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Dear Mr. Smedley,
My name is -me-, and I am a person who is eagerly awaiting the release of PlanetSide 2. More than that, I am someone who is interested in and studies economics, business and math, and I'd like to help offer some of what I think is insight to SOE.
Allow me to define what I think is two ends of the spectrum of general style of games. On one end of the spectrum is purely abstracted games; every aspect of the game is a designed for ease of access and instant gratification, not for metagame goals, not persistent world immersion or not coherent and consistent representation of something. These games would be described as "casual games" or on the extreme end, "social games". On the other end of the spectrum are games with comparatively low levels of abstraction; the game elements exist for more than just instant gratification, often to provide consistent representation of the game's reality. Games on this end are called "hardcore", but I think that term carries much unwanted baggage.
I am bringing this up because it's an important aspect to consider as far as the bottom line of SOE's revenue from PS2 goes. Now, since you are with SOE, I am sure you know the precise F2P numbers, and I do not presume to know more than you and your experts, but this is what I have seen. With all games, especially FPS, there is an urge to go for the "CoD audience" and try to take the easy way out, that is, pushing the design towards the abstraction side of things to make it more accessible. While this may make sense in buy-the-box and even subscription models, the argument to make a persistent game such as PlanetSide 2 avoid the clichés of common shooters is overwhelming. Even though firms tend to be very secretive about their F2P numbers, let's look at the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of social games with microtransactions: Puzzle Pirates has an ARPU of one to two dollars, and it is safe to say this is average for. Riot describes League of Legends ARPU in a Gamasutra interview:
"What kind of average revenue per user do you see?
MM: I haven't announced that stuff yet, but it's north of what you see in the industry averages. When compared to social games, we're many multiples higher in terms of percentage of users who do spend money, and our monetization is deeper. That's because users are more engaged with these games. But the trends are still similar to what you'd see in a Zynga title or things like that."
LoL's ARPU is described as higher because of the increased depth in the gameplay than compared to social games, and LoL itself is widely considered to be a very casual game by gamers.
Riot also described most of League of Legends' revenue coming from a minority of hardcore players that drop a large amount of money per month on it. This would mean their ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Paying User) is very high. And here we begin to see the fallacy of trying to attract the "CoD audience." F2P games have a large amount of fly-by-night players and light players, that will play the game casually regardless of whether the game itself is casual or not. From a business standpoint, non-paying players only exist statistically to bring in paying users for every certain number of non-paying user. From all the intelligence I have been able to gather, increasing a game's depth, "hardcoreness" and anything that makes a player care more about it over more time will increase APRU. But, of course, that's one side of the equation. The other side is the total number of users.
What do we know about paying users that the ARPPU derives from? They are the most hardcore bunch that the persistence, depth, complexity challenge, thrill of victory and meta-game of the game matters to the most. What do we about non-paying uses? They tend to be the ones who care the least about the nuances of the game and have no emotional stake in it. Their numbers may very well wax and wane depending on the game being casual or deep, but for the purpose of this quantifying, I will assume that the game being deep will turn some casual and non-paying users into players that care, which is a fair assumption. This can be abstracted into the increase in the number of paying user. Now, intelligence I do not have is variable costs that scale with the number of users. I will assign the number of 10 cents per month as a cost for each user to take into the cost of their connections, customer service and other overhead, which I think is fair. Next, we have the cost of future content creation. It's a well known fact that deep, hardcore sandbox type games require less development over time because much for the engagement is the players finding and creating fun for themselves. Look at WoW, that relies on a content treadmill that is more expensive, and look at EVE online, where patches are mainly tweaking things to better facilitate a deep player experience. While there is of course development demanded for both hardcore and casual players, constantly building new casual themeparks is of course more expensive.
So what can we axiomatize? In the very simplest way
x = lack of depth and "casualness" of the game, s = ARPU of hardcore users, accounting for variable costs c = players to play, j=ARPU of casual users, accounting for variable costs g = development cost, f = fixed costs and P= total profit.
P = ((1/3cx)s/x) + (cx(j) - g(x)- f, {x > = 1}
(I took the liberty of hand waving that the number of hardcore players will be equal to one-third the number of players, because this is of course very simplified, but I have precious little information to use)
The startling implication is that ARPU-plus-costs of casual users, depending on where the line is drawn, may be zero or negative. Perhaps even casual players that join for a quick gunshootin' will be more inclined to spend money if they feel something is at stake, this would represented by the casual-only ARPU of j(1/x) and replace j. In any case it's evident that profit strictly increases as casualness decreases.
So assuming this admittedly simple model has even a splinter of truth, you now have an a clear cut cash shop strategy with hardcore players that want "hardcore" sidegrades. There is every reason to believe that ARPPU is highly elastic with respect to casualness, and is obviously maximized by keeping the non-customized system that currently exists and is arguably casual, and filling the cash shop with nuanced sidegrades that appeal overwhelmingly to the sensibilities of hardcore players that crave strategy and tactics. Right now a lot of the changes from PS1 look on the casual end, which you can easily turn into a great boon, from both a normal standpoint and even a "pure hardcore" standpoint. Off the top of my head, the liberator's cannon replacing its carpet bombs. Veterans are already lamenting its loss. That alone is a goldmine waiting to be tapped and can surely be priced rather highly. But hardcore players, who already have a high ARPU:hardcoreness ratio, will gladly pay, which not only creates revenue, but lowers the game's overall casualness or 'x', which further increases revenue without alienating casuals who would like the default changes.
Grand-strategy decisions, impacts and goals need to be in game. Every outfit on a faction cooperating to expand should have marginal effectiveness beyond just simultaneously striking hexes. Let bases have points and nodes useful beyond actual capturing, so invading forces can come with intention to incapacitate a hex's production or strategic importance. Radar systems? Logistic bonus to give speed bonuses to vehicles within a few hexes? Bridges that give important connections over gorges? That's just off the top of my head, for the developers, the possibilities are endless! Interesting command choices that have great benefits if successful and big costs if not successful are necessary. Removing these considerations will make the game shallow and will hurt your bottom line. The casual players lose nothing from a deep game except perhaps familiarity, and even if they did lose anything, the bottom line remains unscathed in the end. You have the advantage of being the pioneers of a mother lode of a video game genre and being free to play, a great boon to accessibility, that you don't need to CoDify a game with great substance at all to let it succeed.
Thanks a lot for reading, I sure hope I didn't bore you. I have done some analyses with way more detailed and more advanced mathematics that I omitted, so if you actually would like see them I would love to share. I really look forward to playing PS2, and because it looks so perfect, I'd like to see it not stray away from a great vision.
Sincerely,
-me-
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2012-06-19, 04:02 AM
Linear Mode
