The amount of people who refuse to play a game because of a subscription is equally as high as people who don't understand exactly the value you get with a subscription based game. It boggles my mind.
$15 a month is cheap for the amount of content you get each month. Hell if you play shooters the $15 DLCs have less content than a good MMO gets each month. Also no game is supported like an MMO with a subscription. Devs are constantly jumping on fixes and changing things, always balancing the gameplay, always keeping a high level of maintinance.
Going with a subscription is a good way to keep the game in a higher state of development, content consistently rolling out, content that feels complete and rewarding and never feels like you're missing out on something because you didn't pay extra, and keeps the community more stable and consistent. I've never seen a F2P or B2P game that has as much content and support as subscription based MMOs. The MMOs that survive with a subscription survive because the developer understands you're paying $15 a month to play and thus works their best to keep value in the game.
Not every game should be a subscription but I don't want to see an end of a business model that clearly works. The problem with TOR, which everybody always cites as being a failure because of subscriptions, was that it was way over hyped and under delivered. Ended up being a straight up WoW clone. While building a game with the foundations of gameplay that WoW is built on is fine, playing the exact same game that most MMO players have been playing since 2006 is not fun. To make it worse for TOR is that the gameplay wasn't as good as the game it was copying and it had a fraction of the content.
B2P could be good but GW2 shows that the content they build is usually small and temporary without adding any real depth to the game. GW2 has a host of other problems too. The game as a whole is really simple and shallow with a lot of really dumb gameplay mechanics that are frustrating and not fun. Once I hit 80 I just didn't care.
I just hate how people write it off instantly. They never even gave the business model a chance. It has advantages that no other business model has. In the long run you usually end up paying less on a single game than buying dozens of other games that still fail to equal as much content as a single pay to play MMO can offer.
I understand why people are hesitant, but people need to be more open minded about different business strategies and how they can work for the consumer. No F2P or B2P MMO will ever have as much content or support as a good P2P MMO. Everybody looks at GW2 because they could play it for a few hours and called it fun. It pales in comparison to other MMOs in terms of content and depth.
Wasdie
You're acting like people haven't tried that model before. For me personally, I don't want to spend months and months continuously on a game, I need something that either I can play whenever I want or something that I can quickly jump in, enjoy, and jump to another game. Heck I don't even have enough times to fully enjoy the whole thing for it to worth the money. I know 1 retail game = 4 months subscription, but I don't buy games full price either. Not to mention companies still charge fee for services that other MMOs offer for free. And there's nothing wrong with playing a game for a few hours and calling it fun, it's all subjective; and I find GW2 depth perfectly fine. 
Log in to comment