Could we go back to a subscription model?

jommerryrth

shadyjane62 wrote: »

Next year I will get all the challenge I need, living without the craft bag.

This is the true end game player right here!

Pepegrillos

They make much more money the way it is.

Elsonso

Jaustink wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

Free games have to make money somehow to keep running. Very few players never spend money on something.

Many free games are free because a small group of players pay for everyone else. The studios chase the whales because it is easier to get money from a few hundred fans than many thousands of ambivalent players. If the masses contribute a penny here or there, all the better.

SickleCider wrote: »

fizl101 wrote: »

Console would have to pay 3 times to play, pay for the game, pay for online game access (ps plus and xbox equiv) and then the sub

Yes, this. It would just become prohibitively expensive to play.

I’m surprised it’s not on game pass yet for Xbox at least. Also, the game itself is usually on sale for $10. If you’re using this logic, PC has to pay twice as well. I think a mandatory subscription would be great but I also think they should implement something like the WoW token to allow players to purchase game time with gold to compensate for this.

I am not considering ESO Plus on XBox because I have to pay XBox for the privilege of touching the internet so that I can access the game. ZOS should just give out ESO Plus free to all XBox and PSN players who have to subscribe to those services as a requirement to play.

evan302

SithisKhajitiiLamae wrote: »

... eso's crown store that is completely optional and is never shoved in your face...

I'm sorry. Are we playing the same game? It most definitely is shoved into your face on a regular basis.
E.g. I just logged in to a notice telling me I can buy more character slots on the Crown Store. Now I've chosen my character and entered the game, I have the big notice across the screen showing me all the goodies I can buy.

I do sub to ESO but I think the genie is well and truly out of the bottle at this point. I think a reversion to a mandatory sub would prompt a lot of people to leave to leave the game.

Also, I'm not sure I'd trust them to remove everything from the cash shop and scrap all the things that have been raising revenue so far. I think it's more likely we'd get a mandatory sub and the cash shop running pretty much the same as now, in other words the worst of both worlds.
(Yes, I'm a cynic)

Braffin

I wouldn't mind a subscription model instead of the crown store personally.

Unfortunately the crown store was implemented because almost nobody wanted to pay for a monthly sub.

Twohothardware

Them making ESO a paid subscription service again would have no impact on you getting the things in the Crown store for free.

As you said, a lot of players are already subbing to ESO+ so where is this additional revenue coming from if they went to a paid model? A large part of the existing player base that’s just enjoying the free game would simply stop playing if there was a monthly fee.

That’s exactly why the paid service model went away at the beginning of ESO’s launch, it wasn’t popular.

Gray_howling_parrot

A lot of the reactions here are warranted, but I think they're founded on the assumption that it would be a mandatory subscription with the current monetization structure still in place (expansive crown store). I am indeed heavily in favor of a subscription model IF and ONLY IF crown store prices are 25% of what they are now OR most of the rewards, tokens, etc are things that you do in game. Also, you should definitely be able to purchase game time with in-game gold.

cyberjanet

Treeshka wrote: »

If they go back to that majority of the people will just go away and never ever come back.

I have ESO+. It is optional. If it became mandatory I would go away. Choice is important for me.

Castagere

Narvuntien wrote: »

I'd quit, I only started playing because there was no subscription. I am a 100% buy to play player

Same here, i own all the DLCs I wanted. And the crown store thing makes me laugh at how some are taking it. I have never bought anything I don't really need to enjoy the game. People buying things they don't need but just want is on them.

ixthUA

Jaustink wrote: »

I think a mandatory subscription would be great but I also think they should implement something like the WoW token to allow players to purchase game time with gold to compensate for this.

A lot of players would quit in that case. Game is not a work to farm currency to purchase game time.

Dr_Con

i think they make more money with the non-required subscription model due to whales and people paying for recurring subscriptions to access more content then forgetting to not renew.

rpa

If someone stops logging in the game but forgets to cancel ESO+ for months or years, I'd expect support would refund them when asked (rather than deal with the wrath of the credit card issuer).
If I were to make make renewing subscribtion system for an online game (which is completely out of my skill set) the game would request player to confirm they want to renew when the sub ends. If player is not logged in the sub would not renew until they log in and confirm they want that.

MrGarlic

Only if it was $5 per month. ESO+ is comparatively expensive as it is, for me.

Actually, I'd be furious if they brought back compulsory subscription. I invested real money into buying expansions and DLCs. I'd be quite miffed If I couldn't play them without a sub.

