Everything important relating this topic is just fine explained in following linked article:

http://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/1vsez2/why_im_happy_eso_is_not_f2p_by_someone_who_works/

Exactly - F2P is a poor model with no long term draw.

Lots of heart felt and well reasoned arguments. None of which sadly can change the financial reality. The only thing that might is the release to consoles because its a largely untested market for MMOs.

Yes in an ideal world if a game can attract and retain at least 500k, preferably a million+ subs then its got lots of advantages as well as being a cash cow for the investors. But only Wow has really managed to make this work in a big way. There are other success stories but nothing like on the same scale and not for a game which cost as much to make as the likes of ESO. There are however plenty of big relatively new MMOs that have tried and failed to run subscriber models and ended up going free to play.

It doesn't really matter to me because there's nothing here (is ESO) to make me want it to succeed or for me to invest myself into it. I might play it a bit as a free to play game but I wouldn't buy or sub to it and frankly I think that the developers (or more likely the money men behind them) deserve their game to fail because its so amazingly unoriginal and while competently executed (bugs aside) its just more of the same as what's out there (much of which is free to play btw).

DAoC has a trial period and is STILL a Sub based game. Gives hopes eh?. Source: http://www.darkageofcamelot.com/

While I am a fan of subscription based models I have to disagree with a few points:

Even with a F2P model the games lives from more content. Look at Guild Wars 2... they deliver a lot of new and pretty good content. Players will only pay to buy extra stuff when the are actually playing the game and they will only play the game when they are having fun and they will only have fun if the devs keep the content fresh.

Here F2P has a potential advantage if done right players will spend more than 13$ a month... some WAY more on items. Of course you have to balance this so it does not become Pay2win. Of course this is potentially more while a sub. base game is more the black or white variation... you either pay the subscription or you don't while with F2P one month you might spend nothing and the next 100$.

Of course devs of F2P games also need to implement new streams of revenue... more stuff to buy this costs development time.

I think actually that WOW could have been WAY WAY WAY bigger with a free to play model... the correct question to ask... would it have stayed on the level it still has with F2P... maybe?

This has nothing to do with a subscription or F2P... it as question of revenue and profit. As I already said... F2P has great potential for revenue but this is not as stable as subscriptions. But the money they can (and many F2P games do) spend on development is just as big as with companies that run a subscription based model.

Again... this has nothing to do with the payment model. As long as players are buying the game currency there will be gold farmers. Actually F2P has the upper hand here sometimes as real money can replace ingame gold and the development company can use this to counteract the gold sellers buy ruining their profit margins.

Studies show that in the west 10 year old got on average quite a bit of money to spend. Also...what do you have against 10 year olds? Ok some of them are annoying little brats.... so are 33 years old like me. Other 10 year olds are quite pleasant company in a game while I had 40 year olds who I could have slapped every time they opened their virtual mouth.

F2P does not necessarily mean Pay2Win. Look at The Secret World. Ok they are not very successful but this has different reasons. But they make their revenue through mostly flavor items like cloth. Yea you can get boosters that save you a lot of time. But with their system it just saves you a little bit of time and does only give you an advantage over new players (not much of those around in that game).

Still in most F2P Games players still need skill to be successful in endgame content... most only speed up the process of leveling.

Actually, Matt Friror (afaik) was THE man behind the success of DAOC's RVR gameplay.

TESO is based upon that gameplay moreso than it is based on gw2.. from 2002 on I havent found an rvr experience that has come close to the fun factor in daoc.

Mythic entertainment (doac) made the mistake of selling to EA.. thats why the origianl creators are no longer there..

that being said, to this day DAOC sees success with a $15 a month sub fee. they charged for the expansion packs in the day as well.

I would call that a huge success..

GW2= junk, what you buy or find are just skins.. everyone is the same except for thier character build, which also can be respecced at will, again making everyone actually the same, but in different skins.

Ill gladly pay the sub fees for true content, and server maintenance.

So the game is terrible, and you're therefore waiting to play it until it gets cheap. That's odd: I tend to avoid games that I think are terrible.

It's not that I love subscription fees. It's that I hate everything about the so-called free to play approach: the entire focus of the development team is on extracting cash from players, not on compelling game play. At the best all of the effort goes into vanity items; at the worst, you're roadblocked.until you pull out your wallet, or you're forced to waste lots of your time to save cash (and the tradeoff is absolutely explicit.)

-two horrible guys I know can't afford the game. Trust me, Tamriel will be better without them

It didn't say it was terrible I said it was unoriginal but competent. I also allow for the fact that if it were free to play I might play it only to highlight the problem for subscription games. If you have your doubts or if you stop playing there is a big barrier there. If its free to play even someone who is not convinced can easily get it and play it and perhaps end up spending money. That's why it works better than a subscription model for generating revenue.

I actually enjoyed GW2 for a while. They had some nice system (Public Quests) and the more active combat was interesting. It has it's flaws but I would not consider it junk.

But for GW2 you can't complain about content. It is one of the games with the fastest development cycle and they deliver quite good content on a regular basis. What I do not like is, that new content locks parts of the old content... THIS svcks!

