taking up a slot in their party. The good news is that the learning curve settled down eventually, I enjoyed the flashpoint game enough to continue beyond the required two hard mode runs, and eventually I picked up enough gear - and perhaps experience - to vaguely carry my weight.
Incentives ahead, but short-lived?
 |
| Triumph of the very blue speeder bike, obtained for running each hard mode flashpoint once |
Unfortunately for the game's longevity, very few outright upgrades remain for me in flashpoint content. A few pesky drops aside, most of the upgrades that I can still obtain come from the "black hole commendation" vendor. Like WoW, SWTOR hands out raid quality gear as an incentive to keep players running the flashpoints (and also at least some daily quests). I could see this getting old really quickly given how much non-skippable story dialog happens in the flashpoints.
The other goal I've been pursuing are cold hard credits. On a good day, I pull down several hundred thousand credits, which I've been able to use to purchase a variety of stuff - legacy perks, and F2P unlocks to use when my subscription expires. This too has a limit, especially for the non-subscriber with the strict limits on currency.
Overall, it was a fun month, and perhaps there's another month or so worth of stuff to do at some point, but this endgame does not feel sufficiently robust to continue for month after month. Perhaps it should have been no surprise that the game's subscriber retention suffered as it did.
A Critical Look at Turbine's Status
Roger at Contains Moderate Peril has a summary of some of the recent developments indicating that all may not be as well as gamers believe at Turbine, makers of Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online. The fate of any one studio or project aside, Turbine's status matters because DDO's relaunch kicked off the modern wave of free to play revamps. Bloggers like myself frequently cite the company's content-selling approach as an alternative to the more subscription-driven models at studios like SOE and Bioware. If Turbine's situation goes south, there are implications for the entire industry.
The missing context of DDO's revival
Turbine's success is often taken as gospel based on press statements that lack context. Yes, revenue increased by 500 percent over the first two months after the famous DDO re-launch. Yes, even the subscriber numbers went up 40%. What these relative numbers lack is a baseline.
For a nine month period while Turbine was revamping the game, no new content was added - a situation which would be tailor-made for increased subscribers after the next big patch, even if there had not been the hype of a relaunch. Revenue would almost certainly have been further depressed by some players choosing to cancel their subscriptions and await the relaunch before paying more. If we assume that Turbine's press people chose the most favorable numbers - which is their job after all - then that 5-fold increase is not a realistic baseline.
None of which matters if the increase in revenue were sustained. I've been arguing since 2010 that the limited data we have does not bode well on that front. According to a 2010 Game Developer's Conference talk - to my knowledge, the only such information Turbine has disclosed - the DDO's top ten revenue items included five one-time account unlocks, and three additional purchases (character slots, supreme +1 and +2 tomes) that are paid for only once per character.
We don't know whether this trend continues. That said, my experience with the Turbine model has been that customers can expect somewhat high one-time costs in setting up their accounts, but longterm savings that are significantly below the price of the subscription. This year to date, my total expenses are $25 for DDO and $40 for LOTRO, and both purchases will carry me well into next year. I'm not a heavy player of either game, but those numbers pale in comparison to what even an infrequent subscriber will spend. To the extent that my experience is representative, I suspect that Turbine's revenue has definitely dropped off from that one-time re-launch peak.
(As an aside, one analysis of the studio's 2010 sale to Warner Bros indicated that the studio had previously raised at least $100 million in investment capital, which would make the rumored $160 million sale price an underwhelming return on investment. While I'm largely ignorant of how investors compare annual operating profit to the purchase price of a company, my guess is that there is an upper limit to how well the games can have been doing at that time.)
What we can tell about today
As Roger reports, what little we know of Turbine's status this year includes layoffs, hiring of senior officials with job descriptions like "responsible for our digital technology platform that helps drive online engagement and monetization", and the termination of foreign language support for DDO. What we are seeing on the game development front is not more heartening.
Turbine's major releases this year in both games have drawn fire for uncharacteristically high rates of show-stopping bugs, even after a high profile delay to this year's Rohan launch. Prices have trended upward, with DDO's latest high level adventure pack coming in at 750 Turbine Points, compared to 450 for most releases in 2010, and expansions (themselves a new thing to DDO) coming in at $50 for the cheapest DDO bundle that includes the new class and $70 for the LOTRO bundle that includes the game's first bagspace increase since 2007. Turbine was quick to promote 2011's Isengard expansion as the best-seller in the studio's history, but I haven't seen even such vague comments on either of this year's releases.
Meanwhile, monetization is indeed on the rise in Middle Earth, with apparel mannequins displaying cosmetic outfits that initially appeared in the most remote, dangerous locations in the world, a $10 cosmetic purchase that lets Dwarves take off their shirts, and the joke hobby horse with its hypothetical $50 price tag. Meanwhile, it feels like buggy and unpopular systems - kill deed grinds, legendary item grinds, holiday festival grinds, etc - are being retained in part so that fixes for them can be saved for the cash shop.
None of these individually allows us to distinguish a for-profit company making reasonable efforts to increase revenue from a less favorable scenario in which the studio is struggling to maintain revenue as the short-term gains from the game's front-loaded business model are translating into non-subscribers who no longer need to purchase much of anything. All of the above collectively, however, starts to suggest the less-cheery scenario.
2013: make-or-break year?
I don't think Turbine is going to be the surprise MMO studio closure of 2013, but I do think this may be a moment of truth for the company. According to a 2008 press release, the LOTRO's license for the intellectual property runs through 2014 with options to extend it through 2017. Having a sudden and unfavorable chance in the license terms is the one thing that can suddenly kill a game that had been coasting along without issues.
