Blizzard Free-to-Play Game Rumor Resurfaces

[wildkitten]

[citation][nom]memadmax[/nom]Kartu, you know nothing...WoW is only 6 and a half years old... 11 million(supposedly) at its peak @ $15 a month = 165,000,000 a month * 12 months = 1,980,000,000 * 6 years = 11,880,000,000.....and of course... blizzard never says how many subs they truely have... rumors and speculation are based off of so called WoW census data... which is inaccurate...[/citation]
Oh, and yes they do say how many subs they have, they do it every quarter in the investor conference call. The past one was on February 9th where they announced they lost another 100,000.

Do you even look up anything before saying it?

 

[hythos]

How hard is this to see????
All of the accounts locked to Battle.net, with many items "account bound"? Remember they were gonna buy Myspace?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
TITAN ("NextGen MMO") will be a virtual 'portal' / second-life for all of Blizzards' Battle.net-account games, so that their players can log in and interact with all of their battle.net characters - to sit in pubs/graphical chat, buy Blizzard-swag from on-line stores with "micro"-purchases.
This will not compete with any of their existing games, but will be "Titanic" since it encompasses all things Blizzard.

 

[AnUnusedUsername]

I don't really understand what the big deal with "free to play" is when related to MMOs. As-is, they're the only game out there that charges you both full retail price to buy and then double that each year to keep playing it. It's completely nonsensical for them to be charging you twice in the first place anymore. Everquest needed to do it because at the time the infrastructure was very weak and it did honestly cost them a fair amount to keep servers up. That isn't even remotely the case anymore, the hundred and some dollars it costs a single player to play WoW for a year is enough to pay operating costs for probably at least twenty to fifty players. Free to play should be the standard for MMOs, obviously including a retail purchase price, anyway. The news shouldn't be that companies are doing it, it should be that people are stupid enough to keep throwing these companies pure profit.

Now, the cost to keep a server running (per player) is negligible compared to what it was then, so the ONLY reason MMOs keep charging for subscriptions is that EQ did it and people were willing to pay for it back then. Honestly, the success of EQ has become a colossal problem for modern MMOs. Everquest was decent for it's time, and deserves some credit for that, but it's success has completely destroyed the MMO genre. There are just too many people willing to throw their money away to play a fifteen year old game. Publishers refuse to support/make a decent MMO because doing something even slightly different than Everquest means hordes of stupid people who want to keep playing Everquest with a different time period/setting and (very slightly) better graphics might not like it. Until people stop buying a new everquest clone every three years, we aren't going to see anything else in the MMO genre. And that's really upsetting, because with modern technology there's a huge amount of potential there, if developers don't have to stick to the standards Everquest set because of the technical limitations of the time.

 

[theroguex]

[citation][nom]kathiki[/nom]there is NO such thing as free to play..... it is free to try... that is just that. In order to have access to the whole game every single company that features the f2p model will always force you to pay some money one way or another to proceed in the game. You need some money spent to advance to higher levels, for content like end game raiding etc etc. Some companies now endorse the new idea of limited inventory space unless of course you unlock it by paying. Every online game needs money for maintenance.Then of course come the usual high premium items only obtainable through real money spending. Devs can be so very innovative in what they create every time to make you drool over in order to buy..[/citation]

You're wrong. Play Lord of the Rings Online. You can, quite literally, play the entire game without paying a dime, if you are willing to put in enough time on enough characters to earn the required amount of Turbine Points to buy all the content. I know people who have ALL the content of the game and never once paid any real money for it.

 

[wildkitten]

[citation][nom]AnUnusedUsername[/nom]I don't really understand what the big deal with "free to play" is when related to MMOs. As-is, they're the only game out there that charges you both full retail price to buy and then double that each year to keep playing it. It's completely nonsensical for them to be charging you twice in the first place anymore. Everquest needed to do it because at the time the infrastructure was very weak and it did honestly cost them a fair amount to keep servers up. That isn't even remotely the case anymore, the hundred and some dollars it costs a single player to play WoW for a year is enough to pay operating costs for probably at least twenty to fifty players. Free to play should be the standard for MMOs, obviously including a retail purchase price, anyway. The news shouldn't be that companies are doing it, it should be that people are stupid enough to keep throwing these companies pure profit.Now, the cost to keep a server running (per player) is negligible compared to what it was then, so the ONLY reason MMOs keep charging for subscriptions is that EQ did it and people were willing to pay for it back then. Honestly, the success of EQ has become a colossal problem for modern MMOs. Everquest was decent for it's time, and deserves some credit for that, but it's success has completely destroyed the MMO genre. There are just too many people willing to throw their money away to play a fifteen year old game. Publishers refuse to support/make a decent MMO because doing something even slightly different than Everquest means hordes of stupid people who want to keep playing Everquest with a different time period/setting and (very slightly) better graphics might not like it. Until people stop buying a new everquest clone every three years, we aren't going to see anything else in the MMO genre. And that's really upsetting, because with modern technology there's a huge amount of potential there, if developers don't have to stick to the standards Everquest set because of the technical limitations of the time.[/citation]
Your post seems to assume F2P games have no associated costs to them once you start playing. The sad fact is, that's really not true. Most F2P games are really P2W (pay to win), in other words you buy the goodies off the cash shop like weapons or armor that you can not get in game (or is ridiculously hard in game). The only game that has come close to F2P right is Guild Wars, which is more B2P (buy to play) but they are a rarity.

