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Actually you're wrong but then I thought the same when I was a XI player.

Free to play is amazingly successfull and it works so well because it lets people that never give you money still be customers.

There are 3 kinds of free to play people a)whale buyers that buy items to resell ingame via gold, b)casual buyers that spend roughly what a P2P player would put into a game and c)completely free to play people that buy cash shop items with ingame gold from the broker. They are all important customers because (a) can't function without (c). You also need to keep in mind that most AAA F2P mmos offer sub options with additional benefits if people want to do that.

You have a cash shop with items people can buy, you allow those items to be sold ingame via the broker. Now you have people that can buy those items outright from the cash shop and you also have people that will never give you money but will buy those items from the auction house that others have bought to gain gold ingame. It's very easy to turn completely free to play people into customers in this way.

Also Yoshi as I stated before has said in interviews that he is perfectly fine with changing the payment system later on but wanted to launch as p2p, this is what every major mmo has done for the last few years and they all went f2p. You start as p2p to get box sales mainly, then 6-12 months later you swap to f2p as Yoshi hinted at.

It's easy to make the system I mentioned work well, so that any negatives are kept to a minimum.

(A) Buy items to change into gold because they have a large amount of money they can waste on the game, they can only do this because (c) buys the stuff they put on the broker. Swimsuits etc
You can say these people are bad but these exist in every pay to play mmo anyway, they were everywhere in FFXI and they will be in XIV no matter what system they use. Infact most RMT prefer P2P games because they can make far more profit in them.
(B) You can make a subscriber system in a f2p game where you pay $12 a month and get benefits to boost them up, more raid access or gold benefits etc.
(C) Get to play the game completely for free, if they are good players they can be among the top in the game though, because they can do the content and sell the drops for gold. These people stick with games just as long as p2p players do, if not longer because they never get locked out of the game and can come back for new content or whenever they want.

The different kinds of players rarely make any difference to how well you can do in the game in the long run because if you can do the endgame content and sell the drops you can be as rich as (a) even if you pay nothing.

The whole point was that people that pay nothing can be just as valuable or more valuable than someone that pays $12 a month. A free to play player that gives you no money can still be far more valuable than a p2p subscriber to Square enix. $12 a month is nothing considering how much these games cost to create and continually update, FFXIV especially considering how much it's costing. A free to play player can buy 2-3 costumes in a month from the broker with ingame gold and already be worth 3x as much as a subber.


Edited, Mar 27th 2013 9:14am by preludes

You haven't played a game with a good f2p system.

Free to play is better for the company and better for the players, if done correctly. It all boils down to this, do you trust SE to make a fair F2P system? There are plenty of games out there with great f2p systems.

Also it's not a case of if the game was p2p you would get all these items for free because the items would not be made if not for being sold in the cash shop. It's like saying you should not have to pay for DLC for xbox games, the DLC would not be made if not for that.

Lol did someone actually mentioned DLCs? Dlcs were made in an effort to leech money from the players. The fact that there are people buying them doesn't mean its "better" for the players. What was the game that had the dlc pre installed in the game but was locked till the company "release" it and you buy it? I can't remember.

Anyway enough with the off topic from my behalf.

My opinion is that F2P games are not better for the players as someone mentioned. Well...i am not 100% right there. What i should say is that F2P is not better for players like me or from what i read Thayos or catwho etc for reasons listed in previous posts. On the other hand F2P is also good for players probably like you for the "benefits" that can provide like playing for free.

It all comes down in what you really like for me its always P2P.

I think DLC is acceptable in wholly offline games, or primarily offline games with minimal social networking. For example, in The Sims. You could buy "stuff packs" even for the original Sims I, before the phrase "DLC" was a thing. (DLC as we know it came into existence with broadband Internet.) You paid $10 for a stuff pack, which included new clothes, new furnitures, new wallpaper, etc. It did not change the core functionality of the game - your Sim is pretty much happy in whatever outfit you dress them in - but it expanded the options for decoration and increased the possible fun levels.

For online games, however, DLC content, cash shops, etc immediately turn the entire social strata into the Haves and Have Nots. In FFXI, the Haves are usually people who had time to invest in endgame and successfully networked endgame. The Have Nots for the most part know that if they too invest a similar amount of time and effort, they'll get there. In F2P games with cash shops, the Haves are people who've spent hundreds of dollars in real life on virtual crap, and the Have Nots are everyone else.

