GW2’s hybrid business model built around “fun”

One of my fears with F2P is that design will become increasingly metrics driven and we’ll see more and more exploitative cash shop clones designed to part us from our money as efficiently as possible.

With subscription MMOs I usually feel that the game comes before the business model. Certainly you can argue they use reinforcement and other tricks to keep you playing/paying, but that doesn’t seem much at odds with the goal of the game itself.

Unfortunately in many free to play games it seems like the actual game is just a thin veneer over the cash shop. Web and social games are the worst for this but I’m sure F2P MMOs are catching them up fast.

I believe GW2 is representative of the process I have been arguing exists for years now, that is the evolution of the cash shop model for a Westernized mindset.

I appreciate you playing the skeptic, but it feels to me that ANet has given us everything we could possibly want from a quality game play standpoint, with the most economically efficient model, providing us with a cash shop that players want to buy things from because they are fun as opposed to win.

I think they are correct at being critical of sub models at least as they have been manifested by the AAA’s (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/5946-Why-Do-People-Hate-EA).

Yes, we still need to see if they can pull it off, but this IS the game that can be THE long-term WoW competitor, and hopefully they can make a sufficient profit to maintain this equitable box-only style of game play through a massive player base and lower individual player financial outlay over time.

They can trash talk the sub model all they want as far as I am concerned, and justifiably so if they can accomplish the same “fun” end points at a lower cost per player!

Another link attempt:
linked in profile for Monetization Producer

@bcdevMatt Exactly!

Good content costs money to make and companies need to turn a profit. People complain F2P games make cash shop (or similar money sinks) items optional and not a requirement to play; but if they don’t will they really generate enough revenue? Where else will the money to pay the content developers and shareholders? While I’d love to play for free forever, I’d rather pay a reasonable subscription for unfettered game access than be nickled and dimed by an increasingly desperate game company. I’ve played GW2 and think it’s a good game (though I think there are some good reasons it’s still in beta) and hope they do have a successful strategy with retail copies + expansions + cash shop items (I guess the original GW series argues it’s possible). But for so many other companies, F2P is what they did between their subscription model failing and their eventual sever consolidation spiral to nowhere.

…and Peter Moore speaks about his vision for EA profit models:

http://kotaku.com/5919847/the-strange-scary-fascinating-exciting-future-of-video-games-according-to-a-giant?utm_source=Kotaku+Newsletter&utm_campaign=acf739644a-UA-142218-8&utm_medium=email

GW2 team can shout FUN all they want.
In the end there is only one way to find out how good or bad their added cashshop will turn out to be and that is afterwards.

F2p games are a strange phenomena you often end up spending more then you wanted even if you do not notice it in the first place.

For instance world of tanks: I bought a founder package which gave me a set amount of ingame currency for a discount and a free premium tank.
That ingame currency is gone faster then I anticipated.

Yet here I am falling for it again. Bought the mechwarrior online founder package 2 days ago.

Also what I learned in my F2P experience is that there is one sign that I’m looking out for that is gonna be an instant no no from now on to buy anything.

And that is buying something early to midgame only to find out the gameplay later on is so frustrating due to people that play 23 hours a day or cheating. Possible just cheating.
I’m looking at you F2P FPS games. Fun down the drain 2 days after buying from cashshop so not worth it.

I think I’m done ranting now.

On a sidenote. I bought magic the gathering 2013 cardgame on steam today. Already liked yugioh.
This seems like good fun as well. Maybe a bit deeper.

@Zyler:

Of course it is worth $10 to most people, even with its limited ability for deck customization, but Astral Masters has it right in my opinion.

I believe MAGIC doesn’t allow extensive deck customization for 2 reasons, neither of which I like.

Firstly it makes a game harder to balance; decreasing player options means less options to have to counter-balance.

Secondly it allows less skilled players to have even a greater chance to be competitive. Limiting synergistic options along with the wild randomness of initial starting hands and draws, evens out the playing field, which means even a remedial player can have a chance to win against a skilled player. The first match I played after purchasing this game had a 1 power card hand, followed by another 1 power card hand redraw, followed by a 0 power hand draw, followed by a 1 power card draw, followed by a “restart duel’ on my part. Everyone has had games with significant frequency that either gave you a vast majority of power cards or virtually no power cards, good luck winning under those conditions.

