Tales of the Aggronaut

Defense of Subscriptions

August 23, 2013 by Belghast

So it is neither morning nor Saturday when I sit down to write this. I am about to cheat massively at my one post per day thing… primarily because tomorrow is going to be pure hell. I have to get up and around early because I have a wedding to photograph for a friend. I am completely terrified at this prospect but I figure I will make it through one way or another. However with all the mess going on tomorrow I simply will not have time to do my leisurely two hour jaunt through blog post land that I normally do. As a result I am writing up my post on Friday… and since I am impatient I am going ahead and publishing it today as well.

Defense of Subscriptions

Over the last few days since the joint announcements that Wildstar and Elder Scrolls Online will be subscription based, I have seen a lot of negativity floating around the blogosphere. You have one camp claiming this is the revival of subscriptions, and a diametrically opposed camp claiming this is a fluke and long live the free to play revolution. Personally I can see a place for both in the game industry and I feel like we will see lots of both in the future. Subscriptions are not going anywhere… because quite simply put high quality games have high dollar amounts associated with them.

Most of the games we now think of today as heralds of the free to play “revolutions” started their lifespan as a full functioning subscription based game with a $60 box cost and a $15 a month subscription fee. This is the case for the Turbine games (Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online), the Cryptic games (Star Trek Online, Champions Online), the Sony Online Entertainment games (Everquest, Everquest 2, Vanguard, etc) and the new darling of the free to play market… Rift. Each and every one of them experienced a decently long period of selling boxes and racking up monthly service fees before ultimately converting over to some sort of a freemium model.

Purely Free to Play

I was brainstorming with my friends, and quite honestly we had a hard time listing off significant MMOs that have launched as free to play. There is a whole string of poor quality Asian market games that are too long to ever mention. The only game I can really think of that does not have a subscription fee or box cost associated with it is Neverwinter. Dragon’s Prophet to some extent is in the same boat, but it is still technically in open beta… and was also an Asian market transplant with a good deal of the costs simply being regionalization. Neverwinter is most definitely a sub par gaming experience, with a good deal of incident costs hidden into the system and at least for me… overall forgettable gameplay.

As far as buy the box we have Defiance and Guild Wars 2… both of which appear to either be struggling or at least having a good deal of growing pains. Trion has recently set about a massive restructuring of the company that involved dissolving the offices that supported Defiance and pulling that staff into the main offices in Redwood. Guild Wars 2 has also going through a series of changes trying to deliver content at a more frenetic pace to try and keep paying customers glued to the screens. Additionally with each update comes a slew of items that can only be acquired by unlocking the in game loot boxes.

My main issue to date with the Defiance and GW2 experiences is that while they are rolling out regular episodic updates… they are essentially throw away experiences and are only available for a limited time. Defiance is really too young to fully judge, but they are about to release their first real DLC pack. It will be interesting to see just how much content that adds to the game. Guild Wars 2 on the other hand, seems completely tied to the concept of an expiring series of “living story” events. In neither case are they really expanding the game on a regular and permanent basis to add value to that initial box purchase.

Paying Initial Cost

Rich game worlds with hundreds of hours of content cost an extremely large amount of money to develop, produce, market and ultimately distribute. While I was disappointed when Wildstar announced its model, because ultimately it meant the cost of entry was just too high for someone like me… that only casually had interest in the game in the first place… I fully understood the decision to have a subscription. Box costs and subscription costs help pay off the excessive costs of game development. It has been said multiple times that the average blockbuster game costs far more than the average blockbuster movie. Additionally the development of the game is a much longer drawn out process that someone has to bankroll until it finally sees a profit.

Lets take Elder Scrolls Online for example and try and work through some hard numbers. Please understand that I am creating a pure guesstimate based on what I was able to pull together from Google. Zenimax Online studios is in the Baltimore Maryland area, so there are certain broad assumptions we can make based on average costs in that region. According to Wikipedia they moved into their current offices in 2008, and based on the E3 PS4 presentation, Elder Scrolls Online is slotted for a first quarter of 2014 launch. That means that Elder Scrolls Online will have in essence been in development for roughly six years at the time of launch. Please understand I am trying to just pull together some rough figures, it might have entered development before that and potentially after that.

