General Discussion

Originally posted by bluesession 

  That scenario only works is the game is good.

Just look at WAR, at this timea P2P MMO was highly desirable, even so that many people preorder it just to be able to play sooner. But as we all know, it turned out to be bullcrap. And now is dying.

well yes, of course it does.  that's what I am saying.  if ANet can do what they are aiming to do, namely make a GOOD, high-profile full-fledged persistant world MMORPG while keeping their Guild Wars business model with no sub fee, it's going to make the P2P games look a lot less attractive.

I don't need to elaborate here, everyone knows that F2P games are much more than "free MMORPGs". They do not feature continuity, they do not feature good support, they feature ridiculous amounts of goldseller accounts and the hordes of immature players that "just dont care"...

Guildwars 2 could be the second coming gamemechanicwise, it will be crushed by the diabloesque feeling of non-dependancy and idiocracy F2P games are shipped with.

One of the best thing non-intuitive, complicated games come up with is "community", and pay to play is one of the essential cornerstones of this principle.

It's like the age discussion. I've been in several 18+, 21+ guilds and many of them featured a bunch of unemployed, old morons. The perfect game community is the community of a complicated, non-visual game with expensive monthly payments. Not because it is my favorite gaming style, but because it attracts a lot of intelligent, educated people.

m

Originally posted by Meridion

I don't need to elaborate here, everyone knows that F2P games are much more than "free MMORPGs". They do not feature continuity, they do not feature good support, they feature ridiculous amounts of goldseller accounts and the hordes of immature players that "just dont care"...

Guildwars 2 could be the second coming gamemechanicwise, it will be crushed by the diabloesque feeling of non-dependancy and idiocracy F2P games are shipped with.

not to be rude, an honest question here..have you played Guild Wars, or read anything about Guild Wars 2?

Guild Wars 2 is not supposed to be any of these things that you mention that typical F2P games are. Guild Wars wasn't a typical "F2P" game, it did have continuity, it had GREAT support(and still does).  the only difference between Guild Wars and a P2P MMO is that Guild Wars was mostly instanced and Guild Wars had no monthly fee. They made their money from the new Campaign Boxes(Factions, Nightfall, EOTN) every 6-8 months or so.

Guild Wars 2 is supposed to correct that difference, but keep what has made Guild Wars popular.(i.e. the Hero system, the skill system, PvP, things like that)  it's supposed to be a full-fledged, P2P style MMORPG with a Persistant, Non-Instanced world,  but keeping the Guild Wars pay model.

I'm curious as to whether they can really pull this off.  I dunno if they can pay for server upkeep with just the Campaign Box sales.

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Originally posted by Ihmotepp

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Originally posted by JMadisonIV

the future of Pay-to-Play MMORPGs hinges on Guild Wars 2.
weird statement, I know.  but think about it.
Guild Wars is a major success in the MMO industry, even though it isn't a "proper" MMO so-to-speak.
GW2, is supposed to be a "proper" MMO(i.e. the world is persistent and not fully instanced), but it isn't going to have a monthly fee. It's going to be the first MAJOR "high-profile" MMO to go with a no-Monthly-Fee business model from Day 1(as far as I know).  many MAJOR Western MMOs go free-2-play in their waning years, but none to my knowledge have gone free-2-play from Launch.
and by Major i mean EQ/WoW/LOTRO/AoC/WAR level major.  not little rinky-dink cash shop MMOs.
If ANet pulls this off, and it is as successful as Guild Wars 1 is/was....it won't be very good for the traditional Western MMO business model, as the Monthly Fee model will begin to look pretty unattractive, with a MAJOR no-monthly-fee model game out there.

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I think it costs more to keep a MMORPG up and running than it does to keep a multi player lobby room game up and running, like Diablo or Guild Wars.
How are they going to pay for it with just box sales?

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Probably with lots of expansions. There are lots of F2P mmorpgs incidentally that manage to keep going? (unless they are all revolvant around item shops)

To the original question- possibly. If you look at things outside of WoW you got success really mainly of IPs or funded by original mmo companies anyway- Ie, SoE and Funcom behind Vanguard and AoC respectively. Guild Wars 2 is promising, it should guarantee a minimum of success due to fans of the original. For a mmo that isn't any of these and it has to be Indie(usu lower developer teams) or exceptionally good.

Originally posted by Meridion

By "quality" I mean quality in design, programming and stability. For example WAR is a quality game, you can argue about its concept, and god knows I did a lot recently, but it's a quality game.

Budget and target audience come into play here too, a game is, after all, a service product which relies almost completely on the customer base. Does the game work as a business model? - past games did sometimes not care a bit in this department...

M

You say War has quality. But has it BETTER quality than the market leader in .... exactly the same segment (fantasy). Pay to play ... Pay to play, so has it better quality than COD4?

No, of course not. I am not going into a discussion what War lacks as quality.

The very simple question is ... if you have 2 products for the same market, it is quite obvious other emotional elements don't play.

