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Another, more in-depth response from Yoshi-P regarding F2PFollow

#77 Jun 20 2013 at 8:17 AM Rating: Good
Wint wrote:
seneleron wrote:
I hereby submit a simple rebuttal:

I'll accept your subscription based fee when your account management and payment system is all first party billing with a single user ID/password system and does not require such inane tripe as secure card or gimicky credits like crysta.

Blizzard's subscription based system works because one does not need to jump through hoops and sign up for x amount of third party billing systems just to give a company my hard earned dollars. One can be up and running in minutes: not hours.

And blizzard ALSO has a really healthy micro transaction system in addition to that subscription based fee. I'm sure they'd love to educate SE on things like "yearly averages" for micro transaction profits.


SE's account billing system has in the past burned myself and friends/relatives very badly more than a few times in the past. I *LOVE* what I'm seeing with ARR, but I'm still very doubtful of setting up a subscription simply BECAUSE it's a 3+ hour long ordeal every time I get the itch to give SE my money. I should not have to work that hard to give someone money, anytime, EVER.



You have a single user ID and password for this game, it's your SE Account. They accept credit cards instead of crysta. The only thing I would concede is the site isn't the easiest to navigate, but the rest of your points have been addressed long ago. Now if this were FFXI, you'd have a point, I don't know why they don't just get rid of the POL ID and password, I suspect it is a PS2 limitation Smiley: laugh


Oh god LMAO Wint you just made my morning! Smiley: laugh
#78 Jun 20 2013 at 9:25 AM Rating: Excellent
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Anakte wrote:
Wint wrote:
Now if this were FFXI, you'd have a point, I don't know why they don't just get rid of the POL ID and password, I suspect it is a PS2 limitation Smiley: laugh

Is there any kind of statistic as to how many people are still playing FFXI exclusively on the PS2? If they chopped the dead weight and gave XI a good once over without burdening themselves because of "PS2 limitations' I bet it would do a good job reinvigorating the game.



A quick look over at the FFXIV beta forums tells me all some people really want is a HD FFXI makeover anyway.
#79 Jun 20 2013 at 5:17 PM Rating: Decent
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When the dust settles upon the game releasing, the reviews come in, and we see how many people sub in the short term and long term. Is when we will see the fruits of Yoshi's labor. Whether those fruits be good or bad can't be known before then. So any opinion formed now is just that, whether it supports Yoshi or not.

I often seem to rant about how I want the combat to have depth added. But if you don't like the story, quests, or systems in place. I do not see that changing. This game is going to be very different from FFXI because it has a different director/producer. I say it's ok to share opinions, but let's not ridicule or take away joy from the people who are loving the core please. It's pointless to try and convince someone to either love or hate a game.
#80 Jun 21 2013 at 11:48 AM Rating: Decent
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2,010 posts
Anakte wrote:
Wint wrote:
Now if this were FFXI, you'd have a point, I don't know why they don't just get rid of the POL ID and password, I suspect it is a PS2 limitation Smiley: laugh

Is there any kind of statistic as to how many people are still playing FFXI exclusively on the PS2? If they chopped the dead weight and gave XI a good once over without burdening themselves because of "PS2 limitations' I bet it would do a good job reinvigorating the game.



Only enough in Japan to have warranted releasing the last xpac on it. NA never saw it.

I like Yoshi-P's response, except in the case of Rift. He almost has it right with regards to the investors in that situation. For a long time they held a really high subscription rate - well relative to WoW and XI anyway - but mismanagement of the game itself caused them to have to go F2P. It was a great game for a long time and then they sunk their best resources into that joint venture with Syfy which is a novelty at best, and the top guys all jumped ship when they saw the writing on the wall.

SWTOR is kind of a similar situation. BioWare was a company that had vision and really cared about making a magnificent gaming experience. Then EA.

That is all.
#81 Jun 21 2013 at 7:37 PM Rating: Good
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197 posts
Torrence wrote:
Anakte wrote:
Wint wrote:
Now if this were FFXI, you'd have a point, I don't know why they don't just get rid of the POL ID and password, I suspect it is a PS2 limitation Smiley: laugh

Is there any kind of statistic as to how many people are still playing FFXI exclusively on the PS2? If they chopped the dead weight and gave XI a good once over without burdening themselves because of "PS2 limitations' I bet it would do a good job reinvigorating the game.



SWTOR is kind of a similar situation. BioWare was a company that had vision and really cared about making a magnificent gaming experience. Then EA.

That is all.

There is a degree of truth there, but the counter-argument does exist.

Dragon Age 2

I rest my case :P
#82 Jun 21 2013 at 8:09 PM Rating: Default
Why does he explain why Star Wars and RIFT didn't start as F2P, as if he knows the inner workings of the companies behind them?

He doesn't even acknowledge that plenty of games do start off with F2P models from the beginning, and some of those games have been hugely popular and profitable (certainly more popular and profitable than FFXIV ever was).

The only thing that's going to annoy me is if they add a Cash Shop+P2P and the anti-F2P people defend it. Because that would literally be the F2P model but with a subscription on top. I know that World of Warcraft does it (and Yoshi-P even compares to Blizzard in OP's quote) and Yoshi-P wants his game to be like WoW.
#83 Jun 21 2013 at 9:03 PM Rating: Default
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Maybe it's due to translation but there are a few things he states that follow his examples, but don't really seem to make sense.

