The op failed to account as to why subscription games are doing better. Is it because players are generally discontent with the f2p model and prefer the subscription model, or is it that the subscription games/expansions that recently came out are just a better playing experience?
What this game needs is but fixing, and a focus on gameplay improvement. Close the gap between those that know the system (dps wizards) and those that are clueless. Give us better content, such as enhanced ai. If you give your customers a better product they will spend.
One thing DCUO does do that would be relevant is that lockboxes autodestruct in 30 days if unopened. So no saving them up waiting for a sub and people actually WANT the unopened ones.
The op failed to account as to why subscription games are doing better. Is it because players are generally discontent with the f2p model and prefer the subscription model, or is it that the subscription games/expansions that recently came out are just a better playing experience?
What this game needs is but fixing, and a focus on gameplay improvement. Close the gap between those that know the system (dps wizards) and those that are clueless. Give us better content, such as enhanced ai. If you give your customers a better product they will spend.
I think it's probably some of both but I think a big factor is that a lot of people pinched pennies between 2009 and 2014.
I think the experience in sub games was at least more consistent but even big spenders liked knowing they could log back in and didn't have to quit in a month where content was light or if they were short on cash.
But unemployment is down. People are making better money in the U.S. than they did in 2009 and may spend $15 more freely for a better experience. And in China, incomes are up, period, and they now have gaming consoles, which provide an alternative to F2P MMOs.
I'm not suggesting subs be REQUIRED at all. Just that $15 a month in personal purchasing (which is different than ZEN trading) would make the game less risky. And could be done in terms of XP boosts/rested XP/reduced playtime required in a way where it wouldn't cost Cryptic much real money to boost the quality of Gold perks in terms of XP/services and might actually improve revenue and reduce risk from month to month to borrow something like the DCUO "lockbox buffet" model.
On the lockbox front, you just need to:
Discontinue selling new LTS.
Have lockboxes disappear if unopened after 30 days.
Get enough players subbing so the revenue is the same or higher than what you'd get from a small number of big spenders on lockboxes.
Incidentally, they could tie lockbox droprates internally to total number of subs.
Or reversing things just a bit:
Have special lockbox keys drop for gold players.
Gold keys expire after 30 days and the special keys themselves are non-tradeable.
Tie key droprate to total number of subs on the backend to avoid giving too many keys away. More subbers = more keys dropping for everyone who subs.
Years ago when I heard F2P is the future and pretty much every game is going to change to that system, my first thought was it'll pass.
One major problem I have seen is the F2P model was a specific design to provide QoL upgrades, vanity, social and other fun items for microtransactions People would pay a little bit without thinking too much to make the game more fun, because they enjoy the game
Many F2P have large purchases, gambling, power selling in it, these aren't the F2P model. It isn't surprising that people are going to burn out on the game and the people.
This also, as we see in STO, creates/fuel gambling addictions and leads devs to destroy the gameplay while only creating new systems that provide the best ROI. Why make a game fun when you can make stuff to sell? Its a system that is self destructive and not sustainable. Are we seeing the results of that industry wide? I hope so
I think limited F2P is actually brilliant as a problem with sub models was that they could be socially disruptive.
In a typical sub game according to what I heard, people often take a month or three off quite frequently and become less invested. Also getting people to try sub games was sometimes tricky and having an alternative to paying works for some people and makes them effectively "content" for paying players.
I do think hybrid in some form makes sense or that you want a robust trial or maybe sub with a "day pass" rate or ability to suspend paid for gametime and reactivate. (Ie. a sub where the time only ticks down for days you are logged in more than an hour in a day.)
I actually think there's something to the idea of a gambling buffet where:
- You have a way to earn or trade for store credit in game. (LOTRO actually mints new store credit for players of the game based on accomplishments. PWE games in turn leverages gold-selling, effectively.)
- You have a gambling system that uses store credit.
- You have a monthly fee that allows for unlimited gambling for free but which requires a direct purchase.
This actually mobilizes the gambling urge but makes it directed at people who aren't directly spending cash. And takes a fairly socially responsible attitude towards the cash spender.