The Hard Costs

Over the course of those six years, if you figure an average of 100 employees made an average of $45,000 a year… you get $27,000,000 in salaries alone. Some employees will make more, likely some employees will make less.. and over the course of those six years you would have had significantly fewer than 100 and likely now in pre-launch mode significantly more. From google we can see that the average price of office space in the Baltimore Maryland area is around $17 a sqft. For sake of coming up with a figure we are going to say their offices are likely around 30,000 sqft, so taking that over the course of the six years you have $3,060,000 in rent. Factor in a leased digital internet line ($300/mo), water ($400/mo), electric ($1000/mo), and gas ($400/mo) you have a vague guesstimate of $151,200 in utilities over those six years. Finally if you figure roughly $3000 in computer equipment for each employee, you are at roughly $300,000 not factoring in ANY servers at all.

So far in things I can quantify you are talking about a guesstimate of over 30 million dollars on only a very few factors. There are so many factors that we just cannot come up with a number for. For example it was said that Star Wars the Old Republic took roughly 200 million dollars to develop… and that a majority of that was voice acting time. This is something I simply cannot come up with anything sort of an estimate on. All the voice acting rates I found online were so widely varied that they were meaningless especially when you consider the names that folks are getting are the Steve Blum’s of the world that are sought after for damned near every gaming project on the planet. I don’t really know how detailed the voice acting is for ESO, but every demo I have seen to date gives me the impression that the game is fully voiced… which would lead me to guess bare minimum 100 million on the hundreds of hours of voice talent.

I’ve heard before that it costs roughly 1/3 of the total cost to develop a game… the rest of the costs go into marketing and distribution. So at this point we are already sitting at around 130 million not factoring any tool licensing costs, or server infrastructure and network costs. If that represents only a third of the total costs of the project… no wonder games NEED to sell boxes and charge a subscription to break even… let along fund future development efforts. Essentially a AAA game experience is really damned expensive. If you figure a company receives at most half of the $60 box cost… it would take selling over 3.5 million boxes just to make up for 100 million of the cost. The reason why that $15 a month is so important is they are getting the entire portion of it.

Someone Has to Pay

Ultimately if we want nice games… someone has to pay for it. Either these huge gambles can be paid off in box costs and monthly subscriptions… or they can be financed on the backs of a handful of “whale” players. But ultimately there is no such thing as a free ride. Game development and game infrastructure have large fixed costs that simply cannot be justified away by a players desire to not spend a dime. We have nice free to play experiences in essence because players that came before you… paid for the cost of going there first. They helped to pay off the loans that these companies I am sure have to take out to bankroll this kind of protracted effort.

AAA game studios simply cannot afford to build games out of the goodness of their hearts. They have to pay ultimately hundreds of people just like you and me to build and support the games. These are not nameless faceless corporations… they are businesses just like the one you likely work for… with a human resources department, and social security tax deductions and payrolls to make. This is a real job for someone, and we can’t expect them to get some beer and pizza and knock out a game in their free time. Overall the game industry pays some pretty shitty wages as compared to the IT industry as a whole. I know for a fact that I make well more than any of my friends that currently work in the industry… and have pretty much since my first job out of college.

It is almost expected that part of the benefits package for these folks is the fact that they “get” to make games for a living. Thing is though… they had to gain their skills the same way all of us did, with lots of hard work and sweat equity and now they work in an industry with next to no job security… because it all hinges upon the whims of whether or not gamers like us ultimately purchase their product. So ultimately… all of these things factored in… I have ZERO problem with the concept of buying a box and paying a monthly fee when it is something I am committed to. My friends in the industry need to eat, and pay rent, and survive on a day to day basis just like I do.

Free to Play

The free to play model seems to work extremely well at financing the daily upkeep and expansion of an existing game. I think it has been the savior of a lot of games that have filtered their way out of the popular consciousness and were no longer drawing in active subscribers. It is awesome being able to fire up an account you haven’t played in years, and revisit old characters. While you are there more than likely you will spend at least a little money on the game. Essentially it is the model of “some money is better than no money”. The thing is, like I said above each and every one of these games that we vaunt so highly as free to play successes all had their time of box sales, expansion sales, and monthly subscription fees to pay back the excessively expensive development costs.

Do I get frustrated when a game that I have purchased the box for… and paid multiple months worth of subscription fees goes to free to play? Hell no… because while I might bitch and moan on a regular basis about various aspects of gaming… I LOVE the games I play. Whatever helps a game I have cared about succeed is ultimately going to be good for me personally in the long run. The games that reward me in some way for being there in the early days and helping pay off the huge debt a company brings with them after a game release… I love those even more. But I go into their free to play conversion knowing that ultimately they will be better off in the long run with incremental sales.

