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DC Universe Online Goes F2P
mlauzon writes "It seems a lot of companies are seeing the light and turning their subscription based games into the F2P model, or 'freemium,' as it's now being called. Quoting Massively: "For those of us who lack Batman's financial resources, maintaining several monthly MMO subscriptions can be a challenge. Sony Online Entertainment recognizes this, and as a result, the company has just announced that DC Universe Online will be officially joining the freemium revolution toward the end of October."
Free as in free, or free as in micro-transactions? There is quite a difference and most take the latter.
Not shocking, as the game sucks and paying a monthly sub for it is just retarded. I think everyone but the die-hard masochists subbing it right now have figured that out.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
As to how this all relates to the New 52 though, that will be interesting.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
These free to play games are usually pay-to-win or at least pay-for-power. That's not automatically bad! Here's how to think about that: a pay-for-power game is never actually free. The cost of the game is the price for buying all the power that it's possible to buy. A game like Age of Empires for example costs about 100$ - it's not free, it's really expensive! Think of a free-to-play but pay-for-power game as a gimped free trial, just like lots of other games have free trials. This way of thinking cuts straight through the marketing bullshit. From this perspective, it's clear that it's just not true that games are becoming free. All that is happening is that trials are becoming more comprehensive and that the marketing departments the world over have gotten a new toy.
F2P never really described what i've seen. I'd call it nickle and dime you to death with little bits of crack as a reward.
Yeah. That fits pretty good.
At best it's free to try. But to play? You need all those things the free account won't include to play with friends. You WILL be paying. Sooner or later. You WILL.
Agreed. I had high hopes, but their insistence upon re-inventing EVERYTHING and going against common MMO UI elements (screwed up movement, no way to put things the way you want them) made the game unplayable at best. Last I heard PC and PS3 players weren't on the same servers, so why bother making the game interface dumbed down for the PC? Chat interface was ABSOLUTELY THE WORST one ever created for an MMO. I've played early beta versions of stuff like LOTRO where stuff wasn't completely baked when players were let into the world, and the release chat system in DCU was completely useless.
I'm a huge comic book fan, but the superhero MMOs so far have been disappointing. CoH made endgame play impossible without a group AT ALL TIMES. Champions Online managed to sort of capture the flavor of the P&P game that I loved in the 80s and 90's but then fell into the RMT store crap. DCU Online, for all of it's great license potential, is the biggest crapfest of the lot. After the first two days trying to play it, I never logged in again. Didn't even play out my first "free" Month.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
That requires a premium subscription.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
This game is by Sony right? So you have to sign away your right to class-action them for anything, risk receiving rootkits, and have your personal data distributed to criminals?
Did I miss anything?
Well, it is kind of a stupid idea. Seriously, if you have a city with a couple hundred thousand superheros in it, are they still "super" or just "above-average"? Since nobody's going to play as Jimmy Olsen or Alfred the Butler, and everybody wants to be a hero, then they've got to create cockamamie NPCs for you to save, and usually you don't really care about the NPCs because the characterizations in MMOs are rarely good enough to create any kind of emotional bond. Throw "F2P" into the mix and you've got certain fail on your hands.
It appears that the people making most online MMOs just aren't very creative except when it comes to building business models that piss off the customers.
If the game was good enough, I'd pay $15/mo to play. I didn't mind paying to play Eve-Online for a few years because it was clever and hard and involving and the community was good.
All of the microtransaction games where you do or do not choose to give them money online all seem kind of skeevy. The ones I've played at least. They all make me feel a little queasy, like a greasy video poker machine in the back of a working class bar. You know it's nothing but a machine for taking away the money of the desperate and ill-informed and just knowing it's there makes you feel bad. That's how the "F2P" games come across for me. I'm not sure there's a remedy, either.
When a truly interesting and compelling F2P game comes along, I'll be happy to admit I'm wrong. Until then, I'm not going to try any new ones without a really solid recommendation from someone I trust, or two. And even then, I'll expect the worst.
You are welcome on my lawn.
