People will pay money to advance in whatever the context of the game is. Fortnite is a good example. There are no skill lines, no traits to improve. XP hardly matters, you are not advancing anything. Weapons, ammo, etc, are found in the game, and you don't get to improve them or keep them. You start out the same in every game.
All that is left is your emotes and costume. People spend a ton to get those.
An MMO is just the opposite kind of game. The whole idea in an MMORPG (note the RPG part) is to grow and develop your character. Learn new skills, advance your level, gain more power, acquire fancy weapons and improve them. Advance, grow, and keep your progress.
So people want to pay for that advancement. Costumes, etc, do sell, but people also want to advance their character.
Fortnite is competitive PvP, but everybody always starts out the same. MMO's are competitive PvP, but you can be more advanced than your opponent. People will pay a ton for that.
The Fortnite model reminds me of a gaming Second Life, but they do sell XP "potions" through passes now, one of the posters here picked that up for us. To me though that's just raking it in, I really doubt the game would not have stayed a financial success without that move.
Unlike in an MMO game, XP in Fortnite does not apply to your character. There is no level of your character, no way to improve it. What XP does in Fortnite is open up new cosmetic items. You can gain levels, and those only unlock more cosmetics, your character does not become more powerful.
I place a high value on obtaining "things" (achievements, gear, character progression, etc) through game play. Since cosmetics have been on the chopping block for some time now that is where I've focused my arguments, but that isn't the hill I'm dying on here. That hill is "in game vs buying your way".
In the past I've been very open minded to cash shops and monetization in the name of "the poor business needs to make money". For many years I've been supportive and positive about revenue generation, but for the gaming industry it's never enough.
"So how can they rake the money in and stay away from P2W?" They can make a decent game that sells well. Make a good game, sell it for $30 - $100 and sell a million copies.
I think the problem is (and referring back to Wordsworth saying they could make ESO again and again), that it is easier to make another DI. It is easier to rely on the monetarization to bring the money in than the quality of the game. Obviously you need a decent game, but you don't need to spend the time, money and resources it took to make ESO.
I never was relaxed about cash shops, after only a couple of years in play the direction of travel was obvious. There was nothing able to change that direction of travel, so here we are today. I guess my last hope that anything could challenge that direction of travel died in 2010-11(?) when Lotro's cash shop went P2W. It had been hailed by gaming magazines as "the Turbine Model" which gently led players from buying microtransactions to realising it was just better to get a subscription. A year after it launched it was quite P2W and subsequently became more so, like nearly every MMO out there.
Unlike in an MMO game, XP in Fortnite does not apply to your character. There is no level of your character, no way to improve it. What XP does in Fortnite is open up new cosmetic items. You can gain levels, and those only unlock more cosmetics, your character does not become more powerful.
That's more like what I have been preposing then, found the MMORPG on players willingness to pay for outfits.
My take is that anything sold in a CS is taking game play away from Gamers, cheapening the reward by making it just another cash ticket, and taking away from the "world" that many gamers want to run in.
Think about how these things, even the so called "cosmetics", could be earned as desirable loot or made by Crafting. Sold, the in-game money being used to buy things that other Crafters make, spreading into a viable economy and giving Gamers who value more than just "Hack and Slash" other worthwhile things to do.
Some of you get caught up in the making of money, but there's no better way to make money than to sell a great product. We're never going to have that, a great product, with all this out-of-game stuff going on.
You are spot on, but how do we get a great MMORPG made with good gaming ethos these days? Something has to give, so what is it that is going to give? I didn't see posters jumping on the idea of a $40 monthly or for that matter a $20 monthly, studios need to rake it in somehow, so how?
How do we get a great MMORPG made?
This is a great question. I feel that a lot of the games industry is still based on a "trial and error" mentality. Studios really don't have a clue what works and what doesn't, so they either copy stuff that they think worked in the past, or they take a punt and hope for the best.
Trial and error is a terribly inefficient method of advancing gaming, and copying old designs` results in diminishing returns over time (stagnation).
So, what needs to change?
1) Invest in the Science!
Games are big engineering projects. They are not art projects. Games contain art, they are not art.
If you look at any other engineering discipline, they all invest heavily in the underlying sciences and the engineering processes. Gaming hasn't really done that yet. We need better processes for managing the development of games, but more importantly we need more research into the underlying psychology of gamers.
What do we find fun? Why do we find it fun? How can we turn our gamer's underlying needs into engaging gameplay that fulfils those needs? How do we design social experiences that don't immediately get ruined by trolls and pervs?
Science and research can give us those answers (or, most of them anyway). Once we have the core understanding, it should remove a lot of the risk of developing a new game.
2) Cheaper Tools
Games can be damn expensive to build. The price-per-bit may have dropped loads over the years, but the absolute cost has skyrocketed. These expenses make studios extremely risk averse.
If they haven't reduced those risks through research, then perhaps they can reduce the cost by developing cheaper tools. Game engines that work off the shelf and don't cost too much. Graphics tools that mean you can build a new NPC in a day, not a week.