We don't know the terms of the license, and it's certainly possible that Warner Brothers has the clout to negotiate a more favorable rate if they feel it's worth their time. The big question is whether it is worth their time, or whether this was primarily a transaction intended to net the parent corporation online community transaction technology and infrastructure. I'm certainly hoping it's the former given my investment in Turbine's games, and their generally enjoyable qualities. Time will tell whether that view is realistic.
The missing context of DDO's revival
Turbine's success is often taken as gospel based on press statements that lack context. Yes, revenue increased by 500 percent over the first two months after the famous DDO re-launch. Yes, even the subscriber numbers went up 40%. What these relative numbers lack is a baseline.
For a nine month period while Turbine was revamping the game, no new content was added - a situation which would be tailor-made for increased subscribers after the next big patch, even if there had not been the hype of a relaunch. Revenue would almost certainly have been further depressed by some players choosing to cancel their subscriptions and await the relaunch before paying more. If we assume that Turbine's press people chose the most favorable numbers - which is their job after all - then that 5-fold increase is not a realistic baseline.
None of which matters if the increase in revenue were sustained. I've been arguing since 2010 that the limited data we have does not bode well on that front. According to a 2010 Game Developer's Conference talk - to my knowledge, the only such information Turbine has disclosed - the DDO's top ten revenue items included five one-time account unlocks, and three additional purchases (character slots, supreme +1 and +2 tomes) that are paid for only once per character.
We don't know whether this trend continues. That said, my experience with the Turbine model has been that customers can expect somewhat high one-time costs in setting up their accounts, but longterm savings that are significantly below the price of the subscription. This year to date, my total expenses are $25 for DDO and $40 for LOTRO, and both purchases will carry me well into next year. I'm not a heavy player of either game, but those numbers pale in comparison to what even an infrequent subscriber will spend. To the extent that my experience is representative, I suspect that Turbine's revenue has definitely dropped off from that one-time re-launch peak.
(As an aside, one analysis of the studio's 2010 sale to Warner Bros indicated that the studio had previously raised at least $100 million in investment capital, which would make the rumored $160 million sale price an underwhelming return on investment. While I'm largely ignorant of how investors compare annual operating profit to the purchase price of a company, my guess is that there is an upper limit to how well the games can have been doing at that time.)
What we can tell about today
As Roger reports, what little we know of Turbine's status this year includes layoffs, hiring of senior officials with job descriptions like "responsible for our digital technology platform that helps drive online engagement and monetization", and the termination of foreign language support for DDO. What we are seeing on the game development front is not more heartening.
Turbine's major releases this year in both games have drawn fire for uncharacteristically high rates of show-stopping bugs, even after a high profile delay to this year's Rohan launch. Prices have trended upward, with DDO's latest high level adventure pack coming in at 750 Turbine Points, compared to 450 for most releases in 2010, and expansions (themselves a new thing to DDO) coming in at $50 for the cheapest DDO bundle that includes the new class and $70 for the LOTRO bundle that includes the game's first bagspace increase since 2007. Turbine was quick to promote 2011's Isengard expansion as the best-seller in the studio's history, but I haven't seen even such vague comments on either of this year's releases.
Meanwhile, monetization is indeed on the rise in Middle Earth, with apparel mannequins displaying cosmetic outfits that initially appeared in the most remote, dangerous locations in the world, a $10 cosmetic purchase that lets Dwarves take off their shirts, and the joke hobby horse with its hypothetical $50 price tag. Meanwhile, it feels like buggy and unpopular systems - kill deed grinds, legendary item grinds, holiday festival grinds, etc - are being retained in part so that fixes for them can be saved for the cash shop.
None of these individually allows us to distinguish a for-profit company making reasonable efforts to increase revenue from a less favorable scenario in which the studio is struggling to maintain revenue as the short-term gains from the game's front-loaded business model are translating into non-subscribers who no longer need to purchase much of anything. All of the above collectively, however, starts to suggest the less-cheery scenario.
2013: make-or-break year?
I don't think Turbine is going to be the surprise MMO studio closure of 2013, but I do think this may be a moment of truth for the company. According to a 2008 press release, the LOTRO's license for the intellectual property runs through 2014 with options to extend it through 2017. Having a sudden and unfavorable chance in the license terms is the one thing that can suddenly kill a game that had been coasting along without issues.
We don't know the terms of the license, and it's certainly possible that Warner Brothers has the clout to negotiate a more favorable rate if they feel it's worth their time. The big question is whether it is worth their time, or whether this was primarily a transaction intended to net the parent corporation online community transaction technology and infrastructure. I'm certainly hoping it's the former given my investment in Turbine's games, and their generally enjoyable qualities. Time will tell whether that view is realistic.
Should You Want To Pay?
Should we as players (i.e. consumers) of MMO's want to pay for our games? Most people who can count will have some level of selfish desire to pay less, get more, and somehow have the developers not go out of business in the process. That aside, should you want to play a game where you are paying your fair share? Equally important in the era of non-subscription payment models and cash shops, should you NOT want to play games that are structured in a way where you are not paying much?
My complaint about SWTOR's new model - which should not be a surprise to longtime readers since I have raised the same objection to several SOE games that have taken a similar approach - is that I actually want to pay them more. Bioware does not think it's in their interest to allow non-subscribers to pay for a fully unimpaired experience in their product. If the only two options are to subscribe or suck up quality of life penalties and pay nothing more once I've unlocked the handful of things Bioware is willing to sell, I may just go ahead and freeload. That's not really the happiest outcome for either myself or Bioware.