Been playing LOTRO since launch and all i have to say is.........

Couldn't agree more!

For myself at lease, I save tons of money with a monthly sub. When DDO went free to play, I was excited at first. Until I calculated how much I paid with free to play and a cash shop.

Within a year my husband and I had spend about $500 each, and the cash shop wasn't pay to win.

I feel for the xbox users, and am surprised they don't have a monthly sub. plan just for you guys that is more cost effective. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to start an argument, but with the bad reviews xbox has gotten, and with the fact you know that the ps4 sub is free, I'm surprised you didn't go for the ps4. However, that's my opinion, and neither here no there.

Every p2p MMO has been a great success with non stop content addition.

And people like me will flatly refuse to buy a so-called free to play game, as it represents a trend that we despise. That highlights a problem with your preferred solution at least as clearly as your approach does.

The difference is you don't have to buy a free to play game, you just have to have a moment of weakness and think oh I'll give it a try. Simple logic aside the last 5-10 years is littered with examples of Subscription model games that have switched to a f2p model as well hugely successful games that were launched as free to play, yet there are next to no subscription based games I can think of that would e considered major financial successes, except maybe Eve but they dared to make something different. The trend continues elsewhere, just look at the mobile phone gaming market which is increasingly dominated by free games with in-app purchases. I'm not saying for a moment there aren't problems with these models, but done well they can work and even done badly for the player they can still generate much better returns for the investors. Which like it or not (and I don't) is what its all about.

I have been playing, pay to play, since Everquest went retail. The pay to play method has always been a better gaming experience for me in every game I have played. DAoC was an awesome game for what it was. If those devs are on the team here at Xenimax then so much the better.

Many other posters in this thread have explained the details of why "Pay to Play" is better.

I pay minimum $20 to go see a movie solo or with a friend. It its a date then that is $40. So for less than the cost of viewing one two hour movie the big screen I can have around 100 hours of gaming experience for $15 a month. That is an amazing value to me.

I am not some college student on a tight budget nor am I a minimum wage flunky. Even when I had kids at home and a much higher monthy expense line on my budget, where can you get so much entertainment for $15 a month? Impossible.

Life's a subscription. At least with games, it's a luxury choice.

People complain about all the wrong things.

I think it's better to charge a sub but provide the base game for free. Even if it's the first 20 levels, or just a starter island. More people jump in, more people stay.

I'm convinced there's going to be a cash shop. That's just the way things go now, can only hope that with a sub, they won't go overboard with it.

Please no cash shop, not at all !!!

I want to spend Game money on game items. Not Real money on game items.

You're right we should be complaining about the whole social/economic model of representative democracy married to capitalism which is both becoming increasingly fragile and unsustainable, outdated and fragrantly abused by the haves to accumulate ever greater resources from the have nots. But somehow I think that would be considered somewhat off topic

Even if I agreed, so?

Let's look at this objectively. If tomorrow WoW 2 came out (not an expansion: a complete reboot). Lets assume that you played and enjoyed WoW (with a subscription). This new version of WoW boasts better graphics, improved mechanics, a faster network layer, new content and some quality-of-life tweaks here and there. Otherwise, it's basically the same game. Would you drop your old WoW subscription for this new one? Most players would; how do I know that? FIFA, Call of Duty, Battlefield, GTA. Need I go on? Some die-hards would remain in the original game (testament to that is COD MW2), but that would be a vast minority.

To put into perspective as to how silly this sounds: I am not going to read LOTR: ROTK because I read LOTR: FOTR because, man: it's still a book with black letters on pages. Nothing original. Pfft. Naah, won't play Skyrim because it's still the same thing as Morrowind. Nothing original.

Innovation is hard and risky. Innovate one little bit and players are biting off your hand because "your game doesn't do this from game X." So you go change it to closer match specified game and the same very crowd starts chanting that "your game svcks! No innovations." One of the most requested changes to GW2 is to re-introduce the trinity; but eliminating the trinity is exactly how they innovated - players spew vitriol and anger in their forums because what they really wanted was WoW 2.

Make up your minds. Stop derailing threads opened by those who can appreciate the game and want to discuss its merits.

No, no - please, tell me more!

Sometimes you have to wonder if going off-topic isn't a bad thing.

There are countless F2P cash shop games out there. They come, they go, they get forgotten.

There's a reason WoW is brought up everywhere.

No the real difference is your using assumed logic to fit your argument. There are cases on both sides that you can lose or gain more users if your game is F2P or P2P. Different people are turned off by both methods. You have no actual data to support your claim that the F2P model works better for inferior products or on quicker returns. Citing cases of previous failed or bad games doesnt suit this line of thinking either because each one of those games had varying circumstances that lead to their decline.

Simple logic aside the most successful MMO game ever has always had a sub fee as well as AAA retail box price for it and every expansion it released.

At the very least with a Subscription based model there is accountability on the developers end. There is no excuse for the game to not recieve content updates or have great support. with a F2P game even in the best case scenario like people have said developer time is spent on costumes and vanity purchases that are ultimately meaningless content.