I never can tell about these things – whether it’s just that because I’m playing it, I have an increased awareness of news about the game, or whether I just happen to jump in at about the same time as the rest of the world seems to take notice, but it seems there’s been an awful lot of buzz lately about Dungeons & Dragons Online, and their “giving the game away” model.  The air quotes are there because that’s just exactly not what Turbine is doing, even though the press sure likes to talk about it that way.  But the business model they are employing is, I firmly believe, the future of MMO’s.

The problem is, right now a lot of words are being thrown around right now in the discussions of (and in the press covering) these business models.  Words like “Free to Play”, “Freemium”, “Velvet Rope”, “Microtransactions”, and “RMT”.  And the secret sauce, in my opinion, is no one of these.  Rather, it’s a carefully constructed amalgam of these, combined with some other design edicts, that produces the exact right recipe for getting players into your game, building the game, and then keeping the game strong.  And that mix doesn’t fall easily into any single word classification.  A recent conversation I had with a publisher went something very much like this.  I was attempting to describe my ideal billing model. 

“So, the game is free to play, in that you don’t have to pay to get into the game.  The first initial zones are free, and then when you’re ready to advance, you can purchase tokens to unlock–

“So velvet rope.” he interjected.

“Well, sort of.  But not just that.  You can set up a subscription if you like, to unlock all the content –“

“Oh so a freemium model”

“But that is backed up by a company store where you can—“

“Yeah yeah so microtransactions as well.”

“…”

It is our nature to want to label things neatly.  The thing is, I don’t think we’ve got a label yet, really, for the business model that DDO is employing (and that several other MMO’s have employed as well).  But Free to Play is where the model starts, and its the tag line that draw the biggest headlines and attention, so we’ll continue to use that as the moniker for our model – inaccurate though it may be.  But it is much, much more than just “free to play”.  Here is everything that I think has to be in place for the model to work, and  is where I see the western MMO model going.

Fifty dollars is too much of a cover charge to get into your park.

A few parks can get away with this – Disney World, Six Flags.  The biggest names, with the biggest budgets, and those that have already established themselves as monsters in the entertainment business.  But for the new guys coming out, $50.00 is just too much of a charge for me to find out if I like playing in your world.  I regret paying it for Champions Online.  I certainly wouldn’t pay it for a game like Fallen Earth, or Darkfall.  Nothing against these games, but without knowing too much about what the experience is going to be like over the long haul, it’s just too much money to get into the gate.  I love Wizard101, but even $30.00 would have been to much of a barrier for me to try it out.  I might give EQ2 a chance again, but not at the cost of $60.00 to find out if I’m going to stay.  So the first rule of Free to Play is that, well dammit, It needs to be free to play.  At least initially.

Let me have access to your park anywhere I have a laptop and internet access.

Disks are so passe these days.  Last night I set up my laptop downstairs, started the client download for DDO, and watched the news.  By the time the news was over, I was playing on my laptop.  And yes, I’d already had it installed on an upstairs machine.  But I didn’t want to hassle with copying files across the network (believe me, with Vista and Norton, sometimes that can be a considerable hassle!), and I sure as hell didn’t want to go searching for a DVD that would have still had to been patched up after I installed it.  The second rule of Free to Play is that given a valid account, I should be able to patch everything I need to play from your site.

Please get everything ready while I get dressed

This is not necessarily an absolute must have, but I think the best games will do this:  Let me build my character while you stream down the client and initial zones.  What is the first thing you do when you play an MMO for the first time?  Well of course you create your character.  The amount of time a player is going to be expected to spend on this will vary greatly, depending on your design.  But they are almost certainly going to be spending some amount of time mulling over their choices.  Allow them to mull over their choices – read up on character backgrounds – show them build options – whatever.  But get them actually started in the game, which is character creation, while you’re downloading content.  The best games will have the tutorial zone ready to play by the time my character is created, so I literally feel like I made my account, created my character, and stepped into the world.

Wait for $10.00 I can stay in the park another hour? Okay sure, I’m having fun, why not?

