Gone are the days of simply buying a game and playing it. Now, there are multiple ways to pay and play. What will come of it, asks Graham McCann
The video game industry has maintained a retail pricing standard for the past 13 years or so. A new game comes out and it?s expected to be, at least in North America, $59.99 on consoles and $49.99 on PC. People could play through the game as many times as they wanted and play online with their friends on their PCs in the earlier days and later on consoles without having to pay another cent toward that title. You bought the game, and that was that.
This standard model is still around when it comes to most single-player focused games and, for simplicity sake, I will now refer to this as the middle-model. However, two newer, more basic models on either side of it have become very big and are deeply impacting the gaming world. The two models are free-to-play (F2P) and, for lack of a better over-arching term, pay to continue to play (P2C). On the F2P side, you have critically acclaimed and massively popular games such as League of Legends and PlanetSide 2. On the P2C side, there are critically acclaimed and massively popular titles such as World of Warcraft and Call of Duty.
PlanetSide 2 has recently entered the F2P arena
Keep in mind, discounting the middle-model, the two terms are generalizing two basic but polar-opposite ways that many developers are now creating and profiting. World of Warcraft and Call of Duty fall into the same category because they are both on their own continuums of getting the player to continue to dish out money for play time or content.
Michael Patcher is a research analyst at Wedbush Securities and he gave the opening speech at the Digital Game Monetization Summit in San Francisco in late 2012, setting out many interesting opinions about the status of the games industry including one about how he feels Activision missed the mark in money-making with its Call of Duty franchise.
He said, ?I know the game sells billions of dollars [but] Activision did a bad thing with Call of Duty from a profit perspective. They trained gamers that you can buy a game and play it all year, ten hours a week, forever, and you never have to pay again. You just wait for the next Call of Duty. I promise you there are plenty of people, numbering in the millions, who play one game, which is Call of Duty, and they never stop. That?s just like the people who play World of Warcraft and never stop, yet the World of Warcraft guys are paying $180 a year, and the Call of Duty guys are paying $60. So who?s got a better model? This multiplayer thing being free was a mistake. I don?t think anybody ever envisioned it would be this big. It?s a mistake because it keeps those people from buying and playing other games.?
Pachter feels Call of Duty's multiplayer could be better monetized
He?s right, the multiplayer is free. However, Call of Duty features downloadable content for any gamers, perhaps especially the ones that play ten or more hours a week, allowing to buy new content to continue playing with new perks. This is on top of the annual $60 for the next installment, which will also have its own downloadable content to buy. The level of profitability is irrelevant to the gamers because the model put towards dedicated fans of the series has them shelling out money every time something new comes out.
A recent online community-based first-person shooter is PlanetSide 2, developed by Sony, which is free. According to critics, the game is of high quality and is gathering a following. And the developer isn?t finished with it. It is adding significant updates to the game for free as well as putting an emphasis on listening to fans through social media.
One of the most popular F2P games is Riot Games?s League of Legends. You can download and create an account for the game right now along with your friends and play as much as you want for nothing. But, you can buy things in the game if you want to get ahead. The League of Legends no-obligation business model is something that the PlanetSide 2 developer is interested in, too. It is called Freemium and it allows players to use real money to buy certain items or perks that are also obtainable by just playing more and getting ahead in the game. So, for gamers dedicating ten or more hours a week to games like these, they may pay no mind to paying for premium items because it will come to them anyway just through their dedication. It could be argued that it is not fair on a competitive level that someone gets ahead in certain ways quickly by payment over someone actually skilled at the game.
League of Legends successfully exploits the freemium system
The point is that even though these games are free, they are of high quality. As development of these games moves on and fan following grows, will gamers who have been constantly paying for games that are of arguably equal quality that provide just as much fun be turning their heads towards this other model? Maybe Patcher is wrong in his assessment by putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps there are millions of players blasting away in Call of Duty because the baseline multiplayer is free, and it drew in players who became enthralled and continue to buy DLC and annual installments because of it.
Some games that were originally subscription-based have turned to F2P. Tera is changing its model from mandatory subscription to F2P with freemium content in February. And, although you must still purchase the game, The Secret World has dropped its subscription fee.
So, hypothesizing that many massive multiplayer games will inevitably go to the F2P model, one way for developers to grab revenue is advertizing. Games with already massive followings arguably could get sponsors. The business could become a ratings game like television. World of Warcraft with 10 million subscribers and League of Legends eclipsing both WoW and CoD in certain respects, there are a lot of people to send a message to. And the message ?buy our product? certainly does not go unheeded in the gaming community.
But it is all uncertain. The bottom line for companies is to make money even if the heart of the developer is in the game. The bottom line for the online gaming community is to have fun and from the numbers of people and amount of hours and of dollars spent in this community, so is dedication.
Follow Graham on Twitter: @GrahamSMcCann
Related content from ZergNet
Source: http://press2reset.com/2013/01/15/analysis-are-new-pricing-models-changing-gaming/
whitney mercilus 2012 nfl draft picks andrew luck andrew luck trent richardson robert griffin iii dontari poe
কোন মন্তব্য নেই:
একটি মন্তব্য পোস্ট করুন