Yesterday I made a random comment, and it seemed to gather a bunch of traction with my twitter feed, as I spent the rest of the evening reading comments in general agreement. The beginning of this thought process like so many that I have, actually started the other day. I was talking with a friend of mine and they displayed disdain with having to pay to purchase a game. It seemed to be causing them a certain amount of friction, and it didn’t read as “I can’t afford to purchase this” but more a case of “I don’t feel like I should have to purchase this”. This has made me contemplate the nature of where we are currently in gaming and the prevalence of the “Free-To-Play” business model.
The idea of this model is that they get you in the door with a simple game download and install, and then get you later when you are needing to purchase things to be able to maintain a certain “quality of life” within the game. For example playing Elder Scrolls Online without the optional “ESO Plus” subscription is miserable, because that crafting bag that magically takes away your inventory woes is a massive bonus. Similarly I feel like if I am going to play Star Wars the Old Republic, I am going to be paying for a subscription because the “free player” limitations just feel overtly cruel.
At least in the case of those two games there is a monthly amount of money that I can pay easily to take these woes away. When I get frustrated is with the more South Korean MMO model of having a bunch of purchases that effectively add up to a month subscription, without giving you the convenience of actually paying a monthly subscription. Essentially each month you are going too want a Premium pass and the Mission Pass Gold in order to get the full experience. Combined this is roughly $15 and lasts 30 days, but for quality of life purchases you are also going to want the Material Storage pass… which is 300 star gems. These in theory come from playing the game naturally, but if you for some reason you have to purchase them out right which is a horrible idea… it is $15 for 360 star gems.
There is a large part of me that longs for the era of MMORPGs when you purchased the box, purchased the occasional expansion every few years… and then had a simple subscription amount that you could budget for. The problem there is that this limits the amount of money that a game can drain from your pocket book, and even the bastion of the subscription model has found a way to add additional purchases to try and entice you to spend more. World of Warcraft has 15 mounts, 15 pets, 2 toys, a slew of deluxe bundles, and a large number of services that you can only obtain through hard currency. I am not faulting them for finding additional ways to claw money into the coffers, but it can be a bit exhausting especially if you add in the gold token economy.
Guild Wars 2 has been lauded as this buy the box once purchase without need for subscriptions, but even this game feels like I need to spend a certain amount of money to play it in a manner that feels reasonable. Firstly for each character I would want a set of unlimited harvesting tools, because it is annoying as hell to constantly keep running back to a vendor to purchase new pick axes. Each one of these tools and there are three is roughly $12.50 because unless you can catch them on fire sale they are 1000 gems each. I also feel like a Copper Fed Salvage machine is a significant quality of life improvement at $10, and you need shared account storage to keep it in so all of your characters can use it and that is $8.75 per slot or $35 for 5 slots for a bit of a price break. Black Lion keys are a trap but the game does in fact love to throw you chests that you cannot lock without spending money.
I miss what was essentially the Warcraft Battle Chest era of gaming, where you bought the base game and then every so often an expansion came out that tacked on to the original game and gave you new content. Hell I miss the era when “DLC” meant that I got a bunch of new content for a game rather than what is effectively a bunch of cosmetic gear. I get that cosmetics are the true end game, because this is something that I have said all too many times… but it would be nice to get content drops as well. I never minded paying my own way, and I guess the other day I was balking in part while talking to that friend how we have arrived at a point where some folks don’t expect to need to. During the DLC expansion era of games, I remember having friends that complained about not getting the entire game with their original purchase. So there will always be some controversy that is brewing and micro-transactions are just the newest version of the same discussion that has been happening for decades I guess.
I think one of the big challenges is that we have this artificial price ceiling for games at $60 each, and I am not exactly sure when that was set. I remember when Phantasy Star 4 released it was selling for roughly $90, and above is an example of some of the pricing from the late Super Nintendo era. Take the example of Street Fighter Alpha 2, that game was released in 1996 so that $69.99 in adjusted for inflation would be $114.37. While I realize that games are cheaper to distribute digitally than they were to actually put chips into a cartridge, no matter how you slice it there is still a significant amount of money missing from that $60 price tag.