It is fun, but simplistic, and I believe that it is intentionally designed this way to allow for “broader appeal” that devs equate to larger profits secondary to a larger casual player base. I bought it knowing all this up front given the price, but again it is an example of purposeful dumbing down of a game to maximize the player base.

Some of the artwork in the game is really nice though!

In the first beta weekend, you could collect your AH winnings from anywhere.

In the second beta weekend, you could buy a consumable item from the cash shop to collect your AH winnings from anywhere for 5 minutes. Otherwise, you needed to port to the AH NPCs.

I am not entirely pessimistic about ArenaNet’s cash shop ambitions, but let us not kid ourselves here – if there isn’t anything you want to buy in the cash shop, ArenaNet isn’t doing its job.

@Azuriel:

I know you are posting this specific example as proof of concept, but if they keep cash shop restricted to convenience items such as what you are describing it is a perfectly legitimate way to keep the cash flow incoming especially with cheap insta-travel.

I hope they make a mint on box sales so that the CS is gravy; with good word of mouth maybe we’ll be seeing Chuck Norris throw Charr transmogrification grenades soon?

Yeah, cloned deck building is problematic, but multiplayer between friends is still cool where you can make self-imposed restrictions, and one can always come up with creative ways around problems. For example matches that provide you with random restrictions on deck building prior to the match; this would make matches more time consumptive, but I would really dig seeing what I could slap together with a random variety of cards or restrictions.

As I said somewhere else, the lack of a sub is very evident in that there is absolutely no hook in GW2. If progression ceases to exist (or doesn’t exist at all) then the gameplay has to be good enough, different enough to ensure that people keep logging in. Mount & Blade, for all its faults, is a game I’ve played almost entirely on the MP side and I have not gained anything other than a greater skill at playing the game, and that’s because the combat is so enjoyable and, although I’m loathe to use the word, fun.

For all its claims of innovation, GW2 has come nowhere close to changing its combat to such an extent as to be different from the MMO norm to entice me to continuously play it, purely on the merits of fun.

Every day I regret more and more that such a talented dev team opted to go against the trinity, subs and actually making raiding feel as good as it did in WoW of an earlier era, and instead opted for a gameplay style which, as far as I can see, will favour zerg style tactics above all else.

@Dril:

I also love M&B solely for the fun factor. I still recoil in rl every time I get impacted by a lance and love that my sword gets progressively drenched in dark red goo as I hack away.

I also never was able to get into GW1. Perhaps I didn’t give it enough of a try to judge it properly, but it felt somewhat bland and non-immersive, zoning from instance to instance. Nonetheless, I do appreciate the dev’s innovation in game play style and marketing model.

On the other hand in my beta experiences, GW2 has a unique community-oriented feel. Perhaps you are being more reductionistic than me, but GW2 feels fresh and exciting, at least as much as an MMO can be expected to.

I was a survivor in the BWE2 demon apocalypse finale, and I haven’t felt that level of adrenaline rush for a long time in an MMO. Swarms of spawning demonic players trying to kill me as I fought my way, falling back foot by foot, to the mouth of the Citadel. Even as flawed as the execution of the event was, in it I can see the potential of future scripted events that feel much like the good old days of pen and paper D&D in someone’s basement; a story for story’s sake, painstakingly crafted and exciting to partake in.

Yes, I am completely on board at this point, but solely due to my positive beta experiences; believe me I was no where as sold on SWTOR during their betas or after their launch. It feels good for once to not have to be the perpetual skeptic!

The suggestion that sub MMOs pack in grindy content that no one likes to keep people playing longer is wrong. If the content sucks, people won’t sub, no matter how it’s structured.

The true challenge of a sub MMO is to create solid content at a pace that keeps up with your players. This can either be done by sheer volume (WoW) or by smart design that adds rather than replaces options.

Or you take the easy way out, go F2P, and hope to catch enough idiots who drop a few hundred in a month to offset everyone else that spends nothing.

The only way around the current sub v f2p business model dilemma will be to move the monetization of a game away from mechanics.

I suspect this is the direction Blizzard is taking with the real money ah. If WoW were to ever go f2p it would follow the Diablo 3 model.

Regardless of what the future holds, cash shops will always inherently reduce the value of what a player achieves in game.

I just wanted to add that I’m not a f2p advocate. I’ve never played a f2p game for more the a few days.

I’ve been posting this a lot lately but few seem to grasp it, so sorry if you’ve heard this before.

