It only takes into account WoW. The only counterpoint needed is one single F2P game that saw a rise in its playerbase and micro transaction revenue and suddenly everything said in the article is meaningless.
And there are plenty of those examples to use.
Wow's number are going up because it's a great game and their expansion is hinting at going back to what was the most popular time in wows history.
Absolutly nothing of WoW's next xpac indicates it going back to anything remotely close to WotLK.
A good chunk of it is because they had Pandaria on Sale for $5/$10 over the holidays, so people who had been holding off on it, like me, either bought it, or a friend bought it for them as an XMas gift, and we spent the time catching up on the Story/Lore/Raids we missed since we quit.
I fully expect the numbers to drop again and that they're "Cherrypicking" their bragging time to try and drum up a few more subs out of it, "Hey look, your friends might be playing again, why don't you come back?"
The game itself has lost alot of it's Charm and it's less than likely WoD won't bring that back; however, people are stupid/naive and the subs WILL rise again a month or two after WoD comes out until everyone blows through the overly-easy content as usual and quits again. They're kinda shooting themselves in the foot with the "Free lv90" and Paid lv90s...the less time people spend lvling, the fewer months they spend locked into p2p, e.g: Why pay for 3 months to get a char to 90-100 when you can just buy a 90 and use the buttload of exp bonuses to burn to 100 then only pay for a month to do what you want? Assuming, of course, the Paid lv90s aren't over $25, which has been their "average" service charge, that's $5 less gross profit vs 3 months of time, and in a more "metaphysical" sense, it's a gigantic loss of bodycount vs time, people stick around for shorter periods, less alts made, less RDF filler both cuz of quitters and because some people just pay to skip that process entirely. In a way, it's almost like Vanilla's Group Quests: They've introduced new content and made them obsolete, I just wonder if they'll do the same as they did for Group quests and remove them too...
I just await the day they finally go F2P with optional sub + cash shop. Blizzard has had a habit of "early testing" systems long before they're used, e.g; they tested inventories, player spells, and the ! Quest system in a custom campaign after War3's story among other things, and many other examples I won't bother listing here; ergo, you've seen them start earliest testing of a Cash Shop with the mini-pets, there's been work done on purchasable Exp Boost potions, and now not only are they going to sell instant lv90(with Profession Bonuses if you lvl to 60 first), but they've added 3 different Cash Shop buttons to the UI, all in preparation for the eventual F2P move. That's how Blizz works in experience.
The bottom line, however, back on the Article's topic: A minor jump after holiday sales of the game isn't some "return to form" for P2P; as mentioned in the article, it's a controlled fluke, bragging right after, again, a major gift holiday + month-long price drop. It's a couple hundred k, tops, out of the millions lost, and it will go back down soon once again until WoD hits, where it'll resurge once again, primarily because of Nostalgia & attachment to characters we've had for TEN FREAKING YEARS now, simply wanting to see them push their story forward before going back on the Shelf until the next sale/major content shift. WoW is a Unique case in that regard because of attachment to characters. A new game coming out p2p wouldn't do nearly as well because it doesn't have the backstory or existing playerbase/fanbase, we've already seen proof of this with SWTOR and STO failing despite their huge pre-existing fanbases(Though that's because the developers half-assed the games themselves, too, but that's another article entirely)
A good chunk of it is because they had Pandaria on Sale for $5/$10 over the holidays, so people who had been holding off on it, like me, either bought it, or a friend bought it for them as an XMas gift, and we spent the time catching up on the Story/Lore/Raids we missed since we quit.
I fully expect the numbers to drop again and that they're "Cherrypicking" their bragging time to try and drum up a few more subs out of it, "Hey look, your friends might be playing again, why don't you come back?"
The game itself has lost alot of it's Charm and it's less than likely WoD won't bring that back; however, people are stupid/naive and the subs WILL rise again a month or two after WoD comes out until everyone blows through the overly-easy content as usual and quits again. They're kinda shooting themselves in the foot with the "Free lv90" and Paid lv90s...the less time people spend lvling, the fewer months they spend locked into p2p, e.g: Why pay for 3 months to get a char to 90-100 when you can just buy a 90 and use the buttload of exp bonuses to burn to 100 then only pay for a month to do what you want? Assuming, of course, the Paid lv90s aren't over $25, which has been their "average" service charge, that's $5 less gross profit vs 3 months of time, and in a more "metaphysical" sense, it's a gigantic loss of bodycount vs time, people stick around for shorter periods, less alts made, less RDF filler both cuz of quitters and because some people just pay to skip that process entirely. In a way, it's almost like Vanilla's Group Quests: They've introduced new content and made them obsolete, I just wonder if they'll do the same as they did for Group quests and remove them too...
I just await the day they finally go F2P with optional sub + cash shop. Blizzard has had a habit of "early testing" systems long before they're used, e.g; they tested inventories, player spells, and the ! Quest system in a custom campaign after War3's story among other things, and many other examples I won't bother listing here; ergo, you've seen them start earliest testing of a Cash Shop with the mini-pets, there's been work done on purchasable Exp Boost potions, and now not only are they going to sell instant lv90(with Profession Bonuses if you lvl to 60 first), but they've added 3 different Cash Shop buttons to the UI, all in preparation for the eventual F2P move. That's how Blizz works in experience.
