MMO Monetization Editorial

There’s a new editorial at GamesIndustry.biz which is all about examining MMO monetization.  In this world of post-subscription games, business models often walk a very fine line between the acceptable, the profitable and the exploitative. In this article-style interview, GamesIndustry takes a look at several business models and talks with individuals behind the three games RIFT, The Elder Scrolls Online, and WildStar.

If there is a battleground for this conflict it is the MMO, where game after game has shifted from subscriptions to micro-transactions. One of the latest, though almost certainly not the last, is Trion Worlds’ Rift, which was launched to general critical acclaim in March 2011. According to Simon Ffinch, design director at Trion, the decision to embrace free-to-play was not taken to avert commercial disaster, but to provide its “robust and loyal” fanbase with a better experience – a recognition that the “massively multiplayer” aspect of the MMO is vital to the genre’s success.

“It was doing fine,” Ffinch says. “There was no moment where we thought we had to go free-to-play or Rift was gonna die. That absolutely was not the case. We just wanted to open it up to more people, and this is just the way the market is going. We didn’t want to be behind the curve, so to speak.”

In fact, Trion pre-empted the move in February last year with the launch of Rift Lite, which made the game free up to level 20. “It worked great, but it’s not the same as saying it’s free,” Ffinch says. “The word ‘free’ is, well, it’s magic. That’s what brings people in.

“I’ve seen a lot of games make the transition, and some have done it better than others. We wanted to make sure that all the content was always going to be free. The things we’re going to sell are things that players want, but not things that are required in the game. MMOs are better when you have tons of people. We had tons of people already, but now we have tons times tons.”

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Carbibe’s latest MMO, Wildstar, has taken a more idiosyncratic approach to monetisation than Rift – a combination of free-to-play and subscription that aims to avoid reliance on micro-transactions through a player-driven economy. It is the sort of risk that Gaffney believes must necessarily be taken in the ongoing search to find non-abrasive ways to monetise – the sort of risk that could propel Wildstar to the sort of success that so many recent MMOs have failed to attain. In that sense, Gaffney explains, Wildstar is an anomaly. It is increasingly difficult to find a publisher willing to entertain an MMO model that breaks from established approaches to subscriptions and free-to-play.

“Depending on who you talk to World of Warcraft had a $65 million budget, and budgets have only gone up since then,” he says. “It’s tough to go up to your boss and say, ‘Hey, I’m gonna take $100 million and do something that’s never been done before and, trust me, five years later you’re gonna get something awesome out of it.’ You get conservative when budgets start to get that high, but that’s a mistake, because the second you stop trying to break new ground you get in trouble.