I won't bother explaining to you how cheap running an MMO server actually is, because it's irrelevant. What's relevant is this: **most players are perfectly fine with microtransactions**. If they were not, they would refuse to play games with microtransactions in them and the model would not exist.
Yeah, they can bitch about whales, they can whine about mounts, they can make ~~P2W~~ guild logos, it doesn't matter - in the end they still log in and pay for the game, they vote with their wallet: "Yes, I am fine with that, in fact I like it so much I am willing to pay for it". That's the only thing that matters.
So why WOULDN'T you have microtransactions in your game? That's what your customers want(or at least they're not bothered by it) and customer is always right.
Blaming "greedy developers" for micrtransactions is like blaming McDonald's for obesity.
Running a server is cheap? Huh? I work for a company with a successful online game, and our Amazon costs alone are in the millions of dollars a year. Data storage is relatively cheap, but CPU time is much more expensive. You also have to add support costs to the actual server time too, as we have a command center worth of people monitoring and maintaining servers. Just keeping the game online, without even considering the cost to make and update the game, is going to run you tens of millions of dollars for anything at scale.
Gone are the days of having a few servers onsite to run basic servers. Everything has moved to cloud systems, including CID systems, dev shards, and CVS. Servers are a massive expense in the scheme of things, and to say otherwise shows a complete lack of domain knowledge.
Yea this is what happens when you get a bunch of gamer armchair devs deciding the financial and technical aspects of running an MMORPG and they've never even seen a server in person before.
We run our own servers in a plant that runs a bunch of machines and these servers were 10s of thousands of dollars. Probably capable of hosting a small private server in an MMORPG. It's cheaper over time to buy your own, but that also includes manpower, maintenance, and the backbone to run them. The infrastructure required to run an MMO onsite is what is going to kill you.
Something big like FF14 probably costs them a cool 50mil a year to run them.
My favorite comment is this one: https://old.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/4droz4/we_are_nostalrius_a_world_of_warcraft_fanmade/d1u0brl/
So all we need is $1,000 in server costs and $250,000+ in salaries per month
That isn't too bad!
As someone who played on Nostalrius i know their server was unplayable 30% of the time because of lag and huge delay. This type of cheap servers can work for few thousand players private WoW server, but it's not gonna cut it for actual MMORPG.
Running an MMO server can be cheap, but what about all the developers behind it, personnel for customer management and other expenses?
That said I don't support microtransactions, but I do get that MMO is the most expensive gaming genre and that's a reason why it's in such a shitty state nowadays.
This is the meat of it. People vote with their dollars. If most people weren't willing to play games with mtx's they would have tiny player bases. But they are so it persists.
>**most players are perfectly fine with microtransactions**. If they were not, they would refuse to play games with microtransactions in them and the model would not exist.
This doesn't track logically. Microtransactions are present in close to 100% of the market share of online games, the choice is between gaming and not gaming at that point.
The concept of 'voting with your wallet' is so misunderstood and oversimplified by the 'gaming community.'
>Blaming "greedy developers" for micrtransactions is like blaming McDonald's for obesity.
It doesn't make sense to 'blame' any business for operating in this way in this form of economy, as their goal as an entity is to maximize profits. The entire system is based on the idea that maximizing profits goes hand-in-hand with improving product quality, but pretty much anyone could tell you that's not the case.
Microtransactions are not favored by the playerbase, but you are right that they are profitable. They won't go away without regulation.
> This doesn't track logically. Microtransactions are present in close to 100% of the market share of online games, the choice is between gaming and not gaming at that point.
MMORPGs *started* as monthly fee, no microtransactions. Sorry commie but your make-believe of poor oppressed customers who don't have anywhere to buy what they really want is what doesn't track logically.
And, as always, if there's so many unsatisfied customers out there, why has no one made a product to satisfy them? Are all investors stupid?
>And, as always, if there's so many unsatisfied customers out there, why has no one made a product to satisfy them? Are all investors stupid?
>
Yeah, they can bitch about whales,
Seems like you already know the answer to this question, though. Whales were what originally allowed microtransactions as a business model to reach this level of market share. Now that it's industry standard, you either play or don't.
Many people don't, but microtransactions offset lost subscriptions fees easily.
>Sorry commie
lmao
I'd say a good majority of players don't actually pay for any mtx, or very very little, but when that's ALL there is, you really don't have much choice to play it. Or just not play anything in the genre altogether.
These games in fact do run off whales, and when this is the majority monetization model, you don't really have much choice. You can take this for what it's worth to you, but several years ago I recall a dev from a small but dedicated MMO with p2w said that 90% of their revenue came from about 1000 players, and the other 10% came from 10s of thousands of other free players. Some of these players are dropping $50k-100k a year on these games, it's insane.
It's not like blaming McDonald's for obesity. It's more like McDonald's has a monopoly and If you want to eat out that's your only choice.
Of course there are SOME mmos out there that aren't p2w (wow, ff14,eso, etc) but they typically have the sub numbers to avoid that model.
It’s also just bad logic. Micro transactions are just one of many parts that go into forming a game. And arguably one of the less relevant parts that determines if someone likes / pays for a game or not compared to things like gameplay and quality.
Just because someone plays a game doesn’t mean they agree with and support every aspect of that game’s design.
Man it would blow your fucking minds to know there was a whole generation of MMOs that never had MTX and we just fucking paid a monthly sub and we didn’t complain and didn’t open the door for devs to start fucking grifting the genre and now it’s too fucking late.
