If so, seems to me having 100k or 800k or 1.2M people paying a $14.99 subscription is still better, along with supplementing that with vanity sales.
I think this goes without saying since most games try to launch P2P but fail to meet expectations so convert to F2P so they can cut development costs to reduce overhead. With a constant, consistent money stream you can develop regular content updates. When you have a model that has a wildly unpredictable amount of income every month, your development platform is designing services and items that people will want to buy and content hits the back burner until you have enough in your budget to put towards that.
A lot of publishers going forward are just going to make their game with F2P in mind from the start because they know they don't have the pockets to fund some 50M game.
If the game is built right and the payment model is integrated well (you would be surprised how many people are willing to bypass grind and how few are willing to buy power) then the amount isn't wildly unpredictable as you claim but indeed may in fact be more than what would be possible with a sub. Is this nickle and dime-ing the customer/player? If there is no pay to win and the only thing the player is bypassing is a time investment and maybe some vanity items then no, you can always choose to grind or to pay granted this has to be balanced just right so there is no forcing to pay to skip impossible grind or use the World of Tanks method: 50% regular - 100% premium, same destination different speed.
F2P is the future but right now is the time when it is maturing out of the freemium/p2w/endless trial disguised as f2p buillshit the old guard publishers/developers are trying to peddle and moving towards a system which you , as a player, feel no need to pay to have fun or do so because you gain fun little vanity extras (anything from visual only item effects to character haircuts to customized tabards for your armor and anything in between) which cost 0.5-1 USD a pop and which you could do perfectly without if you so chose (this isn't nickle and dime tactics and vanity extras do not detract almost anything from development).
Cant say I personally feel youre right about F2P being the future. Cant say your wrong either, because I see it being a better profit model for the publisher, but not the best revenue generator. I still think thats in subscriptions.
Then maybe its an the dual model like you mentioned, much like PlanetSide 2 uses.
I think ESO is going to be a real tipping point in the whole F2P vs Sub argument. I know SWtOR was and it tipped the scales more towards the F2P side. Yet they are converting F2P players into subscribers all the time, and are very successful at it too. So is PlanetSide 2 btw, I think they have a decent conversion rate.
That may be the future. Seems like, at least for the publisher, the best of both models.
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
If so, seems to me having 100k or 800k or 1.2M people paying a $14.99 subscription is still better, along with supplementing that with vanity sales.
I think this goes without saying since most games try to launch P2P but fail to meet expectations so convert to F2P so they can cut development costs to reduce overhead. With a constant, consistent money stream you can develop regular content updates. When you have a model that has a wildly unpredictable amount of income every month, your development platform is designing services and items that people will want to buy and content hits the back burner until you have enough in your budget to put towards that.
A lot of publishers going forward are just going to make their game with F2P in mind from the start because they know they don't have the pockets to fund some 50M game.
If the game is built right and the payment model is integrated well (you would be surprised how many people are willing to bypass grind and how few are willing to buy power) then the amount isn't wildly unpredictable as you claim but indeed may in fact be more than what would be possible with a sub. Is this nickle and dime-ing the customer/player? If there is no pay to win and the only thing the player is bypassing is a time investment and maybe some vanity items then no, you can always choose to grind or to pay granted this has to be balanced just right so there is no forcing to pay to skip impossible grind or use the World of Tanks method: 50% regular - 100% premium, same destination different speed.
F2P is the future but right now is the time when it is maturing out of the freemium/p2w/endless trial disguised as f2p buillshit the old guard publishers/developers are trying to peddle and moving towards a system which you , as a player, feel no need to pay to have fun or do so because you gain fun little vanity extras (anything from visual only item effects to character haircuts to customized tabards for your armor and anything in between) which cost 0.5-1 USD a pop and which you could do perfectly without if you so chose (this isn't nickle and dime tactics and vanity extras do not detract almost anything from development).
Cant say I personally feel youre right about F2P being the future. Cant say your wrong either, because I see it being a better profit model for the publisher, but not the best revenue generator. I still think thats in subscriptions.
Then maybe its an the dual model like you mentioned, much like PlanetSide 2 uses.