As much as it might frustrate me, it is this long tailed monetary wrangling that keeps the lights on, the staff paid and the servers running. There are few things more disheartening when a game that you love dies. Talk to all of my friends who pinned their hopes and dreams on Wildstar about how bad it feels that the game is gone, and that there is no viable emulator option to keep playing it. So yeah it frustrates the shit out of me, and I throw some serious shade anytime I see that a game I am interested in is launching as the “fee to pay” model, as Jim Sterling calls it. The alternative of a game closing down however feels really bad. I feel like we had it better when we were just paying a flat subscription fee rather than being constantly needled for another small purchase.
That however is coming from a position of privilege. I can reasonably afford to pay whatever it takes to be able to play a game. There are a lot of folks out there who simply can’t because once you subtract groceries and rent, there just isn’t much if anything left over for an entertainment budget. I firmly believe that those folks have the right to participate in the same type of “games as therapy” that I ultimately do on a nightly basis. So if the cost of that happening is me being needled, than I guess that is the cost that I have to pay. I don’t love it, but I can be okay with it… I just wish more games gave me that “bullshit tax” that was an amount I could pay to ablate all of my frustrations.
So my fearless readers… what say you? What are your thoughts on this matter, because many of you responded last night on twitter. Now that I have laid bare the situation we find ourselves in, spill your soul in the comments below.
Pre-HoT, I supported GW2 with the equivalent of a monthly sub of $10-15usd, because I wanted to. I used the gems mainly for the unlimited gathering tools and cosmetics.
Post-HoT, I got grumpy with the direction they chose and stopped buying gems. That was 2015. I did not make a single real-money contribution to GW2 until they re-introduced alternatives for legendary armor functionality, and even after that, it was limited to buying an expansion, a one-off support for the conclusion of the JP saga – which mostly went into cosmetic mount skins and gem to gold conversion to buy shiny weapon skins off the TP, and not much more.
Since 2017, I’ve mostly gone the way of gold to gem conversion for the rare times I decide I want a character slot or other functionality like shared inventory slot. I don’t harvest enough nodes to even make my unlimited gathering tools ‘worth’ anything these days. I earn a decent to frightening amount of gold through a weekly static raid, and spend very little. Since my account no doubt is interpreted through metrics as a ‘raider,’ I’ve been fully intent on demonstrating through action (or the lack of it) the absurdity of how raids and rewards breaks their revenue-earning economic model, ie. there is very little need or impetus for regular contributions of RL money from the most dedicated (this is the reverse of how most microtransaction games make their moolah. They usually want their most hardcore as loyal whales, because those begrudge spending the least.) The only contribution our subset makes is occasionally pushing up the gold-gems rate when we decide we want something from the gem store..
As for Black Lion chests, I probably make the most money from selling them at 5-6 silver apiece and never opening a single one. Once upon a time, I did level 10 character weekly key runs, but that was maybe seven years ago.
One can get by perfectly well in GW2 without ever paying anything in RL money – especially if one is open to running all manner of group content for gold rewards. You only give up immediate gratification in cosmetics and convenience… like the luxury of having unlimited gathering tools on all characters (that’s a deep pockets luxury indeed.) How about three shared slots from the expansions and one gathering tool set purchase as a more medium expenditure luxury? Or one gathering tool set purchase and just passing it to active characters via the bank as a lower end luxury – you can only harvest with one active character at a time anyway…
Or, given that materials prices are at nearly all time lows between teleporting bots that harvest underground and Living Story rewards that fling all level tiers of materials at you, not bothering to harvest at all and just buying what is needed from the TP instead.
Interesting take. Like you, I’m fortunate enough to be able to throw in a few bucks here and there to experience these ‘free to play’ games. To date, I haven’t stumped up any money for these games and treat them very much like the Shareware of old. The exceptions where I’ve brought the full release are very rare but in recent history probably Plague Inc on Android which warranted a purchase.