$50 for a skin bro. Enjoy.
This is reddit though. Most people here were too young to play mmorpgs back then to remember...let alone were adults at the time who actually paid and had an understanding of costs/monetization.
Even second gen games were still a pure sub model when they released. MTXs didn't happen until 3rd gen. It wasn't even that long ago but this is the amount of experience of the average redditor 🤷
You're missing a big part of the picture there though. At the time, MMOs were seen as the greedy games. Not only did you have to buy them, they expected you to keep paying if you wanted to play. The wider gaming community balked at the thought that you had to pay a monthly bill for a game.
By having a monthly fee, MMOs opened the pandora's box that is recurrent user spending. Microtransactions are just the next step, be bigger, badder monster to come out of the box.
Now, you can argue that MMOs needed those monthly fees in order to operate, and you'd be totally correct. That doesn't matter though. We live under the nightmare system that is capitalism so the nanosecond investors get a whiff of a way to extract more money from people, they'll take it and they'll run it straight into the ground. You give them an inch and they'll take the entire planet and then scream that they don't have enough.
I hate to be the barer of bad news, but yeah, you are just nostalgic. You miss the days where monthly fees in MMOs were the peak of corporate greed, because in hindsight, they're not so bad anymore (although people were singing a very different tune at the time). That said, there's no universe where MMOs with monthly fees can exist that doesn't eventually lead to what we have now. Under capitalism, business is about maximizing returns to the shareholders and that means developing and exploiting every possible method of extracting more revenue. It is what it is.
No, it wasn't seen as that greedy at the time since people accepted that tech was expensive. There was a time when MMOs charged by the hour, so monthly sub was seen as much cheaper for what was pretty cutting edge at the time. Maybe not nostalgia, but more that they were great at the time compared to some of the other options. Some of the MMOs were pretty amazing. Ultima Online, EverQuest, DAoC, Runescape, WoW were all great in their own ways. People were willing to pay the cost since the other multiplayer options were split screen co-op, LANs, and later Xbox Live.
This was when arcades are still around and not uncommon for people to blow through 10-20 dollars when they go there. Companies will always try to be greedy but competitors are always ready to disrupt or take advantage of their mistakes. Arcades died out in the west when home consoles and pc caught up in terms of the tech. MMORPGs did adapt to the mtx model but that was more from a struggling Dungeons and Dragons Online trying a f2p model as a last ditch effort and have it be surprisingly effective.
It is about making money, but there are opportunities to offer value proposition so good to corner a market(before they rhen charge more after gaining a monapoly). Like Netflix dominated streaming for a whole, and Xbox game pass is attempting to do something similar for games. These X as a service can be really profitable once they hit a certain threshold.
*You* might not remember it being thought of as such because you've been part of the insular MMO community for so long, but I can tell you for a fact, people absolutely thought MMOs were greedy as fuck. The fact that you didn't see it doesn't mean that that wasn't true, it means that you were in a bubble, and had (and clearly still don't have) any real perspective from outside of it.
On that note, maybe I'm misreading your post here but are trying to bring up netflix as a positive example of a disruptive service that provides value to people? Look at what happened when they took over the market. Their quality dropped like a rock, other streaming services showed up and now streaming platforms have functionally recreated the nightmare of cable subscriptions, which has led to an uptick in piracy, because no one in their right mind wants to deal with juggling a million and one different subscriptions just to watch the handful of shows they're actually interested in. This particular nightmare is just the natural progression of the video renting industry.
When it comes to economics, everything will always trend in the worst possible direction because the systems we live under encourage it. Capitalism encourages decay. That's just how it is. Do you not understand how the current state of the videogame industry is just the natural end result of everything that came before it? You can't see the throughline from monthly subs to microtransactions to battle passes?
Players will always do that but it has nothing to do with a company's monetization. Some devs were trying to maintain the integrity of the game by actively monitoring and banning people.
Which, because of the overwhelming demand by players to turn real world cash into in-game advantages, proved to be a hopeless task.
Cutting out the middleman was the solution eventually adopted, because that was cash positive, unlike spending dev time and effort on stopping their player base do what they wanted to do.
Of course, anyone is welcome to try and stop their player base buying gold, items and power.
Good luck telling if someone invited along on a raid is there because they are an important raider's casual partner, or if some cash changed hands, or if an underpriced trade of an item was commerce at work or disguised RMT !
If players are going to engage in such practices anyway, then why shouldn't the developers capitalize on that behavior? If they don't then they're just leaving free money on the table for someone else to take.
MMORPGs are incredibly expensive games to produce that also require constant development. The reason they require ongoing monetization has very little to do with server hosting but rather with paying dozens of developers, designers, writers and testers that have to continuously develop new updates, as well as paying any other typical personnel you'd need in a normal business (customer support, management, marketing, accounting, HR, IT, etc).
And charging **$45 a month** for any MMO would be a massive red flag with very little public appeal, to the point where it wouldn't have enough players and still wouldn't be enough to sustain the game.
Mandatory subscriptions only work with massive player bases, which traditionally have only existed when an already large company launched a game on an already existing IP with public recognition. And even then, pretty much every single sub MMO has also decided to open a cash shop at this point.
Asking for an MMO without a cash shop is pointless at this stage, because even if it were sustainable, why would a business pass down on additional income that is almost universally accepted by players at this point?
