There is this great article with Noaki Yoshida, the new director of FF XIV, defending the P2P model. I thought it was a very interesting read, and it tells a lot about how companies like SE, Blizzard and ZOS think about MMOs. I think its worth reading for anyone that is interested about MMOs (including ESO) and P2P v B2P v F2P models.

"There are many different types of MMOs. There are two big types or groups that we see. You have one group with games like your Rift or your Star Wars, which are very large-scale MMOs with established IP. Then you have your smaller MMOs, which are maybe new IPs that don’t need as big a user base to be successful. So we can start off with the big group, the large-scale MMO group, with your Rift, your Star Wars, your Guild Wars, your Age of Conan and The Lord of the Rings. These games all started out on a subscription model, or were planning for a subscription model when they were in development. Then, partway through, they switched to free-to-play.

Then again, you have games like Rift and Star Wars. Even though people have been saying that yes, there is this change in the market, everything’s moving to free-to-play, they still – up until recently – were developing a system that would be subscription-based. Even though everyone is saying the industry is going free-to-play, they still were developing these huge games with subscriptions in mind. Again, we’re not saying that one is better than the other, that free-to-play is better than subscription or subscription is better than free-to-play. But for a large game on that scale, what’s most important – more important than making a lot of money – is making a stable income, a stable amount of money over a long period of time. And so to develop a large-scale MMO like this, you need to spend a lot of time with a lot of resources and a lot of staff to make this game.

To do that, you need a lot of money, and to get a lot of money to do that, you usually need investors to invest in your game. Because you’ve spent a lot of money on getting this game ready and borrowed a lot of money from these investors, when you release the game, the investors expect to see returns. If your game gets a lot of users and a lot of subscriptions right away, your investors will be happy and you can pay them. But what happens if you don’t hit that number right away? You have a bunch of staff members waiting to get paid. You have a bunch of investors waiting to get paid. You have a bunch of contents that needs to get made because you have to have updates, but you can’t do it because you don’t have enough money, because you didn’t hit that number you were aiming for. And so what do you have to do? One option to get instant money is free-to-play, or selling these items. To get that money so you can pay off your staff, pay off your investors, and start making new content, switching to free-to-play, selling items, and using that money is one way to do it.

So why didn’t Rift or EA with Star Wars do this from the beginning? Why didn’t they start with free-to-play? There’s a reason behind that. With free-to-play, because you’re selling these items, you’ll have months where you sell a bunch of stuff and you make a lot of money in that one month. But it’s all about what happens during that month. Next month, the person who maybe bought $100 worth of items in the last month could purchase nothing at all. You don’t know what you’re going to be getting, and because you don’t know what you’re going to be getting, you can’t plan ahead. You don’t know how much money is coming in. If you can’t plan ahead, then you can’t keep staff, because you don’t know if you’ll have enough money to pay the staff next month.

With a subscription base, if you get maybe 400,000 members, you know that you’re going to have the money from that monthly subscription for the next month. You also know that you’re going to have 400,000 this month, and it’s not going to go down to 200,000 users next month. That type of jump really doesn’t happen with a subscription model. So you know that you’re going to have a steady income. Because you have a steady income, you can plan ahead further. You can make sure you have staff members to create that new content. By creating new content, you’re making the players happy. If they know this game is going to keep creating new content, they’ll continue to pay their monthly subscription fees. So rather than going for the huge $100-million-a-month hit that you might get with the free-to-play model, having that steady income allows us to provide a better product to the players.

Now, you have Blizzard and you have Square Enix. We’re the only two companies in the industry, basically, that are making MMOs with our own money. That gives us an advantage, because where other companies have to get money from investors and have to pay that back, we don’t have a lot of time to build slowly and be able to pay that back. Investors want their returns right away. With Square Enix and Blizzard, because we’re putting our own money into it, we don’t have those investors to worry about, and that means we can release something and maybe take a little bit of a hit at the beginning, but as long as we’re increasing the amount of people we have, then we’ll get that money and make the players happy. We’ll get into that cycle I talked about before, where we’re creating good content and have that steady income to keep the cycle going.