Holistically I’d posture, its very much a subjective take on fairness, whether it ‘feels’ the game is restricting your progress behind a paywall which ultimately many do vs rewards through gameplay. One of the best examples I’ve continued to play and enjoy was the mobile release Hayday which keeps adding content and features after all these years with the option to purchase ingame currency but providing a lot of content regardless. So it can work, but is a very rare FTP game that isn’t swiftly deleted.
My tolerance for bullshit is usually pretty low but in GW2 I don’t seem to have those problems you face.
I’ve never bought the unlimited harvesting tools, I’m fine with the normal ones. I have so many of those deconstruction kits I would never have to buy this machine. I’ve always gotten enough keys for the few lockboxes I found.
But yes, most of my gems I actually spent on bag and bank slots.
Also GW2 is that one game where (after the WildStar closing down thing) I regularly bought a little stuff just because I felt bad playing it as my main MMO without a sub.
I have literally thousands of hours in GW2 now, three accounts and been playing with virtually no breaks since launch. I have never needed to spend anything other than the cost of the original game and the expansions. Like Nogamara, I just use the harvesting tools the NPC sells. I actively prefer it. Far from finding it annoying when one of them runs out in mid-harvest I find it increases my sense of being in the world. It’s like running out of milk and having to run to the shops. It’s not as if you have to go far, either – I just hit “B”, port to World vs World, go to the vendor there and buy what I need, hit “B” again and retunr to the exact same spot I left, with the node still waiting for me.
As for the Black Lion Lockboxes – they’re there to make me money, not for me to spend money on! They sell for good money on the TP. I keep a stack in the bank for when I get the occasional free key but the rest I sell.
Generally, ANet have done a pretty good job of almost never putting anything in the cash shop that remotely interests me but I do buy bank and inventory slots and character slots sometimes. I never pay real money, though, I just convert gold to Gems. I have over 12k gold right now, with probably half that again or more in materials I could sell if I wanted to. Accordign to GW2Spidy right now, 100 gems costs around 21g. In real money that would be $1.25. If my math is correct, that means I have about $700 in gold!
Whether F2P is good or bad in most MMORPGs tends to depend on your playstyle, I think. It suits me perfectly. I find restrictions, immersive, by and large. I’ve dropped subs in games so as to have the restrictions before now. In the old days of subs, a lot of gamepaly was intentionally more grindy than it is now, I think. Being able to raise money without having to come up with ways to keep people locked into playing one game for years really freed things up.
Given your examples, I feel as if you’re looking only at MMOs payment structures, so I’ll restrict my comments to that.
I don’t mind subscriptions, whether mandatory or “optional”. Decent sized expansions yearly or every other year are fine. On the whole, I find cash shops to be on the side of icky, although they bother me less when they’re not gameplay focused (WoW) or when you’re given an allotment of premium currency with a sub (ESO). MMOs have infrastructure that costs money to maintain, and someone has to pay for it, and people always want more new content.
I’ve definitely walked away from games where the monetization scheme sucked the fun out of the game itself.
That said, I love the token system in WoW. I love that I can choose to spend money or a whole lot of time to cover my sub costs / expac costs. Someone else being able to buy (with IRL cash) in game currency that I can earn by playing the game doesn’t hurt my feelings any.
Scooter and I have settled into GW2 as our main game for the past couple years. No subscription needed They have a cash gem store, but the vast majority of items are cosmetic. I’ve been known to throw a bit of money into it to achieve a certain style. Ironically, I’ve rarely if ever spent money on utilities like bag slots,mostly for new character slots, I suppose. Anyway, I’m happy not paying a monthly sub when there are months when I can’t play due to business travel. Tyria is always there when I get back.
I’m sad about Wildstar. I loved the general feel of the game, but I think they killed it early on with the “git gud, n00b” attitude. But people liked it and now there’s no way to play or go back and dabble. 😕
I personally don’t mind buying stuff from the WoW shop because it’s my main game and after 15 years my collection is pretty substantial. I also LOVE the token system because as we’re both disabled it let us buy the last expansion x 2 with gold. Otherwise we’d not have been able to afford it for months. So yeah, it is dodgy but it also has some great applications for people like me too.