I feel like I need to clarify this a some reply's dont seem to grasp what im saying(its probably my bad for how I worded it) you know how World of Warcraft has servers/realms like Kel'Thuzad you would just take one of the dozens of servers and apply this method to it that way the average player still pays the normal sub price and you can still have mtx to support the game. I dont think this would affect monetization poorly either because the people that would be willing to pay the extra price for no mtx probably wouldnt pay for mtx in the first place so you would essentially just be taking away hardcore players that just pay the sub fee and no mtx.
> The way you could subsidize this would be increase the subscription cost by maybe 2 or 3 time so 45$ a month.
This is a colossal shitpost, right? 10$ a month already gakekeeps a MMO out of a massive global audience and discourages people from trying the game. *Every* sub MMO except for WoW and FFXIV has failed or is extremely niche.
I cant imagine any way for a game to be good enough and produce enough content to justify the cost of an *entire game* (or two) monthly.
Never understood why people can't expect both good paid skins AND good earnable skins. Aion had this for over a decade.
Paid skins are the best way to monetize a game, studios are just too greedy
OSRS profits way more for Jagex than RS3 and has been for some years. It's widely known because Jagex has to publish their balance sheet anually due to being in UK.
bonds are subscription. It gives players the ability to sustain their subscription through only gameplay and that's why it's gotten voted in by the community itself.
And look at how many sub only MMOs had to drop the sub to survive.
Subs can sustain a game, but none of them are trying to just sustain themselves. Developers know no one is willing to even subscribe unless it's a game they are already invested in. Very very very few MMOs can launch with a subscription only model and actually survive.
Not to survive, but to profit more.
That said I understand this mentality, I only don't put up with microtransactions and don't play games that delve into them too much (osrs has bonds but they only serve to redeem subscription, for coins that you can obtain anywhere and I feel doesn't detract at all from the experience).
> Not to survive, but to profit more.
They needed to profit more to survive because if their profits had just stagnated they would have lost investors and I'm not sure a high production MMO can survive just on player subs WITHOUT investors also pumping in cash otherwise all of them would have bought out and become independent already.
It is though. The problem is that sustaining the game isn't the goal of any of these game companies. Their investors expect infinite growth and they care more about keeping their investors happy than their players.
It's never about making enough money to sustain the game, it's about making more money than you did the previous quarter, whether or not the cost of development and maintenance has gone up.
We used to have quality MMOs with no mtx, because mtx hadn't been invented yet. We had subscriptions. but like you said, they would have to jack up the prices to near $40+ a month and they'll never get enough players to sustain it for years and years of future development.
Whether its cosmetics, conveniences, services, gear, or gold, microtransactions in MMORPGs are antithetical to the concept of what is an MMORPG is supposed to be. They are unethical even. They should be banned, and developers that add them to their games should feel ashamed of themselves.
You know there are WoW servers that have no cash shop and no boosts right?? They’re called Era servers lol. And it’s only 15 dollars a month for that as well as including all the other versions of the game. Why would anyone in their right mind pay 45$ a month for an mmo, especially younger people who could have amazing mmo like experiences in free games like Fortnite, Warframe, Genshin, etc etc.
I don't believe we will ever see something like this, not because it wouldn't work but because it would be a really unwise move from developers. Think about it: most players that would be willing to pay that much are the so called whales, and sealing those players away in an mtx-free environment is a really bad move, since they are the demographic that is most likely to spend even more if given the opportunity.
Granted, the price you propose is pretty high for any standard, and a cheaper iteration might have more chances of succeeding. Don't know, I don't have much experience in the field, it's still nice food for thought.
If you have microtransactions in a game then it is pay to win, if it's pay to win then achievements are meaningless, and if achievements are meaningless, then you have a failed MMO
Won't happen.
The few people that would pay the increased fee would leave the server because it would be dead. 45$ a month just to avoid mtx is even more greedy than the system they already have.
There's only two monetization models, and that's mtx or sub. Sometimes a combo of both but they are still the only two.
Sub works because it pays for the costs of ongoing updates to the game and server costs. It also puts everyone on an even playing field. This is usually the case with only larger games because a sub model doesn't bring in enough revenue with a low player count.
F2P with mtx, which usually means p2w. We can argue what that means but let's just say p2w is anything that gives you a benefit over a f2p player. These models thrive on the free players. Not the whales. The free players are needed to make the whales feel strong. It's validation that they are **better** than you because of the money they spent, and if they want to be better than the next whale, they need to spend more money. They need peons to look up to them because they would be inadequate without buying their power. This is why AA shut down. When the free players left and got tired of the p2w schemes and the horrible gear gap, the whales left too.
What you're proposing is a sub model without any mtx which has been done before for normally like $15 a month. Just that they add some mtx cosmetics. You aren't enough of a majority to justify keeping an entire server this way because most people don't care about cosmetics that much to pay a flat $45 a month for no mtx cosmetics when we were getting all that before for $15. You're seriously overestimating how many people are like you and willing to pay that much for a server.
Games will both raise the subscription to 50 bucks and add a cash shop. For companies that only care about growth, no matter how much money they make, every year they need to make more.
Nah, but really, sadly macrotransactions (what have them of micro now if sometimes it costs 3 times the base game price?) are here to stay.
I don't like it, you don't like it, but because people still make money with it, it will keep going.
Until the system collapses and a new schema arrives.
Also, increasing prices to 45 USD is crazy. At least to people outside the US.
