Announcement is sad news for the whole game industry, The wise old lady shares

The_Death_Princess · January 2015

Yes there is hundreds of threads, but you all should know what this Crazy Nord knows of gaming....

So you know, In real life I owned and operated my own business in the Music industry, and certainly understand the fails of an defunct (for the most part) industry misreading the market. I have also been an avid PC gamer and tester for decades (yes that means I have seen it all). Further, I have an Masters of Science in Business Administration -International Business.

So enough of the creds. I want you all to know the basics of why F2P (and this B2P) is so bad. It all comes down to revenue streams. Without monthly subs, which imo was probably to high from the get go with eso, you cannot maintain a solid income stream to pay the worst expense of all : Labor. This means -

- less game masters keeping the exploiters and hackers at bay
- less customer service agents to take calls to handle point 1
- less coders to solve issue raised by point 1
- less coders to make new content leading to rushed and half tested code
- less executives to guide the mess (usually means new execs who are clueless get hired and paid less)
- and so on, point made

I saw ESO as one of the LAST chance MMO to be a great game to surpass WoW. Now that is gone. It is true that the B2P is slightly better than F2P, but really no. Crown purchases as described is not enough to sustain all the income that is needed to do this. After market saturation which this market is relative small, buying the code disappears too - which means stores sell it for 9.99 or its announces as F2P altogether. The only answer to keep any revenue stream going is buying things to make you able to play to win - and we ALL know how that goes.

So all those who say this is not so bad, look deeper, for all those that have hope, lets hope we can have some fun for awhile at least, and for all the true honest gamers everywhere, lets hope some cool game finds the right balance of monthly sub, content, quality, and all to keep us satisfied

Scamandros · January 2015

If ZOS can say that they believe everything released up until now was not already "rushed half tested code" then I would vote it best joke 2015.
You dun goofed

The_Death_Princess · January 2015

Scamandros wrote: »

If ZOS can say that they believe everything released up until now was not already "rushed half tested code" then I would vote it best joke 2015.
You dun goofed

Actually, on that note, as an alpha an beta tester on several games, this game wasnt that bad. Yes, there was issues, yes it feels like we paid to beta test, but I really doubt many truly were around in the WoW beta/release. No one would say anything about ESO in comparison with what happened there......

knightblaster · January 2015

It's telling for the industry I think.

The genre is kind of dying. Not in terms of going away completely, but the playerbase is really changing a lot, and this is fundamentally changing the atmosphere of these games. It's sad to see the passing of the MMO culture in yet another game, but that's what it is.

In a F2P game, the "community" is uniformly awful and doesn't care much at all about the game. It's filled with drive-by interlopers and "entertainment players", rather than dedicated players and core gamers. It spirals down to a least common denominator approach, which hollows out the quality of the community and replaces it with a sewer, to be frank.

B2P is only marginally better. As you say, it's hard to sustain a game that way unless you add elements of P2W. People who say GW2 is B2P and as a contra case are overlooking the fact that Anet sells in-game gold via the gem/gold currency exchange, which means that anything on the trading post is buyable for cash -- which includes endgame-stat gear and everything else you could want. GW2 is P2W by the "back door", without question. It wouldn't be sustainable for Anet if people were not buying gems to convert to gold to use on the trading post -- they're not sustaining that game on costumes and crafting boosters. It's the B2P currency exchange that sustains the game.

Here, they are trying to go the LOTRO model of hybrid, but we all know where the end station of that is. I guess it depends on how long term you are. If you are just "play as I go along" type of casual player, you probably don't care very much, because you're kind of the same kind of plays F2P games to begin with anyway -- casual, not engaged in the game, playing for entertainment until the new shiny comes along. If you're more of a long-term player, though, it's terrible because even if the impact is less when it is first introduced, over the course of time it destroys the game inevitably because the cash shop grows into a behemoth and/or they introduce RMT currency exchanges. No other way to skin the cat, because the money is needed, and even in a hybrid model with a premium subscription, eventually you'll get to that point because fairly few people will pay the sub, and the company needs to make money.

It's sad, because we're seeing the passing of another phase of the MMO industry into its worst phase yet -- the phase of the terrible, undesirable F2P gamer.