If I want to play 100% free and trade for currency, basically, I can gamble with other people's money, right? And if I'm actually spending money PERSONALLY then I get buffet access to the gambling feature. It's actually smart because encourages the gambler to personally spend real money on a sub but also uses gambling to provide value to the authorized goldselling if the free player legitimately doesn't want to or can't pay a sub. And it's more profitable if hybrid subbers (assuming a high subscription value) are, like I say, maybe around 8 times as common as the biggest scale pure F2P whales would be.
I'll actually go one further, thinking through what I think is a good model:
- You have a way to earn or trade for store credit in game. (LOTRO actually mints new store credit for players of the game based on accomplishments. PWE games in turn leverages gold-selling, effectively.)
- Much like STO's dilithium cap, you have a control which limits how much gold-selling can occur, which secures a level of store credit value for gold-sellers.
- You have a gambling/lockbox system that uses store credit.
- The gambling/lockbox system includes some "second chance" currency award. (Like Lobi in STO.)
- Any subscription fee is optional for access to gameplay or at least optional for SOCIAL PLAY. (Single player content might be monetized in some way but group content is definitely free.)
- You have a monthly subscription fee that allows for unlimited gambling/lockbox and QoL features like faster leveling but which requires a direct purchase.
- You have a $15 monthly free item for subscribers. (Possibly in place of a store credit stipend.) The item may include things like new races, classes, or abilities. (It might include single player content packs.)
- The item-of-the-month goes on the store for $20 worth of store credit (which can be earned or bought).
- All other store items aside from the monthly item are cosmetic or are account-level services like character slots or character re-rolling.
This incentivizes continuous subscription and allows you to get "back subscriptions" off of players who skip months subbing or who come along later. But it doesn't penalize the free player all that dramatically. And any player can get anything aside from a subscription itself for indirect payment via gold-selling and/or store credit earned for game activities.
If economic depressions help F2P then they should be booming, because the economy has only been going down since 2007.
May I ask where, roughly, you are based?
The national and overall western economy has been continuously improving since 2009, albeit slowly for lower middle class and middle class.
Regional gains may vary, naturally, and some regions are losers, typically rural tourist spots/real estate-based economy markets and some troubled industrial hubs like detroit. I'm looking primarily at the U.S., western European, and Chinese economies OVERALL and has been upward enough to offset OVERALL for what individual areas experience.
Granted, wage stagnation and decline is a problem but that's more about share of economic gains for people without college degrees (and isolated age and demographic groups, high unemployment among teenagers and difficulty returning to work for retirement age people) than it is about whether the overall economy is improving. The average person with a bachelor's degree who is in typical working years has seen wages which outpace inflation. The average is not the individual and total market health doesn't necessarily indicate personal economic gains as the economic gains that have occurred do favor people with education and money.
You can get into discussions about deficits and national debt but they aren't really relevant here and are more of a long-term issue. The U.S. deficit has declined every year since 2009 despite skyrocketing in that year. The total levels of U.S. debt have increased but the amount of U.S. debt relative to money owed the U.S. has stayed fairly stable and most of the U.S. national debt would be eliminated if we also called all of our debts or transferred our debts to debts owed to us.
We borrow money from people who owe us money and both sides maintain a debt with one another rather than cancel debt fairly frequently. The U.S. and U.K. for example owe one another money, I believe, without canceling debt on either side. The point is actually to maintain a link between our economies for diplomatic purposes as well as a few short term magic tricks this allows for on a macroeconomic scale because national economies don't work like individual people's credit/debt/savings. The benefit of these tricks is absolutely debatable but the issues with it are all very long term.
Debt and deficit has very little impact on the economy as it relates to people spending money on video games in the short and medium short term.
I'm not going to say YOUR economic situation has improved or that your city, region, or state's economy has improved. Your share of economic recovery is going to be heavily tied to your industry, your demographic group (including education and gender), your age, and how much money you have already had and your share may be negative in a big picture that is net positive. It would be a fringe perspective to say that the overall western economy has not improved since 2009.
I'm not staking out a stance that the management is being done right or that the direction is necessarily sustainable indefinitely. We're almost always doing something that may bite us in 20 years (there's a debate to be had -- not on these forums -- about deficit, debt, immigration, and education financing) and there are areas which are commonly perceived as bubble markets (tech and student loan debt holding).
