One Does Not Simply Purchase A Subscription To Mordor

LOTRO will keep me despite the inevitable tsunami of ignorant suck from people who can’t type (a plague LOTRO has always been blessedly free of, for various reasons) because the game was developed as a subscription based game. The world has been built and populated with long term subscriptions in mind. I’m also, due to circumstances, mostly a solo/PUG player, treating it like an interactive storybook plus chatroom. That insulates me from most developmental changes.
F2P games aren’t structured the same way as P2Ps. They’ve got a lot more frosting and a lot less cake, for one thing.
I suspect this signals a shift in development mindset trends, and future games will be designed with F2P players in mind, with subscribers as the afterthought. One of my jobs is on a F2P game, and the numbers don’t lie – this is ultimately more profitable.
But when it comes to RPG games, I don’t have to like it.

I’m intrigued in one sense.  They really think free-to-play will bring in more income than 300k subscribers?  DDO must have been a successful experiment.
I’m a bit horrified in another sense, because LotRO has one of the best online communities around.  Friendly, helpful and educated conversations in chat channels are the norm.  I was pleasantly surprised when I started playing last year – it’s one of the things that’s kept me around.  Hope that doesn’t change, but I suspect it will.

Good. Another major title one step closer to death.Maybe we can have a full blown crash soon so that the industry can finally lay dead for a few years before being resurrected into something worth existing.

These moves aren’t to contrast stagnation, they are to contrast substantial recession.
F2P is also a very short-term strategy too, due to game design implications and money-made barriers.

@Abalieno : F2p is a short-term strategy? I’ve been running f2p games w/ virtual goods sales for 13 years at Iron Realms (five of them now) ,  and every single one is still running profitably, from the one (Achaea) launched in ’97 as the first f2p w/ virtual goods game in the world to the latest one (Midkemia Online) launched 6 months ago.
If that’s short-term, I’ll take it.

Sure, Matt, I’ll give it a swing. I have played nearly a dozen F2P games, and to avoid rudeness, I haven’t named them.  I already said I’ve seen numbers proving this model makes more money. I also don’t doubt that F2Ps have an audience of devoted players who are smart and lovable in every way.
However, let’s look at say, a carnival midway. Lots of flashing lights to get your attention, the barkers simultaneously insulting you and talking sweetly to you, gaudy prizes, lots of sugar and dreams. If you have trouble with the ring toss, move right along to the archery gallery. The whole thing is basically one long strip of instant gratification designed and tested over decades to get your attention and separate you from your money so painlessly that you go back every time the carnival is in town. But the only real constants are the carnies themselves, not the carnival goers.
That’s frosting.
Now compare that with a hobby, something someone does regularly for years. There’s less instant gratification. There are longer term goals that take time to reach. There are usually communities around these hobbies, and you put down roots in those communities. If you can’t accomplish something on one day, you don’t care because you have no expectation of doing it all at once. There are people who start out in the hobby by racing out to buy all the best stuff, but the advantage that accords them isn’t that big or insurmountable.
That’s cake.
Cake is still fun, still enticing, and still separates you from your money. But it has a long haul mentality, a less frantic pace, different expectations, and deliberately tells stories that could take years to complete. And while frosting makes more money, cake only makes “enough.” Those of us who prefer cake will eventually find ourselves without a dessert because of the neverending pursuit of more than “enough” by the megacongloms with shareholders to appease. And while indie games are wonderful, I do happen to like the polished professionalism of a game like LOTRO, as well as the IP that can only be owned by a deep pocketed company.
 