This I think is absolutely key.  And not all Free to Play games are doing this part of it.  But this is how Wizard101 got me to spend money, and kept me in the game.  It’s the first place I’m going to spend money in DDO.  If you read the Ars Technica article, you’ll see its exactly where the game got that group of players as well.  It’s the ability to make a small, one time purchase to extend the content of the game, presented to the player at the time when they want to keep playing.  When I got through the level 9 content in Wizard101, I wasn’t yet ready to commit to a subscription.  But I did want to keep playing.  And when did it ask me to pay?  When I was literally standing at the gate to the next zone, in which I had several quests waiting to be fulfilled.  And here’s where the psychology comes in.  I could have set up a subscription for $10.00, played all the content, and then terminate the subscription as month later.  That actually makes more fiscal sense!  But for $10.00, I could also unlock all the adjacent zones to the one I was currently in, and still have some coins left over to maybe buy a hat or a pet.  And, I didn’t have to remember to cancel anything.  No commitment.  So yeah, I plunked down the $10.00.  There’s just something about knowing that even though you’re spending this money now, you’re not promising to spend any more money later, that is very compelling. 

Two currencies to rule them all, and a store in which to use them

So in order to do that the one time purchase of additional content that I described above, you’re obviously going to have to set up a mechanism by which the players can make the transaction.  And once you do that, well obviously there’s no reason you don’t make that a fully functional company store for players to spend real live honest to goodness hard earned money on your virtual goods.  So this is clearly one of the fundamental requirements of the free to play model.  And the prevailing version of this is that your game has two currencies.  The in-game currency, which you use to buy and sell goods in game (lets call it gold), and the company store currency, which is only used to buy things from the company store (lets call it tokens).  You can sometimes buy some lower quality items from the company store with gold, but the best stuff can only be bought with tokens.  You can usually earn tokens in game, at a pittance rate, and only over a significant quantity of time, or you can just buy them outright with your credit card.  And you can’t buy tokens one for one, no you always get them in allotments, which always leaves some left over, and you don’t want to throw them away so you buy more.  It’s the age-old carnival ticket model in a modern age.  One interesting variation of this is Perfect World, allows players to trade (or sell) their store bought items for gold.  This in effect allows money-heavy players to convert their store bought items to in-game gold, and allows time-heavy players to get store bought items through in-game gold.  I talked with the executive producer of Perfect World about this, and he told me their economy is actually pretty healthy, for as long as the game has been out. 

Wow we had a blast!  I’m ready for the season pass.

Finally, I firmly believe the subscription model still has a strong role here – especially for MMO’s, over other RMT type games, such as Facebook games and flash-based portal games.  Because once I’ve played along enough to say I’ve got a community here, I’m going to stay for awhile, you’re worth my $10.00 a month, then reward me by doing away with all the nickel and diming – open up the game to me, and let me just enjoy the game.  It’s time for your billing model to get out of my way.  And yes, that means when you put out a new content pack that the F2P players are playing I should get it either completely free, or at definitely at one helluva discount. 

So that’s it.  Discounting the countless asian mmo’s out there that are employing some variation of this model, I know of the following western MMO’s that are making good use of this model:  Toontown, FusionFall, Wizard101, Free Realms, & Dungeons & Dragons Online.  You’ll notice that all but one of these are aimed at kids.  I think that’s certainly part of why DDO is perhaps getting more press right now – in that I think there’s been this implied perception, amongst western players, at least, that F2P meant kids game.  Somewhere along the way we assumed F2P meant Club Penguin.  And this was honestly why I jumped into DDO just this past week – it’s one of the few full blown western MMO’s that is using this model completely, and I wanted to see how well it could pull it off.  It still needs better marks in the client download department, and in the character creation area, but overall I’ve been very pleased with the game.

Finally, the question is – is this model going to work?  I mean, from a player’s standpoint, it’s a dream!  But hell if it was up to us the whole damn thing would be free!  From a developer’s standpoint, and from a publishers standpoint, if you are going to build a complex, AAA quality MMO, can you make enough money giving the client away for free and relying on converted subscriptions and RMT’s to cover your costs?  Well, it’s hard to say.  Right now, even though everyone’s willing to talk about subscription numbers, publishers are being very close-lipped when it comes to ARPPU’s, and free-to-paying conversion numbers.  But Free Realms is boasting 5 million users.  And even if they’re only getting 1% or 5% or 7% of n, when n is 5 million, that percentage is still a really big number.  And I’m willing to bet their conversion rate is actually significantly better than that.  So we can only talk about what we see.  And here’s what I see.

Free Realms has over 5 million subs, and appears to be continuing to grow.  There’s already talk of a new MMO being built using that same model.  Wizard101 is adding content, growing its userbase, and appears to be thriving.  DDO has stronger buzz right now that it ever had under it subscription model, is full of players, and appears to be getting stronger.  Only FusionFall, of the games I listed above, have I not heard any recent news about, and so might be struggling.  So while we (or at least, I) don’t have hard numbers to back up the theory, on the face of things, it would certainly appear that these models are working successfully for the developers that are employing them.  I suppose only time will tell for sure.