I would argue that studios have done themselves a disservice by hyping the "free" angle on for-profit products that have to make money somehow. The games can never be completely without cost, and there will always be one restriction that is the most onerous one left no matter how many things the studio relaxes. (EQ2 may be running into this wall today after several years of doing the dance that SWTOR is doing today.) Meanwhile, the dual business model creates a variety of expectations, with most non-subscribers misguidedly begrudging every penny and subscribers insisting that their $15 should be the only money anyone is allowed to ever pay and anything more would be "pay to win".
And so we have the talk of whales, mounts that have gone from $10 outrage to $25 sparkle ponies and perhaps $50 soon, and the ongoing slippery slope of cash shops as studios claim that more revenue is needed and the majority of players rush to say "not it!". I'm not about to run out and pay hundreds of dollars for premium stuff, but in general I think that players who are not supporting the product can expect to be disappointed with its future direction. Perhaps the middle ground was the old world in which everyone paid $15 and the developers did whatever they wanted to with the proceeds, but that ship appears to have sailed. If the result really is a generation of games whose primary revenue stream is catering to the highest cash store bidder, I don't think anyone (other than that one big spender) will be happy with the result.
My complaint about SWTOR's new model - which should not be a surprise to longtime readers since I have raised the same objection to several SOE games that have taken a similar approach - is that I actually want to pay them more. Bioware does not think it's in their interest to allow non-subscribers to pay for a fully unimpaired experience in their product. If the only two options are to subscribe or suck up quality of life penalties and pay nothing more once I've unlocked the handful of things Bioware is willing to sell, I may just go ahead and freeload. That's not really the happiest outcome for either myself or Bioware.
I would argue that studios have done themselves a disservice by hyping the "free" angle on for-profit products that have to make money somehow. The games can never be completely without cost, and there will always be one restriction that is the most onerous one left no matter how many things the studio relaxes. (EQ2 may be running into this wall today after several years of doing the dance that SWTOR is doing today.) Meanwhile, the dual business model creates a variety of expectations, with most non-subscribers misguidedly begrudging every penny and subscribers insisting that their $15 should be the only money anyone is allowed to ever pay and anything more would be "pay to win".
And so we have the talk of whales, mounts that have gone from $10 outrage to $25 sparkle ponies and perhaps $50 soon, and the ongoing slippery slope of cash shops as studios claim that more revenue is needed and the majority of players rush to say "not it!". I'm not about to run out and pay hundreds of dollars for premium stuff, but in general I think that players who are not supporting the product can expect to be disappointed with its future direction. Perhaps the middle ground was the old world in which everyone paid $15 and the developers did whatever they wanted to with the proceeds, but that ship appears to have sailed. If the result really is a generation of games whose primary revenue stream is catering to the highest cash store bidder, I don't think anyone (other than that one big spender) will be happy with the result.
Punishment or Gameplay?
"In an earlier draft of F2P, we had it so that F2Pers couldn’t use spacebar inside cutscenes and we almost had a riot inside this building. So we being listening to feedbacks the whole way."As context for those who have never played SWTOR, the space bar is used in cut scenes to interrupt the NPC who is talking and make them start their next line of dialog. This can be used when you have to repeat a conversation - for example if you do a quest over (either an alt or as a repeatable quest) or cancel out of a dialog because you were unhappy with the results. However, the main association that SWTOR players have for "spacebar" as a verb is for the equivalent of refusing to read quest text. The only difference is that in SWTOR, that "text" is the result of expensive voice acting that had a huge impact on the game's budget.
- Dulfy's transcript of a Bioware Q+A
Having explained that, I have absolutely no idea what Bioware's business people - who unlike myself are presumably paid a decent salary to know what they are doing on this front - could be thinking. The very idea of using the hallowed "fourth pillar", Bioware's epic story, as a punishment that non-subscribers would have been forced to endure boggles my mind. Bioware has not been afraid to think outside the box for good or for ill - and more often (e.g. restrictions on hotbars) for ill - but this one is absurd.
During the past week, including the Q+A, Bioware has relaxed more of the restrictions imposed on preferred non-subscribers (i.e. lapsed players and those who have spent money in the cash shop). Preferred players will now have four hotbars - the number the game launched with - and six character slots (up from two currently, and close to the eight that subscribers had at launch, though this limit is supposedly per account rather than per server).
On the one hand, they're willing to give away a tremendous amount of stuff that would have been worth paying for. However, they're on the record as unwilling to budge on things like credit caps, mail restrictions, and content pass pricing that greatly reduce how attractive it is to pay for anything as a non-subscriber. I get that Bioware is very afraid of being dependent on creating new content for revenue, and would prefer for players to subscribe. It just seems strange that every change they make shifts the game away from a state where people who won't subscribe are still paying for the game and closer to a state where a single one-time payment is all most players will ever need, want, or have the opportunity to make.
Is the SWTOR Credit Cap Killing Unlock Resales?
A few weeks ago, I pondered whether SWTOR's credit cap was going to cause issues for the game's business model. It's a bit early to tell, but the answer may be yes.
To recap, non-subscribers cannot ever have more than 350,000 credits on their person - in context, it's easy to make over 100,000 credits per day doing endgame daily missions. By design, every item in the cartel market is available for re-sale, subject to a several-day waiting period to deter fraud. This includes the items whose purpose is to lift restrictions on non-subscribers. These items have zero value to subscribers (except if they can be flipped for a profit), so the only real market for them are non-subscribers (who cannot pay more than 350,000 credits by definition) and subscribers who are stocking up because they plan to let their subscriptions lapse in the near future. The latter demographic is limited because the game's model in general discourages people from playing at all while unsubscribed.