With version 1.0, even though we call it a failure, we still had a user base. During the time that we were developing this game, 2.0, we were able to increase the amount of subscribers threefold as well. Again, it takes time. It takes showing the users that we’re really into this and giving them that new content. But we’re able to see a rise there. That’s what we’re looking for in this. Again, we’re not saying—The market didn’t change. It’s that there are two different types of models. Choosing the model that’s right for your product and being successful with that is what’s important. We believe that the bigger the game, the larger the scale of the MMO, it’s going to be better for the game if it’s on a subscription model.

That’s why you see a lot of companies that chose the subscription model, that wanted to do what we were doing, but were forced to free-to-play. They didn’t go to free-to-play by choice, because if that was the case, they would have gone free-to-play at the beginning. They’d develop it for free-to-play, not full subscription, instead of being forced to go free-to-play. We hear a lot of people saying, “Star Wars is free-to-play now, it’s great!” But then you ask them if they’re playing free-to-play Star Wars and they say, “No, not really playing it.” Everyone talks about how great it is that it went free-to-play, but then you ask around and really, there aren’t that many people who are playing it since it’s gone free-to-play. If you spend all that money on a game ,release it, and it’s filled with bugs and you don’t have enough time to do your updates, people will leave. Players need that new content. Not being able to provide it is fatal. If they were able to produce as much content as players wanted, then people would have stayed there. We don’t really believe it’s a problem with the business model. It’s how that’s handled."

http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/17/final-fantasy-online-director-defends-monthly-subscriptions-in-the-golden-age-of-free-to-play-exclusive/

Great read. That man has a good head for MMOs, they chose the right person to take over FFXIV.

That is good to hear. I had heard the rumors that F2P was the way of the future, good to hear that it is not a desired goal but just an unfortunate outcome. F2P can go die in a fire, give me a sub.

So, he just rehashed the same arguments we've had here a dozen times? Waste of a read. The only argument he made that we havn't heard here every week is that P2P is stable and lets them plan, and F2P has spikes and dips so it's harder to plan new content. Just stick that in the OP as a "tl;dr" so people can get stright to the point here.

It is basically expert testimony supporting what a lot of us laymen have been saying. Nothing wrong with having your opinions validated by a professional.

Thing is: after the first three months there is no longer any security for a constant revenue even with p2p. People sub for maybe a month now and then if the game isn't engaging enough. Year after year the amount of people willing for longterm subscriptions are thinning out.

So while you might get a rather stable revenue in the first few months of a MMOs lifecycle to dish out additional content it is this crucial peroid which decides about a games future. And that doesn't depend on how you make your customers pay but THAT you make them pay. Player retention is not hooked to payment model.

i think CCP still make and develop their MMO's with their own money. Can't say for sure though.

Thats what happend to all those P2P went f2p. They just did svck. thats it. If you have a good game the Subs are kinda Stable.. Look at Eve.. they have stable Subs since 100000 years now

You forgot the part where F2P is almost always an unwanted occurrence due to unfortunate circumstances.

Learn to read properly, and then your bias nonsense might have some ground to stand on.

It's really not a rehashed argument, it's validation for the P2P crowd. They (we) have always said, F2P = less content & updates, less support, lower ongoing quality... And that's being validated here by someone that knows. It is what it is.

Yea pretty much. Regular updates with content and bugfixes is one of the things I find most imporant for an MMO and its longevity. Also, imo the P2P crowd tends to be better than F2P, even though that is generalization. My experience has lead me to believing this, especially after what happend to SWTOR after F2P hit.

Couldn't agree more. It weeds out the a-holes for the most part.

It doesn't weed out anyone. I used to run a guild of passive a-holes (they were a-holish to people outside the guild (they also were the biggest PvPers in the guild, not that I'm implying anything)).

Also, re-read the article if you're thinking this is saying F2P is bad system.