I don't know much about the tools that are available right now, only that it takes forever to build a game - primarily due to the graphics. Seems to me that if you could make that process easier and quicker, we could dramatically reduce costs and therefore risk.
3) Scale Back on Mergers and Acquisitions
With AAA studios being so risk averse, most good new ideas come from lower down the food chain. Indies experiment with ideas, mid-tier studios improve those ideas, then large studios polish for the masses.
However, AAA studios keep purchasing all those mid-tier studios, plus any successful indy studios. All those mergers and acquisitions have disrupted the flow of ideas within the games industry. All those talented designers are finding themselves part of massive corporations that just won't listen to their ideas.
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Games are big engineering projects. They are not art projects. Games contain art, they are not art.
If you look at any other engineering discipline, they all invest heavily in the underlying sciences and the engineering processes. Gaming hasn't really done that yet. We need better processes for managing the development of games, but more importantly we need more research into the underlying psychology of gamers.
What do we find fun? Why do we find it fun? How can we turn our gamer's underlying needs into engaging gameplay that fulfils those needs? How do we design social experiences that don't immediately get ruined by trolls and pervs?
Science and research can give us those answers (or, most of them anyway). Once we have the core understanding, it should remove a lot of the risk of developing a new game.
2) Cheaper Tools
Games can be damn expensive to build. The price-per-bit may have dropped loads over the years, but the absolute cost has skyrocketed. These expenses make studios extremely risk averse.
If they haven't reduced those risks through research, then perhaps they can reduce the cost by developing cheaper tools. Game engines that work off the shelf and don't cost too much. Graphics tools that mean you can build a new NPC in a day, not a week.
I don't know much about the tools that are available right now, only that it takes forever to build a game - primarily due to the graphics. Seems to me that if you could make that process easier and quicker, we could dramatically reduce costs and therefore risk.
3) Scale Back on Mergers and Acquisitions
With AAA studios being so risk averse, most good new ideas come from lower down the food chain. Indies experiment with ideas, mid-tier studios improve those ideas, then large studios polish for the masses.
However, AAA studios keep purchasing all those mid-tier studios, plus any successful indy studios. All those mergers and acquisitions have disrupted the flow of ideas within the games industry. All those talented designers are finding themselves part of massive corporations that just won't listen to their ideas.
1) That's not so easy to do. If you're an engineering firm that wants to learn from scratch how to build a bridge, there are a lot of obvious ways that science could help. You could make some concrete and directly measure its strength. (Actually, a lot of measurements, for tensile strength, torsion strength, etc.) You could do so with some steel. You could use different formulas to create the concrete and steel. You could make different size steel rods for rebar or space them differently. It's straightforward to get a lot of useful data.
How do you measure what makes a game fun? One game mechanic isn't fun all by itself without being part of a game. Comparing different games that have a ton of things vary makes it impractical to do scientific comparisons. You could make several nearly identical games that vary only one thing, but if you tried sticking the same varying option into a different rest of the game, you'd likely get very different results.
Rather than being in the hard sciences where getting good data is straightforward, you'd end up in psychology, which likes to pretend to be a science, but doesn't allow for the same sort of rigor. A large fraction of psychology studies basically conclude that if you compel or bribe some college kids to take part in a goofy experiment where you lie to them, you get goofy results that allow you to claim that you've proven whatever it was that you were hoping to prove. That's not objectively useful to game development.
2) The problem is that tools only let you do things that the people who created the tools intended for you to do. If you want to make a completely generic knock-off asset flip, good tools can make it possible to do that very cheaply. If you want your generic knock-off asset flip to actually be fun to play, tools can't help you with that.
Whatever creative ideas you have that could make the game actually be good will be things that your tools don't do for you. You'll have to do them yourself. That's where the heavy work comes in, and it can't be fixed by "cheaper tools".
That's not to say that tools are useless. There are a lot of places that filling in something generic is fine. In most MMORPGs, having a chat box that works well but is exactly the same as the chat box in several other games would be completely acceptable. Few games want to implement some revolutionary graphical methods that force them to make their own graphics engine. Very few games have any reason to create their own programming language and compiler for it. Tools can fill in the details on whatever you want to do that really isn't innovative, and that can be a large chunk of a very good game. But they can't fill in everything for you.
Also, graphics aren't what makes game development take so long, at least outside of no-budget indie games made by amateurs. Artwork is extremely parallelizable, and you can get a given quantity of artwork created in half the time by hiring twice as many artists. A lot of programming and game design work is much less parallelizable, and that's what causes games to take a lot of time. Artwork is a big expense in money, but not time.
3) The fundamental talent in the gaming industry is people, not studios. A talented game designer whose studio gets bought by a huge corporation that isn't interested in what he can do well can quit and go work for a different one that is.
Furthermore, closing off the prospect of buyouts would make it harder for the indie studios to raise money. Venture capitalists are in it for the money, and a studio that has a big hit and gets bought for 20 times what you invested in the company is one way to make that money. They don't have to sell if they don't want to, after all. But if you make it harder for investors to make money, you're going to see less investment.
I place a high value on obtaining "things" (achievements, gear, character progression, etc) through game play. Since cosmetics have been on the chopping block for some time now that is where I've focused my arguments, but that isn't the hill I'm dying on here. That hill is "in game vs buying your way".