The bottom line, however, back on the Article's topic: A minor jump after holiday sales of the game isn't some "return to form" for P2P; as mentioned in the article, it's a controlled fluke, bragging right after, again, a major gift holiday + month-long price drop. It's a couple hundred k, tops, out of the millions lost, and it will go back down soon once again until WoD hits, where it'll resurge once again, primarily because of Nostalgia & attachment to characters we've had for TEN FREAKING YEARS now, simply wanting to see them push their story forward before going back on the Shelf until the next sale/major content shift.
For every one thing that blizz tests then eventually goes with, there are 10 others they dumped in the trash. Blizz's cash shop has also been there for years, WELL before the whole "subs tanking for certain games so they go F2P" craze. Anecdotal evidence is just that
And they didn't "cherry pick their bragging time", they are held by law to quarterly financial reports for their investors....if anything, they timed the sale for the announcement, not the other way around. For every one of your points that might have merit, its overshadowed by ignorant bias or straw man hyposis. Such is life on the mmorpg.com forums.
I don't play free to play games. I see F2P games as cheap disposable garbage. Maybe this is the reason I don't play MMOs anymore. I am sick of all those $$ signs prompting me to buy content on their shop. I just hate it. It fragments the playerbase as well. You need to worry if someone in your party has access to something or not. This F2P is also not very transparent and it's not immediately clear how much you need to sink into a game to enjoy it. If I want to play WoW I know I have to pay £7-9 to buy MOP and pay £9 each month. It's as easy as that.
Also as someone mentioned a lot of development time is spent on developing content for the cash shop. This gets eliminated if you pay a sub. They know they have to push content to make sure you keep sub-ed. The service is also much better. In F2P service is almost non-existant. When I buy products, I also consider the post-sale service.
Long story short => F2P games = cheap disposable garbage not worth your time.
Originally posted by DamonVile
Originally posted by JJ82
What a worthless article.
It only takes into account WoW. The only counterpoint needed is one single F2P game that saw a rise in its playerbase and micro transaction revenue and suddenly everything said in the article is meaningless.
And there are plenty of those examples to use.
+1
A rise of 100k is not a trend in an industry of an estimated 400 million users. This is just people predicting the future based on what they want to happen.
Wow's number are going up because it's a great game and their expansion is hinting at going back to what was the most popular time in wows history.
I agree this is not a trend. But when you look at an industry, you don't necessarily look at pure user numbers. So there are 400m users (going with your figure, not sure of exact number) but from my understanding WoW players spent a lot more than your regular MMO player. WoWcollected the most revenue from microtransactions out of all MMOs. Something like 250m. What good are your 200m users who don't spend any money on your game. It's the same problem you see in the smartphone market. Android has a market share of around 80% in terms of pure numbers but the IPhone generates 5 times higher profits.
WoW probably generates a huge chunk of the revenues/profits of the industry. I wouldn't be surprised if it was over 50%. Who care if 10 MMOs have 100m users who generate almost no revenue.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
I think this just proves that pay to play mmorpgs are fine if you release something of quality and continue to develop your game past release. All these games that went free to play after being pay to play has nothing at all to do with people not being able to afford the game or blocked entry. It has a lot to do with the quality of the game. Even games like everquest 2 were deeply flawed from the start and half assed in quality and still are to this day. WOW has been polished and content heavy every few months since release pretty much and though the game started off deeply flawed to blizzard stayed at it fixing the game and making it much more enjoyable. Hell I havent even played a mmorpg more than 2 or 3 months straight since wow and before that DAOC and some warhammer as that was deeply flawed to.
Go look at the free to play games like neverwinter for example, still to this day hardly any end game content and they charge you WAY and I mean WAY more money than any pay to play game with a year long sub would cost. I think players have just become so damn jaded from shitty release after shitty release copying wow that people just expect this as the normal now.
It only takes into account WoW. The only counterpoint needed is one single F2P game that saw a rise in its playerbase and micro transaction revenue and suddenly everything said in the article is meaningless.
And there are plenty of those examples to use.
Wow's number are going up because it's a great game and their expansion is hinting at going back to what was the most popular time in wows history.
Absolutly nothing of WoW's next xpac indicates it going back to anything remotely close to WotLK.
Thats because wotlk wasn't the most popular time in wow. BC was, when the game had some challenge to it and everything wasn't handed to you. Wotlk/Cata/Mists were a joke. Hit the cap and completed heroic content within a month, 2 at the most. My opinion is Ghostcrawler was responsible for the crappy xpacs. He came in doing the wotlk and then he leaves when they decide to go back to the way the game was in BC. Doubt its a coincidence.
I would have never tried some games if they weren't ftp, so I'm not completely against them. I was ok with how D&D Online did it, for example. Still I prefer sub games from my experience.
