Editorial: You Get What You Pay For

Greetings fellow gamers!

I’ve been using the majority of my internet time recently playing around with a number of the various free-to-play MMOs on the market. As might be expected, the quality, subject matter, community, and pretty much everything else varied to an extreme degree. But there was one thing that remained constant through the experience: There didn’t seem to be much to do for a someone who was just going to try the game out.

I know that it sounds rather strange, complaining about a lack of features for a product that I’m not paying to use, and I’d like to assure you all right now that I’m not nearly that crippled by self-entitlement. My thoughts on the subject are more related to the nature of the business model, and perhaps the nature of the beast that is online gaming in general.

It seems like these free to play games are obviously not all black holes of cash, so it stands to reason that the business model is not to blame for the failures of the games that are not successful. At least I should say not entirely to blame for the failures.

There is one very serious advantage to the free games, and that’s the very thing that I mentioned up at the beginning there. It’s incredibly simple to just pick one up if you only wanted to try it out. As far as I can tell that’s likely half the battle of becoming successful when creating a game like this, and that’s precisely what free-to-play facilitates.

I’m not personally in this group, but I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who might have looked at an MMO and thought it might be fun, but were put off by the initial investment of the buying the box and then being locked into that first month without ever actually knowing if they would play it past the first few days.

These are totally reasonable thoughts for someone purchasing a game, and for a team that doesn’t have the marketing behemoth behind their games like some of the more recent releases do it’s hard to get people to overcome that feeling of trepidation.

The solution then clearly presented itself: play the basic version of the game for free and if you find out that you like it you can give us money and we’ll let you have extra stuff. It seems an elegant solution to the problem of getting people through the door initially, and it works incredibly well. The noobie areas of any of these games are inevitably packed with people very probably doing the same thing that I was.

So far, so good. You’ve gotten a million downloads, and almost half of them actually started the game up, sounds like grand old time.

This brings us very neatly to part two of having a game that doesn’t close down in three months: Keeping people logging in.

Player retention is an ugly beast in the online world. I can’t say I envy the problems of game makers, though “How can I get these people to pay me even more money on a regular basis” is probably a good problem to have in the grand scheme of things.

Back to the topic at hand though, we gamers are fickle, fickle people, and will switch our allegiances at the drop of a hat if we think something better has come along. In fact something needs to be impressive enough in the first place for us to become entrenched at all. This is where I feel the free-to-play and freemium models are far less successful.

The problem I had was this: I had downloaded these games simply to see if they were any fun at all. Much to my surprise, the initial quality was actually quite high in some of the games I tried. However, they had also decided to throw me in either with people who had money to burn right at the beginning, or had played enough to decide it was worth it to them to throw some money in.

While this was a splendid thing for them, the result was I found myself genuinely outclassed, and there was really nothing I could do that would improve my situation, short of paying for some of these items myself.

I wasn’t having fun playing against people who had a systematic and mechanical advantage over me, and that severely hindered my desire to offer any financial support to the developers.

I hesitate to say that I’m the only one who feels this way, and I’d be willing to bet that titles such as this suffer an absolutely atrocious amount of player turnover.

I can’t imagine that even the people who have paid for their Super Advantage Sword+1 find it much fun after awhile, having handily filleted the population of Brooklyn in new players, and they are likely to leave for greener pastures.

But wait, there’s more! This wasn’t the case in all of the games I was perusing over these last weeks. Apparently there are some companies who thought of that very problem above and had made quite certain that the purchasable items were not overpowering.

The problem then became that buyables turned into a purely cosmetic affair. Perhaps I’m simply a pragmatist, but I’ve never been prone to worrying about my characters appearance unless it was hindering my gameplay.

I mean no disrespect if you do enjoy that, in fact if you do I have a few games that you might actually quite enjoy; however this strikes me as a very niche market.

I’m big on niches, I think niches are great, they let everyone get just what they want, but I’m not sure that this is the best way to provide for this particular one for the same reason paying to try a dozen different games doesn’t work. Experimentation becomes prohibitively costly at an alarming rate.

Clearly these are not the final words on the issue, as simple observation and a quick visit to the nearest web browser can demonstrate.

Many of these games are alive and well and continue to thrive. I suppose it’s become obvious over the course of this little discussion that I am a proponent of the subscription model, as I think that providing unlimited access is more rewarding in the long run.

But one thing that I would like to explore one day is why it seems people feel that these are the only two answers to the monetization of online games.

Both of the above models have their place in the world, and the advantages and disadvantages of each are hopefully clear, and so I begin wondering how one might create a freakish Frankenstein job of the two and come up with some sort of hybrid.

Perhaps an account is both free and full featured including the free client download, but there is some predetermined level that is considered maxed out for free accounts.

Perhaps there is some other method that is entirely different, and you out there in the interwebs have thought of it.

I’d love to hear what you think, and perhaps we can come up with something new and highly profitable to pitch to Blizzard. I kid, I kid; but I am eager to hear what people have come up with.

Well, I suppose I should head back to the lab to continue my experiments.

Until next time.