Was the Free To Play Weekend secretly a test for going Free to Play?

Cherryblossom · November 2016

Shadowstep2003 wrote: »

How would you feel if ESO announced they were going Free to Play? You can already buy the base game digitally for 10 bucks, I don't think it'd be such a stretch to give it away for free and make money off the subs, upcoming crown crates, dlc, costumes, etc.

Do you think this was all an experiment by ZOS on whether it would be beneficial to go Free to Play?

I feel like there is always a bigger picture for the reason these companies do these types of things. Sure it could be just to gain more exposure, but if there is data that suggests there were a ton of new users who tried the game when it was free then fell off after the even maybe they see it as a worthwhile change.

It just suggests they want to encourage more to play, so they let people come and see how much has changed, with the hope they might get hooked enough during the weekend that they will fork out the £10 for the game to play again.

SaibotLiu · November 2016

There is an advantage to the playerbase to keep a minor paywall in place for that reason, but any financial benefit to ZOS to attempt to sell the base game as a rule are quickly evaporating. I would give it until this time next year and the game will go F2P. Once the weight of potential F2P revenue outweighs any risk or costs in transitioning to that model you can offically kiss B2P barriers goodbye. And then as the covenant with the dev gods is sundered you shall know the horrors of Oblivion.

I only wonder what they will call it. ESO:Tamriel United Infinite, Deluxe Patriotic Edition featuring:Will Smith.

Ravereth · November 2016

Never F2P, i hope.

Akevoriath · November 2016

If they make it free to play and don't give some compensation to the people who bought the game before it went F2P (Items, some kind of valuable in game reward, maybe a good house or decoration or multiple cosmetics or all of the above) then I and probably a lot of other people will just leave. When GW2 went F2P, they gave you one costume, it wasn't a bad costume, but it wasnt worth the 60 or so dollars I had paid for the original game on top of the (minimum) 50 dollars I paid for the HoT DLC, while people who were just buying the game for the first time got the base game AND the HoT DLC for 50 dollars all up, while myself and all the people who had bought the game for it's full price from their website and had been loyal customers since, were given a costume that was supposed to be worth 60 dollars (usually the ones that don't look as fancy, which this one doesn't, cost around 10 dollars) honestly I'm just getting sick and tired of game devs treating people this way, it's the same thing with politicians, you treat the people you are supposed to be working for like crap, then expect another career politician to be elected again? No, they elected someone who only recently got involved with politics, Trump. This is the reason sites like G2A are so popular, they may rip off game devs, but people will go there because the games are at more than fair prices and people are starting to lose patience with game devs constantly ripping them off, the only AAA game company I currently know of that does not rip off it's customers or renege on promises is CD Projekt Red. In the past I wouldn't have even considered G2A knowing that it actually hurts the game companies more than people just pirating the game, but now I would more than consider it just to spite companies that lie and rip people off.

SickDuck · November 2016

How on Tamriel would that make any difference? The game client is almost free anyway. As someone pointed out it can be bought for less than a month's sub cost. Pretty sure that bulk of the revenue does not come from selling the client already. This also means ZOS could change to F2P without changing anything else
- you wouldn't even notice. Going F2P does not mean going P2W, they are all up to ZOS. The last 2 years so far proved that ZOS can maintain a good balance between greed and revenue.

As long as the infrastructure is capable handling all the new players it's all fine. The free weekend could have been a test for that amongst many other things. Did you suffer from anything during it?

This thread is a speculation and most likely will be closed soon as it happened to similar ones. Noone likes mindless speculation. Or spoilers.

Prof_Bawbag · November 2016

Unless you just went out and sank £40 yesterday on the gold version, I don't really see what the issue is about it going F2P. I've spent countless money in the crown shop, I sub and picked the game up again on the PS4 around 2 or 3 months ago for £8. Spent another £9 on the PSN credit to buy the dlc mega pack when the crown went on sale and it wouldn't bother me in the slightest if it went F2P. In fact, it would probably be a good thing considering how many noobs were running around the starter islands. As long as the CS remains non P2W, then they can do what they want with the game.

Is there a huge difference between someone picking the game up for around £3 on ebay and getting it for nothing? The base game sells for peanuts nowadays.

SantieClaws · November 2016

It may only be a small sum yes to buy your passport to Tamriel.

That small sum though may be enough to deter a huge invasion of bots and also those who just come along to spoil the enjoyment of others for a day or so and have no intention of staying once they have had their kicks.

Therefore khajiit she would prefer the charge for travel documents to remain.

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

Prof_Bawbag · November 2016

SantieClaws wrote: »

It may only be a small sum yes to buy your passport to Tamriel.