Problems for me with the ftp model: I believe that ftp games can often end up costing a player more money over time than the sub games if you don't keep an eye on your spending. Also, the ftp model can also become a pay to win situation which is against the spirit of mmo's to me.
My other thought with these pay models: it appears to me that the developers of these two models have different priorities in order to maintain their game. In subscription based games, developers have to place a lot of their focus on creating new, fun, and interesting content in order to maintain subs (and earn money). From my FTP experience, it would seem a good a good amount of effort from developers in these games is spent trying to figure out how to create an item to sell out of a shop that will get players to open their wallets.
It only takes into account WoW. The only counterpoint needed is one single F2P game that saw a rise in its playerbase and micro transaction revenue and suddenly everything said in the article is meaningless.
And there are plenty of those examples to use.
Wow's number are going up because it's a great game and their expansion is hinting at going back to what was the most popular time in wows history.
Absolutly nothing of WoW's next xpac indicates it going back to anything remotely close to WotLK.
Thats because wotlk wasn't the most popular time in wow. BC was, when the game had some challenge to it and everything wasn't handed to you. Wotlk/Cata/Mists were a joke. Hit the cap and completed heroic content within a month, 2 at the most. My opinion is Ghostcrawler was responsible for the crappy xpacs. He came in doing the wotlk and then he leaves when they decide to go back to the way the game was in BC. Doubt its a coincidence.
BTW, what guild were you in where you completed most of WoW's heroic raids within a month of their launches, because that would mean you cleared them prior to the world first guilds. That would be quite a feat to not have been recognized for.
You are also forgetting that Sunwell, BC's hardest raid instance, was easier than any heroic raid instance ICC and onward, right?
IMO an MMO's combat, story, graphics, ect, all come second to immersion. WoW has a world you want to play in. All the "wow clones" failed to copy that aspect and thus never did as well. IMO Wildstar may have created a fun world that players will want to play in, we'll have to see. But like i said, gameplay/story/graphics, don't matter nearly as much as people think they do. You have to give us a world we want to play in.
Whoopy! WoW subscriptions rose in 1-2 months by ~2.6%! Toll the "End of F2P" bell!
December is the month where 'kids' have the most cash to spend on things used inside the house (winter + Christmas). Some of us are starting to get out of the economic crisis or see the light at the end of the tunnel, thus making a little money available on luxury items like MMO subscriptions unlike previously every dime was saved so you could pay rent, have running water and not have to kill the neighbors cat for sustenance ;-)
That being said, most of the F2P stuff is crap, I'm not talking about P2W, I'm just talking about crap design. I'm an iOS user and can't browse through the app store before tripping over a crap F2P title and getting burried by them. There is awesome F2P stuff, both on PC and iOS, but those are rather the exception then the rule. I recently bought a year long Planetside 2 subscription because I've played it a LOT, I expect to play it a lot more, I enjoy it in moderation, and the folks making the game need to eat to (the announcement regarding the all access pass helped to). The same happened with LoL, DDO, and Tribes Ascend. I expect it to happen with other titles as well...
I have tried WoW a couple of times and I just don't find it all that interesting, not F2P, and certainly not for €15/month. I paid a long time for Eve Online, before earning enough isk to buy time/PLEX, but in the end it took to much time out of my life.
Selling level 90's, even in a F2P game, would be unacceptable to me. It compromises the integrity of an MMO. But a subscription game selling level 90's, it's something that would make me quit (retail) WoW, if I hadn't already.
It only takes into account WoW. The only counterpoint needed is one single F2P game that saw a rise in its playerbase and micro transaction revenue and suddenly everything said in the article is meaningless.
And there are plenty of those examples to use.
Wow's number are going up because it's a great game and their expansion is hinting at going back to what was the most popular time in wows history.
Absolutly nothing of WoW's next xpac indicates it going back to anything remotely close to WotLK.
Thats because wotlk wasn't the most popular time in wow. BC was, when the game had some challenge to it and everything wasn't handed to you. Wotlk/Cata/Mists were a joke. Hit the cap and completed heroic content within a month, 2 at the most. My opinion is Ghostcrawler was responsible for the crappy xpacs. He came in doing the wotlk and then he leaves when they decide to go back to the way the game was in BC. Doubt its a coincidence.
No BC was when they started handing everything to people and going from lore to Haris Pilton pop culture references. BC was free epic time for the masses. Also the time when the classes were int he worst shape balance and fun wise. Maybe popular with some. Start of the decline for me.
I'm on the fence personally. I don't play a single MMO anymore and if every MMO I did play had a sub I would have to cut back, not feeling like spending $100 a month in game subs. But playing f2p and investing money for permanent features or extras is ok by me.
At the same time it does start to hurt the experience when the cash shop becomes overwhelming.
That is good but you also have to remember over the last year WOW has lost over a million subscribers. So they got back between 5-10% of that lost customer base. Which is ok but with TESO and Wildstar coming out we could see a larger dip again before the enxt WOW expansion. I know at this point people might layout the cash for a change of pace before sinking more money into a dying game.