Additionally players who start at the beginning of an MMO will always have a tangible lead on players that start later, especially if the game converts to free to play. You have a head start in the economy before it stratifies, likewise you understand the lay of the land and where to acquire the best stuff. When Rift went free to play my account had so much stuff unlocked thanks to longevity of play that a starting player would not have had. For the explorers you get the feeling of actually discovering things before they are common place and on every website. So while you might have had to pay for the box and subscriptions, you are getting something for your trouble that no one will be able to take away from you.

The games that did not have a box fee and a subscription however have to claw their money out of you somehow. So while I get annoyed at loot boxes and item purchases and artificial gates to my gameplay… they are just trying to survive however they can, because ultimately at launch they were millions and millions of dollars in the hole at day one. I feel like launching as free to play is going to forever doom a game to jumping through coin slotted hoops as you play the game. Rift right now is the best player experience but I feel like it is only that way because they had two years and an expansion of relative success to pay off and fund a fully functional staff during all that time.

Wrapping Up

So if in a few years time… The Elder Scrolls online… that I have used as an example all the way through this post… decides it is beneficial to it to go free to play. I will greet the change with open arms, knowing that ultimately this is going to be the thing that keeps a game I hopefully will love healthy and open to the public. Going to go ahead and wrap this up, and likely get it posted. I hope you guys have a great weekend and that I can survive tomorrow. Sorry for breaking my own rules and cheating a bit by double posting on a Friday… but expect that I will have a normal post on Sunday.

Lucian Arrives

August 23, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning my happy people out in the land that is digital. I am feeling a bit better this morning, so I must have managed to get a decent amount of sleep for once. Quite honestly I think a good deal of my issues right now stem from the fact that my allergies are going into overdrive. Normally bit late August things have calmed down a bit here in Oklahoma. However all of the rain we have gotten seems to be kicking all the things into overdrive. Dear summer sun… why you no kill these weeds?

Lucian Arrives

Yesterday was mostly about League of Legends for me and some of my friends. The champion Lucian finally was available, and this was something several of us had been anticipating. Over lunch Rae and I both played him a bit in a 1v1 game to test out his abilities. Overall he feels like a much less tanky Graves, but with a few more murdery tricks up his sleeve. When we played him he felt extremely mana hungry… but apparently early in the day yesterday his Q was costing double mana… which could very well account for this.

He seems to have the same slowish building period that Graves does, but once he has a fair amount of gear his attacks become extremely potent. I know later in the evening Tam played a few games with him and really liked the end result. The Champion spotlight does a pretty good job of outlining his abilities. Personally when I played him I was constantly out of mana, because the cooldown on his abilities is far shorter than your mana pool can ever support. Essentially he feels like a bottom lane champ I could maybe get used to playing.

Seeking Bot

To this point… pretty much all of the champions I really enjoy playing have been top lane champions. Currently my favorites are WuKong, Darius, Garen, and Riven… all of which are primarily suited to the top lane… though I feel like Riven would do fine mid. Essentially the problem is… when playing with my friends I tend to always hog that one position of the map. While no one has complained… I just feel like I should branch out a bit and try and find something I enjoyed on the bottom lane.

As a result I have been playing quite a few 1v1 custom maps to play with various champions, and see which ones I could get used to. Early on Graves was a champion that Tam suggested I might like, since he played a lot of him early on. I enjoyed playing him, but I was prone to rushing things and engaging way before my items and abilities would support it. So he was a champion I played for a little bit while I was finding my own play style, but never really returned to. Lately I have dusted him back off and realized that I do really enjoy him quite a bit for what he is.

Additionally I had picked up Jayce when he was on sale some time ago but never actually got around to playing him. I have to say I really like him as a bottom lane champion and the tool kit is especially useful once the laning phase is over. The Shock Blast / Acceleration Gate combo seems extremely good at harassing other champions in your lane since you can poke at them near the turret with impunity. So far my favorite one of his attacks is To The Skies!… at one point last night I finished off a champion and stole the blue and red buffs with this little quick pounce. Essentially any champion with a “pounce” attack is a champion I like.