Right now, the market is distorted by large grants of cartel coins that were granted to existing subscribers, many of whom seem to feel that these should immediately be spent, rather than saved to pay for future additions to the marketplace. As a result, my server at least is seeing the global trade network flooded with unlock items that cost several dollars worth of cartel coins but that cost well under 350,000 credits.
An especially egregious offender is the unlock for access to Section X, the new daily quest area and also the home to the quest to claim the HK-51 droid companion. This unlock costs 600 cartel coins in the cash shop (roughly $5-7 depending on your exchange rate), but the item is also available as a (presumably unwanted) reward in the "cartel pack" gambling boxes. As a result, unlocking this area for my main would currently cost me rough 75,000 credits, or less than the credits that I can earn back by doing all of these quests once each.
The sector X unlock may be a special case because of the decision to include it in the gambling packs, which players are purchasing in large quantities for the other possible rewards. Demand for this particular item may be especially skewed because subscribers don't need it and neither does anyone below level 50. That said, I cannot imagine that a secondary market in which players actually fork over several dollars worth of cartel coins for a day or two's worth of daily quest rewards is in any way sustainable. If I'm right, either supply will drop to the ground as players realize that cartel coins cost money and stop wasting them, or else something will have to be done about that credit cap on non-subscribers.
To recap, non-subscribers cannot ever have more than 350,000 credits on their person - in context, it's easy to make over 100,000 credits per day doing endgame daily missions. By design, every item in the cartel market is available for re-sale, subject to a several-day waiting period to deter fraud. This includes the items whose purpose is to lift restrictions on non-subscribers. These items have zero value to subscribers (except if they can be flipped for a profit), so the only real market for them are non-subscribers (who cannot pay more than 350,000 credits by definition) and subscribers who are stocking up because they plan to let their subscriptions lapse in the near future. The latter demographic is limited because the game's model in general discourages people from playing at all while unsubscribed.
Right now, the market is distorted by large grants of cartel coins that were granted to existing subscribers, many of whom seem to feel that these should immediately be spent, rather than saved to pay for future additions to the marketplace. As a result, my server at least is seeing the global trade network flooded with unlock items that cost several dollars worth of cartel coins but that cost well under 350,000 credits.
An especially egregious offender is the unlock for access to Section X, the new daily quest area and also the home to the quest to claim the HK-51 droid companion. This unlock costs 600 cartel coins in the cash shop (roughly $5-7 depending on your exchange rate), but the item is also available as a (presumably unwanted) reward in the "cartel pack" gambling boxes. As a result, unlocking this area for my main would currently cost me rough 75,000 credits, or less than the credits that I can earn back by doing all of these quests once each.
The sector X unlock may be a special case because of the decision to include it in the gambling packs, which players are purchasing in large quantities for the other possible rewards. Demand for this particular item may be especially skewed because subscribers don't need it and neither does anyone below level 50. That said, I cannot imagine that a secondary market in which players actually fork over several dollars worth of cartel coins for a day or two's worth of daily quest rewards is in any way sustainable. If I'm right, either supply will drop to the ground as players realize that cartel coins cost money and stop wasting them, or else something will have to be done about that credit cap on non-subscribers.
MMO Black Friday 2012
U.S. Black Friday is upon us, and there are some discounts to be had.
- For those willing to brave the stores, WoW's Pandaria expansion will be 50% off. Blizzard does not feel obliged to offer a similar discount online, so presumably this is in part to help retailers move their boxes. Not sure if this is technically a sign of weakness, as WoW's last two expansions were not timed right to be discounted on Black Friday, and digital sales are almost certainly a bigger piece of the pie this year.
- As is traditional, Turbine is offering deep discounts on expansions, including 50% off of the six week old Rohan expansion in LOTRO and 75% off of this summer's DDO expansions.
Both products bundled various extras that may or may not be of interest to players in order to justify higher price tags ($50 for the cheapest DDO bundle that includes the new class, $70 for LOTRO's legendary bundle, which was the only way to get the sixth inventory bag until recently). Both become attractive upsells when the price is slashed 50%. In LOTRO, the $40 base edition comes with the content and 1000 Turbine Points, while the $70 edition comes with the sixth bag (which costs 995 TP itself and is specifically excluded from this week's sale on inventory upgrades), an extra 1000 TP (for a total of 2000), and some various cosmetic miscellany. At half off, you're getting those extras for $15 and still paying less than the full price on the base edition.
Various other MMO's have launched expansions probably too recently to offer deep discounts - both Rift and EQ2 rolled out last week. I don't expect major discounts on Guild Wars 2 because they don't have a subscription fee that would motivate them to dump boxes (though Amazon is currently offering it for $45). However, we could see some cash store sales in various games that don't have a dirt cheap expansion on offer. If you know of anything interesting, leave a comment and I'll add it to this post assuming I'm not in a turkey coma or fighting for my life in stores at the time. :)
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
SWTOR: Selling Around What They Can Produce?
As the comments on my SWTOR impressions post point out, the obvious alternative to the approach that Bioware has taken with the game would have been to sell access to the game's solo story content. The game's leveling content is viewed as the best part of the product, and it would seem counterintuitive to have given all of it away for free. The catch is that Bioware could NOT afford to get into the business of exclusively selling content because they are incapable of making content fast enough to sustain that model.
When you look at the minority of nonsubscription games that do charge for content - Turbine (DDO, LOTRO) and Kingsisle (Wizard 101, Pirate 101) - typically nonsubscribers have to be treated relatively well. If you restrict the non subscription experience too heavily, players won't stick around to buy content. For this to work, your content must be produced in small, repeatable chunks that you can release regularly. Many of the issues we are seeing in LOTRO - bundling purchases into larger packages, preserving poorly implemented grinds and charging for features that no other company bills for - arise because that game's content is NOT bite-sized, repeatable, or quick to produce.