It only takes into account WoW. The only counterpoint needed is one single F2P game that saw a rise in its playerbase and micro transaction revenue and suddenly everything said in the article is meaningless.
And there are plenty of those examples to use.
Wow's number are going up because it's a great game and their expansion is hinting at going back to what was the most popular time in wows history.
Absolutly nothing of WoW's next xpac indicates it going back to anything remotely close to WotLK.
Thats because wotlk wasn't the most popular time in wow. BC was, when the game had some challenge to it and everything wasn't handed to you. Wotlk/Cata/Mists were a joke. Hit the cap and completed heroic content within a month, 2 at the most. My opinion is Ghostcrawler was responsible for the crappy xpacs. He came in doing the wotlk and then he leaves when they decide to go back to the way the game was in BC. Doubt its a coincidence.
BTW, what guild were you in where you completed most of WoW's heroic raids within a month of their launches, because that would mean you cleared them prior to the world first guilds. That would be quite a feat to not have been recognized for.
You are also forgetting that Sunwell, BC's hardest raid instance, was easier than any heroic raid instance ICC and onward, right?
Sorry but you are wrong. You are looking at peak subs.
The real story is how many subs each expansion added. BC added approx 5million subs. Wrath added 2 mil. Percentage wise BC was the most popular era.
And your last sentence is a joke. It took one of the top guilds in the world to defeat Muru over 45 attempts. Nothing in Wrath took the top guilds that much effort to down anything.
The article makes one good point: it has turned the market into a substantially more cut-throat environment.
I used to randomly buy games just to try them out. Genre was irrelevant; I'd look at a game, and say "Let's try this one.". No matter how bad that game was, I would play it a minimum of 5 hours. Believe me, this led me through some real suckfest titles. Some that come to mind were "Prince of Qin", "Shadow Vault", and "Harbinger". The reasoning behind this being "I paid for this, I'm going to put some time into it, damnit!"
Since the free-to-play-revolution, I would never put myself through this nowadays. Much like the author said, my expectation for instant amusement or gratification has led me to install a game -> play it for 15 minutes or less -> then make judgment call. If there's even one thing I don't like... **** it, on to the next game. I don't think I'm alone in the matter either. When you spend money on something, you feel at least remotely obligated to get some use out of it. The problem being, when I don't have to spend a dime on the game, I don't have any pre-existing level of attachment to it, so I feel no reason to spend money on it.
The bigger problem, though, to me, is that most Free-to-play games aren't as free as they sound. While there are some gems out there like Hawken and League of Legends and Smite, there's HUNDREDS of games that are nowhere near that caliber. Many F2P games are free to try, but then there's a mandatory cash-advance feature of the game. Whether it's stat boosts, rune pages, itemization, etc, in most F2P games I suddenly get to a point where progress, for whatever reason, is so bottle-necked that the ONLY way to progress is to have 50+ hours a week to play, or to drop $5-10 bucks.
The biggest problem of all, though, is the double-dipping companies. EA and Blizzard and such are absolutely becoming the guiltiest offenders. Charging a box-sale price, and then putting in features on top of that for money is a new industry-low. I think of games like Dead Space 3, where you paid $60 for your game, BUT THEN you also had to spend more money to have access to the best circuits in the game. I think of Sim City where you paid for the game, and then individual features that could and should have been included in the release package, but were saved to sell separately on day 1. This trend is the damnedest atrocity of them all.
If you're going to be Free to play, then you need to be free to play in it's entirety. That doesn't mean charging for different game modes, requiring the spending of cash to progress, or having features that aren't unlockable unless you spend money. For this reason, I think League of Legends has really set the standard in "free to play done right". The problem is that a mere handful of titles followed Riot's lead, and the rest of these companies are following EA'Activision's lead.
Waiting for something fresh to arrive on the MMO scene...
Originally posted by Horusra Your post is contradictory. You want to not be hampered for not paying, but you admit nothing is free.
I dont think you understand the concept of Free to play. I would much rather pay 50 dollars to goto Six flags then goto a local faire and buy 40 dollars worth of tickets to use on subpar rides and then be haggled to pay more money to play some of the side games
I'll gladly pay my 15 dollar admission fee to have the freedom to play without imposing restrictions and constant reminders to buy their product.
Except that is not the case most of the time. The restrictions are negligible things most of the time like less character slots, less bags or bag space and rarely are locked content wise. There are a few overtly bad free to play games that do lockdown actual content, though this is seldom actually the case. Some games offer content packs (which again this is NOT a restriction) like TSW where you can expand the base games content for like 10 - 15 dollars a pop or opt to sub to those games and get the content for free or you have companies like SOE who are making a 15 dollar sub fee that encompasses all of their games in that fee or Rift where you get access to all the expansions and content for free but just need to purchase something to get access to be able to hold more money and use the Auction House, though you do need to make a one time purchase to get access to some of the expansion souls (skill trees).
