deleted (enjoy your F2P game)

Morthur

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eisberg

On another forum I mentioned in my post somewhere between 10-12 months after released they would announce the game going B2P or F2P. Anybody who has been watching the trends with MMOs should have already known this game was going to be F2P or B2P very soon after release. Subscription is nearly dead, with a few outliers.

Morthur

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knightblaster

It's very daunting to make a sub model last long term.

WoW is a singular outlier -- no other sub game has ever come close to its numbers, and likely no future single game ever will. It was the result of a perfect storm of factors at the beginning and then a snowballing effect which created significant "switching costs" in terms of players investing heavily in other games, and a raised bar with respect to content amount and endgame mechanics. At this point, it's very hard to replicate, which is why pretty much every other fantasy theme park MMO has failed to maintain a sub for a long period of time. Exceptions are legacy games (pre-WoW games with legacy fanbases) and the FF games (which have one of the largest fanbases in all of gaming).

EVE is an outlier for a different reason -- it's a true niche game. It's the only serious space MMO and pretty much the only complete sandbox MMO. It has a fanatical fanbase as a result. If other developers thought that base was big enough to compete with, they would have done it (like they have done with fantasy theme park MMOs and WoW), but no-one has tried, and at this point it seems as likely that CCP will replace EVE with a successor as it is that someone else comes in and does a better space sandbox MMO with consequential PvP.

If you're making a fantasy theme park MMO, there is just so much competition and so much of a mindset in the MMO playerbase that unless the game has the amount of content and the endgame mechanics and so on that WoW does it isn't worth a sub for more than a month or two. This makes it very, very daunting for any new game to succeed with the sub model. Sure, the new games all have their flaws, but so did WoW when it launched, as did EVE. The difference now is the comparison issue, and it's just a very hard sell for a new MMO to make in a way that is compelling for a large number of people outside the core fanbase that every game has.

Morthur

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Saint_JiubB14_ESO

There is another thread with a better article about why Forbes is likely wrong and there really isn't anything wrong with the sub model, companies just found a better way to make money.

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/147220/was-zenimax-stupid-like-a-fox#latest

Morthur

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