That small sum though may be enough to deter a huge invasion of bots and also those who just come along to spoil the enjoyment of others for a day or so and have no intention of staying once they have had their kicks.

Therefore khajiit she would prefer the charge for travel documents to remain.

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

To be fair, the majority of bots I've encountered seem to be more established players, farming those last CP points or leveling new toons. You know the new toons are established players because you usually see that little dwarven spider pet that can only be obtained much later in the game especially if the character in question isn't a DC character.

Docmandu · November 2016

Want to know why they do Free To Play weekends, look at http://steamcharts.com/app/306130#3m -- some of those trial users will stick around.

ItsGlaive · November 2016

Tandor wrote: »

yodased wrote: »

I mean their new marketing manager is quite the lover of chinese/korean F2P Grind-a-thons anyway. I mean she was in charge of the transtion of SwToR, whats that tell you?

That she has experience of another decent MMORPG that has retained optional subscriptions?

SWTOR is a lot of things but decent is not one of them. Sure the stories are fun, but an MMO is much more than just a story.

Abeille · November 2016

Docmandu wrote: »

Want to know why they do Free To Play weekends, look at http://steamcharts.com/app/306130#3m -- some of those trial users will stick around.

The reviews plummet, though

Prof_Bawbag · November 2016

Abeille wrote: »

Docmandu wrote: »

Want to know why they do Free To Play weekends, look at http://steamcharts.com/app/306130#3m -- some of those trial users will stick around.

The reviews plummet, though

That's gamers being gamers, though. They complain about review scores from those that review games for major sites, yet they themselves give everything either 0/10 or 9 or 10/10. There is no middle with a lot of these people. They then wonder why no major review sites take them seriously when they complain about their favourite game not getting over a 9/10.

It's truly astounding how many people nowadays use metric (or whatever the site is called) as a stick to beat others with when arguing about which game is better than the other. Unless it's a relatively small site and those users are half way competent about giving out a non biased view, I ignore user reviews. they're not worth the bandwidth afforded to them.

Enslaved · November 2016

F2P would make my own guild consisting of main and alt acc populated by 8 more alts asap lol.
Free 500 guild bank slots ftw

kevlarto_ESO · November 2016

As much as I hate to see it go f2p, I know it will happen sooner than later unless they are selling a lot more clients than we think.

Depends on how much things change, and if they keep the sub option and do not restrict it I might stay around, f2p has been my que to exit stage right, I have found no f2p game worth playing for free and a converted mmo can sometimes be the worst of them, guess time will tell. Most f2p games will cost you more than 14.99 a month if you want any fun game experience I think f2p biggest lie ever sold to gamers.

I think this weekend was to get more people to buy the game, I know my friends are always buying something out of the crown store, I still sub at the moment, here's to hoping f2p is still a ways off, but won't surprised if it is not /sigh

arkansas_ESO · November 2016

Slylok wrote: »

Blizzard just a had free to play weekend for Overwatch.. So according the the OPs logic we can expect Overwatch to be free to play soon.

There's really no comparing Overwatch to ESO. Overwatch hasn't had to drastically change it's business model like ESO did, there's zero TV coverage of ESO (apart from very few paid 30 second ads) while an Overwatch tournament was recently on TBS, Overwatch hasn't had a massive change of the dev team like ESO. It's kinda crazy that a brand new Blizzard IP (Overwatch) was able to outperform an existing Bethesda/Zenimax IP (Elder Scrolls) by so much.

On the topic of ESO going F2P, I could see it happen. You can already get the base game for $10, that's only a few crown crates' worth. They stand to make more money by dropping the initial financial barrier and hooking people with microtransactions, which is why you're seeing things like crown crates coming into the store.

Elsonso · November 2016

Free Play Weekend is designed to get people to try the game so that they will buy the game. If they buy the game, they will want to play the game, which will get many of them to buy Crowns for cosmetic items. This is why the game is on sale right now in Steam. Free trial with game on sale. Get a taste, buy the game cheap.

The bump from the release of Gold and One Tamriel is done, and this adds a new reason for a bump right as the Christmas shopping season starts. People are thinking about spending money, and Bethesda has set this up to take advantage of pre-Black Friday purchasing. The Steam sale runs until Wednesday morning. Act now!

As for longer term plans, I do think that F2P is in the cards for ESO. They won't be able to help themselves, since Bethesda seems to be impatient, and ZOS is not exactly known for being lickity split fast with this whole game development concept. ZOS won't be able to roll out compelling content that will support continued B2P and keep Bethesda happily counting money.