All of the microtransaction games where you do or do not choose to give them money online all seem kind of skeevy. The ones I've played at least. They all make me feel a little queasy, like a greasy video poker machine in the back of a working class bar. You know it's nothing but a machine for taking away the money of the desperate and ill-informed and just knowing it's there makes you feel bad. That's how the "F2P" games come across for me. I'm not sure there's a remedy, either.
I agree completely. As soon as that's the business model there is an irresistible urge for them to start nickle and diming you, to start designing the game around tempting you to insert another quarter at every turn...
My advice for MMOs is -don't- go this route.
Personally this is what I'd like to see... a pay-as-you-go model... $1/day... and if I hit more than 15 days in a month then it caps at 15$. .its not worth the hassle of re-activating and so forth... and i just play somehting else instead.
My problem with MMOs is that I might play a weekend, and then not log in again for 3 weeks... or play daily for a 2-3 weeks and then not log in for a month... I have no problem with $15/mo when I'm "playing" but I don't like seeing the bill for $15 hitting my card and me realizing I've only played 1 evening in the last 4 weeks... so i cancel... and then the next time I want to log in..
I'd still play 3 or 4 different MMOs casually if they supported this, and a few more I'd try.. but as it is I'm not sub'd to any of them.
Unfortunately, if an MMO did that many of its current subscribers would pay less, and its unknown whether they'd pick up more players to offset the loss as a result... meanwhile many of the F2P models out there actually end up costing most players MORE than it did when it was a subscription game... which just solidifies my objection to the f2p model.
Despite game makers thinking f2p is the next bastion of making easy money, they'll eventually realize, even if they make it free, when everyone else is free, they're back at square one... with a game encrusted in micro-transactions. Going f2p won't make a game good. If it sucks it will continue to suck regardless.
I also seem to be part of a growing crowd of gamers who also would rather pay for a good game, rather the having to play it after it's f2p. f2p models, even ones like TF2, tend to ruin games. Even know the content Valve is continually adding to TF2 to make it desirable is starting to pass a quality threshold where it doesn't even seem like the properly balance stuff before kicking it out the door.
You do know about credit cards right? There are all kinds of fees for a transaction and this makes a 15 times a $1 fee NOT the same in money earned as a 1 time 15$ fee. It is part of why iTunes is so expensive, the CC companies are cleaning up on those small transactions. That is why micro-transactions are often done through points, so that you don't end up paying most of your small payment to the credit card company and NOT the company you are buying from.
Expect about half of a dollar transaction not to make it to the company at the end. That means your proposal would net them 7.50$ for a months worth of playing... oh my goodness! The richess! If you even make ONE support email that can be answered easily and with no going back and forth, they are already paying you to play.
It is part of the whole MMO problem, MMO players are stuck witht the idea that 14,99 is not only the amount games should cost for 20 years already but complaining that this is insanely expensive! While drinking 5$ dollar coffees.
Most MMO companies keep their figures hidden but anyone who has ever run a service requiring support knows just how expensive it all becomes especially if you want to moderate. Players often demand instant assistence in the game but refuse flat out to pay for it.
It would be interesting to get an honest answer from players in a poll like way to this question:
How many minutes of support from a human being do you expect for 14,99 in a month?
Pretty damn sure the answer will show absolutely zero understanding of the costs of labor. Just look at budget airlines, the reason they are so cheap is because they cut all the service but then people complain they don't get service for their 50 dollar around the world ticket... no shit sherlock.
It was nice to read the parents post, just another reminder about how little the average MMO gamer understands about economy. He should have mentioned how Guild Wars can offer a MMO for just the box price! Prooof! (that offering an extremely cut down MMO experience with no support and no moderation is cheaper then offering a full game)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'll go with this. See my earlier comment regarding partial custody and playing with kids.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Wow, neat! At what payment level do I get to have my personal information stolen? I'm so excited, I can't wait to have my credit card number sold to the Russian mafia and my username and password hash posted on 4chan!
In Sony-speak, "poor internal security" translates into "massive business opportunity".
