The recent Dungeon
Keeper mobile game has brought the debate on how free-to-play games can
effectively structure their revenue models to the forefront of the gaming
media's id, but I don't want to discuss that at length. First, I haven't played it, so I can only
reiterate things I've heard other people say.
Second, I don't find it terribly instructive: without sounding too
old-hat, the move by Mythic Entertainment is just another iteration on the
trend that Zynga set in motion back in 2009.
Savvy investors know how that's going: the insane hubris Zynga trotted
out at the height of their success is now layered in laughable irony, and
"old fuddies" like me, who saw Zynga as the harbinger of a
flash-in-the-pan trend that couldn't sustain itself are being redeemed somewhat. In 2011, Zynga lost nearly half a million
dollars, representing almost a fifth of its total assets, and things haven't
looked good for them since then.
Mythic's transparent money grab seems like the death knell of a once
revolutionary studio, the swan song of the people who brought us Dark Age of Camelot and introduced the
notions of asymmetric "realm PvP" that would mature so elegantly in
later MMORPGs. But I'm coming
dangerously close to discussing this topic at length.
What I really want to talk about is another free-to-play
model that seems to be working quite well, the model that Mechwarrior: Online and Neverwinter
have adopted.
This is a bit of a controversial statement. MWO
has made some changes to their monetization strategy of late that have derailed
large portions of their base entirely, and Neverwinter,
while self-sustaining, isn't going to tempt any major buyouts any time
soon. But both of these titles manage to
trickle out a steady flow of content, and manage to maintain a dedicated player
base willing to spend bits of their hard earned cash on things they really
don't need to for the sake of "game."
In Neverwinter's
case, you can trace developer Cryptic Studio's model back to Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic freemium
switch. Cryptic more or less copied
Bioware's model play for play, adding in a little more grind, skipping the
subscription based launch model that Bioware employed for the first year of the
game's life, (indeed, Bioware's launch might've been the last successful retail/subscription
launch in MMO history, unless The Elder
Scrolls: Online manages to turn its hardcore niche audience into broad
appeal) and making character experience piss-easy to gain (unlike Bioware, who
curtailed experience gain severely to encourage "player
transactions"). There's a tried and
true method at work, tied to a beloved intellectual property with a dedicated
user base. The parallels are pretty apparent,
and the fan service appears to be paying off: Cryptic is steadily releasing new
content without having to push its players into paying for "fun
times." In fact, they've set up a
marketplace that effectively allows players to sell their hard earned in-game
currency (called Astral Diamonds, earned by completing repetitive daily tasks
that sometimes take hours to finish) to other players for currency purchased
with real world money (called Zen, earned by spending money using a credit card
or Paypal account). In fact, I've
reached the "end-game" of Neverwinter
without spending a dime, and I've had a pretty good about my experience the
whole time.
I can't say the same about Mechwarrior: Online, and that's becoming a real problem. At first, I perceived my real-world money
purchases in MWO as tantamount to a
retail purchase, or a late phase Kickstarter donation: this is the amount of
money I was willing to give them for the game they made, I'm enjoying it, keep
it up, so on, so forth. I bought some
fancy paint jobs for my giant walking death robots, some extra parking spaces
for my giant walking death robots. I
even bought a special, real-world-money-only giant walking death robot. I donated some money to a cancer research
fund and got a special giant walking death robot in return. Then, the Pheonix mechs rolled out.
I was intrigued, heck, even excited, by the notion of
Pheonix packages. Hero-like mechs that
came with mechbays for a solid package price seemed like a great idea, and
while $80 was a little steep for me, $40 seemed totally reasonable. When the mechs dropped, I had a good time
playing with my sudden bounty of new toys, after buying my new mechs chassis by
chassis for so long. As time stretched
on, even as new chasses started to become available for normal in-game
currency, I kept grinding away, but something was missing. The dynamic gameplay and shifting metagame of
MWO had been eroded by a sudden flood
of new content, followed by a drought.