Your basis of argument is probably based off an old experience and not the modern landscape of F2P games or B2P for that matter. There are many huge advancements in AAA F2P titles and it is just laughable to see people not realizing that WoW and many others have taken to selling services that are part of F2P a lot of the time and then paying a sub on top of that. Server transfers and everything else should be handled by your sub payment but they are not.
How many NA subs does Wow have? You'll never know. I don't like f2p games really. I'd rather buy a box and pay a sub for a game that's I like and that gets updated.
If you don't want to spend money then stop bitching or play a console etc.. Devs don't make games for free. Would you work for nothing? Not likely.
It only takes into account WoW. The only counterpoint needed is one single F2P game that saw a rise in its playerbase and micro transaction revenue and suddenly everything said in the article is meaningless.
And there are plenty of those examples to use.
Wow's number are going up because it's a great game and their expansion is hinting at going back to what was the most popular time in wows history.
Absolutly nothing of WoW's next xpac indicates it going back to anything remotely close to WotLK.
Thats because wotlk wasn't the most popular time in wow. BC was, when the game had some challenge to it and everything wasn't handed to you. Wotlk/Cata/Mists were a joke. Hit the cap and completed heroic content within a month, 2 at the most. My opinion is Ghostcrawler was responsible for the crappy xpacs. He came in doing the wotlk and then he leaves when they decide to go back to the way the game was in BC. Doubt its a coincidence.
BTW, what guild were you in where you completed most of WoW's heroic raids within a month of their launches, because that would mean you cleared them prior to the world first guilds. That would be quite a feat to not have been recognized for.
You are also forgetting that Sunwell, BC's hardest raid instance, was easier than any heroic raid instance ICC and onward, right?
Sorry but you are wrong. You are looking at peak subs.
The real story is how many subs each expansion added. BC added approx 5million subs. Wrath added 2 mil. Percentage wise BC was the most popular era.
And your last sentence is a joke. It took one of the top guilds in the world to defeat Muru over 45 attempts. Nothing in Wrath took the top guilds that much effort to down anything.
Not according to Paragon, who got the world first heroic LK 25 kill, which took them over 170 attempts...
By your own crazy measuring stick (apparently attempts?), ICC was 4 times harder than anything in BC. Don't take my word for it, take theirs...
And I quote:
"This is definitely the most challenging boss in WoW history, and I’ve been there among the first to kill Horsemen in Naxx-40 and whatnot. Everything else up to this point pales in comparison. The encounter is extremely ruthless in the sense that anyone making a mistake will almost instantly lead to a raid-wide wipe. The fight itself requires almost 20-minutes of full-on concentration coupled with very high personal skill-level.
Quite simply the perfect end-boss to finnish the expansion with, couldn't have hoped for more. My hat is off to Blizzard on this one. I can't wait to see if this encounter can be outdone in Cataclysm."
-Synti "
The heroic raid fights have only gotten harder from there. Heroic Rags in CATA makes heroic LK look easy mode. At least make claims that are in the realm of reality, and not so easily proven wrong. And WoW was at 8 mill subs at the time of BC launch, which means it added 3 million, to WotLKs 1 mil....which would make Vanilla its "most popular" according to you, even though WotLK had the most players for the most amount of time. Your logic is failing you left and right. Apparently you don't like facts, and would instead rather stomp your feet yelling "lalalalalalala" while outright making stuff up lol.
Edit: For some further context to how the raids have gotten over time, Do you know how many attempts it took Paragon to kill heoric Garrosh (the current end boss)? 638. It took Paragon 638 attempts to kill the latest MoP end boss. GTHO with your 45 attempts lol.
Not according to Paragon, who got the world first heroic LK 25 kill, which took them over 170 attempts...
By your own crazy measuring stick (apparently attempts?), ICC was 4 times harder than anything in BC. Don't take my word for it, take theirs...
And I quote:
"This is definitely the most challenging boss in WoW history, and I’ve been there among the first to kill Horsemen in Naxx-40 and whatnot. Everything else up to this point pales in comparison. The encounter is extremely ruthless in the sense that anyone making a mistake will almost instantly lead to a raid-wide wipe. The fight itself requires almost 20-minutes of full-on concentration coupled with very high personal skill-level.
Quite simply the perfect end-boss to finnish the expansion with, couldn't have hoped for more. My hat is off to Blizzard on this one. I can't wait to see if this encounter can be outdone in Cataclysm."
-Synti "
The heroic raid fights have only gotten harder from there. Heroic Rags in CATA makes heroic LK look easy mode. At least make claims that are in the realm of reality, and not so easily proven wrong. And WoW was at 8 mill subs at the time of BC launch, which means it added 3 million, to WotLKs 1 mil....which would make Vanilla its "most popular" according to you, even though WotLK had the most players for the most amount of time. Your logic is failing you left and right. Apparently you don't like facts, and would instead rather stomp your feet yelling "lalalalalalala" while outright making stuff up lol.
Edit: For some further context to how the raids have gotten over time, Do you know how many attempts it took Paragon to kill heoric Garrosh (the current end boss)? 638. It took Paragon 638 attempts to kill the latest MoP end boss. GTHO with your 45 attempts lol.
