Mhm, suuuuure. Now you're just trying to weasel out of your position by pretending to be Mr. Neutral, eh? Quite frankly as a customer, subs aren't the best. Because what a subscription means is a constant money sink that lasts for as long as I play the game. What a subscription means is paying way more for the game than it could ever possibly be worth. I'm not against paying for a game at all, but I'm only willing to pay for it once. That's why I have never played any game that requires a subscription, and I probably never will: I don't have that kind of money to throw around and I wouldn't want to burn through it like that even if I did have it.
Let's try this again: I'll break it down in layman's terms by going over sentence relation. My view: "Subs are the best, in my opinion." Follow up reasoning for my view: "I'll have alts to circumvent situations, so they'd be wise to make me pay for them." Mind telling me where I said that EC needs, or has to have, a subscription model to be successful? I'm the one who said all models (which includes F2P-types, obviously!) are good if the game is good, too. I'm also the one who linked an article showing that all models work (which includes F2P-types, obviously!). It also doesn't take a genius to figure out the implied generalization of the statement relates to any game. Fact: Leech alts are a drain on resources, which leads to a leak of revenue. They do not add to the game population's experience. They are only used to skirt <insert whatever mechanic can be worked around>. That's why I said I prefer (not need) subscriptions. Again... Back to: Shown again by: And, that's a perfectly valid personal take. Mine isn't same. If I like a game, I'll pay whatever model it chooses.
Which is rendered completely hollow by the facts that character slots allow you to make alts at no additional cost, and the presence of any kind of trial or demo completely nullifies the subscription's supposed anti-alt utility, unless you're also suggesting that there should be no trial and no character slots, which sounds like a rather draconian system. Additionally, a fixed purchase price can perform an identical barrier to entry function without making the game prohibitively expensive for normal players, thus rendering a subscription a completely unnecessary burden. The only real purpose for a subscription is to disguise an unreasonably high price by breaking it up into multiple payments. It's just like an infomercial saying "These products would normally be worth $100, but if you call in the next 10 minutes we'll let you have them for just 5 easy payments of $29.99!"
Number of characters per account doesn't mean anything. People pick up additional accounts for increased production, storage, and efficiency. We could list numerous games with MCS (multiple characters per server) where people use alt accounts. Will the three aforementioned things be a desire in EC with regard to free Ork Boyz alts that are used as leeches and not legitimately played by F2P players? Couldn't tell ya. It may or may not be beneficial. I don't think anyone except the developers could give a concrete statement about that right now. Do I care if free alts are used in that way? Nope. I use them in the same way. I also pay for alt accounts in subscription games I enjoy. Don't mistake me saying "..it sure would be nice if game companies could pull cash from them" ("them" being leech alts) as caring which revenue model is used. Trials and demos are a limited time and usually gated. Add those two components together and you have an alt account that isn't very beneficial. The full access, 2-week trials that ran for awhile in Darkfall were used for mining alts, hacking accounts, and by gold sellers as throwaway spambot/trading accounts, though. I say what I mean. If I was going to suggest no trial and no extra character slots, I would have done so, But, I didn't. No slant injections of random this-might-make-me-right stuff allowed. Everyone already knows the pros and cons of the different models. Your "disguise" statement is an opinion, FYI. The models touch on different types of revenue streams. Every model is a good choice. If you want to argue "disguise", you may want to argue with yourself because many games with micro-transactions pull that convenience carrot in front of people to coerce them to pay. Very similar. Still trying to figure out where I said EC needs a subscription to be successful. I can't find it! Can you help me out, please?
What makes subscriptions unnecessary is not that the game can run without them (we all know that it can, and most of us know that it will run *better* without them), it's that the game gains no tangible benefit from requiring you to have one. Anything you may wish to enforce through subscriptions can be handled by other means that don't jack up the game's price point, and so far all of the alleged "benefits" you have come up with so far are rendered void by other parts of the game structure anyway. Except, perhaps, nostalgia for an archaic payment model which has a deeply ingrained association with a certain genre of game in some players' minds. If we were marketing this as a shooter and didn't even bother to use the "MMO" buzzword, we probably wouldn't see a single one of these pro-subscription threads.