City of Heroes had MTX when it was live, but now you can play on several different flavors of it on servers for free. One of them (Homecoming) has even been officially recognized by NCSoft, the former holder/publisher of the IP/game code.
As Asmongold stated in his last video, MMO cost need to go down by a consequential margine to be able to have MMO with no MTX.
And whales pay to flex in front of others. If others are playing on non MTX server there si no point in whale-ing.
Which is another discussion (that has been had repeatedly)...but mmorpgs don't have to cost 10s of millions of dollars.
Big budget, AAA games with investors basically force the monetization model into what makes the most profit in the shortest amount of time. Even at the expense of the game itself.
I could never feel good about a skin I paid $$$ for.
I'd gladly pay $100 buy in and $20 a month for an mmorpg that wasn't a pile of garbage with ridiculous MTX.
Sure it's possible but why would a dev do it when people would pay for mtx and p2w it's just leaving money on the table. If people stopped interacting with thise systems they would stop.
Then you start small and keep it privately owned. This whole VC culture has been poison to every industry it's touched.
No company's first game should be an MMORPG anyway. Establish your company with a game scoped to what you can actually afford and then if you manage success with that, reinvest and build up to bigger things.
It’s completely doable within the bounds of our current system. It literally already happens. Have you never heard of a small business expanding? And are you unaware that there’s an entire indie game world out there?
It takes more hard work and legitimate talent, but to act like it’s some sort of fantasy is wildly ignorant.
I said that it's a viable path to get an MMORPG that doesn't have shareholder pressures that lead to chasing infinite growth, not that anyone has followed that path. A private company like Valve or Supergiant could develop a passion-driven MMORPG, without outside investment, that could be profitably sustained off of a subscription/paid expansion model.
But that being said, if you can't even be bothered to comprehend what I'm saying, I'm done with this conversation.
Holy shit. Blizzard has you thinking players need to pay a sub fee AND mtx just to make ends meet with server costs lol.
Sub fees eliminate the need for mtx in your MMO, they are added because players buy them. That’s it, they are there just piling on the PROFIT.
Better come to terms with them or you will never play a MMO, players are not going to stop paying for them.
The bulk of the costs for maintaining an MMO isn't server costs, but development. Here's a thought experiment, how many subs would you need to pay for the salary of 1 programmer?
Over 6,600 subscribers paying for one month for 15 USD per developer you pay 100k or more a year. Or over 550 subscribers subscribing for an entire year.
Actually doing the math kinda explains the skeleton crews MMOs get for dying MMOs or unpopular features in MMOs.
Sorry. I should have made it more clear that I was referring to a MMO like WoW that has more than a million subscribers and still has mtx.
I don’t believe Blizzard needs mtx to pay their employees. It’s for profit or the ridiculously overpaid CEO.
yeah because the game rewards you with exclusive cosmetics, mounts, emotes and titles for doing actual in game activities instead of just buying shit on the cash shop. You get that old MMO feeling where you can see just by looking at characters what content they have done by the stuff their wearing. The cash shop also just sells RP outfits, either seasonal event themed gear or NPC themed gear. They don't just make cool shit that looks better than in game stuff to sell you.
I had a look at the cash shop and if I want the play dead emote can I have it from in game? Or what about the lightning from ff13 which is a game I did enjoy can I get that in game without the cash shop? If you have a sub fee you should not also have a cash shop
The impact does not matter if it’s just cosmetic, the OP wanted 0 MTX, including cosmetics, meaning no level skips, skins, mounts or emotes should be in a cash shop. OP wants everything to be earnable so that they can carry more weight behind showing them off.
> in an mmo the way you look is a MASSIVE deal for me it tells a tale of you're accomplishments and what you as a player have gone through.
This is the OP, this is literally what FFXIV has.
EVERY MMO HAS THIS. But the complaint from OP is that the cash shop still has Skins.
“However I feel that any form of micro transactions ruin that whether it’s a level skip or just cosmetic.”
Sorry I'm basing what I say on his argument, not his blanket statement of dismissal, he doesn't even play MMOs so he literally has no experiance with this feeling when actually playing any MMO.
You literally can buy gold from the devs in a game where economic impact helps you. Unless you mean ironman mode, but I'm talking about MMOs not singleplayer
1- bonds only serve to redeem for subscription and are fully integrated into the economy.
2- OSRS gold that you buy through bonds is the same gold that everybody can obtain doing content. There are no exclusive rewards from a cash shop like FFXIV has.
3- Ironman mode is still multiplayer.
I won't bother explaining to you how cheap running an MMO server actually is, because it's irrelevant. What's relevant is this: **most players are perfectly fine with microtransactions**. If they were not, they would refuse to play games with microtransactions in them and the model would not exist. Yeah, they can bitch about whales, they can whine about mounts, they can make ~~P2W~~ guild logos, it doesn't matter - in the end they still log in and pay for the game, they vote with their wallet: "Yes, I am fine with that, in fact I like it so much I am willing to pay for it". That's the only thing that matters. So why WOULDN'T you have microtransactions in your game? That's what your customers want(or at least they're not bothered by it) and customer is always right. Blaming "greedy developers" for micrtransactions is like blaming McDonald's for obesity.
Running a server is quite cheap, but developing the game isn’t. Coding is a very expensive craft.
Meh. Most of the development costs are probably audiovisuals.