“LOTRO will keep me despite the inevitable tsunami of ignorant suck from people who can’t type (a plague LOTRO has always been blessedly free of, for various reasons)”
Well as one of those ignorant sucks who used to play LotRO back in the day, but long since quit due to end game boredom, and having to listen to one too many role players prattle on while playing their latest rendition of Stairway, I’d just like to say, I’ll see you in the fall.
Oh, and fuck you.
-Andy
(It’s still LotRO, I’m sure the more dedicated players will still carve out their niche in the game world and won’t have any problems keeping their noses above the less desireables)

@Sanya Some of my free-to-play games retain players FAR longer than WoW or LotR do, and are deeper games. It’s simply not accurate to claim that it’s the -business model- that determines things like community, longevity, depth, features, etc. Business model is a feature and thus certainly has an effect on everything, but it’s hardly the dominant factor in what the experience of a game ends up looking like. For instance, you can find far more mature communities and far better roleplaying in a number of f2p games than you can in any p2p game. Is that a function of the fact that they’re f2p or that they’re relatively small games though? I’d tend to say the latter. It’s incidental that they’re f2p.
You also mention that you like the polish of large-budget games. That’s fine, but pretty, high end graphics, polished UI, etc….that’s the frosting, not the substance. That’s all surface level stuff as opposed to being the game at its core (just like the ‘pretty’ parts of an animated, 3d rendered chess game is the frosting…the substance is the same whether it’s rendered and animated or displayed in ASCII text).
@Abalieno: I’m flattered to be accused of being my own niche, but the fact is that free-to-play games attract far more players worldwide than p2p games. Again, we can argue about whether this is a short-term thing or not, but the entire Asian MMO market is built on this model (and it’s bigger than the US market), and the fastest growing games company in the world (Zynga) is built on the this model as well.
10 years ago I got a lot of shit for loudly telling people that f2p was the future. It’s no longer the future though. It’s the now, and is only growing more prevalent.
 

*blink*
Not sure why you took my comment so personally, Andy, or what you’re upset about given that you just managed to type in complete sentences without resorting to numbers or text message abbreviations.
I’m not on a roleplay server. I’m on one of the busiest servers. And yet open chat consists of people typing in correctly punctuated standard English, and the conversation is witty and enjoyable. I have not found that to be true of open chat in most MMO games, period, but I have never found it at all in a F2P. If it goes away, I’ll mute the channel, but I’ll miss it in much the same way I’d miss a favorite bar after it became a TGIMcFunster’s.
 

I liked LotRO quite a bit, up until I hit cap. I couldn’t find a regular raiding guild that didn’t suck and basically had the best gear pre-raiding. I also had trouble getting groups just to do book quests after book 10. This was before most of the expansions. I’ve thought about going back but was turned off by some rumors that the game became less about telling stories in Tolkien’s world and more about getting phat loot.

This jumped out at me from your article: “(Lifetime subscriptions in general are not a good idea for game companies – it’s the classic appeal for short term cash in place of long term income, appealing precisely to the hard core players who are likely to keep a subscription in play over years)”
The problem/fallacy here is that you are (possibly drastically) underestimating the time value of money. Money today is always worth more than potential money down the road, but you don’t have to take my word for it, I’m not an economist — there are better books on the subject than the lay version that follows.
Basically, though, it boils down to the fact that money today, according to just the simple interest formula (which means even the most basic type of investments, even capital investments), is always worth more today than tomorrow (and that’s even before you take into account things like asset depreciation and inflation, which only, ahem, compound this effect).
For a game company, given the choice between a large early investment (and maybe erratic investment behavior following) or an equivalent sum distributed as equal, fixed payments: you always want the customers willing to put in the bigger, earlier bankroll.
Sure, it seems counter-intuitive, and it seems harder to run a business on such an erratic payment scheme, but there are mitigation schemes (smart investments) and there’s probably a good market here for business consultants to explain such things to game companies. But you don’t have to take my word for it, I’m just a Software Engineer who had the “time value of money” pounded into his head by a couple of economics courses, but also hasn’t yet figured out how to apply it to game development investment.

(Alright, no supporting links this time because the spam checker eats the message alive)
I think a lot us in the general Lum The Mad cloud of MMORPG appreciation are a tad narrow-viewed in that we really don’t realize how far things have progressed outside of the american MMORPG market.   Consider some of the following F2P games:

* Runes Of Magic – Boasting three million players and a pretty favorable review, it has gameplay mechanics that are pretty damn deep and satisfying.
* Perfect World International – Boasting over 1.5 million players, I would say the game play is less sophisticated than Runes of Magic.
* Ace Online – An MMORPG that actually puts players in control of aerospace fighters, plays somewhat like afterburner.
* Dragonica Online – An MMORPG that puts the players in control of the fantasy grind action from a side-perspective, platforming action, somewhat Street Fighter esque (although a bit kindergarten in the age demographic).  (A older game along the same vein, Maple Story, is said to have well over 100 million player accounts.)
* Atlantica Online – An MMORPG which has players controlling entire teams of characters in a turn-based strategy game for combat.  Over 10 million player accounts.
* Allods Online – An very high quality MMORPG which actually includes an end game where your character can take up posts aboard a Spelljammer-style ship.