I've played the Elder Scrolls since Morrowind (bugs and all). They are great games and I'm a fan obviously. But I haven't once even entertained the idea of playing ESO simply because of the subscription. I for one am an example of that formula completely losing a customer, a customer who has repeatedly bought their product over and over. Give me a fixed price and I will pay for it, that way I own it. And feel like it is 'my' game. That way I can play it whenever I want. I still go back and play Space Marine every once and awhile, sometimes a long while. If I had to pay $15 or even $10 just to play it again for a month I would never go back and play any of my games. Just my take.
That kinda opened my eyes a bit, starting to see a bit differently. Can you explain/quote in very simple terms why this is? I'm interested in how its possible (unless you are talking about DLC, then I get it)
Finally! Something that can actually be a debate between us. Only took 13 pages... Keep in mind that I don't care what EC does. So, can you take some time and list facts and data that we can look at in order to get a view of the situation in relation to the following statements? You can also argue against a few points from Dancey if you want to, since your above statements (first two) oppose his: "If we consider the MMOs that generate the most revenue in the Western market (North America, Europe, Russia, and Australia / New Zealand) a sizeable majority of the revenue being generated is in the form of monthly subscriptions. The era of MMO subscriber transparency has ended but we can still make some educated deductions about these revenues and subscriber totals." --- "It’s even harder to estimate how much revenue is being generated from microtransactions (MTX) but it is extremely difficult to imagine that the revenue even approaches 50% of the amount being paid as subscription fees. Half the subscription revenue is coming from World of Warcraftand Blizzard has just begun to dip its toe in the MTX revenue stream. MTX revenue will clearly increase over the next several years but until and unless there’s a major shift in the market, it will remain a junior partner to subscriptions in terms of revenue generation." --- "However in the West subscriptions are a preferred system for many consumers. People like the ease of not having to worry about paying to play a game every time they log in. They like the idea of paying a known, fixed price and not feeling required to “pay to win” when they play. Subscription services are extremely commonplace: cell phones; cable/internet service; Hulu; Netflix; health clubs, etc. are a common facet of everyday life. Subscriptions are really great for developers too. They provide a continuous dependable source of revenue. Many people allow themselves to be billed for a subscription even in a month where they didn’t access the service. Having the billing information for these customers makes it easier to market to them for re-engagement of lapsed customers, buddy programs for virality, and up-sales for additional revenue." http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/8109/page/1 Yep, and that's cool. No issues with your take. You can look on the other side, too. There are players out who prefer subscription games. Others prefer B2P games. Then, there are those who really dislike F2P. It has a stigma associated with it. Personally, I like the game. The revenue model is just how I pay for it, and nothing more. I'll play and pay for anything I enjoy.
This portion is heavily skewed by early MMOs such as WoW and EQ, which were able to do what they did due to a relatively uncompetitive market (MMOs of their type were rare and difficult to run at the time, especially since bandwidth and high-power servers were more expensive relative to performance). EVE enjoys a similar lack of competition: how many other sandbox space-sim MMOs are there with EVE's mechanics? I haven't heard of any. And with how entrenched EVE likely is in that segment of the market by now, any new competitor that hopes to capture the same audience will likely find it very hard to convince people to run two subscriptions at once, or switch their subscription over from their highly-developed EVE character to roll a newbie (looking at you, Star Citizen). Lack of competition is not something a new game hoping to break into an existing market can bank on. DDO, LOTRO, SWTOR, TESO and others have found this out the hard way. I won't be surprised if Wildstar ends up going down the same path. You know what's better than the money automatically getting pulled from my account? The money not leaving my account at all because I only had to pay for the game once. "Pay to win" is a separate issue, a form of bad game design that can crop up under any payment model. Having a subscription does not automatically stop P2W mechanics from appearing. I'd rather not be getting billed for a "service" I can't or didn't access, TYVM. Collecting billing information is a foregone conclusion in the age of digital distribution, nor are buddy programs and up-sales (microtransactions, anyone?) exclusive to subscriptions. Again, in the modern world absolutely any part of the game can now be sold online and distributed digitally. As for re-engagement, which of these sounds more re-engaging? 1: "Hmm, I think I'll give that game I bought a while back another shot, they've had a lot of content updates since then." 2: "Hmm, that game I was playing a while back has had a lot of updates, but if I want to play it I'll have to buy the entire game again."