But taken as a whole, buying power for the average American, European, or Chinese person is at least up from five years ago. Which is not to say it's up from 30 years ago or 50 years ago, inflation adjusted. It's just up from FIVE years ago which was a low point which made F2P more viable then. And I think it makes subs more viable now.
Interesting tidbit, a review purported to be from an employee on Glassdoor.com:
[Redacted for Space...]
The end of F2P and return of the sub fee...?
It certainly is a bit more extreme than the increased emphasis on hybrid I'd suggested.
In all honestly this is almost certainly spot on to the problem with STO... the fact is nothing we suggest will make a blind bit of difference; because the Developers themselves have absolutely no say.
I've sadly seen this so many times over the past 15 years, even going back to the first Developer I worked for (Core Design, which EIDOS literally ruled over with an iron fist; Developers and Consumers be damned against Quarterly projections) to more recent examples that I'm less able to talk about as it would burn a bridge I'd rather keep for the moment
Point is that Career Managers don't know, or care about the Consumers and sometimes not even the Developers. They've attended the seminars (or had their PA give them the highlights), they've hired PR and Finance firms who again have no bloody clue about 'Consumer' driven products over brand name recognition; particularly in an industries in the Digital Social-Media age we live in now, where a single twitter can effective completely change an entire market.
I mean projections must be measured in Days to Weeks, not Quarters to Fiscal Years now.
Something like Delta Rising, a year or two ago; sure would've been fine until the next expansion, but today... 2-3 weeks max, the damage is done and you MUST be in full damage control mode to correct the mistakes then having to work harder to regain that lost faith.
/---/
You actually want my advice, and I do extend this to the Development Staff here... Star Trek Online is a lost cause until Cryptic (as a Studio, not a Developer) is no longer in-charge of the project.
As it stands, I wouldn't be surprised to see PWE sell off Cryptic; as they're unlikely to actually take an active role in management because the entire reason for getting a Western Developer was to have someone who understood the US/EU Market. As such they get Carte Blanc.
I was wondering where the OP was getting their facts (are other games really hurting? Who knows), until I got here:
"A relatively weak dollar added to this effect."
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA. Yes, that's one thing you can say about the dollar over the last few years: it was too weak! We noticed this in the insanely high inflation rate of under 2% per year and the remarkable growth in exports that dropped unemployment to never-before-seen lows! Factories are closing in China and moving to the US to take advantage of US wages effectively dropping due to the weak dollar!
So I'm guessing the rest of the "facts" are coming from the same over-active imagination.
The US also has not experienced a fast recovery over the last few months. It has steadily been adding jobs over the last few years.
Comments
There's no polite way to get the point across without f***ing DUH.
Yeah, you can. They initially had some limits but laxed up on it.
What this game needs is but fixing, and a focus on gameplay improvement. Close the gap between those that know the system (dps wizards) and those that are clueless. Give us better content, such as enhanced ai. If you give your customers a better product they will spend.
STO usually sees an increase over the holidays and non-F2P games seemed to do much better recently. WoW increased it's playerbase by around 40%.
I think there's room to learn or borrow from non-F2P games to lessen or avoid entirely times when F2P games take a hit.
I think it's probably some of both but I think a big factor is that a lot of people pinched pennies between 2009 and 2014.
I think the experience in sub games was at least more consistent but even big spenders liked knowing they could log back in and didn't have to quit in a month where content was light or if they were short on cash.
But unemployment is down. People are making better money in the U.S. than they did in 2009 and may spend $15 more freely for a better experience. And in China, incomes are up, period, and they now have gaming consoles, which provide an alternative to F2P MMOs.
I'm not suggesting subs be REQUIRED at all. Just that $15 a month in personal purchasing (which is different than ZEN trading) would make the game less risky. And could be done in terms of XP boosts/rested XP/reduced playtime required in a way where it wouldn't cost Cryptic much real money to boost the quality of Gold perks in terms of XP/services and might actually improve revenue and reduce risk from month to month to borrow something like the DCUO "lockbox buffet" model.
On the lockbox front, you just need to:
Discontinue selling new LTS.
Have lockboxes disappear if unopened after 30 days.