In the past I've been very open minded to cash shops and monetization in the name of "the poor business needs to make money". For many years I've been supportive and positive about revenue generation, but for the gaming industry it's never enough.
"So how can they rake the money in and stay away from P2W?" They can make a decent game that sells well. Make a good game, sell it for $30 - $100 and sell a million copies.
I've always been a fan of F2P, it lowers the barrier to entry allowing more people into a game than would have otherwise tried it.
The F2P model itself isn't the issue, it's the developers and the predatory practices they use. They don't just want enough money to keep the servers and lights on, they don't just want a profit on top, they want all the money.
F2P doesn't have to mean "takes $100,000 to fully max out a single character." That's just what greedy game devs have turned it into. It's a damn shame.
I think we need a change of attitude about making tons of money. There's a huge risk of a huge investment, and no one is going to make that investment for pocket change.
The real question is how to make that return that's worth the investment. CS's are the obvious and easy way out, for Devs who can't figure out any other way. (See cameltosis's post above.) CS's also come with the way they deaden the meaningfulness of game play. There is a better way, and it allows the game to be more meaningful to more Gamers.
FTP isn't the answer. You get what you pay for, and that's a fact of life. If you want to play for free and allow others to pay the way, then you're going to get what THEY pay for, which is a lackluster gaming experience that's designed to draw in those others (Gamers who just want to buy their way through it).
I think until there is some other model they're not going leave money on the table. It comes down to what players can tolerate. The conditioning has been slow but the Whales want to spend big and the leeches want to play for free. The purist make noise but we're a dying breed. Kids are being born into this kind of thing.
I don't know maybe developers can accept donations for real life stuff. I really have no solution to the problem. I think they're eventually just win out because us older players are going to become more and more a minority.
There's a market for games that mostly target whales and free players (to give the whales someone to beat), and there's also a market for games that target players willing to pay a moderate amount for games. Neither market is going to kill the other, as there is plenty of money to be made both ways. It's frustrating to see a game that you'd otherwise like to play be heavily pay to win, but there are still a lot of games that aren't, even if they're more commonly single-player, buy to play games.
I love F2P Cash Shop games, where else am I going to get a AAA quality game to play, and have someone else pay for it?
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
I feel like a large portion of people do not care about monetization as long as companies are not directly selling player power and that the game is good. FFXIV is probably a good example of this to use. They update their cash shop monthly like clockwork yet a large portion of their community do not complain about it. Oddly enough, some people complain that there aren't certain things on the cash shop or why certain genders can't use certain cosmetics. One of their playable races can only change their hairstyles by paying real money for a fantasia to do so, but it seems like only a minority of people care about it. But they dont sell actual power in the game. You can argue that retainers can cause people to make more money than others thus being able to buy certain armor when it first comes out, but again, no one really fusses about it.
Tl;dr - people care more about a good game than they do aggressive cash shops as long as direct power isn't being sold.
I feel like a large portion of people do not care about monetization as long as companies are not directly selling player power and that the game is good. FFXIV is probably a good example of this to use. They update their cash shop monthly like clockwork yet a large portion of their community do not complain about it. Oddly enough, some people complain that there aren't certain things on the cash shop or why certain genders can't use certain cosmetics. One of their playable races can only change their hairstyles by paying real money for a fantasia to do so, but it seems like only a minority of people care about it. But they dont sell actual power in the game. You can argue that retainers can cause people to make more money than others thus being able to buy certain armor when it first comes out, but again, no one really fusses about it.
Tl;dr - people care more about a good game than they do aggressive cash shops as long as direct power isn't being sold.
To a considerable degree, it's a question of whose ox is being gored. Very few people will complain about things in a cash shop that they wouldn't personally want even if the items were free.
My take is that anything sold in a CS is taking game play away from Gamers, cheapening the reward by making it just another cash ticket, and taking away from the "world" that many gamers want to run in.
Think about how these things, even the so called "cosmetics", could be earned as desirable loot or made by Crafting. Sold, the in-game money being used to buy things that other Crafters make, spreading into a viable economy and giving Gamers who value more than just "Hack and Slash" other worthwhile things to do.
Some of you get caught up in the making of money, but there's no better way to make money than to sell a great product. We're never going to have that, a great product, with all this out-of-game stuff going on.
You are spot on, but how do we get a great MMORPG made with good gaming ethos these days? Something has to give, so what is it that is going to give? I didn't see posters jumping on the idea of a $40 monthly or for that matter a $20 monthly, studios need to rake it in somehow, so how?
How do we get a great MMORPG made?
This is a great question. I feel that a lot of the games industry is still based on a "trial and error" mentality. Studios really don't have a clue what works and what doesn't, so they either copy stuff that they think worked in the past, or they take a punt and hope for the best.
Trial and error is a terribly inefficient method of advancing gaming, and copying old designs` results in diminishing returns over time (stagnation).
So, what needs to change?
1) Invest in the Science!
Games are big engineering projects. They are not art projects. Games contain art, they are not art.