Lags

fizl101 wrote: »

Console would have to pay 3 times to play, pay for the game, pay for online game access (ps plus and xbox equiv) and then the sub

I think they should have always gone with the sub. In my experience games with a mandatory sub are much more rewarding to play. And eso is really, really, lacking in the rewards department. But this is probably the best argument as to why it shouldnt happen, not why it wouldnt. It wouldnt because zos probably would never do it. But it shouldnt because of what you said. Although zos could probably make it so if you have xbox live you get the sub automatically, but idk about playstation.

And even if they gave the sub to console players for the fact that they have to pay for xbox live or playstation whatever, people on PC would feel slighted. And if they did have to pay for it, console players would feel slighted. While i wish this was a sub game i think that makes it too complicated.

Which is also another reason why i dont think mmos of this scale belong on console, it does nothing but hold them back. And i played on xbox from near launch til 2019. I have like almost 800 days played on xbox. But if i didnt have that option i would have just waited til i got my PC and played on PC, if i really wanted to play the game.

Simaris

I don't play subscription-based games, purely because I prefer buying something and then being able to play it without having to fork over another £15/m to play said thing especially if I don't play the game for a couple of weeks because burnout or something else took my interest.

That doesn't mean I don't spend money of course, I buy the DLCs and chapters (the collector's edition for most of them) and sometimes something else if it catches my interest. I also have a friend who I play with who lives in a country where the conversion rate is prohibitively high; he'd never be able to afford a sub reliably, and he only just manages to buy the DLCs/chapters once a year.

We'd both leave if ESO went back to sub-only because one of us has no interest in subbing and the other literally cannot. I can only assume there are others who would feel the same.

psychotrip

Jack-0 wrote: »

All this fuss over the crown store…I remember when ESO had a mandatory subscription to be able to play. Why can’t we go back to that, ditch the crown store and predatory methods of getting players to open their wallets, turn all the cosmetic stuff into in-game rewards, and everyone’s a winner?

How many people actually don’t subscribe for the craft bag, crowns and dlc access anyway? Would it upset that many people vs how many would be overjoyed to be able to earn good in game rewards? Can these micro transactions really be so successful compared to a standard sub?

"Why can’t we go back to that, ditch the crown store and predatory methods of getting players to open their wallets, turn all the cosmetic stuff into in-game rewards, and everyone’s a winner?"

Because that makes less money, and the priority of games like this is to take as much money as possible with as little investment in the actual game as possible.

Thats literally it. Its that simple.

Not saying that ESO couldnt survive as a subscription game. Zenimax would make more than enough money to fully fund this game, even with F2Pers leaving. Its not that they cant afford this stuff, its that the money we put in has to fund an executives 3rd yacht ONTOP of providing a minimum viable product.

But these companies refuse to live within their means and The goal is to extract as much as possible for as little investment as possible. Its why, over the years, these games always end up giving us less and making us pay for more.

Its also why these companies tend to care more about "engagement" than enjoyment. Time is money, friend.The more you "engage" the more likely you are to be scammed into buying something. This is, unfortunately, a very popular practice. You can find numerous GDCs where game execs openly champion these practices.

If the game ever reaches a breaking point and people quit in droves, they can put the game on life support, milk the whales that remain, then use that money to fund the next slippery slope.

Welcome to AAA live-service gaming. Your disappointment has already been factored in to their bottom line.

Lastly, once you make a game """"free-to-play"""" you really cant go back. It would cause too much backlash and reverting would be a nightmare.

Wait until ESO 2 I guess.

spartaxoxo

Jaustink wrote: »

A lot of the reactions here are warranted, but I think they're founded on the assumption that it would be a mandatory subscription with the current monetization structure still in place (expansive crown store). I am indeed heavily in favor of a subscription model IF and ONLY IF crown store prices are 25% of what they are now OR most of the rewards, tokens, etc are things that you do in game. Also, you should definitely be able to purchase game time with in-game gold.

I definitely wouldn't pay to play, cash shop or no cash shop. I don't play FF14 either. Pay to play games are becoming less and less popular because people want to be able to have access at all times. Honestly, at the times when money is tight, being able to stay inside and use games I have already paid for is a major bonus.

Lugaldu

I'm pretty sure that won't happen because the Crown Store is so much more lucrative. I mean, many things in the shop quickly cost 5000 crowns which is over 30 Euros in EU - nobody would pay that much for a subscription per month, but when you see all those expensive mounts and assistants running around all over the game, it means that a lot of people are buying them - and new ones are coming out all the time, so people keep buying the new variants.

Monte_Cristo

What's with the 'free to play' claims here? Without sub, ESO is 'pay to play', not free.

