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[Industry Thread] Read the OP, or you'll see more red than 38 Studios.
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Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
Basically if Sony was selling a fuck ton of DD copies of Vita games I'm sure we would hear about it non-stop.
I'd like to see the goofy memory card sales figures, how many people just have a 4Gb card and therefore skip the DD stuff due to lack of space I wonder?
It will depend on the price of the DD copy as well. I know that Hot Shots Golf/Everybody's golf Vita had a huge price drop to £7.99 a few weeks back which will have boosted sales. Same with Modnation. What would have been a good idea for Sony to do with its non AAA first party titles would have been to release them as digital only for the first month or so then release the physical copies later at a budget price.
Considering that the only people who are affected when Starforce nukes your DVD drive, SecuROM screws with drivers, Ubisoft's authentication servers are down for days, and the many examples of disc-based DRM that just outright refuse to work for one reason or another are people who bought the game and are attempting to play it legitimately, I'd say it's pretty fair to suggest that they're the only people who are actually affected by DRM. If a regular person has a problem with a game's DRM not letting them play and they either don't know about or don't want to use a crack or a cracked pirated copy, then they've only got one option left to them: don't play the game and attempt to get your money back, and good luck with that one.
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70-30 split between retail and digital would be a pretty big success on the digital front compared to how it does elsewhere.
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
For a company that many like to peg as a company that always plays it safe, they are probably one of the more risk taking companies out there, and it's because they do things so differently. They can either sink or swim depending on how a new idea is accepted or not. Take the products that Raz mentioned, or like the Wii...that was a huge gamble for them...as was the DS, because they were so different. To be honest I love when Nintendo gets crazy like that...it's when they do some of their best stuff.
It's also why Nintendo will forever and always be doooooooooooooooomed.
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They could have just made KOTOR 3 and it would have been a sure fire success. But the hojillion gold coins it would've made is less than the three hojillion gold coins it COULD make, and so...
Just so disappointing.
In a lot of cases they are thinking that they can make WoW money 3 years after WoW launches, but it ends up taking them 5 years to get the game out.
"Play to level 60, wherein you'll need to purchase four expansions for the next 30 levels"
If FTP is what attracted them back the MMO, cutting them off four expansions before end-game content isn't going to do much other than populate low level zones for awhile.
Not sure if WoW is to the point that going (fully) F2P would benefit them more than subscription fees, though. WoW is a weird case.
Plus we're talking about bringing people back into WoW: not revitializing a floundering product.
"Free to play till level X" is an example of what only the old foggies in here will remember: it's called a demo (pronounced demō)
They used to run free across the slow, barren intertubes or that CD that came with every computer gaming magazine\
WoW already uses the model, although I believe it's only till lvl 20.
"FtP till level X" lets people try your game for free, get hooked, get attached and then you go "You can have more, but it'll cost you $Y".
The first hit is free basically.
It's the same reason I don't understand how TF2 makes money...are there really that many users out there that decide to spend money on in-game items that don't do a darn thing?
The recent release of the "balloonicorn"...which is a little balloon of a unicorn that floats above your character...which can only be seen by people wearing specific goggles....is the most baffling There are people out there that spend actual real money on that kind of thing. I just, wow.
Edit: Not only real money but $17.50. WAT.
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No. Games go FTP because they need the money and a box price + subscription discourages people from trying, buying and staying with your product. So you go all in on micro-transactions.
There's multiple MMO models out there:
1) Box Price + Subscription: This is WoW. You buy the game, you pay every month.
2) Box Price + No Subscription: This is like Guild Wars (1 or 2) or Diablo 3 or the like. You buy the game, you play forever for free. You support yourself through box sales and sometimes micro-transactions.
3) Free Game + No Subscription: This is what people call "Free to Play". Your business model is entirely supported by microtransactions.
MMOs tend to go from 1) to 3) because they are failing to making enough money under the WoW model. Mostly because they are not retaining subscribers. And having people playing your game is the most important thing for an MMO. By miles. People playing encourages other people to play and empty worlds encourage them to leave. There's always a snowball effect because MMOs are social games, even if you never talk to anyone ever in game.
So you make everything free to encourage people to jump into the game and try it out. This keeps your playerbase high enough that everyone doesn't leave. And while they are there, they pay into your in-game-store to fund your company.
"Free to Play till Level X" is just a demo for games that run the 1) business model.