If you look at any other engineering discipline, they all invest heavily in the underlying sciences and the engineering processes. Gaming hasn't really done that yet. We need better processes for managing the development of games, but more importantly we need more research into the underlying psychology of gamers.
What do we find fun? Why do we find it fun? How can we turn our gamer's underlying needs into engaging gameplay that fulfils those needs? How do we design social experiences that don't immediately get ruined by trolls and pervs?
Science and research can give us those answers (or, most of them anyway). Once we have the core understanding, it should remove a lot of the risk of developing a new game.
2) Cheaper Tools
Games can be damn expensive to build. The price-per-bit may have dropped loads over the years, but the absolute cost has skyrocketed. These expenses make studios extremely risk averse.
If they haven't reduced those risks through research, then perhaps they can reduce the cost by developing cheaper tools. Game engines that work off the shelf and don't cost too much. Graphics tools that mean you can build a new NPC in a day, not a week.
I don't know much about the tools that are available right now, only that it takes forever to build a game - primarily due to the graphics. Seems to me that if you could make that process easier and quicker, we could dramatically reduce costs and therefore risk.
3) Scale Back on Mergers and Acquisitions
With AAA studios being so risk averse, most good new ideas come from lower down the food chain. Indies experiment with ideas, mid-tier studios improve those ideas, then large studios polish for the masses.
However, AAA studios keep purchasing all those mid-tier studios, plus any successful indy studios. All those mergers and acquisitions have disrupted the flow of ideas within the games industry. All those talented designers are finding themselves part of massive corporations that just won't listen to their ideas.
1) Mixing science and games? I am against AI in MMOs, and we know other science results: abusive cash shops, NFTs, etc.
2) Cheaper tools: there is an explosion of indie games just because of free engines. MMO are still a difficulty because of the first M(assive). But some MMOs (or classified as such by the general public) have only 32 players in an area.
3) Yes, and this is what is really needed IMO: good game design ideas.
I love F2P Cash Shop games, where else am I going to get a AAA quality game to play, and have someone else pay for it?
For now, if free to play players have not sussed the writing is on the wall yet let me point it out to you. Those players playing for free, do you think that sits well with a design philosophy based on raking it in through gambling? You and your fellow punters are being eyed up, what more can be done to entice them to pay? Now you may say its fine we have the whales, they are making the profit they wont be looking at us. You are playing the game, they are most definitely thinking about you.
It would be interesting to see if the dolphins (those players who put some in) are on the rise. I can remember when we were told whales account for 98% of revenue, that link I posted says its only 50%. So I wonder, are many of the old free players now putting something in?
1) Mixing science and games? I am against AI in MMOs, and we know other science results: abusive cash shops, NFTs, etc.
2) Cheaper tools: there is an explosion of indie games just because of free engines. MMO are still a difficulty because of the first M(assive). But some MMOs (or classified as such by the general public) have only 32 players in an area.
3) Yes, and this is what is really needed IMO: good game design ideas.
I have always seen AI as a saviour in MMO-land, they could even act like a GM. Now you are making me think they might be more like Big Brother.
The best point in this discussion that was made, was that for the cash shop to work, it needs to sell something people want to buy.
The trick then becomes, what they can sell in the store, that people will spend significant money on, that won't piss off their general population.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
If there is no advantage to buying it, there is often no reason to buy it, and their sales will be low because of that.
If there is an advantage to buying it, while this will drive up sales, this could also drive away players.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
The best point in this discussion that was made, was that for the cash shop to work, it needs to sell something people want to buy.
The trick then becomes, what they can sell in the store, that people will spend significant money on, that won't piss off their general population.
I would edit that slightly to include "it needs to sell something people want to buy, at a price they are willing to pay.
I think most of the frustration (especially around cosmetics) is that people do in fact WANT them, but the prices are ludicrous and/or hidden behind a gambling game.
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Pay to win benefits tremendously from being massively multiplayer, even if the "multiplayer" aspect of the game is just leaderboards and auto-battling PVP. The whales who are willing to pay to win predominantly want to have other players to beat. They don't just want to beat an AI. The latter is easy to do just by picking an easier game.
But if pay to win benefits tremendously from being massively multiplayer and other business models don't, then that explains why so many MMOs go pay to win. There's still a market for good MMORPGs that aren't pay to win, but they get buried more among the pay to win games than if you're just looking for a good single-player game.
Pay to win benefits tremendously from being massively multiplayer, even if the "multiplayer" aspect of the game is just leaderboards and auto-battling PVP. The whales who are willing to pay to win predominantly want to have other players to beat. They don't just want to beat an AI. The latter is easy to do just by picking an easier game.
Eh...
I could see a lot of Whales (or players in general) paying for direct power even in a purely PvE game.
I mean think about it.
If you made a PvE game, and sold say, a +1 to all stats in the store, who loses from this? In reality, no one, because they are not fighting each other.
But I could see a lot of people considering buy that, if they felt that their character was not strong enough, and wanted that little bit more, to make the encounters a little easier.
As I see it, P2W really only exists in PvP games, because only in PvP games, can one player directly beat another, otherwise, what are you crying about, just because they have more power than you, does not stop you from doing that content and getting the same loot as them.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
That's funny because I wanted to create a post about a fair F2P model for MMOs.