If you can't stay afloat by selling new content, you have to generate ongoing revenue from people using your existing content. This is the route taken by the majority of nonsubscription games, whether they were originally designed that way or retrofit in a relaunch (like SWTOR). For subscription retrofits, this often translates into restrictions that nonsubscribers cannot pay to remove, in an effort to make the "optional" subscription less optional. If you can continue to retain the subscribers you had, collect some new nonsubscription revenue from people who were not subscribing, and incidentally rake in a ton from cosmetic cash store items, the thinking is that you will come out ahead. More important to your bottom line, your revenue is less dependent on you ability to generate new content.
If Bioware has erred, their error may be consistency. You don't want to charge too early and drive players away before they've given you a chance, but perhaps they should have been more willing to let people who still aren't paying more than halfway through the game leave. What I'm guessing they were most afraid of was that introducing charges for stuff that was free earlier in the game (e.g. quests) would have an especially strong effect on players sticking around. This fear of inconsistency may be what led to the game only charging for things that were introduced later in the level progression, such as group and PVP content.
Misc Notes
When you look at the minority of nonsubscription games that do charge for content - Turbine (DDO, LOTRO) and Kingsisle (Wizard 101, Pirate 101) - typically nonsubscribers have to be treated relatively well. If you restrict the non subscription experience too heavily, players won't stick around to buy content. For this to work, your content must be produced in small, repeatable chunks that you can release regularly. Many of the issues we are seeing in LOTRO - bundling purchases into larger packages, preserving poorly implemented grinds and charging for features that no other company bills for - arise because that game's content is NOT bite-sized, repeatable, or quick to produce.
If you can't stay afloat by selling new content, you have to generate ongoing revenue from people using your existing content. This is the route taken by the majority of nonsubscription games, whether they were originally designed that way or retrofit in a relaunch (like SWTOR). For subscription retrofits, this often translates into restrictions that nonsubscribers cannot pay to remove, in an effort to make the "optional" subscription less optional. If you can continue to retain the subscribers you had, collect some new nonsubscription revenue from people who were not subscribing, and incidentally rake in a ton from cosmetic cash store items, the thinking is that you will come out ahead. More important to your bottom line, your revenue is less dependent on you ability to generate new content.
If Bioware has erred, their error may be consistency. You don't want to charge too early and drive players away before they've given you a chance, but perhaps they should have been more willing to let people who still aren't paying more than halfway through the game leave. What I'm guessing they were most afraid of was that introducing charges for stuff that was free earlier in the game (e.g. quests) would have an especially strong effect on players sticking around. This fear of inconsistency may be what led to the game only charging for things that were introduced later in the level progression, such as group and PVP content.
Misc Notes
- While it is possible to play the leveling game completely free, I'd suggest that almost all players who expect to stick with it will benefit from spending at least some money to qualify for the "preferred" status. The best bang for buck here is to snag the $5 coin bundle and take either a third crewskill slot for your main or a third hotbar and some points to spare. If you're willing to go to $10, you can snag both the third crewskill and the third and fourth hotbars for your main (or a third hotbar accountwide if you plan to play alts). Including the perks for the preferred upgrade, this fixes many of the most glaring deficiencies in your leveling experience.
- The cash shop allows players to pay money to unlock things earlier than it would be possible to earn them through class and/or legacy level. For example, you previously needed a character most of the way to the level cap if you wanted the legacy level required to pay credits to unlock species for use with all classes. Now you can pay to have a Sith Pureblood Jedi Knight almost immediately (limited only by the need to get to level 10 first so you can unlock a legacy on which to place the unlock). It's also worth scanning the character perks tab of the legacy UI, as some options are available for relatively few Cartel Coins and sooner than they would have been if you had tried to earn them in-game.
- Bioware is trying a few tweaks that I haven't seen previously when it comes to the point stipend for subscribers. Multi-month subscribers get increased stipend rates, and there's also an increased stipend for subscribers who use an authenticator. I don't expect to change any purchasing decisions over this, but it's a nice perk for those who are already on board.
- Character slots are a big X-factor in the game's business model. Bioware does intend to add the ability to purchase character slots, and will enforce limits when they do get that up and running. The Legacy system is a big incentive to stay on one server, but in principle players can go to multiple servers if the price is too high - in particular, some of the cartel store account-wide unlocks are good across servers.
Early Observations for SWTOR's Non-subscription Model
SWTOR's big relaunch day has finally arrived. The model can and probably will change over the coming weeks, but things have settled down enough to get an idea of what we are dealing with. I have actually gone into the relaunch with a recently renewed subscription - no, not because I wanted to pay $15 for $5 worth of "bonus" coins. SWTOR as currently implemented may be the first model where it can make sense to jump back and forth between the two payment options.
For endgame, not so much...
For better or worse, Bioware has made the decision to give away most of the game's content. This leaves them in the position of trying to convince players to fork over cash for playing the game as a service. Thus, it does not appear that Bioware is keen for existing subscribers to switch to a non-subscription model and pay less. There are various things to unlock - including some extraordinarily petty options such as a charge to hide your helmet (certainly not mandatory, just petty) - but the bigger story is what you cannot unlock.
Leveling and grandfathered unlocks
Setting aside the endgame, what if, like myself, you are primarily interested in the game for the solo story content? This scenario is a bit more interesting.
