Future of CoX..

I've been over at CO a lot since F2P. They got a new dev team that is considerably better instead of the keystone cops they had running it at launch.

Donald Trump would disagree.

Nobody said that changing to meet a changing market would be painless. They did what they had to do. If they trimmed all of those expenses, it's because those expenses weren't helping the bottom line.

I suppose the real test will be if Turbine becomes profitable enough to start taking on other projects now.

I also think that you've not only seen the end of MMO's with the budget of a major motion picture. You've also seen the end of subscription-only MMO's. There might still be a couple in the pipeline (I still haven't heard a revenue model for The Secret World) but I think any new game is going to be either freemium or a hybrid from the beginning.

It will be interesting to see what the next year or two hold.

I would note that when anybody has to go to reality Television to make money, they've pretty much hit the so called Epic-Failure mark.

Slight problem. All of those expenses occurred after LoTR failed as a subscription based game. The damage had already been done.

What it sounds like is you are trying to inverse the situation that Turbine went through, placing their decision to lay off staff and shut down a studio as a move after making the decision to go a Free-to-play business plan. It was the other way around. The free-to-play business plan was only implemented after Turbine had lost lots of money, layed off lots of developers, and sold themselves.

That's not trimming. That is Cauterization

No, the real test would be if Turbine could return to it's original size before the layoffs at the left-over studio on the strength of it's profits alone. The financial reporting methods of Time Warner would make this difficult to determine though. It is possible that Time-Warner could subsidize expansion and development of Turbine games in the same way Infogrames subsidizes the expansion and development of Cryptic games.

This really depends on the market niche. Games which offer unique hooks will likely still be able to command subscription prices.

What is more likely is that average subscription price will fall. We'll see more games with $10 a month or $8 a month service charges, rather than $15 a month.

For Turbine or Paragon Studios?

Paragon Studios has the luxury of having the only game of it's kind with no competitors. Anybody who wants to play the City of Heroes experience will need to play City of Heroes. That means for the forseeable future CoH will continue to be able to command a subscription price-point with no need for a free-to-play business model.

That being said, it is possible that Paragon Studios / NCSoft will examine the possibility of combining subscription titles such as AION and City of Heroes and offering discounts and other perks to subs of both games.

For Turbine, I think that financially, they have stabilized on their free-to-play model. They are not growing, but they are not shrinking either. Which seems to work well enough for Turbune. That still does not make them a poster child.

Star Wars: The Old Republic would beg to differ.

(Now if that doesn't do very very well then I agree, future mega-budget P2Ps will become an endangered species.)

I don't think the freemium market has settled down yet, and I think when it does we'll see some casualties. 3 years ago or so when I was exploring MMOs for the first time there were very few quality full 3D world freemium titles. That's no longer the case, and I doubt that there's enough microtransaction money to keep them all in the black.

Well, I wouldn't argue with that, nor would I argue with the freemium conversion being Hail Mary pass.

I was thinking of the industry as a whole.

I'd count that as having been in the pipeline already, and planned from the start for a subscription. Have they announced a pricing plan?

I'd agree that after having one Star Wars MMO already perform way under expectations (maybe two - I'm not sure how well Clone Wars Adventures is doing) I'd expect that this would spell the end of big budget licensed games.

One of the interesting things about freemium is that it counts on the fact that some people enjoy spending lots of money on junk. I heard an interview recently with the CEO of Night Owl Games, who are the developers of Dungeon Overlord, one of SOE's Facebook games. The game so far was offering very small, reasonably-priced microtransactions that had real value in the game. (That's my opinion, there, not his stated opinion.)

I had posted a question about whether purchases were meeting expectations (the game was in early launch and even now still carries a big "beta" tag) and while he was understandably vague, he made an interesting observation:

What he said was that they needed to find something expensive to offer what Facebook called "the whales". That is, the big spenders who are happiest when they ARE spending lots of money on their pastime. These people, apparently, make up a significant chunk of the revenue of any particular freemium game.

This is why, for instance, a kid's game like Wizard 101 offers a $30 shark mount that is not really good for anything except impressing people with how much money you are able to spend to look unique.

I've noticed, also, that there are more than a few people like myself who won't subscribe to multiple games but who, over the course of several months, are willing to make microtransactions that come out to more or less the equivalent of having subscribed to multiple games.

It's partly the "get the shiny while it's hot" thing. Ironically, partly thriftiness, like "Ooh, a sale on NC Coin! I better stock up now, so I have more later on." Partly just the freedom to make impulse purchases which tend to be large sometimes and small sometimes.

I think the new Facebook generation of gamers is going to grow up with microtransactions as the norm and they won't think twice about spending money that way, where many of us old-timers still look down on it or even see it as somehow an evil or corrupting influence.

The next couple of years will be interesting, alright.

Dare I ask HOW it's exploitive and unfair? People who pay get one thing (or several things, depending on how the payment system is setup; tiered, or flat and/or cash shop, etc...) and people who don't pay get another.

How is that different from a subscription where people who pay get one thing and people who don't pay get nothing at all? You can't get much more "premium rewards" or "unfair" than that...

I think you may be thinking of 100,000%

Okay, I can sympathize with that concern, but painting ALL freemium games with that brush is simply wrong. I participate in several freemium games and only one is potentially the sort that gives the kind of bonuses described.

