Should The Elder Scrolls Online Go Free-to-Play?

Plenty of people (including me, to be perfectly honest) expect The Elder Scrolls Online to go free-to-play in the near future, so IGN decided to quiz Trion Worlds CEO Scott Hartsman and Gameforge CEO Carsten Van Husen about the possibility. Both CEO stopped shy of offering a definitive answer, but offered some pros and cons for this kind of move. Here’s a snippet:

(When you have a steady subscription base, and some people subscribe for a year, some for three months and so on, you definitely get a level of predictability that changes drastically when you go F2P,) Harsten admits. (In a subscription game you’re making money generally whether or not people are actively online at the moment. With free-to-play? Not so much. They have to be online. It’s more of a trade-off than anything else because with a subscription game, while you have better long-term visibility, you lose a ton of instant feedback.)

This feedback is absolutely invaluable during an age that now more than ever sets significant store on instant gratification. That’s not to say it always outweighs the risks that come with F2P games, however. Carsten Van Husen, CEO of Gameforge, the publisher responsible for handling TERA and Aion in Europe, confirms the vast majority of profit in free-to-play titles comes from an inordinately small number of people. The level of unpredictability that this causes, and the risk of losing such individuals, seriously hamstrings MMO developers when it comes to taking risks on new, varied content.

(It’s only a small fraction of those people that ever spend money and of course it’s an even smaller fraction that make you the necessary revenue, but it’s the existence of these people that makes the business model work,) he reveals. (If you are going to tune your title in such a way that there’s a low ceiling per-month in terms of sensible possibility to spend, it wouldn’t work. It’s those high-rollers, sometimes not nicely called ‘˜whales’, which really should have opportunities to spend substantial amounts of money in order to make the entire thing go.)

The argument for many years, and one I myself have subscribed to, is that if a sub fee can be justified I will gladly pay it, safe in the knowledge it gives the developer the ability to plan ahead and produce more content. When I spoke to Carbine Studios boss Jeremy Gaffney he clearly explained to me why no MMOs ever undercut World of Warcraft in terms of subscription charges, saying to do so would instantly mean operating at a loss. Van Husen disputes this, however, citing titles like Guild Wars 2 as a classic example of succeeding without a subscription but with some of the most regular and reliable content updates of any MMO on the market.