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
I was recently involved in a discussion about F2P game models...here is a an except from a post I made regarding some recent experiences with F2P games (DC Universe most closely resembles DDO in the examples I give).
""Google free to play MMORPG some time, and see what is out there."
I did that, and without exception, there was always some serious catch to the "free" part of the title. Paying wasn't much better.
The worst example is my last experience--Runes of Magic. Most of the in-game equivalents of such things as the items required to upgrade gear are severely gimped, making them almost useless in comparison to the items bought with RL cash from their store. To make matters worse, MANY of the items, both free in-game and item store purchased, have a chance, repeat, a chance of giving you exactly what you wanted--a purchase is often a bag that has a chance of having what you paid for in it. It is nothing more then gambling, only with payouts in virtual items. I asked in open chat how much people were paying, for item store purchases, each month in order to have access, gear-wise, to end-game content--the first person that responded stated he spent $600US the previous month on consumables alone. Needless to say this sort of brought chat to a standstill for a little bit. After that, a few chimed in, with clearly stated guilt, that they spent around $100-200 a month to play the game. It's a Casino disguised as an MMO.
Dungeons and Dragons Online was even more frustrating--you had to have a monthly account, or you had to purchase "modules" for dungeon/zone content. If your friends didn't have them you couldn't play with them in those areas. What really pissed me off was paying for the monthly account only to find out that some of the areas still had to be purchased from the "item store". It's a bait-and-switch.
Those two models are how all of the "free-to-play" games I tried worked. One plan, or the other--and each screwed over both paying and non-paying customers alike.
Thus, I am back to UO."
The only way I found it comfortable to play was with a controller and not with my keyboard. It is another example of a grand scale fuckup in the MMO industry.
I won't be subbing to or playing games from Sony ever again after the SOE hacks.
IMHO the real way for any MMORPG, who didn't want to goes F2P (Free To Play), it is going for a B2P (Buy To Play) with Item Shop, with item that are just esthetic. Like Guild Wars or Guild Wars 2!
What people forget is that bulk really allows you to cut costs. Call center support is a good example. Running multiple call centers is expensive so can't be done for small setups BUT this means you need night shifts. The bigger the support, the more I can specialize each support tech and still have them work full time. Example? Apple could have one person answering all the calls for how to start your phone and have them busy all the time. Your local plumber's wife probably got to call her husband who is out on a job to answer a technical question.
I know this because I have been in both situations, written applications that were supported by a tech center with scripts and been in places were the receptionist just patched customers through to me, the developer. Needless to say that the small setup spend more and therefor had to charge more then the big place.
WoW does alright but it does it because it is the only game in town and some claim they have left the game because of the lousy support and the lack of moderation leading to lots of assholes misbehaving.
I am reminded of Pathe, a dutch cinema chain. For years they neglected their cinema's leading to lots of stable customers leaving because they had their movie interrupted by late comers, misbehaving people, callers etc etc. Now they are trying to cleanup BUT this is going to cost them way more because they will have a time when neither group of customers will be coming. The late comers will be refused a ticket and I am watching on my home cinema.
How is this related? Support costs, WoW charges little but does little and the game is overrun by 12 year olds who complain about the high fee. While people like me play other games and could happily pay tenfold for a smoother experience if there was the option.
One of the reasons I know how high costs are is that years ago I researched the option of human assisted config. It wasn't always simple and making it simple would involve to many elements, so why not have people do it over the phone instead. Since that company already payed a LOT to call customers back who had done it wrong. Then I learned just how much a call costs. I believe the absolute minimum we got at was a guilder (half a euro or so) per minute and that was leaving lots of costs like the building out. And what can you do in a minute? Jack of twice of course but not much in the way of support. Try it. No, not the fapping!
As for the high charge rate, Apple actually got a low rate because of their size. I can't tell you the rates I work with because they are highly confidential but the transaction costs for iDeal (dutch bank system) are very low in comparison consisting of a mere flat fee per transaction of 45-55 cents depending on the amount you do. Whenever I tell this figure to American businesses in trying to persuade them to do business in Europe, they don't believe me, no way can it be that cheap.