As it stands though - I'm not sure I see the problem with those kinds of bonuses. I mean - you level up 25% faster. Yeah, so what? How is this a problem for anybody else? The LOTRO case sounds a bit on the manipulative side if ordinary potions became scarce, but I seem to recall that my LOTRO character from way back when was an alchemist. That sort of implies that there ARE potions available, even if they don't come from loot drops. Is that the case?

I DO play a freemium game that is a resource development and battle game, (I mentioned it earlier, but I've already courted IBTL way more than I ought to have done) where you can buy development boosts both permanent and temporary. So far, the players have not complained about it so much as proclaimed their happiness about having the option. Those bonuses are small and reasonably priced, but that just helps push the idea you mention that most everyone will actually pay that price and the game balance really has to assume that everyone is balanced around that inflated (from a non-paying player's standpoint) resource availability.

In the MMORPG's I've so far played that have freemium attributes, the bonuses from making microtransactions have all been geared towards putting the freemium players at just under par in comparison to the subscribers, and so encouraging the freemium players to become subscribers. I have not seen a case where a MMORPG was selling dominance in the game to whoever paid the most money.

Truthfully, if you're in a game for the long haul, then freemium is a superior payment method from a player's standpoint. You own what you buy. Subscribers rent their game, and lose everything as soon as they discontinue paying for it. The freemium player is free to come and go as she wishes and to simply buy the parts that she uses and leave the rest. If a subscriber pays for a year, and a freemium player spends the same amount of money over the course of a year, then after a year the freemium player will "own" the game while the subscriber will own nothing. The freemium player can stop paying another dime and still play at whatever her current investment level happens to be. The subscriber will be unable to play at all except for the basic newbie level freemium game if he stops paying.

That right there is a good enough reason for me to choose never to pay a subscription again for a MMORPG. Why rent when I can own? It's a measure of the esteem in which I hold CoH that I subscribe to it now, but once I have my Vanguard Pack, I can't say how long I might keep doing that if my interest is piqued elsewhere that doesn't charge me a rental fee in order to play it.

They haven't been specific, but they will be going down the P2P route, and I'd be quite surprised if they didn't at least launch on the standard $15/month model. EA's long term goal has been stated as retaining a couple of hundred thousand subscribers, for ten years...

Snipped for space, but that's probably the best defence of the freemium model I've ever read. Sadly many titles seem to prefer to sell temp xp/loot/power boosts, which give no permanent benefit at all.

Hope you're speaking hyperbole - otherwise you're just being spiteful. Just quit playing if they do - why wish *zilch* on the players that're willing to go to a new model?

Of course, people who are fine that model should have the option to play; you're right, I'd just rather not play it myself.

I would not play CoX as a freemium game unless it was strictly dual model or something that does not give people with unlimited money continuous rewards (even if on a logrithmic scale - only a flat line could be even close to fair).

There's a third, and it's far from shut down or unsuccessful.

So let me clarify - I am not against Freemium as a rule; I am against micro-transactions, which most freemium games tend to use as their cash cow.

A model like, "It's free but you don't get base access or incarnate stuff/if you are a subscriber, you get everything" - that way it's a choice between just playing very casually for free, or paying a nominal fee to get the full game content. Technically, CoX already follows that model to an extent - I do have to keep paying $5 every month if I want my jet pack inherent power to keep working.

You do know that you can get those for inf or for doing a repeatable mission don't you?

No, really?? OMG, I am such a n00b

So I really like having it as an inherent, that way it still works on Mo runs; second, it works on every toon I have, from level 1 onwards - and no worrying about recharging it and all.

Plus, if you do the two low-level bank missions in Kings Row, you get the Raptor Pack (flight) and a Zero-G Pack (superjump) for free and they each last for two hours of use. If you don't use them constantly and remember to turn them off when you land, you can make them last until you get to the high-30s or even mid-40s. On my Brute, after getting the 3 free travel backpacks, I didn't have to invest in a travel power until he was 47. And you really need flight in CoV.

Raptor Pack is available levels 6-10 in the Protect Atlas Park Bank mission.
Zero-G Pack is available levels 10-12 in the Protect Kings Row Bank mission.

I have the temp powers, I prefer the jet pack inherent - but that's not the point here :P

My point is that for a fixed amount, we get a small benefit. It isn't a benefit that increases with more money thrown at it. I would consider that acceptable.

Guild Wars would be Buy to Play, which is neither Freemium nor Free to Play. But nice try.

I don't think the MMO genre is old enough yet to be able to speculate on the lifespan of these games. Yes, games have closed, but they were failing. CoH is still lively, and there are several even older MMOs that are still alive and kicking. That, and when MMOs do get sequels their success tends to be mixed, to say the least.

When I play the 1-20 game in Praetoria I often feel that I'm already playing 'CoH 2' since in so many ways it's a far more sophisticated experience. Sure, there's room for improvement still, but would we really want to swap out 7 years of content for a new game which would inevitably have less content and less depth but a somewhat improved engine?

If there is a CoH 2 in the works then NCSoft/Paragon Studios would have to be VERY careful about how and when it was announced, because it would cast a very big question mark over the long term future and continued development of CoH 1, unless it was a completely separate project by a brand new development team... and given that this is already the dominant superhero MMO, do they really want to compete with themselves?