Danikat

A lot of people seem to be forgetting (or never knew) that the game was subscription-only at launch and for the first 10 months so we can see exactly the type of content and rewards ZOS put into this game using that model. Spoilers: it's not a magic bullet to get everything you want.

For example they gradually added veteran dungeons (what's now path 2 in each dungeon) and the rewards were exactly what we get now. There were no special collectible rewards*, no rare mount or pet drops, none of the stuff that currently goes into the crown store. They weren't making all that stuff and putting it into the game under a subscription-only model, they just didn't make it at all. I see no reason to think they'd suddenly start doing things differently if they went back to that.

*I'm using collectible as a general term here, I know the Collectibles menu wasn't added until update 6, shortly before the switch to buy-to-play.

In fact the few additional cosmetics they did make were seperate purchases. At launch the game had a grand total of 4 mounts to unlock in-game: the brown, black, bay and paint horses. There was also the white horse available with the Imperial Edition. When they made a 5th (the palomino) it was a seperate purchase available through the website, kind of like the Hailcinder Elk is now (but you didn't get anything else with it, just the horse). It was the same with pets, there weren't many in total and aside from 2 as loyalty rewards they were part of bundles (like the Imperial edition) or sold through 3rd party promotions and bundled with real-life merchandise. (Which also meant if you don't live in the USA you may be unable to get them at all.)

It's nice to imagine that your personal favourite payment plan would also include everything you want to get in-game at no additional cost, but that's not how it works in reality.

Castagere

Monte_Cristo wrote: »

What's with the 'free to play' claims here? Without sub, ESO is 'pay to play', not free.

This 100%
It's a Guildwars 2 model with an option to sub.

LesserCircle

Danikat wrote: »

LesserCircle wrote: »

I started playing ESO in 2015 instead of 2014 and the only reason was because I waited until the mandatory sub went away. I would stop playing if we return to that model.

Same here.

I'd played the betas and thought the game was ok, worth the purchase price but not worth paying every month to play. Especially since subscriptions don't work with my limited and erratic free time, I never know how much time I'll have over the next 30 days so I can easily end up paying for months when I barely get to log in. Also Elder Scrolls game have always been games I dip in and out of over years instead of playing through in one dedicated block of time. (Not that I really do that with any game, I've never had a 'main' game that I'm focused on.)

But I kept following news about the game and checking in on this forum, waiting for something to convince me it was worth paying a subscription for. Instead I got the news that they were dropping the mandatory subscription, which removed the problem entirely and I ordered a copy as soon as I finished reading about how it would work. (Then waited a week after it arrived to register my account, so my sign-up date was 16th February and the free month ended just as the switch to buy-to-play started and there was no gap where I was locked out of the game.)

I'm not sure how much I've spent since then but I've bought all the chapters and story/zone DLC (except Necrom which I haven't gotten to yet), numerous crown packs and occasionally subscription time - usually because I want to dye costumes and sometimes to get the cheap crowns and crown store discounts, the other benefits don't interest me.

This was exactly the case for me as well, same everything but I was too young to register a credit card for the free month. my first time playing was March 16 2015.

Redguards_Revenge

Jack-0 wrote: »

All this fuss over the crown store…I remember when ESO had a mandatory subscription to be able to play. Why can’t we go back to that, ditch the crown store and predatory methods of getting players to open their wallets, turn all the cosmetic stuff into in-game rewards, and everyone’s a winner?

How many people actually don’t subscribe for the craft bag, crowns and dlc access anyway? Would it upset that many people vs how many would be overjoyed to be able to earn good in game rewards? Can these micro transactions really be so successful compared to a standard sub?

I don't subscribe for the craftbag. I play this game transient just like how online games are. Since everything I've buit can be gone, I never hoard on to much.

I am still competitive in pvp with kena and bone pirates. No mytics, no dungeons sets passed summerset.

katanagirl1

SickleCider wrote: »

fizl101 wrote: »

Console would have to pay 3 times to play, pay for the game, pay for online game access (ps plus and xbox equiv) and then the sub

Yes, this. It would just become prohibitively expensive to play.

I do all of these, it is not prohibitively expensive. The game cost me about $10 I think many, many years ago, I’m going to pay for PSN anyway and it’s about $5 a month, and $15 a month for ESO entertainment anywhere from 5-10 hours a day is a real bargain to me.

I kinda wish we could go back to the sub though. There are plenty of players that probably contribute nothing towards the upkeep of the game and servers. I wouldn’t have played the game if it required it at the time I started, but maybe they could give you 30-90 days free and then you would have to sub to keep it up.