The dislike of the Buy to Play pricing model

[InfernalPaladin]

I'm getting pretty excited for The Elder Scrolls Online's Buy to Play release next month, and was just visiting the forum for that game to get to grips with what's changed since I had last played it (open beta).

Having played Guild Wars 2 in the past, I noticed a... confusing sentiment on the forum that was shared by about half of the players. They actually wanted to keep paying the subscription, and didn't want the game to become single-purchase.

Some people were already going out and quitting the game completely because of this. Their reasons? "Toxic community" and "pay to win" seemed to be the most common of the two. This seemed a little premature however; why quit before knowing for certain that the game would be pay to win, or that it would degrade into call of duty levels of toxicity?

I can totally see these arguments being valid for a free to play game. I've been around a few free to play games (actually one of my favourite games, APB:Reloaded, is free to play) and know what that pricing model brings with the quality of it's community. But the point here is that the game still costs $60 a pop. It's not economically viable for people to just remake a character if they are banned so that they can continue to be malicious.

Plus, the now-optional subscription - instead of only allowing gameplay - now provides it's own benefits over the previous pricing system for people willing to continue to pay what they were before the change (the benefits being an allotment of premium currency every month, all the DLC included, 10% crafting speed buffs and 10% gold/exp gain buffs; not something that I would go out and call game-breaking in my opinion).

I'd assume that the buy to play release will draw in more players (such as myself) that couldn't justify the initial cost of the game, $60 plus $15/mo extra. More players in an MMO would mean more content, more raiding, more people to meet and have adventures with. I know that in some of the multiplayer games that i've played before, lack of community/playerbase is one of the most detrimental things you could have happen to your game.

So with this in mind, I pose the question to you, Escapists, why would someone want to keep paying a subscription for a game, when having a single purchase with an optional in-game shop will provide (from what I can tell) more content and more players?

As an addendum, what would you prefer? Subscription based gameplay, or single purchase with cash shop?

 

[aozgolo]

Some gamers are very economical with their "gaming budget" and a flat expected monthly subscription fee is a very manageable budgetary consideration. The appeal of this model is that everyone pays the same and everyone has access to the same content. While cash shops (at least the good ones) generally stick purely to cosmetic and superfluous content and nothing that aids in character progression, many of the types of gamers who ENJOY cosmetic "fluff" style additions are not endless money pits.

Let's look at a game that ONLY has a subscription model, and has 100 different hats you can collect, let's say you are a hat collector. For the low low price of the subscription monthly fee (let's say $15) you can invest game-time into collecting all 100 hats.

In a game with a cash item store, these cosmetic items are removed from being acquirable in-game and now become cash items and are sold for rather high value (let's say $5). Now you literally have to pay over thirty times MORE money just to collect all the hats than for the price of a subscription alone.

Granted this is just one example and only affects certain kinds of players but it's one of the reasons why I personally hate cash stores in games, I'd much rather pay a set fee every month and have access to the same content as everyone else and my investment in gametime is what nets me the cool stuff.


Also cash-store games have a nasty reputation in MMO communities of doing underhanded things like selling you extra inventory space or worse, crucial hotkey binds.

 

[sanquin]

As said above, the part that worries me is the cash shop. Especially now that they're going with a buy to play model instead of a sub. They expected money from subs, they're removing the sub requirement to play now. So they will want to try to get that money by other means. I'm not saying the cash shop will be bad, but games in similar situations have a bad reputation with handling it so far. GW2 did it well, but that's the only real example I can think of.