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Free-To-Play Switch Going Well For D&D Online
babboo65 writes "Dungeons and Dragons Online is enjoying a second life in terms of player count and buzz, all thanks to its new business strategy: giving the game away. Turbine is making their MMO as accessible as possible, and that includes making players who don't pay anything as happy as possible. Subscriptions are up 40 percent. Ars explores how free can be very profitable."
Matthew 7:13-14
Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.
How much easier could Satan be making it than providing the game for free online?
Some required reading
I won't walk, I'll run away from games that employ strategies like this in the future. I got into a browser game a few years ago called Travian that promised to be "free" and you could buy "gold" if you wanted extras like instant builds or NPC merchant trading or +25% resource production boosts. I quickly realized that if you wanted to be in the top 500 players on a server of about 1500 active players you HAD to buy and use gold or else there was no way to keep up. I got so addicted to it that rather than wait 15 minutes for a resource to build I'd just insta-build it so I could move on to the next building level.
The problem was that by abstracting the currency it made it far easier to spend out of control. You'd pay $25 for 600 gold (~4 cents for each piece of gold) and you'd spend 3 gold (12 cents) to NPC trade, 2 gold (8 cents) to instabuild your queue of up to 2 things at a time (if you had the "plus" feature which added the queue for 15 gold (60 cents) a week), 5 gold x 4 (80 cents) to boost production of iron, wood, clay, and wheat, 3 gold x 2 (24 cents) to boost attack and defense bonuses by 10%, etc. The NPC trading was by far the worst money sink since it was so easy to abuse. You *could* trade with normal players, but nobody really does past the first few weeks of game play (the game round lasts a year) since it is impractical to try and find a trade for tens of thousands of resources... so you NPC trade it instantly for 3 gold (12 cents).
So, at a minimum you'd spend $6.56 a month for the Travian Plus feature plus +25% resource boosts, +10% offensive and defensive bonuses. That at first seems reasonable for running such a cool game, but I was averaging around $100 a month on gold because of NPC trading and instabuilding. My coworker had it worse because his two sons were playing and he was even worse with the instabuilding. His monthly Travian habit, including his two sons' costs were running him around $300/month. FOR A GAME!
So no thanks, I'll take a $15/month subscription fee ANY DAY over a microtransaction arrangement where you need to eventually spend obscene amounts of money just to be in the top players.
This is where you clearly have never even looked at the game in question(DDO). The game does not revolve around player vs. player, though there are some very very limited forms of it in the game(in certain taverns there are combat pits).
The DDO method of free to play is really giving you an unlimited taste of the game for free by offering a bit of free content without making all content for free. You have the option to either play the free content on multiple characters to generate enough "Turbine Points" to purchase additional content, or you can pay real money for Turbine points which you can then use to get the content package of your choice. If you don't like being limited in what you can access, you can just become a normal $15/month subscriber to get access to all the content in the game. In a month or two, if you don't want to pay the monthly subscription any more, you can switch back to free to play, lose access to the non-free content you have not purchased, but you don't LOSE what you have accomplished. Those who pay the monthly subscription also get 500 Turbine Points each month they are a subscriber, and those points can be used to unlock content for the free to play if the player decides to go back to Free to Play status.
So, DDO offers the best of both worlds. You get free to play with micro transactions, and you get subscription based for those who want all the content the game has to offer. There are also no "player rankings" as such, so no one really cares about who has the absolute best stuff, as long as your skill at playing your character is at an acceptable level(clerics who don't heal, or who don't know how to use mass healing spells in a raid situation may upset others for example). There is also a tolerance for poor equipment levels to an extent as long as party members know about it in advance so it doesn't kill what the group is trying to do.
And, this is why DDO is seeing good subscription numbers from the release of Free to Play. Some people may upgrade for only a few months to get full access to the "premium" content in the low to mid levels, and then switch back to the Free to Play and then only buy the few high level premium modules they want access to after that. Or, if new content is released often enough, they may stick with their subscription so they don't have to buy each new content pack as it is released.