Like many of us, I think first and foremost that cosmetics should be the reward for achievements.
It was working great in GW1. You were doing your elite PvE content for cosmetics and you would show them off in PvP (knowing that GW1 had its own streaming channel accessible ingame for PvP games involving guild classified in the top 100).
However, I bought skins in Smite, mechs in MWO, and outfits in BDO (I regret the latter).
I think a way to do it right for cosmetics would be this way:
- let the whales pay for cosmetics of a certain category (e.g. outfits)
- keep some cosmetics for achievements (e.g. weapons / pets / whatever)
-------
Would people pay for just cosmetics?
-------
Yes, definitively.
I currently play PSO2:NGS. The game is incredibly generous in free cosmetics/character recreation. You can switch to 10 different looks you created for free. The free battlepass section gives access to salon tickets you can use to recreate entirely your character.
Despite all this generosity and the fact you can buy paid outfits on the free currency market, people still spend money for cosmetics.
Cosmetics are definitively a reason to spend money in the eyes of many players.
-------
Beyond cosmetics
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Horizontal progression? Such as
- new class
- new powers
- new skills
But for this to work, make sure there is no P2W element
VIP areas? Such as
- special Inn/club (depending of the setting)
- special map
Again not anything P2W, just privileged access.
Other suggestions?
Some interesting and ideas posed here. I'm looking back at other monetization systems throughout recent history.
Radio and TV started with advertisements paid for by large and local companies. This was after the equipment was purchased. Even phone service started out with paying by the minute, either local or long distance. This was "metered service," as other utilities such as electric and gas still use.
Then, cable tv came out because rural areas had trouble receiving signals so communities built BIG antennae that households and/or farms could connect to via cables. The community paid the antennae as a group and sat through the ads, but they got the entertainment.
Then Cable TV morphed into "umbrella" carriers that charged a monthly fee for service. They ALSO made companies PAY for advertisements. Because they could. Society was "accepting" of it because we had a couple of decades of this kind of entertainment. Notice how this "advertisement mentality" never crossed over to phones or electricity
Now, streaming has become popular. I still wonder at Twitch and their own "advertisement mentality" that they practice. Live programming is not a good fit ads that interrupt a program. Twitch just doesn't understand this and they push and push this model. Imagine watching your favorite sports game on TV when something exciting is about to happen and ad breaks in and you miss the action! This is what Twitch is like. I don't know how "fix this", but the root of it is that Twitch wants more money than just subscription service money brings in.
Anyway, enough history. The root of "the problem" is the love of money. It is NEVER enough. The Face Book games early on (Zynga, et al) blew old monetization out of the water. Once gaming companies saw what they raked in with simple, easy to use, time consuming games, their eyes did the Scrooge McDuck Dollar Sign Eye roll!
For a decade or two, companies made a profit in a "niche" market. A profit. When subscriptions came around, we bought the games (off of the shelf) and pay a monthly fee to access their servers and play. This was the original "pay to win", since if you couldn't play, you couldn't win
EQ and UO BOTH made good money from the <500K subscriptions every month. GOOD money. After WoW started making MILLIONS PER MONTH, every company had new "monetary goals." They were still making "good money" with their subs, but they wanted those millions each month.
Peeking at Face Book games, many companies starting to put 2 and 2 together and came up "infinity." There was NO limit with cash shops. I think it may have been WoW's "Celestial Mount" that they did with some charity or other that showed MMORPGs how much money player had and were willing to spend.
To close this out (FINALLY!), A game that attracts and keeps 500K players paying a monthly sub would make GREAT money today. But GREAT money is no longer the goal. MILLIONS NOW is new the business goal.
PS: What many of us players often forget is that this extra money does NOT go to developers and artists who create the games, but rather to "business suits and boards", most of whom don't even play games.
I hope my rambling here wasn't too incoherent
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
PS: What many of us players often forget is that this extra money does NOT go to developers and artists who create the games, but rather to "business suits and boards", most of whom don't even play games.
I hope my rambling here wasn't too incoherent
Sorta.
The Profits do go back to the Dev Team/Studio in the form of approved spending, this allowing them to give overtime to some staff, or perhaps hiring additional staff, as well as getting better software, new offices, better computers, and other upgrades.
How well these help the employees sits more with the direct supervisor/director of that studio, then the top suits.
But, overall, in the most simple form, the more profitable a game becomes, the more money gets given to the studio, to keep improving the product to keep making more money.
This is not always the case (Like Blizzard having a banner year and then firing a bunch of staff) but often the profits (or lack thereof) do direct affect the upcoming budgets for a studio, and thus directly affect the staff that works there.
Just wanted to point that out, yes, the money you spend does in fact directly affect the studio and thus yes, it does directly affect the artiest and programmers, and the like, in some cases, it just ensures they have a job to come back to tomorrow.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
That's funny because I wanted to create a post about a fair F2P model for MMOs.
Like many of us, I think first and foremost that cosmetics should be the reward for achievements.