I don't have several hundred dollars to blow on virtual games, but I do have time. P2P games reward people who invest time, instead of real life money. Since we're talking out entertainment, I have no problem investing time provided that time is enjoyable.

That's fine, but you are a minority, and Square Enix can't afford to market towards the minority. Gamers in general have been spoiled by much more convenient models.

I respect your opinion, and I don't entirely disagree with it, but this thread was about Square Enix's finance troubles. That's why free-to-play was originally brought up.

In this day and age, I think buy-to-play with a monthly subscription after buying it... is an extremely tough sell.

For a game which originally received widespread hatred, even from die-hard fans... it might even be an impossible sell.

Edited, Mar 27th 2013 12:32pm by Killua125

lol they want free to play because either A.) they want to leech on games B.) They lack the skill to start off on equal footing as everyone else to succeed, they need to pay their way to fame and glory! True MMO players <3 Sub fee mode. Plain and simple.

I doubt I could stomach another FtP MMO.. In fact, I despise it so much if ARR were FtP I wouldnt even play it.. DLC.. FtP.. Im tired of all the garbO.. Where are the true games? The one you buy and everything is given to you without having to pay to unlock it later?

Gaming along with many other things in the world is trying to move all extra fast and make a quick buck.. Its sad man.. Gaming is suppose to be a fun pass time but instead its begining to leave a bad taste in my mouth ALLTOGETHER.. Large corps looking at sales figures lower end game makers having to scrape for money through DLC and ftp just to stay afloat because of investors that they cant even make a true game the way it use to be made. Everything has to have an immediate payback..

Thats why SE is truely my only hope for gaming left. Like it has been said in posts before, they have no one they have to answer to. They invest time and money where they please how they please.. But it seems even them in several cases are going the way of the world and everything else..

Anyways. Thats my little rant :)

SE can most certainly afford to market toward a minority that is willing to pay monthly fees for several years. It's better that way for everyone, rather than a quick influx of cash-shop purchases, followed by a rapidly dwindling number of active gamers per server.

My experience with f2p has been with Tera online, this is not some cheap f2p game. It's a 50 million dollar high quality AAA mmo like FFXIV, and you can play it for nothing and be on an equal footing with everyone else. You can also pay a sub if you wish and get game benefits.

They don't hold content back if you don't pay anything. I think playing a good MMO with a good f2p system changes your outlook on it honestly, as I mentioned before I felt the same as you and as most xi players do but experiencing it changed my view.

Free to play would be what's best for XIV, it's not a failing as it used to be it's how the market is now. There is almost zero negatives to XIV being free to play, but many positives and this is why I'm positive it will happen and when it does those in this thread saying how bad it is will be supporting it and saying how good it is for the game.

I heard that as an argument for FFXI. And the battle system in FFXIII. And the board for FFXII. FFVII being on Sony instead of Nintendo ...

I've already stated it before, going F2P is, in my own opinion (which you disagree with), a cheap cash grab that signals the death knell of any P2P game, not a sign of commitment.

"Here at SE we care about the Final Fantasy Brand! We Respect It!"

Releases XIII..... "Well see that sold, lets shove this female cloud down their throats all while we laugh on our way down the bank"

"We know our games have not been quality the last few years but we are gonna fix that BELIEVE IT!"

Hey you toriyama, make XIII-2, just rehash the areas, use the same monsters, and just make a stupid story, WHO CARES IF IT MAKES NO SENSE DUDE TIME PARADOX BRAH!

"We at SE want you all to know we take the Final Fantasy legacy very serious.... How many times do we have to say it guys ? for reals is SERIOUS!"

Hey you monkey go make me a final fantasy for phones.... WHO CARES IF IS WORST THAN ANYTHING WE HAVE EVER RELESED!! Just name it Final Fantasy something man, and it will sell, **** with the name alone we can just charge $20 and call it a day.... Jesus just call it Final Fantasy Dimension and GET ON IT!!!! Oh and also make me a game where there is no strategy, no deepth no story, just random battles and the kicker will be that we will charge them money to unlock FF Main characters, yeah yeah another great idea, if you pay us money, it will be totally random Muahahaha You might spend 50 dollars and never see Cloud! Muahaha THIS SUCKERS!

..... SE..... Is beyond raping Final Fantasy.....