The only difference is that M'uru and 4H were NORMAL MODE.
There was no heroic mode back then.....normal mode (it wasn't even called that, because there was only 1 mode) was the pinnacle of raiding in vanilla and BC, whihc actually makes it thier version of Heroic mode.......which was a joke compared to heroic mode today. Pointing that out only proves my point further. High level raiding in WoW has only gotten harder over time.
Comments
Absolutly nothing of WoW's next xpac indicates it going back to anything remotely close to WotLK.
A good chunk of it is because they had Pandaria on Sale for $5/$10 over the holidays, so people who had been holding off on it, like me, either bought it, or a friend bought it for them as an XMas gift, and we spent the time catching up on the Story/Lore/Raids we missed since we quit.
I fully expect the numbers to drop again and that they're "Cherrypicking" their bragging time to try and drum up a few more subs out of it, "Hey look, your friends might be playing again, why don't you come back?"
The game itself has lost alot of it's Charm and it's less than likely WoD won't bring that back; however, people are stupid/naive and the subs WILL rise again a month or two after WoD comes out until everyone blows through the overly-easy content as usual and quits again. They're kinda shooting themselves in the foot with the "Free lv90" and Paid lv90s...the less time people spend lvling, the fewer months they spend locked into p2p, e.g: Why pay for 3 months to get a char to 90-100 when you can just buy a 90 and use the buttload of exp bonuses to burn to 100 then only pay for a month to do what you want? Assuming, of course, the Paid lv90s aren't over $25, which has been their "average" service charge, that's $5 less gross profit vs 3 months of time, and in a more "metaphysical" sense, it's a gigantic loss of bodycount vs time, people stick around for shorter periods, less alts made, less RDF filler both cuz of quitters and because some people just pay to skip that process entirely. In a way, it's almost like Vanilla's Group Quests: They've introduced new content and made them obsolete, I just wonder if they'll do the same as they did for Group quests and remove them too...
I just await the day they finally go F2P with optional sub + cash shop. Blizzard has had a habit of "early testing" systems long before they're used, e.g; they tested inventories, player spells, and the ! Quest system in a custom campaign after War3's story among other things, and many other examples I won't bother listing here; ergo, you've seen them start earliest testing of a Cash Shop with the mini-pets, there's been work done on purchasable Exp Boost potions, and now not only are they going to sell instant lv90(with Profession Bonuses if you lvl to 60 first), but they've added 3 different Cash Shop buttons to the UI, all in preparation for the eventual F2P move. That's how Blizz works in experience.
The bottom line, however, back on the Article's topic: A minor jump after holiday sales of the game isn't some "return to form" for P2P; as mentioned in the article, it's a controlled fluke, bragging right after, again, a major gift holiday + month-long price drop. It's a couple hundred k, tops, out of the millions lost, and it will go back down soon once again until WoD hits, where it'll resurge once again, primarily because of Nostalgia & attachment to characters we've had for TEN FREAKING YEARS now, simply wanting to see them push their story forward before going back on the Shelf until the next sale/major content shift. WoW is a Unique case in that regard because of attachment to characters. A new game coming out p2p wouldn't do nearly as well because it doesn't have the backstory or existing playerbase/fanbase, we've already seen proof of this with SWTOR and STO failing despite their huge pre-existing fanbases(Though that's because the developers half-assed the games themselves, too, but that's another article entirely)
For every one thing that blizz tests then eventually goes with, there are 10 others they dumped in the trash. Blizz's cash shop has also been there for years, WELL before the whole "subs tanking for certain games so they go F2P" craze. Anecdotal evidence is just that
And they didn't "cherry pick their bragging time", they are held by law to quarterly financial reports for their investors....if anything, they timed the sale for the announcement, not the other way around. For every one of your points that might have merit, its overshadowed by ignorant bias or straw man hyposis. Such is life on the mmorpg.com forums.
I don't play free to play games. I see F2P games as cheap disposable garbage. Maybe this is the reason I don't play MMOs anymore. I am sick of all those $$ signs prompting me to buy content on their shop. I just hate it. It fragments the playerbase as well. You need to worry if someone in your party has access to something or not. This F2P is also not very transparent and it's not immediately clear how much you need to sink into a game to enjoy it. If I want to play WoW I know I have to pay £7-9 to buy MOP and pay £9 each month. It's as easy as that.
Also as someone mentioned a lot of development time is spent on developing content for the cash shop. This gets eliminated if you pay a sub. They know they have to push content to make sure you keep sub-ed. The service is also much better. In F2P service is almost non-existant. When I buy products, I also consider the post-sale service.
Long story short => F2P games = cheap disposable garbage not worth your time.
I agree this is not a trend. But when you look at an industry, you don't necessarily look at pure user numbers. So there are 400m users (going with your figure, not sure of exact number) but from my understanding WoW players spent a lot more than your regular MMO player. WoWcollected the most revenue from microtransactions out of all MMOs. Something like 250m. What good are your 200m users who don't spend any money on your game. It's the same problem you see in the smartphone market. Android has a market share of around 80% in terms of pure numbers but the IPhone generates 5 times higher profits.
