When a controversial opinion piece from a blogger posting on Forbes wrote a piece on ESO (seemingly before he had any experience with the game) calling it a failure in the making, the backbone of his argument was that Zenimax was charging a subscription and subscriptions are a thing of the past. It was a lot of doom calling that was also reflected in other bits of early mainstream press about the game around the net. ‘This is a subscription game and nobody plays those anymore’ was the general theme. In ESO’s case specifically, a few tossed around the idea that players merely wanted a co-op Skyrim and nobody wanted an MMO (despite the fact that the MMO was already in development before Skyrim was released). And, reading some of these, it seemed that some people really didn’t seem to get MMOs or subscriptions.
It’s not difficult to understand why some might come to these initial conclusions. MMORPGs exploded in number after the success of WoW, leading to more games and the perception of diluted quality in the genre. WoW succeeded as a subscription game, but no other game could even remotely match its numbers. Even just taking Western gamers into account, the sub numbers for WoW dwarf those for all other games. A few larger budget and highly anticipated titles came and went. Some still survive or thrive under those hybrid models mentioned above. Others languished. A few games did or have stayed subscription-based for many years with small, but dedicated populations. It’s not that subscriptions are a thing of the past, it’s that expectations have to be in line with what whichever portion of the community you are chasing can and will deliver for a quality game.
With AAA MMO development taking a good four or five years, one must take into consideration the time period when development began for certain games and the climate at the time. We’re now at the point where games that are coming out this year and next year started their development cycles right around or even soon after some of the hyped releases started converting to hybrid models and numbers for WoW began to slip. I think that puts us in an era of more reasonable expectations and concentration on making the game versus chasing any particular coattails.
That doesn’t mean that devs aren’t trying to go after players who enjoy some of the aspects of other games, since with as much choice as players have today, capturing extended loyalty is not a given. At the recent WildStar press event this month in California, Carbine’s Jeremy Gaffney said the team believes that good games sell if you make a game that players want to play and on top of that, they are planning many updates and new content that is based around how people play the game. That’s how they aim to earn your entertainment investment each month. Carbine knows that the game isn’t guaranteed player loyalty for a long time. The idea of earning the player’s cash every month is something that Zenimax has also expressed. Both games will be compared, and sometimes unfairly, because they’re both subscription games launching in a similar window, but they’re different and the majority of each game’s player base will probably be quite different.
Yet the notion of earning the player’s dollars (or Euro, Yuan, Yen, etc) every month is not something new, but it is something we’re not necessarily used to right now. We’ve gotten used to delayed or infrequent content updates, cash shops selling many items we used to get for free (even if they were rare), and a lot of player churn because there are many cheap options from other multiplayer online games like MOBAs, or even other sources of entertainment. Yet some people remember regular content updates, new items released, sometimes new features, built upon the sub revenue that kept a game going.
Value is a word that means different things to different people. It’s easy to try and write off a reluctance to subscribe or skepticism as “entitlement”, but that’s just a slice. And there are indeed benefits to the free to play/hybrid model. One, if you’re able to jump in and play at any time, you’re not pressured to find time to play a game if your real life activities are keeping you occupied. If you’re paying for a month and you wind up barely playing for whatever reasons, you might not feel it’s a good enough value to you to keep pre-paying for the content. The lack of a box fee is another advantage, seeing that one doesn’t have to wait for a free trial to become available in order to test out the game. You can just download the game at any time and start playing.
As for subscriptions, some of the advantages include having all or most of the content available to you for the price of your subscription. Loot systems and crafting systems have both been affected by the move toward hybrid and free to play models. Cosmetic items are usually locked away and that can affect things like customization and making the game feel more your own. In a game like SWTOR, for instance, having so many costume pieces be in the cash shop, even for subscribers (who get a monthly shop allowance), creates that slight bit of disconnect. In WildStar, a system like housing, with its hundreds and hundreds of customizable loot items, house types, interactive plugs, and crafted house items would feel very different if its content were mostly gated off by microtransactions.
The Elder Scrolls Online has it so that the best gear is going to be crafted gear. Anyone can learn to craft gear, though having control over your character’s looks without having some of that content be gated away, to be unlocked for a price (outside of the Imperial race and associated look), it feels refreshing in an “everything old is new again” sort of way. While it remains to be seen just how often post-launch content updates roll out for both games, giving developers a steady revenue stream to work with just seems more practical for future content planning. And that’s a value of subscriptions that some people overlook.
Both a new AAA console or PC game title are normally going to run you around $50-60 and you’ll get maybe 10 or 20 hours out of the main campaign. If it has multiplayer or a co-op component, that’s another 20 hours or more. An MMORPG costs about $60 and lets you play during the first 30 days free. If you play for an hour or two per day, you’ll play about as much as the other game. Yet, if the MMO still entertains you in month two, then you’ll pay about $15 a month for possibly the same 30-60 hours that month. MMOs, however, involve server costs, 24/7 customer service, and other elements. Despite consoles and publishers getting into the service model in the past decade, there are still differences. But when you pay Xbox Live every month, you’re not guaranteeing new content or features (and there’s a customization/cash shop).
Plenty of people wonder if a sub game can work in today’s market, and we’re about to get the biggest test of that in some time. Whatever one’s personal feelings about subscription-based games are, Final Fantasy XIV is already out, and WildStar and ESO are almost upon us. All three games seek somewhat different audiences, which is a good start. Will they offer players enough to earn their subscription fees each month and be seen as a valuable entertainment investment? That is indeed the yet unanswerable question right now.