There are certain restrictions that you can't lift (or won't want to pay for) including the currency penalties (you won't hit the credit cap but you may have problems with commendation vendors on planets) and restrictions on travel. There are also restrictions on your rate of exp gain, but that is ironically a mixed blessing in that I found the game's exp curve to be faster than I needed and skipped most of several planets to preserve challenge. And there are things you will probably need to pay for, such as access to your crewskills, probably a third hotbar (I don't know that all four that players had previously - or six that subscribers now get - are completely mandatory, but you will probably need a third bar).
Then there are an odd handful of things that can be unlocked in principle, but in practice are cheaper to unlock via a temporary subscription. Access to races - which are purely cosmetic in this game - will run you 600 Cartel Coins, but your existing characters are not affected when your subscription lapses. Your first two inventory upgrades can be paid for with 5000 and 20,000 credits as a subscriber, while non-subscribers must pony up 175 Cartel Coins per unlock - 350 total. In short, if you're looking to start up one - or better yet several - new characters, a one-month subscription may be the way to go.
And finally, there's the question of content. The new "Section X" content added with this patch will run non-subscribers 600 Cartel Coins. This content features new daily quests, which will be markedly less attractive to non-subscribers due to the currency issues, and the one-time questline for the HK-51 droid companion. This sort of content may well be more attractive as a rental than a permanent unlock.
Looking Ahead
On the horizon, Bioware plans at least one major content drop. It will also be interesting to see whether some of these restrictions get relaxed - either by default or through additional purchases - as the model matures. In the mean time, I don't regret my one-month subscription, and I might even see an advantage to subscribing for a month at a time periodically.
I suppose the risk you run - and perhaps the reason why Bioware is willing to make the temporary subscription attractive - is that you get used to the perks that cost money and do not want to give them up. Then again, I suppose that is a good thing to the extent that it would mean that you are playing the game and enjoying it enough to want to pay.
For endgame, not so much...
For better or worse, Bioware has made the decision to give away most of the game's content. This leaves them in the position of trying to convince players to fork over cash for playing the game as a service. Thus, it does not appear that Bioware is keen for existing subscribers to switch to a non-subscription model and pay less. There are various things to unlock - including some extraordinarily petty options such as a charge to hide your helmet (certainly not mandatory, just petty) - but the bigger story is what you cannot unlock.
- Endgame content requires the purchase of consumable weekly passes per type of content you wish to play. Even at the most favorable exchange rate, unlocking two of the four types of content (raid, PVP, space combat, flashpoints) will cost you more than $15/month.
- Nonsubscribers are stuck with a currency cap that cannot be lifted. This limit applies not only to credits - the standard currency - but also the various token currencies used to purchase items.
- Nonsubscribers are also slapped with a permanent penalty to vendor prices, which includes gear vendors that take tokens.
- The cap plus the penalty combine to make it impossible for non-subscribers to purchase certain token rewards, and more generally require 25% more grinding at whatever you are grinding (raids, PVP, flashpoints, etc) for gear.
Leveling and grandfathered unlocks
Setting aside the endgame, what if, like myself, you are primarily interested in the game for the solo story content? This scenario is a bit more interesting.
There are certain restrictions that you can't lift (or won't want to pay for) including the currency penalties (you won't hit the credit cap but you may have problems with commendation vendors on planets) and restrictions on travel. There are also restrictions on your rate of exp gain, but that is ironically a mixed blessing in that I found the game's exp curve to be faster than I needed and skipped most of several planets to preserve challenge. And there are things you will probably need to pay for, such as access to your crewskills, probably a third hotbar (I don't know that all four that players had previously - or six that subscribers now get - are completely mandatory, but you will probably need a third bar).
Then there are an odd handful of things that can be unlocked in principle, but in practice are cheaper to unlock via a temporary subscription. Access to races - which are purely cosmetic in this game - will run you 600 Cartel Coins, but your existing characters are not affected when your subscription lapses. Your first two inventory upgrades can be paid for with 5000 and 20,000 credits as a subscriber, while non-subscribers must pony up 175 Cartel Coins per unlock - 350 total. In short, if you're looking to start up one - or better yet several - new characters, a one-month subscription may be the way to go.
And finally, there's the question of content. The new "Section X" content added with this patch will run non-subscribers 600 Cartel Coins. This content features new daily quests, which will be markedly less attractive to non-subscribers due to the currency issues, and the one-time questline for the HK-51 droid companion. This sort of content may well be more attractive as a rental than a permanent unlock.
Looking Ahead
On the horizon, Bioware plans at least one major content drop. It will also be interesting to see whether some of these restrictions get relaxed - either by default or through additional purchases - as the model matures. In the mean time, I don't regret my one-month subscription, and I might even see an advantage to subscribing for a month at a time periodically.
I suppose the risk you run - and perhaps the reason why Bioware is willing to make the temporary subscription attractive - is that you get used to the perks that cost money and do not want to give them up. Then again, I suppose that is a good thing to the extent that it would mean that you are playing the game and enjoying it enough to want to pay.
Optional Is the New Hard
Two years ago, players were complaining that the dungeons of World of Warcraft's Cataclysm expansion were not fun because they were too difficult. The Blizzard response - that content should possess non-zero challenge - was as accurate as it was irrelevant. Customers were dissatisfied with the level of fun they were having with the results of the design, not the quality of the design itself.
Today, Blizzard argues that various non-raid activities - such as daily quests and running the looking-for-raid difficulty in pick-up-groups - are optional for raiding because only the very top difficulty setting is balanced so tightly as to assume that players have the best gear available. I like to call this the "pants optional" argument - no MMO I am aware of has a mandatory requirement that characters wear pants, but very few players opt to go pantless. The choice technically exists, but is largely uninteresting, as there is almost always (*) no benefit to going without pants and the player would then be obligated to upgrade the rest of their gear to off-set the stats from the missing leggings. More to the point, every bit by which you exceed the theoretical minimum requirement gives the player - and the group of 9-24 friends they are raiding with - that much more margin for error to help secure victory.
