Soren Johnson wrote:In China, a new MMORPG with a very aggressive business model, entitled ZT Online, has gained significant popularity. With over 10 million users and an ARPU of $40/month, the game has made its publisher, Giant Interactive, one of the most profitable online entertainment companies in China. Like many Asian games, ZT is free-to-play (F2P) and focuses primarily on player-vs-player gameplay. Not only can players steal from their defeated foes, but weaker characters can even be kidnapped and held for ransom, locking their owners out of the game.
Access to equipment in ZT is very limited. First of all, there are no loot drops from killing monsters or completing quests. Further, all items in the game are completely bound to the owner, so there is no way to trade for better weapons with other players. Instead, the primary way to gain equipment to empower one’s character is by paying real money directly to the publisher to open “treasure chests.” Essentially in-game slot machines, these chest have only a small chance of producing something useful, and finding the best equipment often requires opening thousands of chests. In fact, each day, the game confers a special bonus to the player who has opened the most chests, meaning the player who has spent the most real-world money to obtain better items.
ZT Online’s complete embrace, at every level of the game, of real-money transactions (RMT) may be appalling to some in the West, but the game is in many ways at the vanguard of a trend to develop games that take advantage of the players’ appetites for spending money to gain in-game advantages. Ironically, the F2P-with-RMT model traces its origins to the challenge of getting Asian gamers to buy boxed, retail games, most of whom preferred the free ride of easy and widespread piracy. In response, Korean companies like Nexon and NCsoft built server-based online games which could not be pirated and would require alternate business models.
Starting with subscriptions (including the world’s first million-subscriber MMO, NCsoft’s Lineage), the Korean industry eventually shifted to F2P games that made money from micro-transactions, such as Nexon’s KartRider and MapleStory. With many of these online games serving tens of millions of players, the Korean model has begun attracting the attention of major Western publishers, who have chartered their own F2P games in Asia, such as EA’s FIFA Online, Valve’s Counter-Strike Online, and THQ’s Company of Heroes Onine.
The promise of F2P games is that gamers will get hooked on a free game and then eventually spend their own money on their new passion. However, designing these games is not a simple endeavor; in fact, the challenges of F2P design can make developers appreciate how fortunate they were when they could design for a fixed-cost product, either a boxed, retail game or a standard, subscription-based MMO. In a fixed-cost world, the designer can focus on just one thing: making the player’s experience as engaging and interesting and fun as possible.
For a F2P game, however, designers have to balance making free content fun enough to engage first-time players but not so much fun that they would not yearn for something more, something that could be turned into a transaction sometime in the future. Every design decision must be made with a mind towards how it affects the balance between free and paid content. Thus, the true cost of piracy is that the line between game business and game design has become very blurry. As games move from boxed products to ongoing services, business decisions will become increasingly indistinguishable from design decisions. Of course, the industry has seen game designers play businessmen before - a fundamental part of arcade game design was understanding how to suck the most quarters out of players. Thus, understanding how successful F2P game have navigated these waters is instructive.
http://www.designer-notes.com/?p=115
The article continues, but I stopped reading here because he committed two GARGANTUAN gaffes, and because it's clear to me that his train of thought moves on into very boring, tedious territory. But what are the gaffes?
Thus, the true cost of piracy is that the line between game business and game design has become very blurry.
Yeah dude, because these game design models would not have been invented if piracy did not exist, because the people who design games do not care at all about maximizing profits, lol.
Of course, the industry has seen game designers play businessmen before - a fundamental part of arcade game design was understanding how to suck the most quarters out of players.
More proof that Western designers never understood arcade gaming, which is why most REAL credit-feeders were designed by Westerners, and why 99.99% of arcade games worth mentioning were, and still are, made in Japan.
And this tripe gets published in "Western Game Developer" magazine. This, dear readers, is how fallacies are disseminated and perpetuated. By ignorant twats scribbling furiously in random publications with no editorial standards whatsoever.