Why would you have "had enough" though?
Your character wouldn't be complete, there'd still be more content to see and all that shit.
Now you might say "I don't care about any of that enough to pay for it", but that's not everyone. The whole point of a demo is to hook you enough that you want to pay to see the whole product. They all work that way.
Many people played the first like 1/4 of Duke Nukem 3D and said "I've had enough". But many many people liked what they played and wanted the whole game.
FTP = failure is ignorance of how cut throat this industry really is. You don't get pitied if you are going down. The higher ups will simply end you.
I really would not want to work in mmo development.
FTP only needs to make more money then a failing MMO for your reasoning to apply. Which is true.
The reason everyone goes the WoW route is because WoW makes so much more money then the FTP MMOs.
Subscription makes more money. But only so long as you can maintain a good number of subscribers. If you can't, then you do FTP instead.
Good point. There isn't enough data to expand further because that's all it's really been used for until now. You've clarified how I think about this.
For example, I have reservations about extending your point this far.
Has anyone ever actually launched a full FTP on the same level as these major games? If so, what was their quality and how well did they do?
Is there actually any situation where a game as big as Wow actually goes FTP? I've heard multiple mmo developers talk as if FTP makes more money, period.
It would seem to me that the stigma of FTP and the uncertainty of not having done it before on such a large scale could be putting investors off, which puts publishers off and curtails funding for starting them. This could be a likely alternative explanation for why it is only done until they get so low: because it has been established that it can do it in this controlled environment.
It very much depends on the game. In WoW's case, it used to take a few weeks of regular play but they have since smoothed and flattened the curve such that you can pretty easily get a character up to 60 in a few days of play. Of course, at this point you've got another 25 levels to go (which take much longer than 1-60 did, but still not a ton of time if you aren't burned out on the content).
In comparison, I believe WoW is currently offering 1-20 in their trial mode, which is equivalent to maybe 3-4 hours of gameplay... perhaps 6-8 for a totally new player.
Basically though, WoW has such a development and polish advantage that any time a serious competitor crops up they are able to make a small change to their gameplay mechanics or business model that they won't see a long-term loss in players due to the competition. They're a bit down over the last year or so due to what appears to be some general fatigue from long-term players, I think, and I don't think there's a whole lot they can do to get those players back, besides promotions like the Annual Pass.
No, because there are no games as big as WoW.
There have been some big MMORPGs like Lord of the Rings Online that have gone FTP and it seems to have helped them.
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
I didn't actually mean Wow itself there, I meant the AAA hype train big launch style game.
But that's a good point. There are no games as big as wow. It is not possible to talk about Wow making more or less money on FTP until they actually do it. They're the only example, an outlier by a huge margin, and the scale is so huge it's ludicrous to assume you understand what would be best for them.
WoW is such an interesting case because there really is no historical precedence here. No other MMO is as large as WoW and no other game has the seen the success that it has. It's like trying to compare other handheld games to Pokemon. You can't do it because they break the model.
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If Wow does do this 1-60 FTP thing and it works for them...
...guess what's going to happen for the next five years?
That's true. The current starter account restrictions are huge*, and it'd probably limit their opportunities to convert people from free to paid if they maintained those restrictions for as lengthy of a stretch as 1-60.
*Restrictions on Starter Edition Accounts -- with the three biggest restrictions (imo) bolded
A maximum of 10 gold
Trade skills are capped at 100 ranks
Unable to trade via the Auction House, mailbox, or player-to-player
In-game access to public chat channels unavailable; players are limited to communicating using only say, party, or whisper
Characters will be unable to create or join guilds
Characters are not able to send whispers to other characters unless they have been added to the characters' friends' lists or have received a whisper from a character first
Characters will not be able to invite other players into a party
Characters will be unable to disable experience gains
Voice chat is disabled on Starter Edition accounts
Realms experiencing login queues will prioritize players who have full, paid accounts
Starter Edition accounts are not eligible for character transfers
RealID features are disabled on all Starter Edition Accounts
It'd be a big hurdle for Blizzard to clear, business-wise, especially if they still wanted to make sure that the paid users are still relatively free from spammers and other exploitative use of free accounts.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/174225/Developers_cautiously_optimistic_about_the_Ouyas_ambitious_promise.php
http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/17/pachter-on-the-case-for-call-of-duty-black-ops-ii-on-the-wii-u/
Gotta love that last comment. O_o
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