PS2 Business Model

[basti]

Pay to play is the way to go for a MMO. Free to play with micro transactions does only work if you balance the shop really, really well. And most F2P games fail at that.

I guess for planetside 2 they will go with Pay 2 play AND micro transactions. But as Sony already stated, they will do micro transactions only for cosmetic items, nothing that would improve your character at all. Just like CCP started to do recently.

[Death2All]

Originally Posted by basti

Pay to play is the way to go for a MMO. Free to play with micro transactions does only work if you balance the shop really, really well. And most F2P games fail at that.

I guess for planetside 2 they will go with Pay 2 play AND micro transactions. But as Sony already stated, they will do micro transactions only for cosmetic items, nothing that would improve your character at all. Just like CCP started to do recently.

I agree wholeheartedly. I would hate to see PS follow GA's example with a one time pay fee and then you have a premium character with the addition of a cash shop. Most people are foreign to the idea of paying a subscription for an MMO but I believe it's good for a few reasons.

A subscription fee generates a constant revenue stream for SOE for new content etc. Okay, maybe that wasn't the case with PS 1 obviously, but this team seems to be a lot more focused and passionate about the game this time around than they were before.

One time fees force the company to either have a hell of a large player base and also to be dependent on a cash shop for future monies. This often leads to the addition of imba weapons/armor. While they stated that they would never add a weapon to the cash shop that would give an advantage over a player, depending on a cash shop isn't the way to go in my opinion of gathering money from a game.

Another reason is that it's preventive of hackers/griefers to some degree. Having to pay a subscription for the game would deter most hackers I'd imagine assuming of course they would get banned. Who would continue to pay money to a company that you're trying to obviously destroy. Well, there are some pretty stupid people out there so who knows.

Thirdly, and finally it kind of gives an impression over the game. I'm often swayed away from F2P games because it gives me the impression it's a cheap game with added features in the cash shop to get people to pay money for their shitty game. A subscription based game is usually getting new content and has an active development team. Where I'm getting these impressions are unknown because PS has been primarily, the only subscription based game I've played much of excluding a few others here and there.


While the last one was more opinionated than the others I still feel that most people view it the same way.

It may sound strange to WANT to give away gobs of money to company, but in many ways you get a lot more out of a game and it can be A LOT more enjoyable in most cases.

[Lunarchild]

Originally Posted by Malorn

<snip>
The key is having an adequate motivator for subscribing or having a few services/convenience items worth purchasing on a somewhat regular basis. Training time/xp modifier is a safe one and that's why I suggested it. People will pay for convenience. I'm mostly a 9-5'er these days and I'll happily pay extra money to make the smaller amount of playtime that I have 'count more' and ease the BR/cert grind. And whether I do or not really doesn't affect anyone else and is a revenue opportunity for SOE.
<snip>

I agree, yet think that the training time / XP modifier is not adequate enough: When people have the things they want they'll just unsubscribe. That's why I suggested making some parts of the tree subscriber only. Especially the leadership branch is a good target for this, as this will double as a filter: Subscribed members are more invested in the product that free to play members.

There are a lot more things that SOE can do with this though: special events and looks for subscribers; shorter spawn timers; shorter vehicle timers... Though the last two might impact game balance, so longer than normal timers for free players might be a better way to put it.

I also think paying for the package is a must for non-trial players! (And the trial should be time-limited to something short, and limited to what you can get/do)

[Hamma]

Malorn nails it again, well said.

[RavenUSC3]

The problem with the first Planetside, and what scares me about this one, is the promises of things to come. Whether it was in beta, right at release, or after release, there were these promises of things they were going to do, and continual updates, etc.... Updates took way too long, and once we got them, they weren't even what was promised.

If you're going to charge me for cable TV and you don't keep adding channels to keep up with competitors like DirecTV, I'm going to drop cable. The same goes for a subscription video game. There is an opt-out option. To keep people in the game, you have to keep updating it. I've already seen the same stuff I heard before. "We're going to implement this, maybe not at release, but some time after..." I don't want to hear that, just do it. In fact, don't even mention stuff you might put in the game later as it'll just dissappoint people later.

WoW apparently gets the subscription thing right. I've heard its from continual updates. I haven't played WoW or any Blizzard game, but however many millions of people can't be wrong. I just don't get into that stuff. FPS I can do, and have been wanting another MMOFPS for....eight years now.

I really just hope they get it right this time. It seems like they're combining features from popular FPS out there. Hopefully they'll take aspects of the business model from popular subscription games out there.

[Bags]

Yup. Blizzard actually gives you value for your $15/mo.

[Hamma]

Blizzard has had problem keeping players recently, the sub for the new expansion then quit till the next one. I believe they are considering changing up their model a bit to combat this.

[SKYeXile]

Originally Posted by Hamma

Blizzard has had problem keeping players recently, the sub for the new expansion then quit till the next one. I believe they are considering changing up their model a bit to combat this.

They probably need to dripfeed people more quests and zones to do. if thats all their intrests are.

[Rbstr]

Part of what I understood SOE is, with PS2, moving to a more CCP-esque model of MMO development:
Have the subscription pay for the periodic content additions besides access to the game. Make improvements to the game, add massive new game play elements, redo the graphics from scratch (and then decide the ships still don't look cool enough and start slowly revamping them), completely change how missiles work, have a team of people that does nothing but optimize servers and so on.
They took the longterm stance, where many take the short term stance.

It has worked amazingly for EVE, which is one of the very few MMOs that has grown significantly beyond the initial spikes. To my knowledge no other MMO has gone though 6+ years of growth.

I completely support the idea of "Hey, we're going to start here with a complete game that has a strong foundation. Then we've got these crazy ideas that we're hoping to implement down the road."
It's very different from producing an incomplete game and fixing it up later.

[Bags]

Originally Posted by Hamma

Blizzard has had problem keeping players recently, the sub for the new expansion then quit till the next one. I believe they are considering changing up their model a bit to combat this.

That's because people are stupid. Blizzard gives enough content and support to justify $15/mo. I quit because it was too hard to find smart enough people to PvE with.

[artifice]

Let's put it this way, they are going to have to have a business model to encourage people (including old veterans like myself) to play it. There are too many competitors coming out and some of them are F2P.

[Sirisian]

Originally Posted by artifice

Let's put it this way, they are going to have to have a business model to encourage people (including old veterans like myself) to play it. There are too many competitors coming out and some of them are F2P.

Could you name any of these "competitors"? I've researched and never saw any real competitors in the future.

[SKYeXile]

off the top of my head:

firefall, warhammer 40k DMO, COD3, BF3, tribes ascend, tribes universe.

[Gandhi]

Originally Posted by SKYeXile

off the top of my head:

firefall, warhammer 40k DMO, COD3, BF3, tribes ascend, tribes universe.

I don't think any of those are direct competitors, for the most part they're regular shooters with gameplay as different as TF2 compared with PS1.

TU comes close, but from what I've seen it won't be anywhere near the same scale and lacks vehicular combat. The rest are (I think) normal instanced shooters with game modes like deathmatch and capture the flag, nothing like Planetside.

[Heaven]

How much is ps to play now still £8.99? maybe have a pay to play but cheaper as that could attract a lot more people, i dont mind paying the 8.99 or whatever is is but if they made it say £4.99 a month that would be great!