FilthMcNasty wrote:
Missing the point. Topic is related to the way P2P games are developed vs F2P games. Housing was designed to take 3 months for the typical player to be able to achieve. Whether or not you thought it was cheap or expensive, you weren't expected to be able to unlock it. The way that the cost was setup clearly demonstrates that.
Yes clearly despite Limsa's ward 1 being flooded with houses now and other districts in the works while Gridania and Ul'dah see moderate activity. I guess all those FCs that have achieved this impossible feat that they weren't supposed to be able to kind of discredits this little tirade. You're finally reaching that point where you've been out of the FFXIV loop for a while now and don't seem to know what's going on.
Besides, the only person seemingly missing the point is you. Why are you using one specific example to discredit a person's statement when we are talking about a subset of the MMO genre?
You don't play GW2? So...you're less experienced with F2P than I thought originally. Would you mind speaking of any other F2P games you've had some experience with? I would really like to know.
FilthMcNasty wrote:
I'm done here.
Barring your ability to pull some examples out of your rear in the F2P MMO genre, I agree.
As for people thinking that GW2 somehow doesn't apply to the F2P genre, it gave me a good chuckle.
IF F2P had a successful game to use as a demonstration of success, I'd hope you would pick GW2. But even then, I'd like you to list some simple statistics for me because, quite frankly, F2P MMOs are notorious for either lack of statistics or listing ones that do not really give you the full picture.
It's natural for a P2P to release statistics and not need to elaborate due to the nature of how the system works. However, when a F2P MMO tells me they have 1.5 million registered users, I think, "Wow. This tells me nothing."
There's a huge flaw with your line of reasoning. Money talks and most companies have finite amounts of it, you know? Servers and bandwidth are not free. Dedicating staff to a project that does not rake in revenue is a pretty big waste of resources.
Without a cash shop, a F2P MMO's fate rests upon the initial purchase and their advertisement division. Even with a cash shop, you are not guaranteed anything UNLESS you gate content behind it like GW2.
When you look at both models in terms of finances, a P2P will win almost every time provided the development team expends their resources in an intelligent manner. You have money to maintain the servers/purchase new ones, to invest on future expansion packs, and pay staff to work on actual content patches. On top of this, most P2P MMOs still can implement cash shops via server transfers/character aesthetics/collectable items that do not give in-game advantages, furthering their ability to acquire money and reinvest it.
If you'd like to talk about an ideal world, the door is in the other direction. F2P games, in general, are pretty successful. F2P MMOs, on the other hand, are doomed for failure due to limited resources. They exist in large droves, now, because the likelihood of producing WoW Jr. is very slim.
When you ask a company if they want to make a potential investment on a game to compete with another game on the market that has had a huge monopoly for years using their model (WoW) or go with a model where the turnover rate is high and no game seems to have any monopoly on the market, the obvious answer is the later. Knowing the approximate time for turnover and the maximum amount of money the average person will spend on your cash shop, you can easily calculate revenue produced and decide whether it is viable or not.
This is exactly the opposite of what I described above. F2Ps are not popular, as of this time, because of their huge success...they are popular because companies lack either the resources or creativity to produce something to rival the current monopoly figure.
Edited, Feb 10th 2014 12:21pm by HitomeOfBismarck