Earlier this month, Gamasutra interviewed Neowiz executive vice president Sang-Won Chung about the state of Free to Play MMORPGs in the Korean market. For those of you who don't know, Korea is home to many distinguished F2P (Free to Play) MMO developers like Nexon, the F2P company that developed MapleStory and Kart Rider. Sang-Won Chung was the CEO of Nexon until 2004.

Within the interview, Sang-Wong discussed the difficulties that are currently facing the MMO market in Korea, noting that there's an "oversaturation of these new games that are free to people, but people are still just playing the old games that they used to play, which they already made an investment in." This is particularly interesting in our North American market that is just beginning to see the emergence of the F2P genre, having been weaned on subscription favourites like EQ2, FFXI and World of Warcraft.

What's intriguing about Sang-Wong's observations is that the Korean market looks similar to our growing North American MMO market, but replace that F2P with the words P2P (Pay to Play). It's not hard to see a certain amount of market saturation with subscription-based MMOs clamouring for our attention. Between World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, Darkfall Online, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, EVE Online, EQ2 and Lord of the Rings Online, it's not hard to see that the competition pool is getting bigger and fiercer.

Perhaps one of the biggest differences, however, may be the fact that your hardcore P2P gamer could potentially pay less money over the course of a year than the hardcore F2P fan. The reason for this is that subscription based MMOs typically do not include the opportunity to make microtransaction purchases (outside of SOE's recent decisions). Thus, the hardcore P2P player pays $60 for his game and $15 a month to play just like the casual gamer does. The F2P enthusiast, however, can potentially drop hundreds of dollars a month on microtransaction items, ranging from experience bonus potions to excessively powerful swords that can level small countries (for the low, low cost of $50!). Sang-Wong's observation that players are already 'invested' in their chosen game, therefore, could be more applicable to the F2P genre, because if a player doesn't financially invest in his chosen F2P MMO, the company gains no real benefit. In our subscription saturated market, however, every interested player is already a paying customer.

Sang-Wong equates this to the idea of a movie theatre and cable channel when he points out that "if you are in a theatre you must sit there two hours because you paid the money. But with TV for instance, you just watch for five minutes, then change the channel." This is also an indication of why F2P MMOs typically 'adapt' easily recognizable genres, like Kart Rider's similarity to Mario Kart, or MapleStory's 2D take on exp grinding MMOs. When interested audiences download their client, they make no money until the player decides to 'invest' in the game. In this way, F2P companies try to appeal to gamers who already know what they want (much like TV shows!). Sang-Wong also notes, however, that developers are already moving away from this approach, owing to the saturation of the market in typical MMO styles.

So what do you think about the growing industry of F2P and P2P MMOs? Will the future ultimately herald in a hybrid subscription based game, with microtransactions tacked on like SOE's Station Cash? Or do you think that genre bending, free to play, microtransaction based MMOs will be able to grab their own slice of our North American gaming pie. Perhaps it all hinges on development decisions made by Blizzard in the coming years, or maybe rising F2P threats like Perfect World, MapleStory, Atlantica Online and SOE's Free Realms will radically change our vision of MMOs in the coming years. Let's wait and see!

Source: Gamasutra

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