Speaking of free-to-play World of Warcraft-ish games, Runes of Magic just punched through the one million registered users mark in less than two months past launch — enviable numbers, to be sure, until you return to earth and realize that you can’t compare player numbers from a F2P RMT MMO (too many abbreviations there?) to a subscription-based MMO. It’s why these sorts of games — Runescape, DOMO, Free Realms — will always enjoy player populations that make AAA-titles like Warhammer and LOTRO weep. People like the free junk, and are willing to settle for less, and play much more because of it. It makes me worry a bit for the higher quality (yet subscription-based) MMOs, as future developers might look to compare the seemingly instant success of the F2P models and start edging in that direction instead of pumping out higher quality titles that are far more risky to launch.
Speculative “what if?” question — what if past canceled MMOs, such as Tabula Rasa, had gone F2P in the first place, with RMT backing it up? It’s not hard to imagine NCSoft proudly announcing that Tabula Rasa just hit its two millionth “registered user” as they continue to rake in their operating budget plus profit in micro-transactions.
Anyway, I’ve yet to try Runes of Magic — not really willing to return to anything WoWish — but I hear it’s pretty solid and the content they dish out for free is impressive. I’d think this would be a day for them to celebrate pretty hard.
Show me the money.
If the ftp rmt mmo makes 5 dollars a month off of the average player (a very high number I would think) they would need 15-20 million subs to equal WoWs probable revenue (33 million to match their vaunted by dubious 11 million subscribers). And I think that is very high, because a FTP MMO’s sub #s are likely to end with a large number of no revenue players. I mean, I’m technically a Free Realms subscriber, even though I only played the game twice. It’s like Scientology; they say they have 8 million members (counting everyone who ever took a class) when they have maybe 100,000 active paying members worldwide.
You have the same risk in a free to play and a regular old MMO, except in the free to play scenario you can have a bunch of people get your game for free, play it for a month, and never give you a dime. At least Age of Conan got the box sales, ya know? That’s something at least.
It really isn’t too bad. Would I trade anything I pay for to play it? No way… but when servers are down (which seems to happen to me half the time I have free time lol), it’s a nice time waster.
They certainly went for a WoW-esque look but the gameplay is it’s own thing. Under the hood it’s squarely a Diku-based MMO but it has its own charms and quirks that make it its own experience as opposed to “WoW with an Item Shop.”
I would be too quick to judge overall yet just because it bears the F2P badge. Asian F2P titles have always shirked on “real” content in favor of the grind because (so I’m told) they run on single-thread servers that can’t handle much in terms of real AI. I’ve heard that’s also a factor (in addition to cheating and cultural preferences) why they tend to use click-to-move.
But as bigger studios with bigger budgets (such as SOE with Free Realms) target the “F2P” market, who’s to say we won’t be seeing AAA quality titles that use microtransactions (or just transactions, we Westerners often tend to think too big for our britches) rather than the monthly subscription? We’re only a decade into the MMO market and businesses have been very conservative about experimenting with their pricing models.
Psychologically its a lot easier to swallow one 15 dollar transaction than a 15 1 dollar transactions on your bank statement.
I’m sure the free to play, expensive to play well model has its place, but so does the subscription model. The sub model will dominate the AAA mmos.
“It makes me worry a bit for the higher quality (yet subscription-based) MMOs, as future developers might look to compare the seemingly instant success of the F2P models and start edging in that direction instead of pumping out higher quality titles that are far more risky to launch”
I think the thing with RMT that people are proposing is that it’s more profitable than going sub-based. i.e. you get a lot more people playing than you otherwise would have, some don’t spend and others spend a lot, and the goal is that it averages out to give you more money than you would have otherwise obtained.
Sure, the RMT games aren’t pulling in $$$ like WoW, but then again neither are the non-WoW sub MMO’s.
In other words, I think if WoW was an RMT MMO it would probably be even more profitable.
Wizard101 boasts they’ve “recently surpassed two million unique users who have registered to play the game.” but my take was similar, because honestly it’s easy to get people to try something when they hear “Free”.
On the other hand, they’re probably doing quite well, financially speaking.
I have no doubt this trend of F2P (*cough* Pay-as-you-go *cough*) games will turn out to be profitable, in fact I weep a bit because they will be and there’s the possibility that all MMOs will move toward a nickle-and-dime format.
I just hope Guild Wars 2 does really well to show there’s still a market for games in this genre that don’t keep players on a wallet-connected leash.
Up until recently I would have guessed that the free to play model couldn’t generate enough revenue per customer to sustain a “Full Service AAA” mmo title. I thought that free to play would be forever restricted to low quality games with cheap graphics and a limited amount of repetitive content.
That picture seems to have changed dramatically in the last year. Games like Wizard 101, Runes of Magic and Free Realms may not have quite the same depth as AAA subscription games but they come damn close and their overall quality level is very high.
I suspect this is a sea change in the market. Developers realising that they cannot compete with WOW head on realise are deciding to take a different route.
I am still of two minds as to whether or not I like this development though. It is still true that there is no such thing as a free lunch and in order to generate revenues F2P games have to try and entice you into the RMT shop leading to some unfortunate game play choices. I think my preferred option would be a F2P game with rmt shop but which also has the option of a monthly sub which would give unmetered access to all the goodies in the rmt shop.
I keep hearing these things about RoM, and I keep trying it out, but I just can’t play it because the animators can’t get the animation I’m going to be seeing the most right – running.
I mean they run like… I don’t know what they run like. Nothing runs like that. It’s freaky.
It’s probably shallow of me to continuously dismiss the game because I can’t stand the run animation but it really is quite terrible. >_>
@ Starayo – Could be the uncanny valley working against ya.
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The running animation is incredibly bad, especially for female characters. I find this especially odd given how fluid some of the other animations are.
You’d think they’d spend more time to get that one right, lol.
I played it till lvl 30. Than, one day, i met lvl 32 char who had exatcly 7x my HP (same class). That was the moment i left.
Yes, PvP server.