preludes wrote:
Simply put a new MMO customer has to ask themselves.
Why should I pay monthly, every...single month for a game when I can play another one that is very similar for nothing at all. Can anyone list a reason they should? Just being a FF title isn't enough anymore.
This is how most mmo players think these days.
I love Angry Joe and he was a deciding factor in me picking up GW2 but he is by no means a true MMO player. He is a complete Casual, as made obvious by some of his other videos. He plays multiple ones for a couple months and then drops them. He also comes from the XBox generation so his tastes are quite different than most of us MMO players. Yes GW2 might appeal to a larger audience being F2P but it still doesn't make it any less boring to play for me. It's sad but I've actually heard people get surprised when they got close to max level and realized there was no end game content.
With P2P today you get constant content updates, I mean hell, look at 1.0 and the amount of crap they released in about a year's time. If they weren't focused on fixing a broken game just think of what they could have produced in patches. GW2 has had one big patch since I bought it around 4 months ago and all they did was fix arbitrary crap, balance stuff, and add more useless crap to the gem shop. Paying a subscription fee allows companies to provide more content and new stuff a lot faster than the F2P model, if they even add anything at all. I mean look at WoW. It got to the point that every 2 weeks to a month they were adding new stuff, with major new content being thrown in every couple months. SE will have to do this to make that subscription worth paying and I'm pretty sure they know that. If F2P is the road companies take to pay back shareholders, I don't see much surplus remaining there to put toward a constant flow of content.
That kind of gets me back to the Casual player vs Serious player mentality. A casual player won't have an issue with a F2P model that doesn't add new content more than once or twice a year, while a more serious player will need that content to keep their interest in the game. Those casual players will hop onto the next big thing and leave the game with even less of a source of income.