Get enough players subbing so the revenue is the same or higher than what you'd get from a small number of big spenders on lockboxes.
Incidentally, they could tie lockbox droprates internally to total number of subs.
Or reversing things just a bit:
Have special lockbox keys drop for gold players.
Gold keys expire after 30 days and the special keys themselves are non-tradeable.
Tie key droprate to total number of subs on the backend to avoid giving too many keys away. More subbers = more keys dropping for everyone who subs.
One major problem I have seen is the F2P model was a specific design to provide QoL upgrades, vanity, social and other fun items for microtransactions People would pay a little bit without thinking too much to make the game more fun, because they enjoy the game
Many F2P have large purchases, gambling, power selling in it, these aren't the F2P model. It isn't surprising that people are going to burn out on the game and the people.
This also, as we see in STO, creates/fuel gambling addictions and leads devs to destroy the gameplay while only creating new systems that provide the best ROI. Why make a game fun when you can make stuff to sell? Its a system that is self destructive and not sustainable. Are we seeing the results of that industry wide? I hope so
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In a typical sub game according to what I heard, people often take a month or three off quite frequently and become less invested. Also getting people to try sub games was sometimes tricky and having an alternative to paying works for some people and makes them effectively "content" for paying players.
I do think hybrid in some form makes sense or that you want a robust trial or maybe sub with a "day pass" rate or ability to suspend paid for gametime and reactivate. (Ie. a sub where the time only ticks down for days you are logged in more than an hour in a day.)
I actually think there's something to the idea of a gambling buffet where:
- You have a way to earn or trade for store credit in game. (LOTRO actually mints new store credit for players of the game based on accomplishments. PWE games in turn leverages gold-selling, effectively.)
- You have a gambling system that uses store credit.
- You have a monthly fee that allows for unlimited gambling for free but which requires a direct purchase.
This actually mobilizes the gambling urge but makes it directed at people who aren't directly spending cash. And takes a fairly socially responsible attitude towards the cash spender.
If I want to play 100% free and trade for currency, basically, I can gamble with other people's money, right? And if I'm actually spending money PERSONALLY then I get buffet access to the gambling feature. It's actually smart because encourages the gambler to personally spend real money on a sub but also uses gambling to provide value to the authorized goldselling if the free player legitimately doesn't want to or can't pay a sub. And it's more profitable if hybrid subbers (assuming a high subscription value) are, like I say, maybe around 8 times as common as the biggest scale pure F2P whales would be.
- You have a way to earn or trade for store credit in game. (LOTRO actually mints new store credit for players of the game based on accomplishments. PWE games in turn leverages gold-selling, effectively.)
- Much like STO's dilithium cap, you have a control which limits how much gold-selling can occur, which secures a level of store credit value for gold-sellers.
- You have a gambling/lockbox system that uses store credit.
- The gambling/lockbox system includes some "second chance" currency award. (Like Lobi in STO.)
- Any subscription fee is optional for access to gameplay or at least optional for SOCIAL PLAY. (Single player content might be monetized in some way but group content is definitely free.)
- You have a monthly subscription fee that allows for unlimited gambling/lockbox and QoL features like faster leveling but which requires a direct purchase.
- You have a $15 monthly free item for subscribers. (Possibly in place of a store credit stipend.) The item may include things like new races, classes, or abilities. (It might include single player content packs.)
- The item-of-the-month goes on the store for $20 worth of store credit (which can be earned or bought).
- All other store items aside from the monthly item are cosmetic or are account-level services like character slots or character re-rolling.
This incentivizes continuous subscription and allows you to get "back subscriptions" off of players who skip months subbing or who come along later. But it doesn't penalize the free player all that dramatically. And any player can get anything aside from a subscription itself for indirect payment via gold-selling and/or store credit earned for game activities.
May I ask where, roughly, you are based?
The national and overall western economy has been continuously improving since 2009, albeit slowly for lower middle class and middle class.
Regional gains may vary, naturally, and some regions are losers, typically rural tourist spots/real estate-based economy markets and some troubled industrial hubs like detroit. I'm looking primarily at the U.S., western European, and Chinese economies OVERALL and has been upward enough to offset OVERALL for what individual areas experience.