So combined with Lucian, that at least gives me three champions that I like on the bottom lane. I feel like there are probably more I should try. I picked up Kennen at some point because I like ninjas… but have never really played him much. The problem is… because of my dislike of mages… I tend to shy away from AP champions. Building AD feels natural to me… but the AP items all feel odd to me. I feel like this is a thing I need to get past at some point… but ultimately right now the ranged champions I enjoy are the ones that are also ADCs. The problem is that I have pretty much exhausted the AD ranged champions that I like. Ultimately I will have to get over the hurdle and start digging into some AP ranged champions to add some variety to the bottom lane.

Realm Reborn

This weekend begins the official head start for Final Fantasy XIV and I am climbing down off my fence and giving it a shot. Quite honestly a good chunk of what changed my mind was the fact that Green Man gaming has a 25% code(GMG25-OGRUH-7SM8H) that you can apply which takes down the Digital Collectors Edition to a level I am willing to gamble on. Additionally there are going to be a large number of House Stalwart folks giving it a shot. For me at least this is going to be mostly a weekend game. I still planning on playing Rift during the week because there are a number of things I want to do there. Additionally the guild is still pretty active and I love the vibe we have built there.

Final Fantasy is not really a primary game for me… the job system is really interesting… but it is still very wow like overall. Quite honestly… I know that this game will have worked its way out of our systems well before the First Quarter 2014 release of Elder Scrolls Online. I am under no illusions that this is the type of game that is going to hold the attention of our guild for very long… but it might be enjoyable to explore for awhile. Being brutally honest… the majority of folks will have burned through whatever they wanted and gotten bored of it within the first month… but for a few people it might hold some meaningful long term gameplay.

With the ability to do all the jobs and all the professions on one character… I really plan not to alt at all. Belghast Sternblade will be my only character far as I am concerned. We are settled into the Cactuar server, and I am really hoping Square pulls their heads out and fixes the server capacity issues we experienced last weekend. I was finally able to get in and register my head start code yesterday, so hopefully that is a sign that they have gotten a number of the kinks worked out. Overall the gameplay has been enjoyable, but we have struggled with infrastructure problems that never should have made it out of alpha testing.

Unfortunately this weekend I am not really sure how much playtime I will get. Friday night we have a wedding rehearsal, and Saturday morning I am photographing a wedding while my wife is a bridesmaid. Then Saturday night we have a baptism to attend. So that pretty much fucks both Friday and Saturday, leaving only Sunday to do anything enjoyable. My hope is that between the Wedding and the Baptism… we can run any errands we need to run so that Sunday we do not have to leave the house at all.

Wrapping Up

Well I have rattled on more than enough and now it is time for me to get my ass out of this house and on with the day. I hope you all had a good week and that you have a far less busy and annoying weekend ahead of you. I am nervous as hell to be honest… I have never shot a wedding. But this is a favor to a friend so I am sure I will muddle through as best I can. I am just not one for portrait photography… people tend to bore me as subjects go. But she was happy enough with the family portraits I shot for her… so here is hoping she will also be fine with my wedding photos.

Fear the Reaper

August 22, 2013 by Belghast

Hey look, it is morning again… and once again time to push random thoughts into Live Writer. I wish to god I knew what the hell was up with my sleep patterns. Last night I started attempting to go to bed around 8:30, but I still tossed and turned and woke up half a dozen times. I feel slightly less zombified than I did yesterday… but it is still not that great. I am beginning to suspect this is all thanks to my friend allergies, and then fact that I have been stuffed up for weeks. Maybe tonight I will try taking some Benadryl before hitting the sack.

Elder Subscriptions

Yesterday I wrote a rather long ramble about how the subscription model is something I am only wiling to pay these days, if I am really committed to a given game. I provided for an example the fact that I would be more than willing to pay a monthly subscription fee for the Elder Scrolls Online for example, whereas I simply am not for Wildstar. At the time of writing the post at 6 am… I did not realize that at 4 am that same morning it was announced that ESO would in fact be a subscription based game, and be charging something along the lines of the standard $15 a month “wow rate”.

The thing that I am comforted by is the fact that they seem to understand that for a subscription fee you have to give a kind of “premium” access. In the age of free games being really good, and easily accessible… you cannot simply allow players access to your game for the monthly fee. You have to sell your players on a service… that you will provide regular updates to them for free as part of that monthly commitment. The original interview that announced the information leaked a handful of details to this fact.