It was working great in GW1. You were doing your elite PvE content for cosmetics and you would show them off in PvP (knowing that GW1 had its own streaming channel accessible ingame for PvP games involving guild classified in the top 100).
However, I bought skins in Smite, mechs in MWO, and outfits in BDO (I regret the latter).
I think a way to do it right for cosmetics would be this way:
- let the whales pay for cosmetics of a certain category (e.g. outfits)
- keep some cosmetics for achievements (e.g. weapons / pets / whatever)
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Would people pay for just cosmetics?
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Yes, definitively.
I currently play PSO2:NGS. The game is incredibly generous in free cosmetics/character recreation. You can switch to 10 different looks you created for free. The free battlepass section gives access to salon tickets you can use to recreate entirely your character.
Despite all this generosity and the fact you can buy paid outfits on the free currency market, people still spend money for cosmetics.
Cosmetics are definitively a reason to spend money in the eyes of many players.
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Beyond cosmetics
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Horizontal progression? Such as
- new class
- new powers
- new skills
But for this to work, make sure there is no P2W element
VIP areas? Such as
- special Inn/club (depending of the setting)
- special map
Again not anything P2W, just privileged access.
Other suggestions?
Some interesting and ideas posed here. I'm looking back at other monetization systems throughout recent history.
Radio and TV started with advertisements paid for by large and local companies. This was after the equipment was purchased. Even phone service started out with paying by the minute, either local or long distance. This was "metered service," as other utilities such as electric and gas still use.
Then, cable tv came out because rural areas had trouble receiving signals so communities built BIG antennae that households and/or farms could connect to via cables. The community paid the antennae as a group and sat through the ads, but they got the entertainment.
Then Cable TV morphed into "umbrella" carriers that charged a monthly fee for service. They ALSO made companies PAY for advertisements. Because they could. Society was "accepting" of it because we had a couple of decades of this kind of entertainment. Notice how this "advertisement mentality" never crossed over to phones or electricity
Now, streaming has become popular. I still wonder at Twitch and their own "advertisement mentality" that they practice. Live programming is not a good fit ads that interrupt a program. Twitch just doesn't understand this and they push and push this model. Imagine watching your favorite sports game on TV when something exciting is about to happen and ad breaks in and you miss the action! This is what Twitch is like. I don't know how "fix this", but the root of it is that Twitch wants more money than just subscription service money brings in.
Anyway, enough history. The root of "the problem" is the love of money. It is NEVER enough. The Face Book games early on (Zynga, et al) blew old monetization out of the water. Once gaming companies saw what they raked in with simple, easy to use, time consuming games, their eyes did the Scrooge McDuck Dollar Sign Eye roll!
For a decade or two, companies made a profit in a "niche" market. A profit. When subscriptions came around, we bought the games (off of the shelf) and pay a monthly fee to access their servers and play. This was the original "pay to win", since if you couldn't play, you couldn't win
EQ and UO BOTH made good money from the <500K subscriptions every month. GOOD money. After WoW started making MILLIONS PER MONTH, every company had new "monetary goals." They were still making "good money" with their subs, but they wanted those millions each month.
Peeking at Face Book games, many companies starting to put 2 and 2 together and came up "infinity." There was NO limit with cash shops. I think it may have been WoW's "Celestial Mount" that they did with some charity or other that showed MMORPGs how much money player had and were willing to spend.
To close this out (FINALLY!), A game that attracts and keeps 500K players paying a monthly sub would make GREAT money today. But GREAT money is no longer the goal. MILLIONS NOW is new the business goal.
PS: What many of us players often forget is that this extra money does NOT go to developers and artists who create the games, but rather to "business suits and boards", most of whom don't even play games.
I hope my rambling here wasn't too incoherent
Then the question could be: how a company could make millions without spoiling/wasting the very foundations of a game?
Pay to win benefits tremendously from being massively multiplayer, even if the "multiplayer" aspect of the game is just leaderboards and auto-battling PVP. The whales who are willing to pay to win predominantly want to have other players to beat. They don't just want to beat an AI. The latter is easy to do just by picking an easier game.
Eh...
I could see a lot of Whales (or players in general) paying for direct power even in a purely PvE game.
I mean think about it.
If you made a PvE game, and sold say, a +1 to all stats in the store, who loses from this? In reality, no one, because they are not fighting each other.
But I could see a lot of people considering buy that, if they felt that their character was not strong enough, and wanted that little bit more, to make the encounters a little easier.
As I see it, P2W really only exists in PvP games, because only in PvP games, can one player directly beat another, otherwise, what are you crying about, just because they have more power than you, does not stop you from doing that content and getting the same loot as them.
P2W very much exists in PvE, either to get you to a level where you do PvP or to take part in end game play like raids. In a PvE game with no competitive gameplay what so ever then yes it does not exist. Though those who put great value in outfits might still disagree with both of us.
As to what AIBQuirky mentioned, the money problems really started when gaming started to overtake every other entertainment medium for profit. That meant that corporate types from every industry imaginable (big chemical company for example) wanted to come in as top executives. They brought with them a corporate culture that we had only had a taste of up to then, they initiated the design by metrics approach, GaaS, the move to mobile. Mind you, you could say they simply acted as catalyst and we would have arrived here anyway, it would have just taken years longer.