Elements like "yep but the other product had more polishing time, is more established, also had bugs in the beginning, players don't know how to play WAR, WAR will grow further if given time etc..."

Hard fact: The competition is out there. And Blizzard invested 200 million dollars these last 3 years just to maintain its MMORPG. 200 million dollars. No one can raise that. No one.

The business model is now.... hundreds of millions of dollars to ... begin with and why should the general playing public change to lesser developped products?

Vanguard, LOTRO, TR, AoC, WAR, but also D&DO, PotBS, Hellgate London, etc ... In looking back and knowing what we know now from these products... is it THAT curious they all missed their target revenus as subscription based games?

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The paid subscriptions for single MMO's are gone. End of an era. You'll see only combined subs in future years and even Blizzard will bundle its subscriptions to Blizznet and future MMO's. And the on line fees will be only partial for MMORPG's.

People who still think there will be another multi million based (paid) MMO are dreamers. Aion, Darkfall, Spelborn, Star Trek Online. Same route, same destiny. 100-400K sales, under  100K subs after 4 months and missing in action one year after launch.

Perhaps, perhaps Kotor could do better (EA ?) but all the other attempts are no use following. Waste of time, waste of money - both for investors as for players.

I think this last year a LOT of players learned it the hard way. The GW model? Only if they use sponsored gameplay and have in game shops, but Hellgate showed this is a very dangerous route.

Originally posted by nomadian

 

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Originally posted by Ihmotepp

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Originally posted by JMadisonIV

 

the future of Pay-to-Play MMORPGs hinges on Guild Wars 2.
weird statement, I know.  but think about it.
Guild Wars is a major success in the MMO industry, even though it isn't a "proper" MMO so-to-speak.
GW2, is supposed to be a "proper" MMO(i.e. the world is persistent and not fully instanced), but it isn't going to have a monthly fee. It's going to be the first MAJOR "high-profile" MMO to go with a no-Monthly-Fee business model from Day 1(as far as I know).  many MAJOR Western MMOs go free-2-play in their waning years, but none to my knowledge have gone free-2-play from Launch.
and by Major i mean EQ/WoW/LOTRO/AoC/WAR level major.  not little rinky-dink cash shop MMOs.
If ANet pulls this off, and it is as successful as Guild Wars 1 is/was....it won't be very good for the traditional Western MMO business model, as the Monthly Fee model will begin to look pretty unattractive, with a MAJOR no-monthly-fee model game out there.

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I think it costs more to keep a MMORPG up and running than it does to keep a multi player lobby room game up and running, like Diablo or Guild Wars.
How are they going to pay for it with just box sales?

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Probably with lots of expansions. There are lots of F2P mmorpgs incidentally that manage to keep going? (unless they are all revolvant around item shops)

the majority of them are item-shop based. GW2 is going to be one of the exceptions. there's no item-shop in Guild Wars.

the GW business model involves multiple Standalone Boxes that can be linked together, and that are released in fairly rapid succession, much faster than a typical MMO expansion would be(talking like every 6-8 months or so, a year at the absolute latest). as far as I know, they had 2 seperate teams cranking out the Campaigns.

they had:

Prophecies (the Original GW, Ascalon) - April 2005

Factions (Cantha)  -April 2006

Nightfall (Elona) - Oct. 2006

Eye of the North (Expansion) - Aug 2007

there were major content additions, and typical MMO stuff (patches, bug fixes, etc) added for free inbetween the campaigns. Sorrow's Furnace was one of the major content additions, it added a whole new area and dungeon to the Prophecies campaign.

from what I remember, when Factions was just wrapping up development and getting ready to launch open beta and such) there was a team already working on Nightfall.  there was supposed to be a 4th Campaign, but they scratched it in favor of making the EOTN expansion and Guild Wars 2. 

Factions and Nightfall were standalone campaigns that you could purchase and that did not require any of the other campaigns.  each standalone campaign had its own content, its own landmass, introduced it's own major features (Factions had faction-based PvP, Nightfall had Heroes), and each Campaign had 2 unique classes that could only be created within that campaign.

EoTN is an expansion that requires that you own at least ONE(but not all) of the three Campaigns.

I own all 4, so basically I have 3 games worth of content and an expansion, and I can shuttle between each as I see fit once my characters get to the appropriate level.

so the basic plan is,  They launch Guild Wars, it's a success. they introduce Factions, and new players buy it and jump into Guild Wars for the first time with that campaign.  Players of the Original Campaign buy Factions and treat it basically like an expansion.  they bring their characters from the previous campaign through to the new lands and jump into the middle of that campaign's storyline, or they make one of the new classes and take them through the content. rinse and repeat for Nightfall.

the Campaigns aren't really designed only for longtime players, they are designed to be able to be played by brand new players from start to finish, and longtime players are given a good avenue to jump into the story at an opportune moment.

as long as the content is good, the business models works very well, to be honest.

the thing about Guild Wars 2, is that F2P games don't generally have the clout, or the name recognition to be considered alongside your average western P2P MMO.

I think the Guild Wars brand has that, and that is what seperates GW from other F2P games.</