30-Day Free Time when you purchase the game, and then a monthly fee to play.
$14.00 / €12.99 / £8.99 per month.
Discounts for setting up multiple months at a time.
Game card support.
Promise: new content every 4-6 weeks.

The last part is going to be crucial. So many game developers have promised regular content updates. Some of them deliver for awhile, and then taper them off over time. Not to pick on them… but The Secret World was supposed to have monthly episodic releases… yet a little over a year into the game we have had 7. Granted there are multiple mitigating circumstances, namely the loss of most of their staff… but still very few companies have ever actually delivered on the promise of regular content updates. To the best of my knowledge the only two that have really excelled at it are Trion with Rift and Arena.net with Guild Wars 2.

Elder Scrolls promises to provide us a massive game world to explore, with two decades worth of land mass… literally every area we have ever explored in an elder scrolls game. But we all know that there will be a string of players that has burned through every inch of that content in a single week of playing. The success of this game will be to provide a constant stream of updates, and at a frequent enough pace to keep the players always engaged in the game and not gobbling up content in a purely episodic manner. That is the problem I currently have with The Secret World, the content is infrequent enough that I stop playing while waiting on the next “issue” to release… only to come back and gobble it up and then leave once more.

I feel like the trick that Elder Scrolls has up its sleeve that we are really not even fully capable of wrapping our heads around.. is that fact that it will be a fully fleshed out MMO experience launching on a console. Currently DC Universe Online is the best “MMO” experience that console gamers have, and at the end of this month Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn will be joining it. However both of those are limited to PlayStation 3 players only. ESO will be launching on both the PS4 and XBone and will be adding a completely different dynamic to the sink or swim equation.

Elder Scrolls in general is already massively popular among console gamers… so it will be interesting to see just how many of them are willing to pony up a monthly subscription fee to continue that experience. To me it feels like the console market is relatively untapped territory… and it could be the thing that ultimately pushes ESO over the top. There was a lot of gnashing of teeth among the PC gamers that we would be getting a watered down experience since ESO would be launching on the consoles as well… but I look at it in a completely different light. If we want regular content delivery… we ultimately want Zenimax to make as much from this game as they reasonably can to keep funding constant development time.

It will be interest to see how this all plays out in the end. I have been shocked at just how civil the discussion has been on the Bethesda forums. Sure there are a handful of doomsayers explaining how that ultimately this will lead to the end of Elder Scrolls as we know it… but the majority seem to be taking the announcement of a subscription model well. Normally that forum is a wretched hive of scum and villainy… that is known for its completely outrageous demands. My hope is this is a sign of how the Elder Scrolls community as a whole will take the announcement. Ultimately this is the community that Zenimax has to lock down as far as a subscriber base, not necessarily the roaming community of nomadic gamers.

Fear the Reaper

Another surprise from Gamescom yesterday was the announcement of the new Diablo 3 expansion… Reaper of Souls. What is so surprising about this to me… is the fact that Blizzcon is only a few months away. This is the type of announcement I expect Blizzard to hold in reserve for their own convention. This does however provide them a little bit of momentum and building anticipation as they move towards November. I will admit… this cinematic had me dusting off my Diablo 3 account and playing some last night.

Like many of my friends… I ultimately lost interest in the game once I finished the main storyline. We beat the game and then retired our characters completely. For me at least it has always been a problem with the click to move control scheme. However thanks to regularly getting coaxed into playing League of Legends… it feels a little less foreign than it did… and as a result I rather enjoyed playing my little monk last night. Overall I was a much bigger fan of Torchlight 2 than Diablo 3… but returning to it now it feels better than I had remembered.

Ultimately my one major problem with the game still remains. I hate the fact that I have to play on their servers, and as a result have to deal with server lag while playing essentially a single player experience. Most of last night things were going peachy… however there was one moment when I died due to a massive lag spike and went from full health to dead almost instantly. This is at the end of the day the most damning strike against the game. There should still be a “Lan” mode… even if you have to dial home every so often to save character data… the bulk of the interactions should be happening independent of the server.