Pay to win benefits tremendously from being massively multiplayer, even if the "multiplayer" aspect of the game is just leaderboards and auto-battling PVP. The whales who are willing to pay to win predominantly want to have other players to beat. They don't just want to beat an AI. The latter is easy to do just by picking an easier game.
Eh...
I could see a lot of Whales (or players in general) paying for direct power even in a purely PvE game.
I mean think about it.
If you made a PvE game, and sold say, a +1 to all stats in the store, who loses from this? In reality, no one, because they are not fighting each other.
But I could see a lot of people considering buy that, if they felt that their character was not strong enough, and wanted that little bit more, to make the encounters a little easier.
As I see it, P2W really only exists in PvP games, because only in PvP games, can one player directly beat another, otherwise, what are you crying about, just because they have more power than you, does not stop you from doing that content and getting the same loot as them.
P2W very much exists in PvE, either to get you to a level where you do PvP or to take part in end game play like raids. In a PvE game with no competitive gameplay what so ever then yes it does not exist. Though those who put great value in outfits might still disagree with both of us.
Yah, I still remember when players in GW2 were calling mount skins P2W, Not mounts, not special abilities, just purely cosmetic skins, they were calling that P2W, and really upset about it too.
At the same time, the same company, and same group of players, GW2 gives out 80 Level boosts, which is directly giving away raw character power, and not peep about how this might be remotely P2W.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
Pay to win benefits tremendously from being massively multiplayer, even if the "multiplayer" aspect of the game is just leaderboards and auto-battling PVP. The whales who are willing to pay to win predominantly want to have other players to beat. They don't just want to beat an AI. The latter is easy to do just by picking an easier game.
Eh...
I could see a lot of Whales (or players in general) paying for direct power even in a purely PvE game.
I mean think about it.
If you made a PvE game, and sold say, a +1 to all stats in the store, who loses from this? In reality, no one, because they are not fighting each other.
But I could see a lot of people considering buy that, if they felt that their character was not strong enough, and wanted that little bit more, to make the encounters a little easier.
As I see it, P2W really only exists in PvP games, because only in PvP games, can one player directly beat another, otherwise, what are you crying about, just because they have more power than you, does not stop you from doing that content and getting the same loot as them.
P2W very much exists in PvE, either to get you to a level where you do PvP or to take part in end game play like raids. In a PvE game with no competitive gameplay what so ever then yes it does not exist. Though those who put great value in outfits might still disagree with both of us.
Yah, I still remember when players in GW2 were calling mount skins P2W, Not mounts, not special abilities, just purely cosmetic skins, they were calling that P2W, and really upset about it too.
At the same time, the same company, and same group of players, GW2 gives out 80 Level boosts, which is directly giving away raw character power, and not peep about how this might be remotely P2W.
The principle involved is simple and consistent: people get upset if a company charges for things that they want. They don't get upset if the company charges for things that they don't want. The latter is trying to make money off of someone else, which is what most gamers think is the best sort of monetization.
Then the question could be: how a company could make millions without spoiling/wasting the very foundations of a game?
EDIT: engriSh#*!
I guess making a great game that "millions" want to pay for each month to play? Maybe half a million?
Just a thought
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
Comments
Unlike in an MMO game, XP in Fortnite does not apply to your character. There is no level of your character, no way to improve it. What XP does in Fortnite is open up new cosmetic items. You can gain levels, and those only unlock more cosmetics, your character does not become more powerful.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
I never was relaxed about cash shops, after only a couple of years in play the direction of travel was obvious. There was nothing able to change that direction of travel, so here we are today. I guess my last hope that anything could challenge that direction of travel died in 2010-11(?) when Lotro's cash shop went P2W. It had been hailed by gaming magazines as "the Turbine Model" which gently led players from buying microtransactions to realising it was just better to get a subscription. A year after it launched it was quite P2W and subsequently became more so, like nearly every MMO out there.
That's more like what I have been preposing then, found the MMORPG on players willingness to pay for outfits.
How do you measure what makes a game fun? One game mechanic isn't fun all by itself without being part of a game. Comparing different games that have a ton of things vary makes it impractical to do scientific comparisons. You could make several nearly identical games that vary only one thing, but if you tried sticking the same varying option into a different rest of the game, you'd likely get very different results.
Rather than being in the hard sciences where getting good data is straightforward, you'd end up in psychology, which likes to pretend to be a science, but doesn't allow for the same sort of rigor. A large fraction of psychology studies basically conclude that if you compel or bribe some college kids to take part in a goofy experiment where you lie to them, you get goofy results that allow you to claim that you've proven whatever it was that you were hoping to prove. That's not objectively useful to game development.
2) The problem is that tools only let you do things that the people who created the tools intended for you to do. If you want to make a completely generic knock-off asset flip, good tools can make it possible to do that very cheaply. If you want your generic knock-off asset flip to actually be fun to play, tools can't help you with that.