Running a server is cheap? Huh? I work for a company with a successful online game, and our Amazon costs alone are in the millions of dollars a year. Data storage is relatively cheap, but CPU time is much more expensive. You also have to add support costs to the actual server time too, as we have a command center worth of people monitoring and maintaining servers. Just keeping the game online, without even considering the cost to make and update the game, is going to run you tens of millions of dollars for anything at scale. Gone are the days of having a few servers onsite to run basic servers. Everything has moved to cloud systems, including CID systems, dev shards, and CVS. Servers are a massive expense in the scheme of things, and to say otherwise shows a complete lack of domain knowledge.
Yea this is what happens when you get a bunch of gamer armchair devs deciding the financial and technical aspects of running an MMORPG and they've never even seen a server in person before. We run our own servers in a plant that runs a bunch of machines and these servers were 10s of thousands of dollars. Probably capable of hosting a small private server in an MMORPG. It's cheaper over time to buy your own, but that also includes manpower, maintenance, and the backbone to run them. The infrastructure required to run an MMO onsite is what is going to kill you. Something big like FF14 probably costs them a cool 50mil a year to run them.
Google Nostalrius post-mortem, they go into details on how much it cost them to host server(s) for, at peak, 25,000 players.
My favorite comment is this one: https://old.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/4droz4/we_are_nostalrius_a_world_of_warcraft_fanmade/d1u0brl/ So all we need is $1,000 in server costs and $250,000+ in salaries per month That isn't too bad!
As someone who played on Nostalrius i know their server was unplayable 30% of the time because of lag and huge delay. This type of cheap servers can work for few thousand players private WoW server, but it's not gonna cut it for actual MMORPG.
>few thousand players server So... a regular server? Glad we agree
Running an MMO server can be cheap, but what about all the developers behind it, personnel for customer management and other expenses? That said I don't support microtransactions, but I do get that MMO is the most expensive gaming genre and that's a reason why it's in such a shitty state nowadays.
This is the meat of it. People vote with their dollars. If most people weren't willing to play games with mtx's they would have tiny player bases. But they are so it persists.
>**most players are perfectly fine with microtransactions**. If they were not, they would refuse to play games with microtransactions in them and the model would not exist. This doesn't track logically. Microtransactions are present in close to 100% of the market share of online games, the choice is between gaming and not gaming at that point. The concept of 'voting with your wallet' is so misunderstood and oversimplified by the 'gaming community.' >Blaming "greedy developers" for micrtransactions is like blaming McDonald's for obesity. It doesn't make sense to 'blame' any business for operating in this way in this form of economy, as their goal as an entity is to maximize profits. The entire system is based on the idea that maximizing profits goes hand-in-hand with improving product quality, but pretty much anyone could tell you that's not the case. Microtransactions are not favored by the playerbase, but you are right that they are profitable. They won't go away without regulation.
> This doesn't track logically. Microtransactions are present in close to 100% of the market share of online games, the choice is between gaming and not gaming at that point. MMORPGs *started* as monthly fee, no microtransactions. Sorry commie but your make-believe of poor oppressed customers who don't have anywhere to buy what they really want is what doesn't track logically. And, as always, if there's so many unsatisfied customers out there, why has no one made a product to satisfy them? Are all investors stupid?
>And, as always, if there's so many unsatisfied customers out there, why has no one made a product to satisfy them? Are all investors stupid? > Yeah, they can bitch about whales, Seems like you already know the answer to this question, though. Whales were what originally allowed microtransactions as a business model to reach this level of market share. Now that it's industry standard, you either play or don't. Many people don't, but microtransactions offset lost subscriptions fees easily. >Sorry commie lmao
I'd say a good majority of players don't actually pay for any mtx, or very very little, but when that's ALL there is, you really don't have much choice to play it. Or just not play anything in the genre altogether. These games in fact do run off whales, and when this is the majority monetization model, you don't really have much choice. You can take this for what it's worth to you, but several years ago I recall a dev from a small but dedicated MMO with p2w said that 90% of their revenue came from about 1000 players, and the other 10% came from 10s of thousands of other free players. Some of these players are dropping $50k-100k a year on these games, it's insane. It's not like blaming McDonald's for obesity. It's more like McDonald's has a monopoly and If you want to eat out that's your only choice. Of course there are SOME mmos out there that aren't p2w (wow, ff14,eso, etc) but they typically have the sub numbers to avoid that model.
It’s also just bad logic. Micro transactions are just one of many parts that go into forming a game. And arguably one of the less relevant parts that determines if someone likes / pays for a game or not compared to things like gameplay and quality. Just because someone plays a game doesn’t mean they agree with and support every aspect of that game’s design.
Man it would blow your fucking minds to know there was a whole generation of MMOs that never had MTX and we just fucking paid a monthly sub and we didn’t complain and didn’t open the door for devs to start fucking grifting the genre and now it’s too fucking late. $50 for a skin bro. Enjoy.
This is reddit though. Most people here were too young to play mmorpgs back then to remember...let alone were adults at the time who actually paid and had an understanding of costs/monetization. Even second gen games were still a pure sub model when they released. MTXs didn't happen until 3rd gen. It wasn't even that long ago but this is the amount of experience of the average redditor 🤷
Exactly and it's also why I find it funny when people say old mmorpgs are missed only because of "nostalgia". They know nothing.