EVE is P2P in the same way that WoW is; they're grandfathered in. There is no recent example of a AAA MMO staying P2P. People just aren't as rich as they were in the 2000's. MMOs aren't a big new thing like they were in the early 2000's. There are way more options unlike there was in the early 2000's. P2P is a relic of a better time; better ecnomy, big new exciting games, and none of this was rehashed hunderds of times before.

Are new MMO's bad? No. New MMO's have to compete with MMO's that have been out for 10 years with a decade of updating and a monster amount of content. Do you think if The old republic came out before WoW it would have failed? It wouldn't have, because we wouldn't know what to expect of it and it would all be new.

I think you need to read it again. Specifically the bit at the end where he says it 'isn't a problem with the business model.' The bugs and updates are pretty cleared tied to the release of SW, and its lack of content and bugs (most of which remained through the entire sub period, and a lot of promise features never happened). Not because it was F2P or Sub, but because they screwed up the entire process. 'How it was handled,' as the author put it, was wrong, not the business model.

The article is fairly confused anyway. He talks about Rift and Guild Wars as being both large scale and having an established IP. The latter wasn't true for either, and GW wasn't ever designed as large scale. Age of Conan wasn't large scale either, despite (or actually because of) the existing IP. You can't really sell Conan reliably to anyone but white males, due to a lot of baggage in the background, setting and writing. He also claims there are two groups, when the reality is there are at least three (and he talks about all 3 and alludes to one or two others, though it isn't clear, since he's pretty confused about what categories other games go in)

Sub games, which do badly as sub games and go free to play (SW, LotR, Age of Conan), and also LotR ended up doing better as F2P.

Games designed as Free to Play from the beginning (GW2, Neverwinter), which is rather cruel to categorize anything with the POS that is neverwinter.

Then he goes on to say that MMOs buy Blizzard and Square don't have to deal with any of this nonsense, because they're self funded, have enough money, don't need investors so, 'Hahaha, we can do whatever we like, even when version 1 tanks.'

Incorrect. The better economy think is a laugh... come on brother, you probably spend 8.99 for lunch to get the new topped quarter pounder at mcy d's. I mean, the money isn't the problem... people are stupid.

You know as well as I, the reason the games these days are going F2P is because they bring -NOTHING- to the table compared to WoW. Honestly, what's the difference between LoTRO, Rift, TSW over WoW? It's the same exact game. People wont leave WoW unless something new and exciting comes along, and that hasn't happened yet. Of course I don't think SWoTR would have failed if it came out BEFORE WoW... that's the point.

Unless a new game gives people a reason to leave WoW, they will not switch. It's the time investment. That's why I think ESO will succeed, because they're going a different direction than WoW.

Me and you agree I think, except for the money part of it. People like F2P games because they know they wont stick with them... they're 3 week trash games to give these kids a break from Call of Duty 12.

I will never understand why MMO developers think they are special. Gamers (by and large) are not willing to pay monthly for games. There are too many option out there without subscription fees. WoW was a rarity and it only worked because it was clearly the best one on the market at the time. I do not think a subscription MMO will ever come close to that success again.

There is one model that makes sense and it is the same model used in all online games other than MMO's (including shooters, fighters, RTS, ect.)

You pay once for the game. After that, you have unlimited access to all of the content you purchased forever. When new content is release, and only when new content is released, you pay for that as well. That way you are paying for something rather than the promise of something. If I buy Halo 4, I pay for the game and then I pay for Map Packs when they come out. That's it.

You can also OPTIONALLY have a cash shop. But cash shops should never give players an advantage in the game. These should be cosmetic items only or items that add convenience (rather than inconveniencing players who don't buy them.) In Halo 4 I can buy special skins for my armor and guns, but I can't buy a gun that is more powerful than other players.

I honestly believe this is the way of the future. If ESO has a subscription, I will play through the content once, as fast as I can, and then cancel. I'll make sure to get it done in one month and then I won't return to the game. I think there are a lot of people who think similarly. In the population at large, that strain of thinking seems to be dominant (whereas on MMO forums you'll still find plenty of people willing to pay subs.)