Granted, wage stagnation and decline is a problem but that's more about share of economic gains for people without college degrees (and isolated age and demographic groups, high unemployment among teenagers and difficulty returning to work for retirement age people) than it is about whether the overall economy is improving. The average person with a bachelor's degree who is in typical working years has seen wages which outpace inflation. The average is not the individual and total market health doesn't necessarily indicate personal economic gains as the economic gains that have occurred do favor people with education and money.
You can get into discussions about deficits and national debt but they aren't really relevant here and are more of a long-term issue. The U.S. deficit has declined every year since 2009 despite skyrocketing in that year. The total levels of U.S. debt have increased but the amount of U.S. debt relative to money owed the U.S. has stayed fairly stable and most of the U.S. national debt would be eliminated if we also called all of our debts or transferred our debts to debts owed to us.
We borrow money from people who owe us money and both sides maintain a debt with one another rather than cancel debt fairly frequently. The U.S. and U.K. for example owe one another money, I believe, without canceling debt on either side. The point is actually to maintain a link between our economies for diplomatic purposes as well as a few short term magic tricks this allows for on a macroeconomic scale because national economies don't work like individual people's credit/debt/savings. The benefit of these tricks is absolutely debatable but the issues with it are all very long term.
Debt and deficit has very little impact on the economy as it relates to people spending money on video games in the short and medium short term.
I'm not going to say YOUR economic situation has improved or that your city, region, or state's economy has improved. Your share of economic recovery is going to be heavily tied to your industry, your demographic group (including education and gender), your age, and how much money you have already had and your share may be negative in a big picture that is net positive. It would be a fringe perspective to say that the overall western economy has not improved since 2009.
I'm not staking out a stance that the management is being done right or that the direction is necessarily sustainable indefinitely. We're almost always doing something that may bite us in 20 years (there's a debate to be had -- not on these forums -- about deficit, debt, immigration, and education financing) and there are areas which are commonly perceived as bubble markets (tech and student loan debt holding).
But taken as a whole, buying power for the average American, European, or Chinese person is at least up from five years ago. Which is not to say it's up from 30 years ago or 50 years ago, inflation adjusted. It's just up from FIVE years ago which was a low point which made F2P more viable then. And I think it makes subs more viable now.
In all honestly this is almost certainly spot on to the problem with STO... the fact is nothing we suggest will make a blind bit of difference; because the Developers themselves have absolutely no say.
I've sadly seen this so many times over the past 15 years, even going back to the first Developer I worked for (Core Design, which EIDOS literally ruled over with an iron fist; Developers and Consumers be damned against Quarterly projections) to more recent examples that I'm less able to talk about as it would burn a bridge I'd rather keep for the moment
Point is that Career Managers don't know, or care about the Consumers and sometimes not even the Developers. They've attended the seminars (or had their PA give them the highlights), they've hired PR and Finance firms who again have no bloody clue about 'Consumer' driven products over brand name recognition; particularly in an industries in the Digital Social-Media age we live in now, where a single twitter can effective completely change an entire market.
I mean projections must be measured in Days to Weeks, not Quarters to Fiscal Years now.
Something like Delta Rising, a year or two ago; sure would've been fine until the next expansion, but today... 2-3 weeks max, the damage is done and you MUST be in full damage control mode to correct the mistakes then having to work harder to regain that lost faith.
/---/
You actually want my advice, and I do extend this to the Development Staff here... Star Trek Online is a lost cause until Cryptic (as a Studio, not a Developer) is no longer in-charge of the project.
As it stands, I wouldn't be surprised to see PWE sell off Cryptic; as they're unlikely to actually take an active role in management because the entire reason for getting a Western Developer was to have someone who understood the US/EU Market. As such they get Carte Blanc.
"A relatively weak dollar added to this effect."
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA. Yes, that's one thing you can say about the dollar over the last few years: it was too weak! We noticed this in the insanely high inflation rate of under 2% per year and the remarkable growth in exports that dropped unemployment to never-before-seen lows! Factories are closing in China and moving to the US to take advantage of US wages effectively dropping due to the weak dollar!
So I'm guessing the rest of the "facts" are coming from the same over-active imagination.
The US also has not experienced a fast recovery over the last few months. It has steadily been adding jobs over the last few years.