They need to get more people paying for non-content, and F2P gets more people in the door paying for stuff like that than any other business model. Of course, with that comes the "expectation" that the store stuff will have more than cosmetic meaning in the game. Even if they try to roll out F2P without P2W, they will be under pressure from all sides to make the store content more meaningful. I doubt that the current "moral stance" against P2W in the Store will hold up against such pressure.

Shadowstep2003 · November 2016

Personally, I'm not afraid of the game going F2P or coincidentally becoming pay to win. I think ZOS has proven that they will not go that route.

HOWEVER, I believe that if the game goes F2P it will become massively inconvenient to play the game without spending crowns on a sub. We already have the crafting bag which can be circumvented through the use of multiple alts/storage mules. BUT, if you have those mules you then feel pulled towards buying a banker to more efficiently manage them.

I feel that we would begin to see a whole bunch more of these types of implementations where playing the game without a sub would make it almost a chore for a large amount of your game time.

wenchmore420b14_ESO · November 2016

Ok, here's my 2 Septims on this....
As far as the OP's concerns, and as has been stated, this was not the first time they have done this. It is not even the second time, they have had "free weekend" events several times since launch. It is just to lure new players and get old players to come back.
F2P kills games IMO. This is probably the best buisness model with B2P and then voluntary sub's and I feel it will stay.
Also! Let us remember!!!....
The game went B2P not because it was dying or to set up for F2P, it went B2P because of Consoles!!
Microsoft and Sony wouldn't play well together and Zos had to drop mandatory subscription to get consoles launched. No "Dooms Day" forecast there.
I have subbed since launch, and continue to do so. I personally love this game and I find it is better even with it's few bugs and flaws than any other MMO out there.
Keep up the good work Zos!!!
Huzzah!!!

Wreuntzylla · November 2016

Pallmor wrote: »

Wreuntzylla wrote: »

Mic1007 wrote: »

A year ago, I would've raged at the thought of ESO going F2P. Now it's just become a bitter pill that I am expecting to swallow soon.

Ah, yes, the heady days of learning that what ZoS devs say cannot be taken for a grain of salt. Or that slightly sick feeling you get when you realize the goodwill built up by an epic franchise is slowly sliding into the bottom feeder pit with games like Neverwinter.

Hey, I like Neverwinter! It's actually one of the better F2P MMO's out there. Everything you can buy in their cash shop can also be earned in-game. All their DLC is free. Their auction house works really well. Their events are the best of any MMO I've ever seen. It has a great companion system. And their grouping tool for dungeons and skirmishes works really well. It's not as pretty or open-world as ESO, but there are a lot of things it does really well (even if you never spend a dime).

I like to PvP,. The outcome of any map was solely dependent on who had the most P2W players (full max level perfect enchants), and the vast majority of players were just fodder. I paid quite a bit of money until I was almost fully enchanted and they announced the next xpac, including an increase in enchant level....

In PvE it probably wasn't that apparent because the content was really aimed at mid level enchats, but in most MMOs, competitive players start to only accept players with maxed builds, I can't imagine why that would be different in Neverwinter.

ArrerBoy · November 2016

Kinda silly to test this as a F2P system without more crown store items to attract F2P customers with bargain prices to useless cosmetic junk.

Knootewoot · November 2016

Shadowstep2003 wrote: »

How would you feel if ESO announced they were going Free to Play? You can already buy the base game digitally for 10 bucks, I don't think it'd be such a stretch to give it away for free and make money off the subs, upcoming crown crates, dlc, costumes, etc.

Do you think this was all an experiment by ZOS on whether it would be beneficial to go Free to Play?

I feel like there is always a bigger picture for the reason these companies do these types of things. Sure it could be just to gain more exposure, but if there is data that suggests there were a ton of new users who tried the game when it was free then fell off after the even maybe they see it as a worthwhile change.

I played Vanguard from beta till they pulled the plug. They wanted at first keep the game Pay to Play. In the end there where only 2 servers left which where both servers which came to be by already merging servers. The last ones where Halgar and Telon. Halgar had 2 players (inluding me) and Telon around 200-300. I did server transfer of course but later they also merged there to.

I so wish they went F2P to get more people in. But when they finally did go F2P it was to late. They introduced a cash shop (although they knew they where gonna pull the plug) but no new people came.

I think, even if it does go well with TESO, it would not a bad move. Subbing will still be an option, but a lot of people don't want to buy the game to try it out. I do not know how many did try the free weekend. Some might have liked it but not to buy it. I think going f2p will lure more people. Some people who will do f2p will buy crowns, maybe even sub for the crafting bag in the long run. So it's a win for Zos then.

I do not care if they go f2p. I think in the current mmo market it is a smart move.