Under The Hood: Free For Now
There is a veritable glut of free-to-play MMOs, both in development and on the market. This much is certain. It especially originates around the Asian countries such as South Korea, Japan, and China. And some of the smart designs of these free-to-play games are gradually working their way into more mainstream, American and European MMOs. But how do these games stay in business? And how do they relate to the traditional design of monthly fees?
The very first thing you'll notice about free-to-play games, is they are supported by one of two things, or even both: In-game ads, or some form of micro-transactions. All free MMOs (yes, including web-based ones) get revenue from one or both of these sources, and it's the only way to really gain a stable income to support your MMO.
This does, however, have a disgruntling side-effect. If your players have to pay to get the best equipment, they feel robbed, like most of their hard work is for naught. And in-game ads can subtract heavily from an experience (Personally, the in-game ads for Anarchy Online very much put me off). But there's no real choice in the matter, as development costs money.
They biggest problem with free-to-play MMOs, though, is not a disgruntled playerbase, or a lack of players, but rather a lack of quality. This is best illustrated by taking a normal MMO and comparing it to a free-to-play MMO. So let's take World of Warcraft, and compare it to a free-to-play, such as Maple Story. Where WoW has plenty of patches, added content, and the like, Maple Story does not get even close to the amount of tweaks that WoW does, and the patches are hardly as anticipated.
This disparity in updates, content production, and overall quality, is, as I said in my last article, exactly what you pay for when you pay monthly for an MMO. Developers with a more stable income can focus more on tweaking and improving the game, making it a huge hit. While free-to-play games can (and will, such as RuneScape has) obtain a large player base, they just can't compete with some of the more commercial MMO numbers. The commercial MMOs have the larger teams, the increased amount of content, and the almost continual support. And it definitely shows.
Both F2P and P2P have their place in the MMO world. Paying often gives you a better, more fleshed game world and continued support for what you bought, and free-to-play allows you to not feel obligated (as some may) to playing the game on a regular basis. As this Penny Arcade comic so eloquently shows, sometimes an MMO can feel like a job which you pay for, a job you feel obligated to do because you are spending money on it.
Well, unless MMOs really are your job, after all.
Each week James Murff writes Under The Hood, a deeper look at MMO game mechanics and how they affect players, games, and the industry
