Beau has a decent post up on Massively at the moment answering this question: Would he be more likely to play RIFT if it was F2P? As you might imagine, it brought the commentors out of the woodwork. Perhaps considering the penchant for vocal minorities to be, well, vocal, there’s a lot of RIFT hating and F2P loving going on over there (it -is- the Free For All column, after all). But to be quite honest, it’s been pretty interesting to read the conversations sprouting up. When you cut through the chaff, you see some pretty insightful points come up.
What really caught my attention though was Beau’s own comment:
From what I have read/heard and seen, even WoW is now getting a run for its money with a couple other FTP companies, as far as profit. Also, of the millions of customers of WoW’s, most do not play with a subscription. If you take WoW out of the pic, then FTPs are performing much better than subs.
I’m not sure that a lot of the western gaming audience is understanding that using a handful or recent Western MMO converts of the FTP payment model is really proof of anything. After all, they are too new and too few. Now, looking at the larger FTP market shows just how successful FTP is…which is why so many companies are going that way.
I’m not arguing Beau’s point here because frankly he’s right… as far as public perception goes. I have my questions about how valid those conclusions actually are and explained them in a reply.
I agree that F2P is successful and great in a lot of ways, but I’d have to question how much money we’re talking by game here. Take two games of similar population and community standing and see who’s making more. We can’t know that, of course, but when we take *single games* profitability, and put these things to equal standards of fair comparison, then I think we’ll get a better picture.
What concerns me is that the AAA industry is looking to F2P as a cash cow for the wrong reasons. F2P as an industry segment surely *does* make more than the sub-market (minus WoW) but there’s also way more games weighing down that F2P side. You also have higher worldwide adoption of the various cash shop models than you have subscriptions. The comparison must acknowledge that Western gamers are of a whole different mindset and background than Eastern gamers — which is why we’ve kept the sub model in the first place — and that whole hearted embracement of the cash shop model should be done with caution at best.
Will it be the wave of the future? Probably, and personally I think we’ll be better for it; subs are restrictive. Still, the income comparison we can be sure the big publishers reacting to is slanted towards a part of the world we’re not even a part of — and is only made possible by having many small games rather than a relative few big ones ala “AAA.”
I feel like when we’re talking about F2P vs. P2P, we always come to this conclusion that F2P is the more profitable option. But let me give you this analogy: You have a scale. On one side is Walmart with it’s multiple departments (which we can think of as our major AAA games). On the other you have everything else. Every. Thing. The mom and pop’s? Weighing it down. Competing chains? Weighing it down. The totally non-related but stores none-the-less? You guessed it, weighing it down. Guess which side makes more money at the end of the day?
My point is that saying F2P is more profitable than P2P is a slanted argument at best. There are simply more free games than paid ones. Period. This is the exact reason why F2P got a bad name in the first place: It requires a discerning player to separate out the good from the bad. But then again, even the crappy ones make money and add to their “side.” It certainly speaks to our impulsivity, but it’s not the greatest ground for comparison. It also ignores initial box sales in favor of subscriptions and holds that against years of mini-sales by the spending five percent. A game that sells 500k boxes still makes a 24 million dollar initial return. How much do even big cash shops make? If we agree that only a small percentage of players ever buy anything in the cash shop, how big of an active and dedicated fanbase do you need to make similar numbers? The only way these games are more profitable is in the long-term, which agreeably is preferable but not a guarantee of each game ever making some huge profit compared to their P2P brethren. That is unless their production costs are far, as in millions and millions, less — and doesn’t that support the argument that F2Ps lack in quality? That or they’re efficient, take your pick.
Then again, we’re never going to know the truth of it because companies don’t reveal these hard numbers. So all we have is anecdotal evidence and company press releases (read: “We made X dollars on 18 different games”).
In the end, I’m really just sharing this to record my thoughts on this year’s Eternal Argument.
Note: Nothing against Beau, too. His comments made me think and I respect his opinion. This particular argument has always bugged me a little bit and I’ve finally figured out why.
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