Hello, my fellow ESO players!
It has been a while since I've brought myself to write my huge and useless walls of text here, but after a nice talk with a friend I decided to come up with a little poll.
I'll try to be short on this one - promise.
It's a simply question:
How do you think should Housing be monetized?
Before we proceed, however, let's take a look into a couple of facts that we know:
- We know that housing will be instanced but the houses themselves are spread all across Tamriel.
- We know that we have a lot of different types of "houses" that will be offered to us: from simple Inn rooms and small cottages fit for a lone adventurer to big estates and castles that will likely be the home of wealthy characters or even guild halls!
- We can probably assume there are going to be functionalities, features and a lot of customization for our homes.
With that in mind, let's talk about monetization.
First of all, we must be fair and reasonable. For that reason, I'm excluding the option that it should all be 'free'. ZOS employees deserve to eat, too.
So, the way I see it, these are plausible/possible models:
Layered Paywall X Full Paywall
The Layered Paywall would be a model where the Housing system is available for everyone that owns the base game but some parts of it are closed behind a paywall (store purchases). The best PRO argument for this approach is that Housing has always been an important and fun part of most TES games and so it deserves to be a part of the base game, since it's an "Elder Scrolls experience" that should be available to all. It's also agreeable that giving a little taste of it but closing the best parts of it behind a paywall is more encouraging and can be an incentive to purchases rather than closing it all from everyone not willing to pay. A Layered Paywall Model can be branched into different types which I'll explain soon.
The Full Paywall would be the standard DLC experience: everything related to Housing will be locked behind store purchases and you can only access the content by spending crowns. This can also be branched into three major types, which I'll explain.
Layered Paywall Types
These are the types of Layered Paywalls that could possibly come with Housing. Notice that these are considering 4 aspects of the Housing system: Houses (the properties themselves); Guild Halls (same as Houses, but for guilds); Features (Possible features we could access at home, these include storage, crafting, new stuff like farming, etc.); Aesthetic (Furniture, wall/floors, garden decoration, etc...) Also, please note that when I say something is available for 'free', I mean in terms of real money. Of course things will still have in-game gold costs and all that.
- Limited Advancement: All 4 aspects are available for free but only in their earlier stages. Medium and larger houses and guild halls, better features and better aesthetic stuff are behind the paywall.
- Limited Features: Access to all Houses and Guild Halls and Aesthetic stuff are available for free but the feature-content is limited by the paywall.
- Limited Houses & Halls: Access to Aesthetic stuff and features is available for free but the properties themselves must be bought in the store.
- Limited Aesthetic: Everything but the decorations and furniture are available for free. These, however, must be unlocked in the store.
- Limited Features & Aesthetic: Same as above, but including features too.
- Limited Guilds: Same as Limited Houses & Halls, but only applicable to Guild Halls and other major guild/collective features and aesthetic stuff.
- Limited by Taxation: System is mostly free, but you have to pay taxes and upkeeps (store or not) to keep your stuff, otherwise you lose the property.
Full Paywall Types
- Complete Package: a single purchase - like the other DLCs - that will unlock access to everything related to Housing.
- Partial Package: several purchases that unlock different aspects or tiers of the Housing content. For example, "Unlock Pact Houses" would only unlock houses in the Pact regions, or "Unlock tier X furniture", etc...
- Individual Purchases: everything related to housing is locked in the Store and each part and aspect of it is a different, individual purchase: each house, each piece of furniture, each feature, etc...
My opinion:
I would honestly be very happy with the
"Layered Paywall - Limited Advancement" model. I think it is
FAIR, allowing people to experience all aspects of housing, it is
REASONABLE because it locks the best houses, furniture and stuff behind store purchases, which will certaily be good for ZOS' sales and it's
FAITHFUL to the idea of Housing being an Elder Scrolls experience and as such available in the base game. Being able to taste it but not grasp it entirely would encourage sales and prevent disappointments (since you would know what you'd be buying because you can already have "lesser" versions of it.)
And finally, this model allows for a lot of variety in the future: store purchases for more furniture and stuff and rare drops for decorations. Getting a rare decoration to drop and not be able to use it because you have not purchased the Housing DLC would be terrible, but having access to basic homes would allow every player to experience it, run out of space and desire (and buy) bigger houses

That said, know that this is just plain speculation. Of course there are N possible ways to monetize it and I'm not claiming to have listed or thought about everything. It's just an approximate thinking of how would you like things to work. Also, please note that there is NO "None of the above" option because I'm limited to 10 poll options. Feel free to comment with other ideas and possibilities if you do not feel represented by any of the options

Without further ado, time to vote!