WoW probably generates a huge chunk of the revenues/profits of the industry. I wouldn't be surprised if it was over 50%. Who care if 10 MMOs have 100m users who generate almost no revenue.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
I think this just proves that pay to play mmorpgs are fine if you release something of quality and continue to develop your game past release. All these games that went free to play after being pay to play has nothing at all to do with people not being able to afford the game or blocked entry. It has a lot to do with the quality of the game. Even games like everquest 2 were deeply flawed from the start and half assed in quality and still are to this day. WOW has been polished and content heavy every few months since release pretty much and though the game started off deeply flawed to blizzard stayed at it fixing the game and making it much more enjoyable. Hell I havent even played a mmorpg more than 2 or 3 months straight since wow and before that DAOC and some warhammer as that was deeply flawed to.
Go look at the free to play games like neverwinter for example, still to this day hardly any end game content and they charge you WAY and I mean WAY more money than any pay to play game with a year long sub would cost. I think players have just become so damn jaded from shitty release after shitty release copying wow that people just expect this as the normal now.
Thats because wotlk wasn't the most popular time in wow. BC was, when the game had some challenge to it and everything wasn't handed to you. Wotlk/Cata/Mists were a joke. Hit the cap and completed heroic content within a month, 2 at the most. My opinion is Ghostcrawler was responsible for the crappy xpacs. He came in doing the wotlk and then he leaves when they decide to go back to the way the game was in BC. Doubt its a coincidence.
I would have never tried some games if they weren't ftp, so I'm not completely against them. I was ok with how D&D Online did it, for example. Still I prefer sub games from my experience.
Problems for me with the ftp model: I believe that ftp games can often end up costing a player more money over time than the sub games if you don't keep an eye on your spending. Also, the ftp model can also become a pay to win situation which is against the spirit of mmo's to me.
My other thought with these pay models: it appears to me that the developers of these two models have different priorities in order to maintain their game. In subscription based games, developers have to place a lot of their focus on creating new, fun, and interesting content in order to maintain subs (and earn money). From my FTP experience, it would seem a good a good amount of effort from developers in these games is spent trying to figure out how to create an item to sell out of a shop that will get players to open their wallets.
The facts beg to differ....i'm sorry.....
BTW, what guild were you in where you completed most of WoW's heroic raids within a month of their launches, because that would mean you cleared them prior to the world first guilds. That would be quite a feat to not have been recognized for.
You are also forgetting that Sunwell, BC's hardest raid instance, was easier than any heroic raid instance ICC and onward, right?
Yea I can't imagine Disney ever working that way.
Oh oops.....
Whoopy! WoW subscriptions rose in 1-2 months by ~2.6%! Toll the "End of F2P" bell!
December is the month where 'kids' have the most cash to spend on things used inside the house (winter + Christmas). Some of us are starting to get out of the economic crisis or see the light at the end of the tunnel, thus making a little money available on luxury items like MMO subscriptions unlike previously every dime was saved so you could pay rent, have running water and not have to kill the neighbors cat for sustenance ;-)
That being said, most of the F2P stuff is crap, I'm not talking about P2W, I'm just talking about crap design. I'm an iOS user and can't browse through the app store before tripping over a crap F2P title and getting burried by them. There is awesome F2P stuff, both on PC and iOS, but those are rather the exception then the rule. I recently bought a year long Planetside 2 subscription because I've played it a LOT, I expect to play it a lot more, I enjoy it in moderation, and the folks making the game need to eat to (the announcement regarding the all access pass helped to). The same happened with LoL, DDO, and Tribes Ascend. I expect it to happen with other titles as well...
I have tried WoW a couple of times and I just don't find it all that interesting, not F2P, and certainly not for €15/month. I paid a long time for Eve Online, before earning enough isk to buy time/PLEX, but in the end it took to much time out of my life.
At the same time it does start to hurt the experience when the cash shop becomes overwhelming.
"Their stance is clear: to fully enjoy our game, you must pay. And pay. And pay."
A sub is no different. If you don't experience the whole game in a month, you must rent your character for another month to continue the experience.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
Sorry but you are wrong. You are looking at peak subs.
The real story is how many subs each expansion added. BC added approx 5million subs. Wrath added 2 mil. Percentage wise BC was the most popular era.
And your last sentence is a joke. It took one of the top guilds in the world to defeat Muru over 45 attempts. Nothing in Wrath took the top guilds that much effort to down anything.
The article makes one good point: it has turned the market into a substantially more cut-throat environment.
I used to randomly buy games just to try them out. Genre was irrelevant; I'd look at a game, and say "Let's try this one.". No matter how bad that game was, I would play it a minimum of 5 hours. Believe me, this led me through some real suckfest titles. Some that come to mind were "Prince of Qin", "Shadow Vault", and "Harbinger". The reasoning behind this being "I paid for this, I'm going to put some time into it, damnit!"
