We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact—it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts.
~Jonah Lehrer, Wired.com
So, I guess Turbine is laying off some workers. To those whose jobs are on the chopping block: you have my deepest sympathies. I hope you land on your feet in a great new place. Meanwhile, there are those jumping at the chance to gloat at your misfortune, ready to draw conclusions not only about the health of Turbine, but the MMO genre as a whole.
Instead of linking to that old PR release about how great LotRO and DDO are doing thanks to F2P, please use this updated link.
F2P ALL THE WAY!
~Syncaine, Turbine finally updates us on the continued success of their F2P conversions
Yeah, because no proprietor of a subscription-only game ever laid off any employee. Syncaine makes a fallacious correlation between a business model he personally dislikes and the health of a company that operates it. (And yes, it's fallacious, because we don't know the circumstances or reasons behind the layoffs.) Syncaine espouses all sorts of valid reasons to dislike F2P. This instance, sadly, is just his schadenfreude showing through.
No game succeeds or fails purely due to its business model. The success factors of both WoW (which has hemorrhaged more players than pretty much all other MMOs ever had) and EVE have little to do with their business model (btw, doesn’t PLEX make EVE a hybrid?) and everything to do with game design. Turbine’s “rightsizing” is business, not game design. We need to look at the design decisions behind LOTRO and other games, as well as external market pressures, to understand why they succeed or fail. Syncaine insists on oversimplifying it to a question of how the companies extract money from players’ wallets.
I'm not saying business model doesn’t influence design. But a crappy, unpopular game will be crappy and unpopular regardless of the business model. And a good game will be good regardless of how the player is asked to pay for it.
Pretty much every game that is not WoW (including EVE) has proven that WoW is a glaring exception to the rule that MMOs are basically a niche in western markets. Every game has its fanbois and haters, regardless of its relative success. And every fanboi thinks his favorite is the result of superior game design.
But Syncaine has declared himself arbiter of both quality and success. He has "yet to see a great F2P MMO," but he's also the one determining "great." He knows "what a great sub MMO looks like," but again that is his personal opinion. This reminds me a little of the SCOTUS definition of
obscenity.
I assume Syncaine is playing EVE. He certainly holds it up as an example of great game design. I don't dispute its success, but I would never play EVE, given the tales of what I consider dickish, unethical, and downright criminal behavior of the players. All explicitly allowed by the premise of the game. That's not a great game, in my opinion; and it's by far a distant second in success to the behemoth that is WoW, a game that Syncaine deplores, if I am not mistaken. And when we take into account that the average EVE player allegedly has upwards of 2.5 accounts, Syncaine's
500,000 accounts translate into maybe 220,000
really enthusiastic players. So about the same number of subscribers as LOTRO
from what I could gather; though they pay far more per player.
I love TSW, but I don't subscribe. I throw money at it every once in a while for either "fluff" costuming, or the DLC-style content updates. And I am happy with that. Does it struggle? Yes, but it is in a niche genre. However, I haven't encountered a better progression system (imho) or better content (imho) in any other game. Syncaine, naturally, probably thinks it sucks. But I defy you to find any way that TSW drives players into the cash shop from within the game. The shop certainly is available through an in-game interface, but I don't really think that's what we're talking about when we say a game is "purposely designed to make me use their cash shops," as
Xyloxan put it. Maybe LOTRO does, I don't know.
I am past the point in my life that I want to be tied to any particular MMO because I am subscribed to it. You can argue about my level of commitment, I suppose. But there are more important things in my life I have committed myself to than a game. Therefore, F2P is perfect for me, right now. If I don't like a particular F2P system—*cough*SWTOR*cough*—I don't play. I don't play LOTRO either. But the reasons have nothing to do with the business model.
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