Whatever creative ideas you have that could make the game actually be good will be things that your tools don't do for you. You'll have to do them yourself. That's where the heavy work comes in, and it can't be fixed by "cheaper tools".
That's not to say that tools are useless. There are a lot of places that filling in something generic is fine. In most MMORPGs, having a chat box that works well but is exactly the same as the chat box in several other games would be completely acceptable. Few games want to implement some revolutionary graphical methods that force them to make their own graphics engine. Very few games have any reason to create their own programming language and compiler for it. Tools can fill in the details on whatever you want to do that really isn't innovative, and that can be a large chunk of a very good game. But they can't fill in everything for you.
Also, graphics aren't what makes game development take so long, at least outside of no-budget indie games made by amateurs. Artwork is extremely parallelizable, and you can get a given quantity of artwork created in half the time by hiring twice as many artists. A lot of programming and game design work is much less parallelizable, and that's what causes games to take a lot of time. Artwork is a big expense in money, but not time.
3) The fundamental talent in the gaming industry is people, not studios. A talented game designer whose studio gets bought by a huge corporation that isn't interested in what he can do well can quit and go work for a different one that is.
Furthermore, closing off the prospect of buyouts would make it harder for the indie studios to raise money. Venture capitalists are in it for the money, and a studio that has a big hit and gets bought for 20 times what you invested in the company is one way to make that money. They don't have to sell if they don't want to, after all. But if you make it harder for investors to make money, you're going to see less investment.
There's a huge risk of a huge investment, and no one is going to make that investment for pocket change.
The real question is how to make that return that's worth the investment.
CS's are the obvious and easy way out, for Devs who can't figure out any other way.
(See cameltosis's post above.)
CS's also come with the way they deaden the meaningfulness of game play.
There is a better way, and it allows the game to be more meaningful to more Gamers.
FTP isn't the answer. You get what you pay for, and that's a fact of life.
If you want to play for free and allow others to pay the way, then you're going to get what THEY pay for, which is a lackluster gaming experience that's designed to draw in those others (Gamers who just want to buy their way through it).
Once upon a time....
I don't know maybe developers can accept donations for real life stuff. I really have no solution to the problem. I think they're eventually just win out because us older players are going to become more and more a minority.
I love F2P Cash Shop games, where else am I going to get a AAA quality game to play, and have someone else pay for it?
It would be interesting to see if the dolphins (those players who put some in) are on the rise. I can remember when we were told whales account for 98% of revenue, that link I posted says its only 50%. So I wonder, are many of the old free players now putting something in?
I have always seen AI as a saviour in MMO-land, they could even act like a GM. Now you are making me think they might be more like Big Brother.
The trick then becomes, what they can sell in the store, that people will spend significant money on, that won't piss off their general population.
If there is no advantage to buying it, there is often no reason to buy it, and their sales will be low because of that.
If there is an advantage to buying it, while this will drive up sales, this could also drive away players.
I think most of the frustration (especially around cosmetics) is that people do in fact WANT them, but the prices are ludicrous and/or hidden behind a gambling game.
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But if pay to win benefits tremendously from being massively multiplayer and other business models don't, then that explains why so many MMOs go pay to win. There's still a market for good MMORPGs that aren't pay to win, but they get buried more among the pay to win games than if you're just looking for a good single-player game.
I could see a lot of Whales (or players in general) paying for direct power even in a purely PvE game.
I mean think about it.
If you made a PvE game, and sold say, a +1 to all stats in the store, who loses from this? In reality, no one, because they are not fighting each other.
But I could see a lot of people considering buy that, if they felt that their character was not strong enough, and wanted that little bit more, to make the encounters a little easier.
As I see it, P2W really only exists in PvP games, because only in PvP games, can one player directly beat another, otherwise, what are you crying about, just because they have more power than you, does not stop you from doing that content and getting the same loot as them.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
The Profits do go back to the Dev Team/Studio in the form of approved spending, this allowing them to give overtime to some staff, or perhaps hiring additional staff, as well as getting better software, new offices, better computers, and other upgrades.
How well these help the employees sits more with the direct supervisor/director of that studio, then the top suits.
But, overall, in the most simple form, the more profitable a game becomes, the more money gets given to the studio, to keep improving the product to keep making more money.
This is not always the case (Like Blizzard having a banner year and then firing a bunch of staff) but often the profits (or lack thereof) do direct affect the upcoming budgets for a studio, and thus directly affect the staff that works there.
Just wanted to point that out, yes, the money you spend does in fact directly affect the studio and thus yes, it does directly affect the artiest and programmers, and the like, in some cases, it just ensures they have a job to come back to tomorrow.
As to what AIBQuirky mentioned, the money problems really started when gaming started to overtake every other entertainment medium for profit. That meant that corporate types from every industry imaginable (big chemical company for example) wanted to come in as top executives. They brought with them a corporate culture that we had only had a taste of up to then, they initiated the design by metrics approach, GaaS, the move to mobile. Mind you, you could say they simply acted as catalyst and we would have arrived here anyway, it would have just taken years longer.
At the same time, the same company, and same group of players, GW2 gives out 80 Level boosts, which is directly giving away raw character power, and not peep about how this might be remotely P2W.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR