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I do believe this shows P2P models have greater financial potential than F2P models.
They have greater theoretical potential in a situation they are almost certainly never going to find themselves in. The chances of any game getting anywhere close to WoW's subscription levels is essentially nonexistent. WoW came into the market as the most polished game in an environment where it really didn't have much competition, which allowed it to skyrocket its growth in the first three years, establishing a strong brand that let it ride through the next 2 years with growth.
That's not going to happen again. The new MMO market is WAY too saturated for that. A game that maintains 1 million subs is going to be the crazy P2P success story of this MMO generation.
And when we're talking 1 million subs, F2P could still be better revenue for the company if they can bring in 2-4 million players.
But what launching as P2P lets them do is:
1. Sell the game for an MSRP (that's a solid $30-40 million in sales revenue).
2. Work on getting their game stable and serviceable before they do the larger F2P launch.
Those are the two signficant points. A F2P game revolves around giving access to a ton of people. If your servers are going to be unstable, you need to do a soft launch, too. But soft launches help burn off the buzz, and diminish your potential player return.
SO, you get a whole bunch of players purchasing the game and playing on a free month to work out the kinks, then (assuming the game is good enough to stick around for) you'll have another 2-3 months of subs to get more content in. Hopefully another 3 months brings your second major content patch in.
You're going to ride this content stream for as long as possible - essentially, it's an aggressive, live development period. A paid beta.
If, on the incredibly unlikely chance that your population numbers have grown 6 months in, not shrunk (something ONLY WoW has achieved in the P2P market in the past decade, that I'm aware of), then they might decide to keep riding that trend to it's last breath. And that makes sense,
because spending money breeds investment in a game (subscription or RMT). These are players more likely to stick around and spend money after it goes F2P.
If that game actually keeps a growth pattern, or rises to the point where it has a solid base of revenue, it just makes sense to keep supporting it that way. Why switch up something actually meaningfully profitable, even if you think your profits could potentially rise under a new payment structure. That's still a big change to a game that's making you solid money - the gamble isn't worth it.
Not because F2P is inherently risky, but because massive change is inherently risky.
But for the VAST majority of games launching P2P, that growth trend doesn't happen. They don't get 1.5 million consistent subscribers.
So F2P becomes a very attractive option - a way to get their old players back, drastically grow their population, support their brand, and (through those 3 things), drive revenue.
You can rest assured EQN and Wildstar developers have had very serious conversations and made a lot of decisions about what their F2P models would look like, and they're both launching P2P.
Thayos wrote:
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Which of any of the games we've discussed launched as a free download?
In that sense, I guess you're right... no AAA title has ever launched as a F2P game.
And that's still not a valid reason to dismiss F2P, unless you actually feel fear of the unknown is a valid reason. I really, really hope you don't.