So here we are back in America trying to sell some EverQuest/WoW clones for $15/mo, when there’s a ton of games out there giving away a much wider variety of overall gameplay variety, often high quality experiences that match subscription games, for free with optional micro-payments.   We’re more than just overcharging for our games in America, we’re getting our asses kicked at making better quality ones.

There might as well just be two pay to play MMORPGs on the American market, EVE Online (not made by America) and World of Warcraft – this is only because nobody else can offer the same experience at a better price.  (Well, okay, maybe City Of Heroes could be the third one if only because it deviates sufficiently from the standard mold.)

The thing I notice about F2P games is the “more frosting and less cake” sort of thing, though using the metaphor differently.  The content is designed in such a way as to discourage actually playing for free.  See, there is a group of players who will play the game and never, ever spend any real money on anything in the online store.  Those players are pretty much pariahs to the game developers since they enjoy the product but don’t invest any income into it.  That’s just the risk of a F2P model though, the hope is they can lure players with the free-ness of it and then get them to actually spend money via the store extras.  (Coincidentally, I tend to be one of those pariahs.  If they promise free enjoyment, then darnit I’m gonna enjoy it on a free basis!)

When someone said “more frosting and less cake,” what that suggests to me is that they will purposefully make the core part of the game light on content, thus passive-aggressively forcing players to spend money to enjoy the true content of the game.

Turbine’s been looking into this for a long, long time.
From the Asheron’s Call forums today, a post by a dev:
“

I will let you all peek behind the curtain here for a sec… A while back, long before DDO went FTP, AC was discussed as being the first one here to go this route. It made sense after all. So we did some investigation, and found that due to the way AC was coded, how the billing system works with AC and how the server communicate with our Authentication servers, we would have to re-write pretty much the entire game in order to make it work the way we as a company wanted it to. We are talking an enormous amount of time and money for something unproven.(FTP)

So then after looking at DDO, it was found to be much easier because the game and all related things were better designed to handle a switch like this.

Now this is not to say we won’t ever take AC FTP, but there are no plans for it right now. I will however not say this won’t ever happen.”

john smith: And what is the lesson we all get from this? Never, ever purchase a lifetime subscription.. Nearly every single mmorpg that has offered it, has either gone out of business or decided that your one time payment just wasn’t enough and done some bait and switch like this f2p, or as I like to call it: “Feel free to buy cash shop items” plan later on.

Except that my lifetime subscription, even if I quit tomorrow, will have already saved me money. So so much for your “lesson learned.”

And as a lifetime subscriber, I also get rolled into a special VIP status, which means I get all the benefits of a monthly subscription (mainly, loads of free store points and access to everything I have access to now), without having to pay said subscription. So, I have nothing to complain about there. My issues are purely atmospheric.

Also, as it stands now I notice that any player who never visits the store to purchase something is going to be pretty much confined to the intro areas and Bree. Which makes the totally F2P aspect not much more than an extended demo of the game, designed to hook in players to spend *something* to get access further.

A few points/questions:

Using simple math, Base subscription * X months = Lifetime Subscription cost.  After X months, publisher can go Free to Play with a clean conscience?

My main question is this: Should entire subscription games go Free to Play?  Or should companies launch Free to Play servers, possibly even charging subscribers to move their characters out of the subscription model to the free servers if they choose? (subscriptions could still be supported, for a while)

Right now, it would seem that launching a game, selling boxes, collectors editions, lifetime subs, etc, then moving to F2P after a while would be the most profitable approach you can take with a title.  The question is, will more gamers become so jaded towards MMO’s that people stop buying titles and only focus on them when they go free? Or is that a relatively small number compared to the horde of folks already refusing to pay the initial costs of a box/subscription?

http://www.lotro.com/betasignup/vipchart.html

It looks like if you used to have an account, you may be in for quite a suprise.