We could sit here and argue the academic/semantic merits all day, but this misses the point for the same reason Blizzard's 2011 defense of the game's difficulty missed the point. If paying customers feel like they are obligated to do something that they do not believe is fun, it does not matter if the customer is theoretically incorrect. Lecturing the customer on why they are incorrect, not as good at playing the game as people who are beating the content with the minimum gear, and need to find new friends with lower expectations - however accurate all of these statements may be - is not a good business strategy.
The structural issues with Cataclysm as an expansion probably would not have gone away had the game's initial cadre of heroic dungeons launched with lower difficulty and shorter completion times. Even so, it was an inauspicious start to what turned into the game's least successful era to date. If Blizzard continues to build a game whose core endgame mechanic is upgrading character performance through acquisition of better gear, and continues to require non-raid content for access to upgrades that raid players want, Pandaria may not be off to any better of a start.
(*) - There have been several eras of WoW in which certain tanking classes were obligated to intentionally lower their mitigation when attempting content that was significantly below their gear level, because their classes were dependent on taking sufficient quantities of damage in order to generate resources. Several players I knew would remove their characters' pants in this scenario, because it was the quickest and most humorous way to accomplish this.
Today, Blizzard argues that various non-raid activities - such as daily quests and running the looking-for-raid difficulty in pick-up-groups - are optional for raiding because only the very top difficulty setting is balanced so tightly as to assume that players have the best gear available. I like to call this the "pants optional" argument - no MMO I am aware of has a mandatory requirement that characters wear pants, but very few players opt to go pantless. The choice technically exists, but is largely uninteresting, as there is almost always (*) no benefit to going without pants and the player would then be obligated to upgrade the rest of their gear to off-set the stats from the missing leggings. More to the point, every bit by which you exceed the theoretical minimum requirement gives the player - and the group of 9-24 friends they are raiding with - that much more margin for error to help secure victory.
We could sit here and argue the academic/semantic merits all day, but this misses the point for the same reason Blizzard's 2011 defense of the game's difficulty missed the point. If paying customers feel like they are obligated to do something that they do not believe is fun, it does not matter if the customer is theoretically incorrect. Lecturing the customer on why they are incorrect, not as good at playing the game as people who are beating the content with the minimum gear, and need to find new friends with lower expectations - however accurate all of these statements may be - is not a good business strategy.
The structural issues with Cataclysm as an expansion probably would not have gone away had the game's initial cadre of heroic dungeons launched with lower difficulty and shorter completion times. Even so, it was an inauspicious start to what turned into the game's least successful era to date. If Blizzard continues to build a game whose core endgame mechanic is upgrading character performance through acquisition of better gear, and continues to require non-raid content for access to upgrades that raid players want, Pandaria may not be off to any better of a start.
(*) - There have been several eras of WoW in which certain tanking classes were obligated to intentionally lower their mitigation when attempting content that was significantly below their gear level, because their classes were dependent on taking sufficient quantities of damage in order to generate resources. Several players I knew would remove their characters' pants in this scenario, because it was the quickest and most humorous way to accomplish this.
Currency Caps And Cash Shops
Two indirectly related stories over the last week: SOE has implemented a tradeable in-game time card for Everquest 2, while Bioware is testing SWTOR's free to play model and allowing the resale of most cash shop purchases for in game credits.
Both moves seek to harness the desire of customers with out-of-game money to get a headstart on their in-game finances. In the process, both moves potentially convert non-paying players into sources of revenue by making their in-game currency into an incentive for the moneyed crowd to pay more to the studio. However, both are potentially hampered by strict currency caps aimed at preventing legacy subscribers from switching down to less lucrative non-subscription models.
Both studios invested the money to re-launch existing products with presumably hundreds of thousands of subscribers in the hopes of coming out ahead financially. Thus, both struggled with how to make an "optional" subscription less optional without alienating the new potential customers coming in under the new model. Currency caps have stayed on the table as a subscriber-only perk because they fit both bills. New players are unlikely to hit the restrictions until later in their careers, while existing players who bump up against the caps may already be using enough other services to make the subscription worthwhile.
Allowing players to effectively pay others to farm in-game currency for them calls more attention to players who fall in the middle ground, as this type of option will inherently be most attractive to people who are, for whatever reason, looking to limit their real-world expenditures. Unfortunately, here is where the business models conflict - a player who can offer only a pittance - 18.4 plat in EQ2 or 350,000 credits in SWTOR - is not much of an incentive for someone else to open their wallet and pay the studio real world dollars.
It's possible that both studios will ultimately relent on the currency restrictions. Prior to the announcement, SOE's David Georgeson told me on twitter that they were re-evaluating the game's currency cap - in hindsight, perhaps due to this very concern. Meanwhile, the Bioware folks are still iterating their model, though the game's senior producer stated that the current escrow functionality was intentional as of two days ago. Perhaps this sort of continued mishap is just the price of doing business in an era of retrofitting non-subscription business models onto existing games.
Both moves seek to harness the desire of customers with out-of-game money to get a headstart on their in-game finances. In the process, both moves potentially convert non-paying players into sources of revenue by making their in-game currency into an incentive for the moneyed crowd to pay more to the studio. However, both are potentially hampered by strict currency caps aimed at preventing legacy subscribers from switching down to less lucrative non-subscription models.
