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The new business model
alderdale
Member Posts: 301
The old business model:
Smaller market had to earn every sub. Devs were forced to make a deep gameworld that would keep players hooked for years just in order to make a decent buck. Hardware and bandwidth costs high.
The new business model: (mostly)
Huge market. Make it fast make it cheap, boxed or F2P. Count on massive number of frustrated or A.D.D. gamers to at least try your game get hooked for 6 months. Money made through cash shop or boxed or online sales, enough wont leave due to cash or time investment.. Keep server running for practically nothing (cheap bandwidth and VM ware server). Start new cookie cutter MMO, rinse repeat cash grab.
My point is not that every MMO works like this today, but a fair number certainly do and the numer grows every quarter. 8 Years ago this would of been an unsubstainable business model, today it seems to work just fine. Allot of the MMO market has become the same as the console game market..
Comments
yes .. the true wow killer. they killed the entire genre.
So far most cookie-cutter MMOs that came out lately are P2P. Very few of them are Freemium or B2P.
Fast money-grabs happen in a lot of industries, but I'm not convinced that they're the ones making the most money in the MMORPG game currently.
Although the sense that a game might be a fast, low-quality game is partially driven by the fact that established MMORPGs reinvest some of that money back into the game (cyclicly making a dramatically superior product than competition within each "tier" of MMORPG.) These MMORPGs started higher quality and kept people interested (or they wouldn't have done as well as they did to make this cyclical trend happen.)
Free or Subbed, if you're not providing a game people want to play and pay for, they won't.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Old business model - smaller market, very few games, making any and all of the ones that existed a success regardless of whether they were good, polished, had content. Most of them released in much much much worse shape than todays' games, and fairly on par with Vanguard. Daoc had a decent launch though. Players that liked the genre played for years in 1 of 3-4 games because there was no other choice.
New business model - huge market, hundreds and and hundreds of games, games are given once chance (mostly) to get your attention and keep it. A bad launch will kill a game. They have to offer more content, more activities, more styles of gamplay, and thus appeal to a larger market to be able to meet operating costs and have any chance at making a profit. It is much more competitive and cut-throat than in the past, with developer costs, taxes, benefits... being much more expensive than before.
My point is that developers today have much more risk, and far less reward than they did in the past. They have to compete much harder for your sub than in the past. Which is one reason why so many are exploring alternative revenue sources.
Venge
edit - I will probably get flamed for this. But you know what, I'm not getting jaded of games, I still like them. I'm getting more and more jaded of people, of these forums. I think I need to take a break for awhile.
Noooo! Don't leave me alone with all these cranky bitter old people.
No doubt it will be interesting as GW2 IS B2P apart from this being a AAA title ,and according to the hype they are going to change the MO scene with all sorts of features not seen in a freemium model or in many P2P games.
If this is a monumental success whch by all accounts it will be could this then change the business models for future games,could F2P be replaced by B2P just as ROM,Atlantica shook up the F2P markets with there so called AAA status.
If so this could change the Mo industry we could actually see more quality launches like Rift as they will need to compete from the get go, as they will not be given any time by consumers if their product is are sub standard.We will see lesser Mo's as more devs concentrate on long term projects and not shove out content faster than most customers could download stuff to their hard drives.
The old business model was that way cause the market was rather niche and compared to today pretty small.
The new business model follows what seems the work better then in the old day's (keep in mind I like the old allot more)
But your last sentence didn't make much sense TO ME. Cause to me it's the other way around where the console market copies what works from the pc-market, as in the old day's of the console market they needed to bring out a game that worked instantly cause there wasn't any internet connection to it, while pc's had internet allot sooner then the console, with pc games most of them often got patches, downloadeble content, extra's, something that now is working the same with the console's.
You also know that the market has expanded into what it is today, where in the old we might have had 3/5 choices of MMORPG's to play, where we now have hunderds of MMORPG's to choose from.
I think it's the overload of choices that makes us see more crap being released where there still are a few gems that seem to work just fine.
So in short the new business model even though I personaly dislike it seems to work just fine for the majority of gamers into this genre.
But mannnnn do I long for some of the old evolving into something next gen, but as I said in other topics the type of MMORPG I personaly would want might be one of the most expensive MMORPG ever created due to what I want and see/read what others of the old want.