Although I understand that if you reactivate an old account into premium status, you aren’t actually limited in money or bags. Still, that’s confusing as fuck, and there are still some other restrictions that might fuck over a former paid account.

But here’s the worst. If you take a look at "traits" and "destiny points", it seems turbine has no qualms about crossing the line between cosmetic and necessary purchases. Traits, IIRC, are slottable passive enhancements that you generally grind to unlock. There are a couple different trait rows, but there’s one that lets you have like 5 or 6 slots by the time you hit 50. You generally get most of them just grinding levels, but to unlock their full potential takes a fair amount of grinding. To say the least, a full set of appropriate traits fully unlocked is the equivalent of two or three pieces of gear. Arguably necessary for end-game content.

I think there is a problem with having too many games available.  I also think there is too much emphasis on the “game” aspect with the “virtual world” aspect lost and forgotten.  My interest has become passive because I no longer feel emotion.  Hundreds of game worlds are a blur of repetition in my memory.  They all share a singular personality.
Is it just me?  I can’t name a single recent celebrity gamer (like Lum), passionate and vocal.  Nobody cares about their game, so they hop around continually searching for something with staying power.  Searching for a community that doesn’t turn over every 60 days…
Anyways, these problems plague both F2P and P2P, and they are both equally at fault.
 

@Max Battcher I think you are drastically overestimating the time value of money. Consider two LotRO subscribers – one who took the $200 lifetime subscription and one who took the $10/month lifetime reduced subscription.  After 2 years, one  will have earned you $200 (plus a little bit  of interest) while the other will have earned you $240.  Without even reaching for the calculator, you can see that the lifetime subscription would have to have slightly under 10% interest for the two to be worth about the same at this point.

This is not really the time value of money. You are making a big assumption here that the company / product will be around in 2 years time to continue collecting those monthly payments, or that your customer will still be around paying (you touched on this last bit).

The time value of money does not just depend on the amount of interest lost by not having the money up front. When choosing payments over a long period of time as opposed to payments up front right now, the principle consideration is risk.

Think of it this way. If I said I’d give you $10 million today, or $20 million in one year’s time, which would you take?

Using your straight interest calculation – there’s no way you will earn double your money on any investment in a year, so the $20 million choice is an absolute no brainer.

But it’s not that simple, is it? A year is a long time. Who can say what will happen between now and then? Maybe I will die and I won’t be around to give you the $20 million in a year. Maybe you will die before you get it. Any one of an infinite number of things could happen which would prevent you from collecting the $20 million in the future. But you have an offer on the table, RIGHT NOW, to take $10 million immediately.

THAT decision is what time value of money considerations are all about.

For you to accept the $20 million, you would need to assess the risk of not being able to collect in the future, as well as the cost of forgoing the interest on the $10 million today and the utility you would derive from having that money now, plus a number of other things. These considerations get estimated and calculated and are specified as the discount rate. Using the discount rate, you compare the value of $10 million today versus the $20 million in the future discounted by the discount rate (the “net present value” of $20 million). If the net present value of the $20 million is greater than $10 million, you take the $20 million.

Lifetime subscriptions are an excellent idea for games such as these – games with huge upfront capital investments. I can only speculate as to the magnitude of debt incurred by a project the size of LOTRO, but having a big cash injection up front does wonders for the cash flow problems of such a business. It is worth more to Turbine to have that money now because it gives them resources immediately, which reduces the risk of them folding due to cash flow problems and gives them some flexibility in how they structure their finances.

It is an excellent way to manage financial risk. One of the main reasons a business folds is not due to inadequate assets – it’s due to inadequate cash flow, ie not being able to pay the bills despite having highly valued assets. And you can’t pay the bills with monthly payment contracts that can be terminated at the customer’s whim.

That’s not to say that a company can’t survive without this model – it depends on their other financial resources and the market in general. In my view though, lifetime subscription offers are a clearly superior approach to managing the finances of MMO companies.