Apples taking 30%, the credit card companies laugh at that.
The best thing that could happen to online transactions is for the credit card companies to finally get some competition.
Why do you think Credit Cards are so unpopular in the rest of the world? Many dutch business charge nothing for iDeal but charge a couple of euro's for CC because that is what they end up paying. On a thousand dollars that is the cost of doing business but on 1 dollar.
Another piece of proof? Dutch shops WANT you to pay with pin (debit card system) rather then cash for ANY transaction, even a CHEAP cup of coffee. Try that with a credit card.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
its confidant. Cosmonaut is a space traveller.
It's not Freemium it's Feemium.
I haven't played DC Universe, but the trend in asian MMO's is that they hold back half the customization options and many special outfits, weapons and pets. In the case of some games, they also play the "Arcade game" card which means the difficulty is tuned in a way to extract the most amount of money out of players by paying to continue when they die (albeit this is a time tradeoff, since some missions may take as long as two hours to complete, and paying 25 cents to resurrect on the spot is preferable to having to spend 2 hours to get back.)
If I had designed such games, I would have put more emphasis on a fun game and anti-bot/anti-cheating before flipping on the premium features. This is something that every damned MMO out there fails at. They see $$$ in their eyes and don't give a shit about the rampant cheating, which in turn causes more players to just cheat and not buy the premium features. The "end-game" with these MMO's is that there are only two population bases, the 97% that don't pay for anything, and the 3% "premium kings" that fund the entire game by paying for the premium content and selling it for the in-game currency. They never really have to play the hard parts of the game since they can just buy their way past it.
Unfortunately the fun is truely sucked out of the games when you can just buy all the game rewards cheaply. Too many of these games are turning into cow-clickers.
What they're actually providing you with, when you play an MMO, is server time. So why don't they charge for that? 20c/hour, or something like that - so someone who plays a few hours a day ends up paying $10-20 per month, and someone who only logs in once every 2-3 weeks only pays for the time they use.
Amalgamate it into a single bill at the end of the month, plus an extra ~50c to pay for the credit card transaction fee.
About time.
Oh wait, that wasn't it was it...
It's time to get out of your parents' basement if you have enough time to play several MMOs (and be any good at any one of them), but lack the financial means to do so.
Not all of them. I would start playing Everquest again if there was a F2P option. Unfortunately that's just for EQ2.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
The problem with that from their point of view is that it makes it far too easy for you to walk away. If you have a lot of money invested in a "F2P" model game, or you have a running subscription that means unless you're playing two or three nights a month you feel like you're not getting your money's worth, it's much harder to take a few weeks away from the game, and people who find it easy to take a few weeks away might also find that they like to do other things and end up leaving the game completely. That's why they'll never make it easy for you to dip in and out when time permits, they'll always want some hook to keep you coming back more often.
The new ToS that Sony has made would not stand up in court, at least not in Canada, because companies are not allowed to do what Sony is trying to do with that new ToS!
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
Free as in; I do not have to give them any personal information, any business information, any money, and free of any chance installing their software will effect my computer? That would be the only circumstances I would involve myself with Sony.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
And don't forget, you can't form a class-action lawsuit, AND can only submit to arbitration!
(Those PSN terms are coming to all Sony online services near you, if they haven't already).
The EQ 2 implementation is pretty bad unless you really enjoy grinding, because the highly restrictive cash and inventory limitations keep you from being able to do much else.
The problem with that from their point of view is that it makes it far too easy for you to walk away.
Agreed. But at the same time, it ensures I never leave completely, because I never left.
The current model, has the casual player in this perpetual frustration cycle... of enjoying the game, and not wanting to quit, but resenting how little they play and pay for it. Sooner or later, they cancel... and then they are gone for good.
My proposal makes it easier for them to walk away... but leaves the door open to come back. I know I would still be playing MMOs today if they had a reasonable pay as you go option.
For instance; Anarchy Online and Runescape. Both of these games give you the full game that paying customers used to get. Expansions cost the monthly fee, but as long as you stick to the original game you can have a complete rewarding experience totally free.