Making CoX F2P: How would you do it?

Tabby_Cat beat me to it.

{citation needed}

Likewise there are "indications" that F2P will choke up the market with mediocrity and desperation, and quality MMOs will be able to continue using subscription models by way of distinguishing themselves from their "you get what you pay for" competition.

(There are also very ugly signs that less than scrupulous companies will try to monetize players' personal information, but that privacy rights debate is for another derail. I mention it as an aside because some of the most prominent examples are F2P.)

You make a very good point. And with radio/newspaper missions, not to mention AE content, you can get by just fine with little to no real content. Unless F2P means you have no access to AE content and/or radio/newspaper missions unless you are a VIP (i.e. a normal subscription paying member). Then it would be easy to lock out contacts.

Then again since you can join anyone's team and get xp, that blows that out of the water, especially since the bulk of the xp really isn't tied to mission end bonuses like other games.

The point I'm trying to make is that F2P is a good business model that can make money for some games. I hear LOTRO is making lots more money now. To say that F2P automatically means that all games will fail is just wrong. I can see where this game would have challenges with a F2P system given the game and teaming mechanics already in play. And it is those teaming and mission mechanics that make this such a great game.

It's not a question of "get XP." It's a question of "Being able to team with anyone and do anything without those boundaries."

See my Guides and Tutorials

Here are some editorials/articles on the subject that I've read which I have helped change my opinion.

http://venturebeat.com/2010/07/15/fr...e-game-makers/

http://freetoplay.org/article/article_582/

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/featur...ewards_of_.php

http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming...-gaming-582868

http://mmohuts.com/editorials/is-fre...ture-of-gaming

Thank you for the articles - I'll make sure to read them later (although the one from freetoplay.org may be ... partisan).

I have read the Gamesutra piece since it features the redoubtable Raph Koster and certainly recommend it. The games under discussion in it are ones that are on my case study watch list. Without getting into them, however, I'd like to note that they are object lessons of why successful F2P games operate under different principles than A-list MMOs, which make them inapplicable to CoH and its community.

I wouldn't be so quick to call CoH an A-list MMO. First you got the true A-listers (1+ million subscribers) such as the 800 lb Gorilla of MMO as well as NCSoft's Aion. If we lower the A-list bar to say, 250-500k or more subscribers then we can add NCSoft's own Lineage series to the list as well as a couple of other ones. Moving downwards to the 100-249k subscribers range, we got about half a dozen MMOs jockeying for position which is what I consider to be the B-lister games. CoH is firmly entrenched in this segment, hovering at about 100k-150k subscribers for several years now. Last but not least, we have the C-listers which includes MMOs that rarely, if ever, breaks the 100k mark.

http://www.mmodata.net/

I agree, I'm wondering why there are people who seem to desire a F2P of CoH. There's no need to convert CoH into a F2P game and quite honestly it would do more harm than any kind of good that the pro-F2P group can bring up.

It's speculation on both sides.

Some people speculate that F2P would utterly destroy the game.

Some people speculate that F2P could head the game into an entirely new direction and perhaps for the best.

To each their own.

The idea has been tossed around before but this thread sort of restarted the discussion again.

If you're using those numbers, might as well split between "Asian" and "Non asian" MMOs.

IIRC, over half the Gorilla's subs are in Asia. Lineage 1 and 2 are - asia. Aion? Asia. The specific gameplay (and grind) tends to appeal over there for whatever reason.

The COH gameplay - lacking that grind/dependant on group for almost everything/etc. gameplay - shut down in what, a year in korea?

See my Guides and Tutorials

(Sorry, that's my own shorthand term, to distinguish such games from the social-casual kind mentioned in the Gamesutra article. It's not a question of the number of players, it's the state of play as a state of mind. "Hardcore" or "major league" might be applicable. too. Really, I think of an A-list game as a gamer's game, one that puts the player in that special zone that a casual one never can. I could go on, but I'd have to start naming examples...)

That's easy. It all goes back to the fact that some people don't want to pay for anything and think they are entitled to handouts. They assume that they will be able to enjoy the game while other people pick up the slack of paying for everything.

I take offense to your post. You may disagree with the topic I presented in this thread, but making a personal attack on me is uncalled for and rude.

Liz, I admit I did not use the search function to see if there was another thread that talked about how one would turn COH into a F2P. I did take your suggestion, however, to see what models were discussed in those other threads but couldn't find any other thread (my search-fu must be weak). Could you help please? The ideas in this thread were creative, so now I want to see what other people might have said.

Yes. But are you taking offense because it is true? Or because it is not true?

If the latter, he wasn't speaking about you.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

How does it become less offensive if he was speaking about someone other than the reader?

You're not familiar with the old recreational drugs adage about how "the first hit is free", are you?

Freemium isn't about people wanting to freeload. It's about publishers getting players in the door with the free offering and then selling the hell out of them to get them to part with their money.

The attitude quoted above is one of the reasons I noted previously that a freemium version of the game is not targeted at people who already subscribe. Condemning your fellow players as cheapskate freeloaders for favoring a different monetization model is doing them a disservice, IMO.

In any case, it doesn't matter if 90% "freeload" and 10% pay if the company turns an overall profit on that 10%.