The Pheonix mech packages were, more or less, all that Pirahna had on
offer.
They released some other, newer Pheonix mechs to try and
shake things up again, but the chasses were too similar in terms of size,
appearance and play. In the end, the
Pheonix package did little to invigorate the game, but landed Pirahna a solid
windfall of cash. No one begrudged them:
Pirahna did something incredible by securing the release of "Unseen"
mechs, chassis archetypes previously rendered unusable by intellectual property
disputes. They deserved their
money. They delivered on their promise,
and even tossed in some bonus goodies to show players they were glad for all
the support they received: paint jobs, dashboard goodies, all kinds of nice
crud.
Then came the Clan Mech announcement.
The Pheonix Mechs were, in and of themselves, something of a
surprise, an unveiling of a benchmark achievement in the Mechwarrior video game continuum.
Their release was a victory for fans.
The Clan mechs, on the other hand, have been an expectation in MWO from day one: Pirahna said that
they'd be setting the game during the Clan invasion, and they made it clear that
Clan mechs would be appearing at some point vaguely analogous with the Battletech timeline from the era they
chose. Players knew that Clan mechs were
coming. They knew the mechs already,
knew which ones they wanted and why, plotted out their purchases in
advance. So there was something a little
iffy about Pirahna's Clan mech announcement, which proudly declared that
players could purchase Clan mechs the same way they bought their Pheonix mechs! At a significant mark-up! With a much more significant delay! And no solid information on just how Clan
tech would work in the game!
Players were outraged by what they perceived as a blind
money grab on the part of MWO's
developers and publisher. They saw the
move as a desperate attempt to buy time to complete work on a game which had
repeatedly missed benchmarks, without delivering any immediate content. Worst of all was a set of $500
"unique" gold Clan mechs, a clear ploy to entice "whales,"
as freemium designers call them, solitary customers who pour massive sums of
money into the structure of free-to-play games. MWO lives on these whales,
people who own every hero mech, who purchase every mech color, but these
purchases are normally iterated over the course of months, not presented in a
single lump sum. In attempting to shore
up support for their game, the designers of MWO
alienated a large portion of their core base.
They've been working to earn that group back, delivering on
much needed and long promised UI updates and dropping some neat new surprises
in the form of unexpected maps and mechs, but by and large MWO has lost a great deal of goodwill, and finds itself in a place
where it needs to re-earn its players' respect.
The surprise release of the Firestarter mech is a step in the right
direction, as is the recent return to "Double XP weekend," a move
that literally costs Piranha nothing, but encourages players to hop back into
the game again. Even so the money grab
that the Clan mech sale represented was a damning move and a clear warning to
other freemium designers: it's dangerous to ask players to bet on future
content, and it's poor form to ask them to spend money on features that are
untested, undefined, and unproven, especially when you're lagging behind on
presenting already promised, much needed content updates. It was, in a very real sense, a failed
proof-of-concept of Zynga's business model in a non-native context. Removed from the realm of microtransactions,
the expectations of freemium game designers and publishers become transparent,
and the client who would gladly plunk down thirty dollars each month for a new
hero mech and a new camo pattern will bark righteous indignation at being asked
to plunk all that money down at once for a one-of-a-kind piece of in-game
hardware.
I hope that MWO
survives. It's a solid game, and it
fills a wonderful niche that I don't think Hawken
will ever come close to engaging completely.
I still play it, though nowhere near as religiously as I used to. The atrophied veteran player base is readily
evident, and changes to major game systems (like grouping pre-made 12 man
groups into games with randomly assembled opponents) constitute real threats to
the game's continued viability. I get
the sense that their future will become quite clear over the next few months,
as Pirahna finds their path and chooses between the pay-to-win models that have
landed Mythic and Zynga in such hot water, or to return to the steady release
of content and community events that have served other true free-to-play
designers, like Cryptic, so well, that served Pirahna so well in the past.
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