Comments on: Other Folks’ MMO Lookaheads

By: Sok

Sok — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:28:04 +0000

@Grimwell: “Actually, the full-on changeover already happened in the Asian market earlier this century. We have a clean case to study for how this pans out and what it does to games, communities, and the market.”

Which game went from strictly a subscription-based revenue stream to full-on RMT? I’m not aware of one, but that’s probably ignorance on my part.

Regarding the NGE comparison, if you read it as “major shift that will result in a large loss of your existing player base,” then I can see where Hardcore Casual’s coming from with the prediction. If we woke up tomorrow, WoW had full RMT, and a mass exodus occurred as a result, I could accept the “kinda like the NGE” description. As an description of *how* the game changed… definitely apples and hubcaps.

By: Grimwell

Grimwell — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 05:31:03 +0000

Actually, the full-on changeover already happened in the Asian market earlier this century. We have a clean case to study for how this pans out and what it does to games, communities, and the market.

Obviously free to play with RMT won the day in Asia, but that does not mean it will apply exactly the same way in the West. After you study the case, you have to compare it to the reality of your particular case as well, and see where there are difference points (and try to predict what will happen differently based on those points).

Calling it an NGE is just stupid though. It’s convenient shorthand, but thoroughly flawed application of the shorthand to identify a situation that is not nearly as similar. IE: If we woke up tomorrow and WoW had full RMT in their game, it wouldn’t be an NGE; it would be something entirely different.

By: Sok

Sok — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 23:17:07 +0000

Re: “one major MMO will make a legitimate push into full-on RMT, giving us the NGE of 2009″:

I didn’t read that as a crack against RMT in general, but rather attempting to retrofit RMT into an existing game designed for a subscription-based revenue stream. If you do a “full-on” changeover, you risk completely screwing up your game’s economy, levelling curves, PvP, etc., resulting in pissing off your existing player base. This is apart from the simple backlash you may get on changing the revenue stream mid-stream.

A game designed with RMT in mind would (probably) not have these issues. Your gameplay would already presume RMT and the players would’ve signed on expecting it.

How accurate that prediction is I don’t know; I could see it happening in games that are floundering hard and have a dev/management team trying desperate measures…. like the NGE.