GW2 is not a F2P, it’s a B2P(Buy-to-Play). There’s a difference. A true F2P is a game like Shaiya: no sub AND no initial cost AND unlimited play. The rub is the game won’t be all that enjoyable for very long unless you purchase cash-shop items, and it effects all levels, not just end-game. That’s the sole place they make thier money.

The high initial cost of GW2 allows them a lot more flexibility with managing thier funds efficiently, especially since the highly cosmetic cash-shop caters to those who not only have the money to spend, but want to spend it. GW2 is a slightly modified B2P with limited microtransaction elements, but calling it a F2P is plain wrong.

Obsi

“To say that the sub model doesn’t impact the design in a negative manner is incorrect.”

Only if you count what you mentioned as a negative.

@Obsi:

Bruce Banner might disagree on that point…

I’m not knocking the sub model just trying to point out that getting people to play monthly has a massive impact on the game design as well. And it’s not all positive.

The “money left on the table” will be more then made up by the no raid or gear treadmill at endgame along with more box sales. They will sell more boxes because they are b2p versus being a sub game.

At the end of the day all we have is conjecture around their profit goals. We don’t know what they are. If they make a million a year will that be enough? 10 million? I don’t know.

What I do know is the leadership of arenanet seems to understand the tight rope they need to walk with a cash shop. This is based on what they’ve said and what they’ve done. I’ll take that over just taking the stance cash shop = negative impact all the time due to a visceral gut reaction based on poor decisions by other companies.

If they do go down the Allods route I’ll jump off the ship and move on to a new game. I just have no evidence they’re that stupid. Do you?

“Bottom line, knock the sub model all you want but there will be a method for generating revenue in GW2 and it WILL impact gameplay.”

Sure, but this is not unique to the CS model, especially one with a box cost. Game companies will try to make money, this is a given. How heavy-handed they are about it makes the difference between a fun game and a grinding game.

The reason I left WoW years back was because of the end-game gear grind and dailies. They were tediously repetitive and solely designed to keep players around paying a monthly sub via intermittent positive reinforcement, like a slot machine.

For me the end-game grind through raids and dailies in modern subs has a tremendously negative impact on game play (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvIYRrgZ04).

Personal preference dictates what one finds enjoyable, but I still contend that many people confuse having fun with the short-lived thrill of getting a new item or gold piece once in a while.

I saw it in myself at the end, feeling the need to log on to do my dailies otherwise it was like leaving free money on the ground; so each day I would try to fly around as efficiently as possible, doing the same repetitive tasks, competing for respawns, only to immediately log off as soon as I was done having gotten my fix.

In retrospect I can assure you that it was not fun (nor was doing the same raids over and over hoping that someone didn’t mis-click on the pedestal and cause us to wipe), but it kept me around until the epiphany moment when you say to yourself (or perhaps your significant other does) “Why am I still doing this?” and you accept that it is OK to walk away from the game even though it means you will lose out on the virtual stuff waiting for you in game.

I think that this is the point of the idea of monetizing fun. Making a cereal that is intrinsically delicious to eat so you buy more, as opposed to putting collectible figurines in the bottom of a box of mediocre cereal. Both cereals will make money, but only one will leave the consumer with a feeling of satisfaction intrinsic to the experience of consuming it.

You may be added content from a sub model, but do you really get $15 worth? (I realise it is to cover other costs like power, wages, servers etc, but the point I’m making is it’s not for $15 worth of content) That’s like 25% of a full game price, and you sure don’t get a full games content every three or four months. Even with a sub game, you’ll be paying for the “real” content updates (xpacs).

With the model ANet is using, at least you’ll only be paying when the “real” content gets updated/released, which seems a much fairer deal to me.

Of course the post is filled with marketing speak. The point of the post was to get people to take the feedback boxes seriously by letting us know they take it seriously. Oh and to sell the game even more.

Regarding their business model, it’s just as likely that it’s based around keeping the world dynamic by regularly updating and adding DEs and events (for free) to keep people invested in the game. Invested people are more likely to buy shop items for convenience, looks or just to support the company. Their purchases along with expansions keep them making money. Like you said – we just don’t know yet.

What I do know is without having to worry about ensuring the sub rates don’t flag they can focus on content that will cater to my play-style now more then my play-style from 5 years ago (hardcore raider). So in that sense their model = more fun for me.

Keen – Bottom line, knock the sub model all you want but there will be a method for generating revenue in GW2 and it WILL impact gameplay. […] In a F2P it’s to get people to a cash shop.