Sure, 3 years down the track, the subscriptions aren’t making you money, but by then, you’re stable. The risk of you collapsing is over. You aren’t “losing” money to these subscriptions, you’re just paying for the upfront reduction of risk you received. As MMOs are one of the riskiest software projects in the world, that’s a smart investment.

I think i’ll choose to be cautiously optimistic. I liked LOTR when i tried it and turbine has always been one of my favorite developers. Great game, very pretty and sweet questlines. The reason i never stayed in LOTR was the loneliness. I joined very late and most people were already max level. Very hard to find a group, no workable LFG-system and lots of group-only content, including the main questline. Maybe this will bring in a wave of new players?
I see in the vip-chart that free players will have limited communication. Perhaps thats an attempt to preserve the chat for VIP-players? One of the best things about LOTR when i played it was the lack of lolkids in the chat. Maybe turbine realises this?
The free to play model that turbine uses seems fair to me. At least its not the Cryptic way, with full storeprice+monthly fee+microtransactions on top. (Btw, Anyone who bought a sparkly horse has bought a rideable dunce-cap and helped make sure that we will see more microtransactions in both wow and other games.

Mery: This is another NGE. “Those who do not know the lessons of history..” , and all that.

It’s interesting how many people seem to think learning the lessons of history means forgetting any detail that conflicts with whatever agenda you’re trying to push.
* LoTRO going F2P is keeping the way the game plays, but adding another way to play a game outside of the monthly subscription model.
* The SWG NGE is completely replacing the way the game plays, but charging the same monthly subscription model.
On these two tangents, they’re roughly the opposite situation. The main tangent in which I can find resemblance is “a change has occurred that may alienate some players,” but that’s a very vague thing that could encapsulate every patch they ever rolled out.

A Man In Black: You realize you’re wishing harm on the owner of his site and many of his friends, right?

I’m sure lum has some skills under his belt that don’t involve “menial tasks in mmorpgs”

geldonyetich: Woah, woah, woah.Stop the train right here.  No.What we have here is a subjective opinion.

No, the awfulness of the gameplay in almost every one of these games up to the current day is not an opinion. It is an indisputable fact, like gravity. If you disagree with this, you do not have a different opinion; you are wrong.
And the wonderful thing about this deliberately bombastic and dismissive statement (which is no more absurd than the claim that because millions of people play these a la carte “games” that they must have some intrinsic value comparable that an MMO player must respect, e.g.1: Farmville) is that, as a matter of the economic argument we’re having, the pig-headed, close minded value judgment is provably correct, while the pluralist, subjectivist objection is manifestly irrelevant.To summarize: If MMO players want to play MMOs, but they don’t want to play these content-lite paper-doll “frosting” games, and enough of them are willing to endorse their “mere opinion” with their wallets, then their interests will continue to be served (unlike with EQ clones where most of them just bitch as they resubscribe or move to the next one). It doesn’t matter how closeminded and parochial they are for demanding to spend their time with games that don’t suck. It’s their money; if there’s enough of it, they win.My point in making my post, which was perhaps lost in my gleeful hammering of tedious futurism, was that there are two separate arguments going on. If you’re maintaining that F2P has a gloriously profitable future, you’re right. (Actually I think it will go out of style within 5 years for a number of reasons, but I concede the point out of total disinterest.) If you’re maintaining that the success of F2P represents some endpoint toward which we’ll all be drawn, pining for the days when publishers used to satisfy consumers who wish to spend large amounts of money upfront and monthly on a certain kind of gaming experience, you’re not just wrong, you’re Michael Patchter wrong.

I think your inability to read one word – or seven – past a sentence that irritates you before jumping for the post button to satisfy your primal need to be heard explains a lot.<p>In an attempt to get my point across before you reply again, I’ll condense my point into as few words as I can: it doesn’t matter if I’m an asshole, they want my money.

Yeah, well, I haven’t quite grokked his newest reskin. So let’s just pretend this is a paragraph break. Your imagined future is one that is quite likely to come to pass. I just don’t agree that it has any bearing on my future, except obviously for the next couple years as much of the venture capital will be inevitably sucked from the “MMO!” to “Free MMO!” hype train.