Both studios invested the money to re-launch existing products with presumably hundreds of thousands of subscribers in the hopes of coming out ahead financially. Thus, both struggled with how to make an "optional" subscription less optional without alienating the new potential customers coming in under the new model. Currency caps have stayed on the table as a subscriber-only perk because they fit both bills. New players are unlikely to hit the restrictions until later in their careers, while existing players who bump up against the caps may already be using enough other services to make the subscription worthwhile.
Allowing players to effectively pay others to farm in-game currency for them calls more attention to players who fall in the middle ground, as this type of option will inherently be most attractive to people who are, for whatever reason, looking to limit their real-world expenditures. Unfortunately, here is where the business models conflict - a player who can offer only a pittance - 18.4 plat in EQ2 or 350,000 credits in SWTOR - is not much of an incentive for someone else to open their wallet and pay the studio real world dollars.
It's possible that both studios will ultimately relent on the currency restrictions. Prior to the announcement, SOE's David Georgeson told me on twitter that they were re-evaluating the game's currency cap - in hindsight, perhaps due to this very concern. Meanwhile, the Bioware folks are still iterating their model, though the game's senior producer stated that the current escrow functionality was intentional as of two days ago. Perhaps this sort of continued mishap is just the price of doing business in an era of retrofitting non-subscription business models onto existing games.
Liberté, égalité, free-to-play
Rohan has a post up categorizing what he dubs "payment methods". This is a more systematic approach to a question I tackled colloquially - you are what you sell. Current players appear to dislike almost all of the options that Rohan has described for how it appears that SWTOR plans to make money after its non-subscription re-launch. I would suggest that the real issue at hand is that the changes upset the balance of how the game is developed - and how the developer will value these customers in the future.
As long as the angry mob is out anyway, let's break out the guillotine and look at this question with the motto of the French Revolution.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité - Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood
Under a subscription MMO model, customers are relatively equal in value. Longtime subscribers are going to pay more in the long-run, and may serve as pillars of the community in a way that retains more than just their $15. However, when it comes to the quarterly earnings call, each customer's $15 is the same.
If anything, this equality motivates companies to focus on endgame. The raider is most likely to quit now if they are out of content, and most likely to be retain-able if the studio makes more raids. The solo player may also quit when they run out of content, but they might re-roll instead. Worse, the developers might spend their effort on more solo content only to have the solo player beat that content as well and quit anyway.
The non-subscription model adds variety to the payment models, and, in so doing, adds Liberty. A non-subscriber might pay less than $15, while non-subscribers and subscribers alike can potentially choose to pay MORE than $15. This freedom means some customers are literally worth more than others.
The obvious and most-feared extreme is that the one person who is addicted to gambling for cosmetic items through so called "lock-boxes" is literally worth more than a small guild of loyal players who had been with the game in its previous incarnation. That aside, having a model where players can pick and choose what they pay for potentially reverses the developer's incentives for the future direction of the game.
If only a small proportion of players raid - and said players vehemently oppose any mechanism whereby they make themselves proportionally more valuable by paying more money, on the grounds that this would be "pay to win" - then only a small proportion of future development can support them. By contrast, if the majority of paying customers are located in the leveling curve, that is where the developer must focus their efforts, even if said customers are certain to depart after spending some amount of time in game.
To use another concrete example, the patch will add a new NPC companion, an HK-51 droid. Bioware hopes that nonsubscribers will pay for an unlock to access the content that awards this NPC. However, even though companions are basically solo tools that cannot be used in serious group content, the questline requires a max level character and several group dungeons. Merits of this decision aside, a non-subscription game can ill afford to put barriers between customers and stuff they want to pay for.
With this kind of split in the interests of the playerbase, it should come as no surprise that Brotherhood is in short supply indeed.
As long as the angry mob is out anyway, let's break out the guillotine and look at this question with the motto of the French Revolution.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité - Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood
Under a subscription MMO model, customers are relatively equal in value. Longtime subscribers are going to pay more in the long-run, and may serve as pillars of the community in a way that retains more than just their $15. However, when it comes to the quarterly earnings call, each customer's $15 is the same.
If anything, this equality motivates companies to focus on endgame. The raider is most likely to quit now if they are out of content, and most likely to be retain-able if the studio makes more raids. The solo player may also quit when they run out of content, but they might re-roll instead. Worse, the developers might spend their effort on more solo content only to have the solo player beat that content as well and quit anyway.
The non-subscription model adds variety to the payment models, and, in so doing, adds Liberty. A non-subscriber might pay less than $15, while non-subscribers and subscribers alike can potentially choose to pay MORE than $15. This freedom means some customers are literally worth more than others.
The obvious and most-feared extreme is that the one person who is addicted to gambling for cosmetic items through so called "lock-boxes" is literally worth more than a small guild of loyal players who had been with the game in its previous incarnation. That aside, having a model where players can pick and choose what they pay for potentially reverses the developer's incentives for the future direction of the game.
If only a small proportion of players raid - and said players vehemently oppose any mechanism whereby they make themselves proportionally more valuable by paying more money, on the grounds that this would be "pay to win" - then only a small proportion of future development can support them. By contrast, if the majority of paying customers are located in the leveling curve, that is where the developer must focus their efforts, even if said customers are certain to depart after spending some amount of time in game.
To use another concrete example, the patch will add a new NPC companion, an HK-51 droid. Bioware hopes that nonsubscribers will pay for an unlock to access the content that awards this NPC. However, even though companions are basically solo tools that cannot be used in serious group content, the questline requires a max level character and several group dungeons. Merits of this decision aside, a non-subscription game can ill afford to put barriers between customers and stuff they want to pay for.
With this kind of split in the interests of the playerbase, it should come as no surprise that Brotherhood is in short supply indeed.
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