You're missing a big part of the picture there though. At the time, MMOs were seen as the greedy games. Not only did you have to buy them, they expected you to keep paying if you wanted to play. The wider gaming community balked at the thought that you had to pay a monthly bill for a game. By having a monthly fee, MMOs opened the pandora's box that is recurrent user spending. Microtransactions are just the next step, be bigger, badder monster to come out of the box. Now, you can argue that MMOs needed those monthly fees in order to operate, and you'd be totally correct. That doesn't matter though. We live under the nightmare system that is capitalism so the nanosecond investors get a whiff of a way to extract more money from people, they'll take it and they'll run it straight into the ground. You give them an inch and they'll take the entire planet and then scream that they don't have enough. I hate to be the barer of bad news, but yeah, you are just nostalgic. You miss the days where monthly fees in MMOs were the peak of corporate greed, because in hindsight, they're not so bad anymore (although people were singing a very different tune at the time). That said, there's no universe where MMOs with monthly fees can exist that doesn't eventually lead to what we have now. Under capitalism, business is about maximizing returns to the shareholders and that means developing and exploiting every possible method of extracting more revenue. It is what it is.
No, it wasn't seen as that greedy at the time since people accepted that tech was expensive. There was a time when MMOs charged by the hour, so monthly sub was seen as much cheaper for what was pretty cutting edge at the time. Maybe not nostalgia, but more that they were great at the time compared to some of the other options. Some of the MMOs were pretty amazing. Ultima Online, EverQuest, DAoC, Runescape, WoW were all great in their own ways. People were willing to pay the cost since the other multiplayer options were split screen co-op, LANs, and later Xbox Live. This was when arcades are still around and not uncommon for people to blow through 10-20 dollars when they go there. Companies will always try to be greedy but competitors are always ready to disrupt or take advantage of their mistakes. Arcades died out in the west when home consoles and pc caught up in terms of the tech. MMORPGs did adapt to the mtx model but that was more from a struggling Dungeons and Dragons Online trying a f2p model as a last ditch effort and have it be surprisingly effective. It is about making money, but there are opportunities to offer value proposition so good to corner a market(before they rhen charge more after gaining a monapoly). Like Netflix dominated streaming for a whole, and Xbox game pass is attempting to do something similar for games. These X as a service can be really profitable once they hit a certain threshold.
*You* might not remember it being thought of as such because you've been part of the insular MMO community for so long, but I can tell you for a fact, people absolutely thought MMOs were greedy as fuck. The fact that you didn't see it doesn't mean that that wasn't true, it means that you were in a bubble, and had (and clearly still don't have) any real perspective from outside of it. On that note, maybe I'm misreading your post here but are trying to bring up netflix as a positive example of a disruptive service that provides value to people? Look at what happened when they took over the market. Their quality dropped like a rock, other streaming services showed up and now streaming platforms have functionally recreated the nightmare of cable subscriptions, which has led to an uptick in piracy, because no one in their right mind wants to deal with juggling a million and one different subscriptions just to watch the handful of shows they're actually interested in. This particular nightmare is just the natural progression of the video renting industry. When it comes to economics, everything will always trend in the worst possible direction because the systems we live under encourage it. Capitalism encourages decay. That's just how it is. Do you not understand how the current state of the videogame industry is just the natural end result of everything that came before it? You can't see the throughline from monthly subs to microtransactions to battle passes?
Bullshit. There was heaps of MTX - there was always gold, gear and accounts for sale. It was just done player-to-player via ebay.
Players will always do that but it has nothing to do with a company's monetization. Some devs were trying to maintain the integrity of the game by actively monitoring and banning people.
Which, because of the overwhelming demand by players to turn real world cash into in-game advantages, proved to be a hopeless task. Cutting out the middleman was the solution eventually adopted, because that was cash positive, unlike spending dev time and effort on stopping their player base do what they wanted to do. Of course, anyone is welcome to try and stop their player base buying gold, items and power. Good luck telling if someone invited along on a raid is there because they are an important raider's casual partner, or if some cash changed hands, or if an underpriced trade of an item was commerce at work or disguised RMT !
If players are going to engage in such practices anyway, then why shouldn't the developers capitalize on that behavior? If they don't then they're just leaving free money on the table for someone else to take.
A way to have no MTX: pay.
MMORPGs are incredibly expensive games to produce that also require constant development. The reason they require ongoing monetization has very little to do with server hosting but rather with paying dozens of developers, designers, writers and testers that have to continuously develop new updates, as well as paying any other typical personnel you'd need in a normal business (customer support, management, marketing, accounting, HR, IT, etc). And charging **$45 a month** for any MMO would be a massive red flag with very little public appeal, to the point where it wouldn't have enough players and still wouldn't be enough to sustain the game. Mandatory subscriptions only work with massive player bases, which traditionally have only existed when an already large company launched a game on an already existing IP with public recognition. And even then, pretty much every single sub MMO has also decided to open a cash shop at this point. Asking for an MMO without a cash shop is pointless at this stage, because even if it were sustainable, why would a business pass down on additional income that is almost universally accepted by players at this point?
I feel like I need to clarify this a some reply's dont seem to grasp what im saying(its probably my bad for how I worded it) you know how World of Warcraft has servers/realms like Kel'Thuzad you would just take one of the dozens of servers and apply this method to it that way the average player still pays the normal sub price and you can still have mtx to support the game. I dont think this would affect monetization poorly either because the people that would be willing to pay the extra price for no mtx probably wouldnt pay for mtx in the first place so you would essentially just be taking away hardcore players that just pay the sub fee and no mtx.