None of this matters here, though. I've seen this discussion on other game forums before and the same tired arguments, FUD and name calling by the anti-freemium crowd. In the end, the decision by a publisher/developer to use a freemium model is based on projected profitability, not based on the personal opinions of a few forumites, regardless of which side of the equation they land on.

Forbin has a pretty good response as is.

The push for a gratis-client and gratis-server-access has been around... well... just as long as the MMO itself. "Players" of MMO's have been demanding that the game's binary-client, content-assets, and server access come at no charge since, well, Meridian 59. As I favor explicit terminology, the practice of offering the game client and server access for no charge is hear-after referred to as gratis-access.

The push for City of Heroes to move to a gratis-access model has intensified in recent years as events change the computer industry. Many "players" look at the rise of the Korean gratis-access market as evidence that a gratis-access model is somehow a good thing. Too many "players" mis-understand the benefits and issues that come with a gratis-access model. As Forbin so eloquently puts it, such "players" want something for free and expect other "players" to pick up the tab.

What many "players" seem to fail to realize is that the vast majority of gratis-access games are coupled with a per-item-purchase model that nets razor-thin profits. Mega-hits like Zynga's Farmville are the exception, not the rule.

One standout example of a total mis-understanding is how players view Turbine's "successful" conversion to a gratis-access model with Lord of the Rings Online. Many "players" fail to realize just how much money Turbine lost, or the catastrophic damage to the studio's size. Factors such how much money Turbine lost, and how many employees lost their jobs just do not matter to the vast majority of arm-chair analysts. The fact is, Turbine's gratis-access model is only profitable due to the drastically decreased costs associated with running the existing studio.

NCSoft also demonstrates problems with trying to leverage a gratis-access and per-item-purchase model. A few years back NCSoft had a large portfolio of such such games. Proponents of gratis access + per-item-purchase model games seem to ignore the fact that both eXteel and Dungeon Runners are shut down after costing NCSoft quite a few pretty pennies.

As of right now there is only one development studio, that I am aware of, that has successfully moved to a gratis-access business model, remained profitable at their current studio size, and was able to start work on additional projects. That studio is High-Rez which runs Global Agenda.

Whether or not "players" want to admit it, all other development studios that have played around with gratis-access models, have inevitably lost money. I've seen references in this thread to them, but come on, lets be honest here for a moment, They've been loosing money for a while. They specifically dropped several projects to focus on specific games.


Now, if push came to shove and NCSoft was faced with the choice of having to shut-off City of Heroes, I do think I can give them a better option than the method they took with Lineage.

I'd advise NCSoft to dump the source-code for the existing binary client and server to Sourceforge under a GPL2 or GPL3 license and assign themselves the copyright. The result of this is that players would be able to build their own private servers and maintain their own game-clients, but any updates would be fed back to NCSoft. Yes, this does mean that a down-stream "user" would be in the position where they could make the compiled binary client available under non-gratis terms.

To combat the possibility of a down-stream user "reselling the game", I'd release the art and content assets under a Creative-Commons license. I'd go for Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 since it would allow content creators to modify the existing content without enabling a downstream contributer to resell that content, while still assigning credit for the creation to Paragon Studios.

The result would be that while the player-base would be able to continue playing City of Heroes on their terms without direct support from NCSoft. I would also note that this particular method is proven to work. Other studios have been doing it for literal decades.

I'd also advise NCSoft to allow players to export the data-configuration files for their existing characters, effectively allowing existing subscribers to import their existing characters to private servers.

This method may also open up avenues for NCSoft and players to derive a financial gain from City of Heroes, such as offering a central "store" for players to make their created content items available for sale. This method of user-generated-non-gratis cnotent has been proven to work by other companies

Would NCSoft be open to examining such a strategy if they felt it was time to close City of Heroes down?

I don't know.

I do know they have my phone number.

Where did I say your name in my post? Oh that's right I didn't. Unknown User wondered about the origin of the F2P movement in this game and guess what? You ain't it. Your just another person in a long line to beat a dead horse.

Wasn't talking about freemium in other games. My comment was in response to another poster asking about the origin of how going F2P got started in CoH and it wasn't started by the company. It was started here by players years ago.

i fully support the second point and didn't understand the first one.

Sigh, did we really have to go there? Many MMOs since the days of EQ has had a sizable international subscriber base. EQ and FFXI have a ton of Japanese and Koreans. CoH and LOTRO have quite a few Europeans. Aion and Lineage do have subscribers outside of Asia you know.

It probably wasn't your intent but let's not single out one portion of the global population and suggesting that they enjoy the grind in order to differentiate them from us somehow. After all, it was EQ, UO and AC that wrote the book on grind and all of them were American games dominated by American players. Then there's also the fact that WoW being immensely popular in Asia despite the fact that there really isn't much grind to speak of, other than end game content.

Lastly, there's a very specific reason why CoH isn't popular in Asia. It is the same reason as why DDO isn't popular there and it has little to do with game play. The theme behind these MMOs are distinctly American and Asians did not grow up with it. If roles were reversed and some company makes a manga/anime themed MMO here, do you think any American who has never had any exposure to that aspect of Asian culture would be remotely interested in it? They can make the game play completely similar to CoH and it will probably shut down in a year too.