Since the free-to-play-revolution, I would never put myself through this nowadays. Much like the author said, my expectation for instant amusement or gratification has led me to install a game -> play it for 15 minutes or less -> then make judgment call. If there's even one thing I don't like... **** it, on to the next game. I don't think I'm alone in the matter either. When you spend money on something, you feel at least remotely obligated to get some use out of it. The problem being, when I don't have to spend a dime on the game, I don't have any pre-existing level of attachment to it, so I feel no reason to spend money on it.
The bigger problem, though, to me, is that most Free-to-play games aren't as free as they sound. While there are some gems out there like Hawken and League of Legends and Smite, there's HUNDREDS of games that are nowhere near that caliber. Many F2P games are free to try, but then there's a mandatory cash-advance feature of the game. Whether it's stat boosts, rune pages, itemization, etc, in most F2P games I suddenly get to a point where progress, for whatever reason, is so bottle-necked that the ONLY way to progress is to have 50+ hours a week to play, or to drop $5-10 bucks.
The biggest problem of all, though, is the double-dipping companies. EA and Blizzard and such are absolutely becoming the guiltiest offenders. Charging a box-sale price, and then putting in features on top of that for money is a new industry-low. I think of games like Dead Space 3, where you paid $60 for your game, BUT THEN you also had to spend more money to have access to the best circuits in the game. I think of Sim City where you paid for the game, and then individual features that could and should have been included in the release package, but were saved to sell separately on day 1. This trend is the damnedest atrocity of them all.
If you're going to be Free to play, then you need to be free to play in it's entirety. That doesn't mean charging for different game modes, requiring the spending of cash to progress, or having features that aren't unlockable unless you spend money. For this reason, I think League of Legends has really set the standard in "free to play done right". The problem is that a mere handful of titles followed Riot's lead, and the rest of these companies are following EA'Activision's lead.
Waiting for something fresh to arrive on the MMO scene...
Except that is not the case most of the time. The restrictions are negligible things most of the time like less character slots, less bags or bag space and rarely are locked content wise. There are a few overtly bad free to play games that do lockdown actual content, though this is seldom actually the case. Some games offer content packs (which again this is NOT a restriction) like TSW where you can expand the base games content for like 10 - 15 dollars a pop or opt to sub to those games and get the content for free or you have companies like SOE who are making a 15 dollar sub fee that encompasses all of their games in that fee or Rift where you get access to all the expansions and content for free but just need to purchase something to get access to be able to hold more money and use the Auction House, though you do need to make a one time purchase to get access to some of the expansion souls (skill trees).
Your basis of argument is probably based off an old experience and not the modern landscape of F2P games or B2P for that matter. There are many huge advancements in AAA F2P titles and it is just laughable to see people not realizing that WoW and many others have taken to selling services that are part of F2P a lot of the time and then paying a sub on top of that. Server transfers and everything else should be handled by your sub payment but they are not.
How many NA subs does Wow have? You'll never know. I don't like f2p games really. I'd rather buy a box and pay a sub for a game that's I like and that gets updated.
If you don't want to spend money then stop bitching or play a console etc.. Devs don't make games for free. Would you work for nothing? Not likely.
Blizzard sold more than $200 million in micro transactions.
The appeal of micro transactions remains intact.
Not according to Paragon, who got the world first heroic LK 25 kill, which took them over 170 attempts...
By your own crazy measuring stick (apparently attempts?), ICC was 4 times harder than anything in BC. Don't take my word for it, take theirs...
And I quote:
"This is definitely the most challenging boss in WoW history, and I’ve been there among the first to kill Horsemen in Naxx-40 and whatnot. Everything else up to this point pales in comparison. The encounter is extremely ruthless in the sense that anyone making a mistake will almost instantly lead to a raid-wide wipe. The fight itself requires almost 20-minutes of full-on concentration coupled with very high personal skill-level.
Quite simply the perfect end-boss to finnish the expansion with, couldn't have hoped for more. My hat is off to Blizzard on this one. I can't wait to see if this encounter can be outdone in Cataclysm."
-Synti "
The heroic raid fights have only gotten harder from there. Heroic Rags in CATA makes heroic LK look easy mode. At least make claims that are in the realm of reality, and not so easily proven wrong. And WoW was at 8 mill subs at the time of BC launch, which means it added 3 million, to WotLKs 1 mil....which would make Vanilla its "most popular" according to you, even though WotLK had the most players for the most amount of time. Your logic is failing you left and right. Apparently you don't like facts, and would instead rather stomp your feet yelling "lalalalalalala" while outright making stuff up lol.
Edit: For some further context to how the raids have gotten over time, Do you know how many attempts it took Paragon to kill heoric Garrosh (the current end boss)? 638. It took Paragon 638 attempts to kill the latest MoP end boss. GTHO with your 45 attempts lol.
There was no heroic mode back then.....normal mode (it wasn't even called that, because there was only 1 mode) was the pinnacle of raiding in vanilla and BC, whihc actually makes it thier version of Heroic mode.......which was a joke compared to heroic mode today. Pointing that out only proves my point further. High level raiding in WoW has only gotten harder over time.