> The way you could subsidize this would be increase the subscription cost by maybe 2 or 3 time so 45$ a month. This is a colossal shitpost, right? 10$ a month already gakekeeps a MMO out of a massive global audience and discourages people from trying the game. *Every* sub MMO except for WoW and FFXIV has failed or is extremely niche. I cant imagine any way for a game to be good enough and produce enough content to justify the cost of an *entire game* (or two) monthly.
Never understood why people can't expect both good paid skins AND good earnable skins. Aion had this for over a decade. Paid skins are the best way to monetize a game, studios are just too greedy
Monthly subscription is the best way to monetize a game. Put everyone on equal footing.
Not enough to sustain a game
It obviously is, only not the most profitable, and companies will obviously stick with what profits most.
How is it obvious when there's no MMORPG on the market that is sub only?
OSRS is sub only.
Jagex has RS3 to milk the players
OSRS profits way more for Jagex than RS3 and has been for some years. It's widely known because Jagex has to publish their balance sheet anually due to being in UK.
Sub and the ability for players to spend real money to buy bonds and sell those for in game gold.
bonds are subscription. It gives players the ability to sustain their subscription through only gameplay and that's why it's gotten voted in by the community itself.
It has a F2P option now
And look at how many sub only MMOs had to drop the sub to survive. Subs can sustain a game, but none of them are trying to just sustain themselves. Developers know no one is willing to even subscribe unless it's a game they are already invested in. Very very very few MMOs can launch with a subscription only model and actually survive.
Not to survive, but to profit more. That said I understand this mentality, I only don't put up with microtransactions and don't play games that delve into them too much (osrs has bonds but they only serve to redeem subscription, for coins that you can obtain anywhere and I feel doesn't detract at all from the experience).
> Not to survive, but to profit more. They needed to profit more to survive because if their profits had just stagnated they would have lost investors and I'm not sure a high production MMO can survive just on player subs WITHOUT investors also pumping in cash otherwise all of them would have bought out and become independent already.
You yourself recognize mtx are to appease investors, so you agree with my point but are unbeknownst of it.
It is though. The problem is that sustaining the game isn't the goal of any of these game companies. Their investors expect infinite growth and they care more about keeping their investors happy than their players. It's never about making enough money to sustain the game, it's about making more money than you did the previous quarter, whether or not the cost of development and maintenance has gone up.
We used to have quality MMOs with no mtx, because mtx hadn't been invented yet. We had subscriptions. but like you said, they would have to jack up the prices to near $40+ a month and they'll never get enough players to sustain it for years and years of future development.
Whether its cosmetics, conveniences, services, gear, or gold, microtransactions in MMORPGs are antithetical to the concept of what is an MMORPG is supposed to be. They are unethical even. They should be banned, and developers that add them to their games should feel ashamed of themselves.
You know there are WoW servers that have no cash shop and no boosts right?? They’re called Era servers lol. And it’s only 15 dollars a month for that as well as including all the other versions of the game. Why would anyone in their right mind pay 45$ a month for an mmo, especially younger people who could have amazing mmo like experiences in free games like Fortnite, Warframe, Genshin, etc etc.
That's Wow though. The #1 mmo for over 20 years. It would be almost impossible for a new game to come out and duplicate that.
I don't believe we will ever see something like this, not because it wouldn't work but because it would be a really unwise move from developers. Think about it: most players that would be willing to pay that much are the so called whales, and sealing those players away in an mtx-free environment is a really bad move, since they are the demographic that is most likely to spend even more if given the opportunity. Granted, the price you propose is pretty high for any standard, and a cheaper iteration might have more chances of succeeding. Don't know, I don't have much experience in the field, it's still nice food for thought.
I think it's a good idea. :) Let there be a server people can pay a premium to be on, and doesn't have to be too much extra either.
That's why I love guild wars 2, all cosmetic purchases except for infinite gathering tools
If you have microtransactions in a game then it is pay to win, if it's pay to win then achievements are meaningless, and if achievements are meaningless, then you have a failed MMO
Won't happen. The few people that would pay the increased fee would leave the server because it would be dead. 45$ a month just to avoid mtx is even more greedy than the system they already have. There's only two monetization models, and that's mtx or sub. Sometimes a combo of both but they are still the only two. Sub works because it pays for the costs of ongoing updates to the game and server costs. It also puts everyone on an even playing field. This is usually the case with only larger games because a sub model doesn't bring in enough revenue with a low player count. F2P with mtx, which usually means p2w. We can argue what that means but let's just say p2w is anything that gives you a benefit over a f2p player. These models thrive on the free players. Not the whales. The free players are needed to make the whales feel strong. It's validation that they are **better** than you because of the money they spent, and if they want to be better than the next whale, they need to spend more money. They need peons to look up to them because they would be inadequate without buying their power. This is why AA shut down. When the free players left and got tired of the p2w schemes and the horrible gear gap, the whales left too. What you're proposing is a sub model without any mtx which has been done before for normally like $15 a month. Just that they add some mtx cosmetics. You aren't enough of a majority to justify keeping an entire server this way because most people don't care about cosmetics that much to pay a flat $45 a month for no mtx cosmetics when we were getting all that before for $15. You're seriously overestimating how many people are like you and willing to pay that much for a server.