@Keen – Yes, but if the method for generating revenue is graphical upgrades for those that can afford it and expansion packs that expand the game play itself, I wouldn’t say that it would be a negative impact on gameplay. In fact, I would argue that this method benefits both players and developers.

That said, we can never rule out greed. I think you could say this is a hybrid of a Buy 2 Play and a Free 2 Play model. There is nothing stopping ArenaNet from exploiting either side for more money. But if they play it safe, they could keep the game fun and balanced between B2P and F2P for a long time.

Btw, I consider still a B2P even after several years because the majority of players will be purchasing the expansion packs.

Thanks to Obsi for the B2P explanation above.

I think you are missing the point of the article. They do not claim to be devoid of marketing tactics; instead they claim their tactics are based upon player feedback metrics to improve the fun factor, which in turn should encourage people’s continued financial support.

These are not binary arguments. Obviously WoW needs to design fun content just as GW2 needs to retain a player’s base. The arguments propose that a sub model needs to more heavily depend upon fostering addictive behaviors through mechanics such as dailies and rare raid loot drops; I believe that it is a rare individual that honestly thinks doing the same repetitive dailies and raids for months on end is actually “fun”, as opposed to appealing to their addictive natures.

I would often wonder why over the course of years that glaringly bad problems with seemingly simple solutions persisted in games like WoW (take AFK’ers in battlegrounds). This line of thinking likely comprises most of the content of your blogs, which is, why do devs let game mechanics pass into launch and persist although they are overtly flawed from a fun POV? I surmise that many of these are based on fears of diminishing their monthly subbed player base.

The sub model is more prone to have devs make decisions on fostering daily addictive logging than on player feedback. I think the point is lost if one claims that the article states ANet will not make decisions based on financial motivations. I believe the point is that without the primary focus on maintaining monthly sub numbers they have the opportunity to shift away resources from content design primarily based upon addictive slot machine behaviors. So far their actions support this contention with the numerous player surveys, and the elimination of loot chasing by avoiding traditional raids and OP loot drops.

People should be able to play the game in the fashion they find most entertaining as opposed to the most efficient way published in an online guide to get the most woot. Concepts such as maximizing honor earned/hour isn’t relevant.

This article contends that they are going to make the tastiest encounters as defined on the basis of consumer feedback, instead of covering up a mediocre product by putting a toy at the bottom of every box. It makes perfect sense to me, and I believe this has been the contention of numerous posters on your blog throughout the years, namely that if devs listened more to gamers, gamers would have more fun, and it turn make the game a financial success, no?

What I read in that blogpost is;
Most other MMO devs will space out content making you have to work “harder” (read grind for longer) to get to the “end” to keep you paying your monthly fee until they release new content, which ofc is made in the same manner.

ArenaNets model allows them to make content which is fun to play, and doesn’t have to be dragged out for a long haul because they won’t miss out on any subfee should you decide not to play for a while until the next content patch or expansion comes along.

So basically, they don’t have to make content repetitive to make sure you stick around like other games to, especially since returning to the game is as easy as logging in, no pondering if you REALLY are going to resub or not.

I can see your point on them releasing paid content to make up for no sub, but if they stay true to how they ran the old game I expect them to release several patches with new content for free. They’ve released a lot of new content to tie in the gap between GW1 story and GW2 story the last year or two (Guild Wars Beyond).
They’ve released 4 paid expansions in the same time as WoW has released 3, so not much of a difference there (though a big difference is that you are free to buy any or none of them in GW, in no particular order, as opposed to WoW where they rely on having the previous one). In addition they’ve also released a paid “bonus mission pack” which I can’t comment much on since I’ve never played it (it’s basically a singleplayer questline afaik).

So I can only hope they’ll be releasing free content for GW2 as well, all we can do is wait and see. 🙂

Single sentence summation: Sub models design content that heavily relies upon operant conditioning and not primarily intrinsic enjoyment of the experience.

BTW I don’t claim to be above being conditioned by these models. I think I realized it happening to me most vividly when playing WoW came into conflict with another addictive behavior of mine.

My girlfriend at the time stated late one night while I was sitting for hours with my headset on in yet another raid, “If you you don’t come to bed right now you can forget about sex”; it soon after that I quit WoW…

“I’ll bet GW2 has dailies!”

Heck, they have “minuties”. You can replay the events back-to-back if you find it (dare I say it) fun.