Silent Hunter Online

[drEaPer]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

The idea seems to be that you get people to play by offering the incomplete, unfinishable game to the public in the sure knowledge that a certain number will become addicted and pay the price just so they can keep playing.

Yep, and before it just had a different naming: Demo, Trial, Shareware with restricted access to content and functions.

Unlike World of Warcraft, Eve Online etc. you do not have to pay 60 bucks after a 14day trial and transfer 15 bucks a month to continue playing.

That is really bad, I see...

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Sounds like a scam to me. No, more like a drug dealer.

You can get alcohol if you want it. It is your decision if you consume it.

Your logic: Games should not be fun, when there is paycontent in it, as fun games can be addictive.
Ban World of Warcraft.
Ban arcade game halls.
Ban poker.
Ban las vegas. Its the biggest drug dealer in the world.

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

A long time ago there was a cartoon strip called The Wizard Of Id. One of the characters once paraphrased Abraham Lincoln, saying "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and that's enough for a good lawyer to make a living."

Blizzard fools over 10 Mio people. They are probably all braindead zombies. I was one of them. And I enjoyed my zombie time. It was a good game, until I got bored and quit. Maybe I am just too drug resistent?


Playing a subscription based game for half a year:

Initial cost: ~60 $, Subscription cost: 15x6 = 90$
-> 150 $

Invest 150 $ in the core unlocks of a western (non asian grinder) F2P and you will have probably unlocked all of the permanent important stuff that you need to fully enjoy the game and even retain some money for those "consumable" things like potions or XP boosts.


Conclusion: You are a doomsayer.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by drEaPer

Conclusion: You are a doomsayer.

Not at all. All I'm saying is if you have to pay to get the fullest benefit, then no matter how you twist it it's not really free.

[Dowly]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Not at all. All I'm saying is if you have to pay to get the fullest benefit, then no matter how you twist it it's not really free.

This is true.

[drEaPer]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Not at all. All I'm saying is if you have to pay to get the fullest benefit, then no matter how you twist it it's not really free.

So its not a drug, thats a step forward.

Also: What you say is true and the case for all commercially
developed games.

So after back and forth, I think we can come to the agreement, that F2P should be called F2T =Free 2 Test/Try. Like a demo with largely reduced scope.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by drEaPer

Also: What you say is true and the case for all commercially
developed games.

But they rarely tell you it's free.

So after back and forth, I think we can come to the agreement, that F2P should be called F2T =Free 2 Test/Try. Like a demo with largely reduced scope.

So you admit it's not free. That's a step forward for you.

[Ducimus]

Free to play really is a farce. Actually, i take that back, its marketing genius. Some free to play models are better then others. I personally never tried Free 2 play until:

a.) Age of Conan
This F2P model acted more like an extended trial. Certain features were limited that really aids character progression. For example, in this game, certain areas are needed to progress your character - they happen to be premium only. So you have road blocks set up, that either slow you down, or make it agonizing to play without subscribing. This F2P model is very easy to see through. There's no microtransactions, your just deliberately road blocked at certain key areas. It is in effect an extended trial. You cannot progress at certain key points without subscribing.

b.) Lord of the Rings Online
This model, consists of microtransactions. The game doesnt force via road blocks you can't get around without subscribing, instead you buy access to the area via turbine points. These points are sold in lots that come out to like 5, 10, 20, or 50 US dollars or something like that. If something costs 100 turbine points to access, you have to buy like 500 turbine points, being the lowest increment of points you can buy (or something like that).

Long story short with LOTR, they nickel and dime you via turbine points. Need more backback space? That'll cost you. Want access to certain skills? That'll cost you. They charge via small amounts of turbine pionts, id even say each transaction is a pittance. So it doesn't seem like your spending lots of cash - until you start adding it all up. Over the course of 3 months before i got bored and quit, i had spent the cash equivlant of 6 months premium subscripton in microtransactions. So they got twice the money out of me, for the same time period. Considering i'm stingy with my money, that is absolute genius on their part!


Free 2 play is not free.

[Julhelm]

It was never supposed to be free. Like I stated in the other thread, I worked as a developer on a title that made the transition from traditional pay-to-play to free-to-play precisely because it was found that F2P is orders of magnitude more profitable in the long run. Instead of relying on sales you basically get a consistent income and you can stimulate ingame purchases by introducing "new" items that basically take a day or two to implement. While I totally agree that this way of basically reducing the customer to what amounts to a wallet on legs from which you seek to extract money is rather nauseating, you can't really fault corporations for moving to a more profitable businessmodel when their entire reason for existing is to be profitable to their share owners.