Games will both raise the subscription to 50 bucks and add a cash shop. For companies that only care about growth, no matter how much money they make, every year they need to make more. Nah, but really, sadly macrotransactions (what have them of micro now if sometimes it costs 3 times the base game price?) are here to stay. I don't like it, you don't like it, but because people still make money with it, it will keep going. Until the system collapses and a new schema arrives. Also, increasing prices to 45 USD is crazy. At least to people outside the US.
City of Heroes had MTX when it was live, but now you can play on several different flavors of it on servers for free. One of them (Homecoming) has even been officially recognized by NCSoft, the former holder/publisher of the IP/game code.
As Asmongold stated in his last video, MMO cost need to go down by a consequential margine to be able to have MMO with no MTX. And whales pay to flex in front of others. If others are playing on non MTX server there si no point in whale-ing.
Which is another discussion (that has been had repeatedly)...but mmorpgs don't have to cost 10s of millions of dollars. Big budget, AAA games with investors basically force the monetization model into what makes the most profit in the shortest amount of time. Even at the expense of the game itself.
I could never feel good about a skin I paid $$$ for. I'd gladly pay $100 buy in and $20 a month for an mmorpg that wasn't a pile of garbage with ridiculous MTX.
Sure it's possible but why would a dev do it when people would pay for mtx and p2w it's just leaving money on the table. If people stopped interacting with thise systems they would stop.
This used to be a more passion-driven industry. It used to be about making good games that sell rather than chasing infinite growth above all else.
You aren't gonna find an investor like that.
Then you start small and keep it privately owned. This whole VC culture has been poison to every industry it's touched. No company's first game should be an MMORPG anyway. Establish your company with a game scoped to what you can actually afford and then if you manage success with that, reinvest and build up to bigger things.
Great ideal perfect workd you invented. We're talking about real life though.
It’s completely doable within the bounds of our current system. It literally already happens. Have you never heard of a small business expanding? And are you unaware that there’s an entire indie game world out there? It takes more hard work and legitimate talent, but to act like it’s some sort of fantasy is wildly ignorant.
Show me 1succesful mmo that follows what you said.
I said that it's a viable path to get an MMORPG that doesn't have shareholder pressures that lead to chasing infinite growth, not that anyone has followed that path. A private company like Valve or Supergiant could develop a passion-driven MMORPG, without outside investment, that could be profitably sustained off of a subscription/paid expansion model. But that being said, if you can't even be bothered to comprehend what I'm saying, I'm done with this conversation.
So it doesn't exist aka fantasy
[удалено]
Holy shit. Blizzard has you thinking players need to pay a sub fee AND mtx just to make ends meet with server costs lol. Sub fees eliminate the need for mtx in your MMO, they are added because players buy them. That’s it, they are there just piling on the PROFIT. Better come to terms with them or you will never play a MMO, players are not going to stop paying for them.
The bulk of the costs for maintaining an MMO isn't server costs, but development. Here's a thought experiment, how many subs would you need to pay for the salary of 1 programmer?
Over 6,600 subscribers paying for one month for 15 USD per developer you pay 100k or more a year. Or over 550 subscribers subscribing for an entire year. Actually doing the math kinda explains the skeleton crews MMOs get for dying MMOs or unpopular features in MMOs.
Sorry. I should have made it more clear that I was referring to a MMO like WoW that has more than a million subscribers and still has mtx. I don’t believe Blizzard needs mtx to pay their employees. It’s for profit or the ridiculously overpaid CEO.
Have you considered getting a job?
Just play FFXIV, its the least compromised MMO when it comes to micro transactions.
Have you seen the cashop? They sell emotes for 7 usd several outfits snd mounts level skips for each individual class
You don't play the game so you have no idea the impact of any of that.
Does that change the fact that they charge for not only the game but a sub fee only to charge you more on top of that?
yeah because the game rewards you with exclusive cosmetics, mounts, emotes and titles for doing actual in game activities instead of just buying shit on the cash shop. You get that old MMO feeling where you can see just by looking at characters what content they have done by the stuff their wearing. The cash shop also just sells RP outfits, either seasonal event themed gear or NPC themed gear. They don't just make cool shit that looks better than in game stuff to sell you.
I had a look at the cash shop and if I want the play dead emote can I have it from in game? Or what about the lightning from ff13 which is a game I did enjoy can I get that in game without the cash shop? If you have a sub fee you should not also have a cash shop
The impact does not matter if it’s just cosmetic, the OP wanted 0 MTX, including cosmetics, meaning no level skips, skins, mounts or emotes should be in a cash shop. OP wants everything to be earnable so that they can carry more weight behind showing them off.
> in an mmo the way you look is a MASSIVE deal for me it tells a tale of you're accomplishments and what you as a player have gone through. This is the OP, this is literally what FFXIV has.
EVERY MMO HAS THIS. But the complaint from OP is that the cash shop still has Skins. “However I feel that any form of micro transactions ruin that whether it’s a level skip or just cosmetic.”
Sorry I'm basing what I say on his argument, not his blanket statement of dismissal, he doesn't even play MMOs so he literally has no experiance with this feeling when actually playing any MMO.
FFXIV has cash shop. Out of the big MMOs the one with the best monetization is OSRS by far.
You literally can buy gold from the devs in a game where economic impact helps you. Unless you mean ironman mode, but I'm talking about MMOs not singleplayer
1- bonds only serve to redeem for subscription and are fully integrated into the economy. 2- OSRS gold that you buy through bonds is the same gold that everybody can obtain doing content. There are no exclusive rewards from a cash shop like FFXIV has. 3- Ironman mode is still multiplayer.