I still feel like a complete sucker, that a pretty trailer got me to break out a game I had not played in over a year. I have always been a fan of the blizzard cinematics, and this is no different. They always manage to tell a compelling tale for whatever they are choosing to show. Overall I really don’t much care for the design of Malthael… but he does seem sufficiently creepy to carry the role of bad guy for another Diablo 3 chapter. WoW Insider has a rundown of the features… that include:

A new Crusader class, wears heavy armor as a tank, buffs/debuffs friends and enemies, not unlike Diablo II’s Paladin
Reaper of Souls will officially by Act V of Diablo III
Level cap raised to 70
Paragon level cap removed
All classes will get new spells as they progress to level 70
Something called a "multilevel Legendary item"
Substantial updates to the loot experience, "Loot 2.0" as named by Blizzard — you’re more likely to pick up items tailored to your current class
Overall loot reduced, not picking up as many items not needed by your current class
New Crafter: Mystic — re-roll stats on items, gives chance to create better gear
Two new endgame modes/activities: loot runs and Nephalem Trials

My hope is that the overall experience is far less forgettable than Diablo 3 was for me… and this will add features to the game that make me want to play it more often than you know… once a year.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap things up and head into work. Yesterday we got the new washing machine installed and I was able to do the loads of laundry that had gotten wet and soured due to the flood. Things feel like they are mostly back to normal. At some point we need to rent a carpet cleaner and try and get rid of the massive water stain in our bedroom, but that can be done later. The rest of my week will be focused on getting read for the wedding I have to photograph on Saturday. I hate weddings… so here is hoping that sitting behind the lens of a camera will make it less heinous. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope your weekend is going to be far less busy than mine.

Wildstar Woes

August 21, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land. I am trying to muster the “oomph” to do another days post. For whatever reason since the “flood” happened, I have not been sleeping well at all. I assume it is all the noise from the air mover fan we have had pointed at our carpet to try and dry everything out. Luckily at this point… I think the carpet is completely dry so here is hoping that turning it off tonight will render a full nights sleep.

Wildstar Woes

With all the recent strife caused by our washing machine and the subsequent damage… my morning posts have pretty much been dominated by that. However in the gaming world there was quite a little shake up… at least as far as the twitter-sphere is concerned. Monday Carbine announced the business model for Wildstar… and it was shockingly subscription based. I think most of us in the blogging circles had been expecting Wildstar to launch as a free to play or some sort of hybrid model. Instead we are getting a full subscription game with an implementation of the PLEX system from Eve.

Essentially all players will have to do one of two things to continue playing. Either they will pay a monthly subscription fee, or they will purchase and consume a C.R.E.D.D. on the open market that another player has purchased speculating that they can sell it for enough in game currency to make it worth their while. EQ2 also has a very similar system to this with the Krono, and it seems to work well enough at removing large sums of in game currency from the market. The big negative however is that mere mortals are unlikely to ever possess enough currency to buy one of these subscription tokens.

In the games I have played that have them they usually start off reasonable enough shortly after the program launches… but over time it continues to trend upwards gaining in game currency value. For example when I bought my first Krono in EQ2, they were selling for 500-600 platinum. However the last time I sold one, I was able to get almost 1000 platinum for them in a few months time. Additionally the REX token in Rift launched at around 600 platinum and now fetches roughly 1500 platinum depending on the server. Essentially it is constantly pushed out of the reach of anyone that is not an auction house baron or a habitual gold farmer.

Killing Casual Interest

Essentially in my experience there is really no way that anyone casually interested in a game like this can afford to buy the subscription tokens from the market. They are stuck with subscribing to keep their access turned on. For me my interest in Wildstar has gone from passing to pretty much dead zero. All thanks to the announcement that there will be a subscription attached to the game. Don’t get me wrong… I love subscriptions in games that I am really interested in. I will happily pay a monthly fee to support the game and gain buffet style access to all its features. But I am simply not “really” interested in Wildstar.

The problem is… in my large circle of gaming friends it seems very few players actually are. There are a bunch of us, that likely would have picked the game up were it a “buy the box” or free to play model. We would have given it a shot, seen what it was like in close up and maybe for some of us… it would have clicked. But the fact that I know there is both a box cost and a reoccurring subscription fee really makes the game something I don’t want to take a chance on. In a world where most of the games I have been playing… are free to play… that subscription fee seems like an awfully binding commitment.

Ultimately I will be sitting in the wings, waiting for the eventual switch over to free to play. That seems to be the thing to do these days… and what started off as a way to bail out a sinking game seems more and more like an actual business model. It feels as though there is the initial 6 month money grab of subscriptions… then a planned deployment of free to play to catch the players like me who were only casually interested in their net. If this is really in fact a business model, it seems like a very disingenuous one.