I think ESO is going to be a real tipping point in the whole F2P vs Sub argument. I know SWtOR was and it tipped the scales more towards the F2P side. Yet they are converting F2P players into subscribers all the time, and are very successful at it too. So is PlanetSide 2 btw, I think they have a decent conversion rate.
That may be the future. Seems like, at least for the publisher, the best of both models.
Not really because you will always have a large group of players that will see it as a challenge, myself included, and will do without the sub if it is only a straight downgrade in xp and in-game money earned. If it is gating access to content I straight up won't play (see: Mortal Online, Wurm Online, D&DO, etc,etc). Do note I said I not the whole group as some may go either way.
And SWtOR's initial model was a idiotic decision on the part of EA because as it stands the freemium model of the game, just D&DO, is offering enough of a taste and a incentive to want to buy expansions to see more at the very least. If they were to relax their idiotic constraints on F2P players (the hotbar thing, locked character slots, etc) it would really boom as a model similar to what GW1 had sans the initial box price.
That said my belief is and always will be that properly done F2P beat properly done P2P simply on the basis of more players = more interactions (good and bad ) = bigger community = bigger game = more people joining on friends advice, etc,etc, it has a lower threshold to snowball like WoW did initially and as you can see with games like LoL, WoT and now Warthunder the snowballs happen pretty frequently with good solid games.
what this data tells me is that 500k sub number the developers/publishers throw around for p2p to be profitable might ACTUALLY BE A THING.
As for the p2p versis f2p which is the better model arguement.....
the graph really doesn't tell anything
There are too many factors such as cross game log ins, disparity in how the fan bases of the sub genres spend money, development costs variations based on sub genre, is gw2 counting box sales in their value, the overall value of fun provided by model, etc
It's actually 4.51 and 1.32 per Month, not year, if you read the part under the graph in the link...
its net revenue per year
"shown: average dollar amount spent by a player in the last twelve months" is a direct quote from the the grey box under the graph. basically march 2013 to march 2014
Its the monthly average per user based on data collected over the last 12 months. "There’s World of Tanks, which has a monthly active user base of around 9.1 million and makes $4.51 per month per user. "
Iselin: And the next person who says "but it's a business, they need to make money" can just go fuck yourself.
Comments
Cant say I personally feel youre right about F2P being the future. Cant say your wrong either, because I see it being a better profit model for the publisher, but not the best revenue generator. I still think thats in subscriptions.
Then maybe its an the dual model like you mentioned, much like PlanetSide 2 uses.
I think ESO is going to be a real tipping point in the whole F2P vs Sub argument. I know SWtOR was and it tipped the scales more towards the F2P side. Yet they are converting F2P players into subscribers all the time, and are very successful at it too. So is PlanetSide 2 btw, I think they have a decent conversion rate.
That may be the future. Seems like, at least for the publisher, the best of both models.
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
Not really because you will always have a large group of players that will see it as a challenge, myself included, and will do without the sub if it is only a straight downgrade in xp and in-game money earned. If it is gating access to content I straight up won't play (see: Mortal Online, Wurm Online, D&DO, etc,etc). Do note I said I not the whole group as some may go either way.
And SWtOR's initial model was a idiotic decision on the part of EA because as it stands the freemium model of the game, just D&DO, is offering enough of a taste and a incentive to want to buy expansions to see more at the very least. If they were to relax their idiotic constraints on F2P players (the hotbar thing, locked character slots, etc) it would really boom as a model similar to what GW1 had sans the initial box price.
That said my belief is and always will be that properly done F2P beat properly done P2P simply on the basis of more players = more interactions (good and bad ) = bigger community = bigger game = more people joining on friends advice, etc,etc, it has a lower threshold to snowball like WoW did initially and as you can see with games like LoL, WoT and now Warthunder the snowballs happen pretty frequently with good solid games.
Its the monthly average per user based on data collected over the last 12 months. "There’s World of Tanks, which has a monthly active user base of around 9.1 million and makes $4.51 per month per user. "
Yeh .. many games have more players than WoW now.