And I don't know what you mean by infrastructure in place. There is as much infrastructure in place as there was when EQ started. Maybe more people have broadband obvioulsy, but each game has to set up it's own server farms for the game. Not to mention $15/mo for an MMO is hardly extravagant spending. People can spend that easily for a 2 hour movie (if not more).

I peronally would rather pay a $15/mo sub fee for a game where I have the exact same content and features as everyone else playing. Most people spend more in the so called F2P games.

 

[wildkitten]

[citation][nom]theroguex[/nom]You're wrong. Play Lord of the Rings Online. You can, quite literally, play the entire game without paying a dime, if you are willing to put in enough time on enough characters to earn the required amount of Turbine Points to buy all the content. I know people who have ALL the content of the game and never once paid any real money for it.[/citation]
Yet LoTRO was the game who recently started the controversy of selling stat armor in it's cash shop.

And even your own description spells out a scenario where one has to spend more time just grinding, and on multiple characters, to even approach the point of being able to earn in game points for the cash shop.

 

[AnUnusedUsername]

[citation][nom]wildkitten[/nom]Your post seems to assume F2P games have no associated costs to them once you start playing. The sad fact is, that's really not true. Most F2P games are really P2W (pay to win), in other words you buy the goodies off the cash shop like weapons or armor that you can not get in game (or is ridiculously hard in game). The only game that has come close to F2P right is Guild Wars, which is more B2P (buy to play) but they are a rarity.And I don't know what you mean by infrastructure in place. There is as much infrastructure in place as there was when EQ started. Maybe more people have broadband obvioulsy, but each game has to set up it's own server farms for the game. Not to mention $15/mo for an MMO is hardly extravagant spending. People can spend that easily for a 2 hour movie (if not more). I peronally would rather pay a $15/mo sub fee for a game where I have the exact same content and features as everyone else playing. Most people spend more in the so called F2P games.[/citation]

Well, first of all, yes, they still need to set up servers to run the games today. But, there's a critical difference. The amount of data going through the network for any given player is more or less the same for WoW as it was when Everquest came out, the only differences in required computing power are taxing on the clients, not the servers. A modern desktop computer is far more powerful than an entire server was back then, let alone comparing a modern server to one that's fifteen years old. On top of that, significantly faster internet service is significantly cheaper now than it was fifteen years ago. These two things alone make it obvious that modern MMOs are basically just charging users because they can, rather than because they actually need the money. Sure, $100 a year isn't horribly expensive. But, compared to a $60 game, a $160(much more if you play for more than a year) game IS horribly expensive.

As for pay to win versus free to play, that's just a matter of implementation. Sure, there are a lot of examples of "pay to win" games out there, but the vast majority of them aren't even good games after you've paid for all of the locked content. It seems like, right now, most of the free to play games that aren't pay to win are also the free to play games that are actually good games, regardless of whether you put money into them or not.

 

[wildkitten]

[citation][nom]AnUnusedUsername[/nom]Well, first of all, yes, they still need to set up servers to run the games today. But, there's a critical difference. The amount of data going through the network for any given player is more or less the same for WoW as it was when Everquest came out, the only differences in required computing power are taxing on the clients, not the servers. A modern desktop computer is far more powerful than an entire server was back then, let alone comparing a modern server to one that's fifteen years old. On top of that, significantly faster internet service is significantly cheaper now than it was fifteen years ago. These two things alone make it obvious that modern MMOs are basically just charging users because they can, rather than because they actually need the money. Sure, $100 a year isn't horribly expensive. But, compared to a $60 game, a $160(much more if you play for more than a year) game IS horribly expensive.As for pay to win versus free to play, that's just a matter of implementation. Sure, there are a lot of examples of "pay to win" games out there, but the vast majority of them aren't even good games after you've paid for all of the locked content. It seems like, right now, most of the free to play games that aren't pay to win are also the free to play games that are actually good games, regardless of whether you put money into them or not.[/citation]
But the point is, there are very very few F2P games that don't require you to pay for things out of the cash shop to un-gimp your character.

 

[photonboy]

There are several MMO's that I'd play if they were $5 per month, even if the level cap was lower than the MAXIMUM.

I simply can't justify $180 per year on a game I don't have time to play more than a couple hours a month.

Plus, SKYRIM, Kingdom's of Amalur and Fallout 3/NV eat up pretty much all my free gaming time anyway.

 

[Guest]

Pretty sure Blizzard IS trying to create the next Pac-Man or Sonic the Hedgehog, after all they've introduced Pokemon into Mists of Pandaria. Expect Pacman and Sonic to follow, anything to counter falling subscriber numbers.