There are players who are supremely devoted to the subscription business model. One of my good friends Liore, has gone through a whole arc as a game she deeply cared about… namely Rift went free to play. While she has softened to the idea of the Rift free to play implementation… since arguably it is likely the most player friendly one on the market.. she still is not a huge fan of the “death of the subscription”. When a game company sets out to do a 6 month money grab then convert to free to play… they risk alienating all the players that are extremely pro-subscription.

Of Subscriptions

I guess at the end of the day… my problem is not that Wildstar has gone subscription at all. It is that Wildstar is not interesting enough to me to make me WANT to pay a subscription for it. Granted I have yet to play it at all… so maybe the proof is in the play style… but right now having only received the publically available information I am just not interested enough to commit to it. Additionally I seem to have a love/hate relationship with Science Fiction MMOs. I enjoy the hell out of them for a short period of time… but the scifi genre in general seems to lack the hooks to keep me there for long. Granted that would probably all change if a Mass Effect or Fallout MMO were ever to release. However I highly doubt either of those would happen, and quite frankly after SWTOR Bioware should farm out the “MMO” portion to someone more experienced.

Getting back on track… I don’t see anything fundamentally flawed with the subscription model. I pay a subscription to Rift, even though it is the best free to play model out there. I do it because they reward me in so many ways for doing so. Similarly I used to pay a subscription to EQ2, Lotro, DDO, etc… all of which are free to play games… because the subscription gave me something more than I could get otherwise. Ultimately this comes down to a case of me just not being that interested in Wildstar. The main issue with the subscription model is it turns off the revenue stream from players like me that might have bought the box if there were no strings attached.

Ultimately right now there are entirely too many good options for a player to play for no money outlay at all. It used to be that all you could play for free were a handful of subpar eastern games. Now you have games like The Secret World and Rift at your disposal… both of which are games I would happily pay a subscription fee for… but don’t have to. Essentially Carbine is asking players to take a gamble on their game… by buying the box and paying a monthly subscription and I feel as though a lot of players just are not willing to do that any longer. This is simply my point of view based on the “temperature” from both social media and blogs in response to the rather “shocking” announcement of Wildstar’s payment model.

Grain of Salt

Essentially you can take everything I just said today with a grain of salt. Just because I was shocked that Wildstar did not go free to play… does not necessarily mean I am opposed to the subscription model entirely. For example… if Elder Scrolls Online were to come out tomorrow and announce that they were going to be subscription only, it would be equally shocking. However I would care far less, because ESO is a game I am already 110% committed to playing at launch. From the moment it was announced I have been figuratively been like Fry begging them to “Take My Money!”. The difference is.. ESO is a title I deeply care about and have been wanting to play literally since the first time I played Morrowind.

I had played Daggerfall before, but with Morrowind I was already used to the MMO construct thanks to lots and lots of Everquest 1. All the while I was playing the game I kept thinking… man this setting would be so much more enjoyable if I could play it co-op. So I have been 100% sold on the concept of an online Elder Scrolls game since that moment. Each additional TES game.. has made me want the ability to play it with my friends even more. When I heard that Zenimax was working on an MMO, I hoped beyond all hope that it was the Elder Scrolls setting. At this point they could charge a $200 box fee, and $20 a month subscription… and I would likely still figure out some way to play it.

I feel however that this level of buy in from an MMO player is extremely rare right now. We are literally deluged with really good options that cost us next to nothing to play. The MMO climate is nothing like when WoW launched or even when Warhammer Online launched. Players are not looking to ditch their current game for something new… they want to dip their toes in the water first to make sure they like it better. Having both a box fee and a subscription fee sufficiently raises that barrier just high enough that a good number of players, myself included will not commit to the game unless we are completely sold on it. For an unproven brand, from a publisher that is notorious for selling their games short (NCSoft)… it just seems like a massive hurdle to cross.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap this up and get on the road. We are taking delivery of the new washing machine today… so I am only working a half day. Essentially I need to get to work and do a full days work in 4 hours. I hope you all have a great day and I hope everything goes smoothly with the delivery and install of the new washer. Last night was a bit of a mad dash around the house to try and clear room for the folks to move it into place. I think I am as ready as I will ever be.