[Ducimus]

My main beef with "Free 2 play", is that the name used to describe this sales model, is deceptive and misleading. I'd even go as far as to say it is false advertisement.

[drEaPer]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

So you admit it's not free. That's a step forward for you.

Hehe, I like your attitude.

So the truth, like so often, is somewhere in between. F2P is a good way of making games accessible, and getting an initial idea what they are about (gameplay, style, etc.) Yet it comes with the inherent danger of creating false expectations, due to a not so fitting naming.
F2P is basically a trial version.
Additionally there is the danger of companies steering away from the fair grond, when it comes to content per $$$. Though that is not a problem of the F2P concept, but purely a problem of the specific product. A ripoff is a ripoff... no matter the distribution channel. This happens to retail games as well.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by drEaPer

Hehe, I like your attitude.

As I said long before, I have no real beef against anything, this just doesn't seem like my kind of game. While I do argue and take sides sometimes I'm always the first to admit I might be wrong.

So yeah, I try to be fair. Try and fail a lot, but still try.

[Nisgeis]

I tried to determine what exactly all the definitions were for online game business models. Turns out, it's quite a horrible confusing mess.

Originally Posted by drEaPer

Yep, and before it just had a different naming: Demo, Trial, Shareware with restricted access to content and functions.

Unlike World of Warcraft, Eve Online etc. you do not have to pay 60 bucks after a 14day trial and transfer 15 bucks a month to continue playing.

A time limited trial is what is now called Freemium and is not 'Free To Play'.

World of Warcraft, Starcraft II and DIablo III (when it's released in a few days) are all now on what Blizzard call 'Free to Play' and they have changed the trial from time limited to level capped and character restrictions. Blizzard has to call them free to play, as a it sounds better than Freemium as that implies there is a cost later on. It's sad, but in order to compete on a level playing field, they all have to call their games 'Free to Play' even if they aren't.

Originally Posted by drEaPer

-F2P was generally accepted by gamers before it was called F2P, it was called "demo". The purpose of a demo was to get an impression and to decide if you want to buy the game. Of course Demos featured the more attractive stuff, and were visually appealing to lure you to buy the main game. F2P does the same.

I'm sorry to quote you again drEaPer, I'm not picking on you, but you just provided the best quotable material.

This is where things start to get confused. Free to Play is claimed by some to mean literally free to play the game, even if the game costs money to buy. Some Guildwars fans claim that Guildwars is 'Free to Play' as there is no subscription fee, even though you still have to purchase the initial game (and every expansion pack to date). Other places define Free to Play as a game where you don't have to pay a subsription (which leaves the issue of initial price hanging in the air). OK, I'm going off topic with this, but the point is, it's a term that doesn't really mean anything, as it hasn't been strictly defined and there are no rules governing it. It's like saying a mobile phone contract has unliited texts, yet there is in fact a fair usage (limited) quota of 300 texts, or having unlimited download quota on your broadband even though it has a fair usage (limited) quota. You can say it's unlimited all you want and a lot of people will get taken in by it, but it's not unlimited.

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Not at all. All I'm saying is if you have to pay to get the fullest benefit, then no matter how you twist it it's not really free.

There are ways of making micro transactions in the game that do not affect actual gameply. For example, you could charge someone a dollar to allow them to customise their sub with an emblem. This doesn't affect gameplay, but is something people would possibly do. Of course there are ways to really screw up the gameplay balance as well and therein lies the difficulty.

Do we know yet what form the micro transcactions will take?

Originally Posted by Ducimus

1. Browser based. Really? I didn't buy a beefy rig to play flash or java games in a web browser.

NOTE: That's quoted from another thread.

Unity (a game / 3D application development platform) recently released a version that could cross complie to Flash 11 and I have to say the results were pretty nifty. Here's an Adobe presentation featuring Unreal 3 cross compiled into Flash 11:



I'm quite indifferent to SHO, as I long ago gave up on all hope that Ubisoft would ever fix SH4 or SH5. I think that a lot of the angst here is a sense of injustice that Ubisoft are making another game when they haven't finished the last two in the series. It's almost as if the feeling is that there should be an authority that can go round saying 'Now listen here, you didn't finish your last two games in the franchise, so you can't start a new one before you finish those other two'. Just like talking to a child who never finishes anything.

I think I wrote more than I was going to. Sorry to bore you all.