Overall it's a nice breakdown of the differences between subscription based and F2P business models. I don't get why having a subscription based model would guarantee that the 400k subs who were there the previous month will not be cut by a large amount and remain consistent. There is clear evidence that shows otherwise. Perhaps he meant he was suggesting that it was less likely to happen?

The explanation about the cycle is great, but if you looked to FFXI as an example, consistent subscribers != consistent content releases. Their best work came before they rose above the red line. I could make the case that not knowing if you're going to eat next month makes you hustle your *** off to make it happen.

XIV tripled it's subscriber base during the development of ARR... Legacy? I don't really care if it was the legacy drive or not, but that would make an even stronger case for F2P Smiley: wink

Yoshi wrote:
Choosing the model that’s right for your product and being successful with that is what’s important. We believe that the bigger the game, the larger the scale of the MMO, it’s going to be better for the game if it’s on a subscription model.


So ultimately, going with a subscription model was decided because of the scale of the MMO? I wish I knew what he meant by scale, because the amount of bytes your world occupies seems completely irrelevant to the business model. Must procure the squiggly version and try to decipher this.

Yoshi wrote:
We hear a lot of people saying, “Star Wars is free-to-play now, it’s great!” But then you ask them if they’re playing free-to-play Star Wars and they say, “No, not really playing it.” If you spend all that money on a game ,release it, and it’s filled with bugs and you don’t have enough time to do your updates, people will leave. Players need that new content. Not being able to provide it is fatal. If they were able to produce as much content as players wanted, then people would have stayed there. We don’t really believe it’s a problem with the business model.

XIV 1.0 was F2P for most of it's lifespan. No one played it and no one thought it was great. I'm not seeing the connection here.

At least he understands that XIV failed because of the lack of content. My only concern is that it is going to take too long for him to put XIV in the shape it needs to be in to contend. Putting SWtoR on blast like that... he's writing some pretty hefty checks. Not only that, but based on his own words he is going to go above and beyond any F2P game solely because a consistent income means more content. Gonna be a long summer...

Edited, Jun 21st 2013 11:04pm by FilthMcNasty
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#84 Jun 22 2013 at 3:07 PM Rating: Excellent
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138 posts
FilthMcNasty:

Well, it's quite simple. If you take into account (among others) the pricing differences of FF XIV:ARR and a B2P or F2P game (GW2 comes to mind with its $59.99 price-tag), a player can easily buy the standard edition of ARR and sub for a couple of months before he decides whether to keep this long-term.

Remember that the game does indeed offer 30 days free with every purchase. So - In my mind, it's very easy to ascertain whether you want to be involved with something for the medium term or want to just get the POS uninstalled and move on with your life.

SWTOR, since you mentioned it, and I wrote about it earlier in this thread, was a prime example of corporate incompetence. From design choices (They were heralding the "mass PVP" features only to suffer from an engine which had no capability of rendering >10-20 characters on the screen properly, without all players suffering FPS on the single digits), to project management (Even major features which included the Legacy System or new content were delayed to infinity. I just found out that it's an 18 months game and paid character transfers only now (!) will make their appearance) to obvious attempts to cut costs from day 1 (You would expect a response from an in-game ticket to take less than 10 days, for a simple item restoration or something, right? Yeah, me too. Or bugs being left unfixed for weeks upon weeks? Yeah....), I could go on and on and on in 3000 words about why a subscription to this monstrosity was not justified.

And although not an avid SW fan, I very much liked the concept of playing a "futuristic" MMO, where even the transportation system or mounts were hovercrafts. Talk about awesome.

There's this, then:

F2P and B2P and P2P are all valid revenue models for a game. Whether a game can "pull off" an option of these properly, is largely dependent on game design and content.

There are games which are F2P-oriented from the beginning, but alienate players by offering "pay to win" avenues, where the richest douchebag emptying the cash shop dominates the game.

There are games which have tried the B2P model and remained relatively decent, GW2 comes to mind, but even them could not cater to the needs of a large percentage of players, who left the game and did not come back. (PvE players, and PVP players who wished RvR / WvW to be more meaningful than a gimmick)

There are games which have a community passionate enough about the game to continue P2P. EVE Online is a prime example, and of course WOW, which could easily profit from F2P more than anyone else. But why change to a F2P model when P2P works for you as a company? That's the whole spirit of the debate.

And if FF XIV's developers and SE continue listening and responding to feedback, they have all the potential in the world to do great. Not maintain 3,000,000 subscriptions, no, but at the very least create a game which will have a successful presence in three (! - PC, PS3, PS4 in 2014) platforms.

I think they are up to the task, mainly because Yoshida is an MMO gamer himself, and not a random manager having loads of "brilliant ideas to bring in more money". The first rule of an MMO is: If it has no content, nobody will stick around with it, and I'm pretty sure they know that all too well.
#85 Jun 22 2013 at 6:54 PM Rating: Decent
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His post today was very long winded, and at the end he said he had more to say.

Yoshi, you can't please everyone.
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