US free-to-play MMO market oversaturated?

Over-saturation isn't necessarily a bad thing .

It means that if you want to get a place at the table your going to have to dish out something that resonates and wave after wave of SRO clones just don't cut it anymore. Not to bash on SRO it was decent but if you ever played it you essentially played 3/4 of old F2P market. They all played the same they all looked disturbingly similar.

They will need to diversify and innovate and if they manage that they are going to have a huge market for their games. If they don't their games will go the way of the dodo, as simple as that. Is letting bad games fall by the wayside such a bad thing?

Unfortunately most developers think with their marketing department .... and that means they will look at the market as flooded and not bother trying.... again I say is that a bad thing. If they weren't going to put the effort into developing a good game would the world be at a loss if the game never happened ?

Quality always Trumps Quantity
So you say Over-Saturated, I say Trimming the Fat

Nah they're all crap. There isn't a single free 2 play game that is good and has yet to get really high reviews from the main stream.

The advantage to a F2P game is the free part -- no strings attached, if I don't like it I'll look elsewhere.

Anything worth playing will, most likely, be news worthy also -- Runes of Magic is a good example. As more quality titles become available (if ever) the poor quality ones will die out.

There are only two F2P MMORPG games i really can recommend after my long run of testing dozens if it. Free Realms and The Chronicles of Spellborn.

It's not an issue of over-saturation, it's an issue of quality. No one would mind looking at that list and seeing 26 amazing games. Instead, looking at that list you see over 20 bad ones.

It's tough to choose one.

While over-saturation may be good to make developers take risks to make themselves stand-out it also makes it tough to find a game where you have confidence that the population won't disappear tomorrow.

I have played two F2P that I have enjoyed. Depending on how you like to play I'd be surprised if you couldn't find ONE that matched your tastes.

Well over-saturated is quite the exaggeration, if you put online gaming alongside DVDs, books, music etc. - there's countless thousands of examples of each of those I'm not interested for every low-budget MMO I'm ignoring.

OVER-saturation will be the case when/if we see F2P developers folding & closing shop - currently we're just at the introduction-of-a-bargain-basement stage of MMO growth.

TANSTAAFL.

The F2P market looks more and more like a bubble ready to burst by the day.

Well IMHO there are two different "F2P" markets: the import Asian games and the newly emerging western market.
It's too early to really say but personally I think GW, Free Realms and DDO are proving that there is a demand for alternate business models.

The 14.99 sub based model can't stay 14.99 forever with rising cost....something has to change...I feel that the MMO industry knows that if they raise the monthly prices it will break the genre.

Runes of Magic,Atlantica Online or Perfect World International maybe ? I don't know, there isn't any major quality in f2p mmos because of the budgets they work with.

What surprises me is that when I try out a new F2P MMO it never seems empty. A lot of the starter areas seem to be filled to overflowing with people, and even one I hated, like Atlus's F2P one NeoSteam, wasn't a ghost town.

A lot of kids seem to be growing up comfortably with F2P games, especially Korean ones.

Honestly though, Hood has no reason to be even taken seriously as a critic. Reality gap ruined Monato Espirit by linking it with Metatix, and the whole Metatix concept is probably one of the worst developments in f2p history because it makes you pay money for actual in-game currency to spend on things. You can play most F2P games with little to no use of the cash shop, but they force people to use it with that system.

Yeah, like others have said, my first thought when I read this post is: Yeah, but how many *quality* F2P MMOs are there out there? In my opinion, not many. The best of the bunch, to me, is Runes of Magic. I can't see any reason to pay a monthly subscription for any MMO now.

I have yet to buy anything through microtransactions on a F2P game. I probably never will. I'll play a F2P game until it isn't fun anymore or as far as the "freeness" goes and then I'll move on to the next game. So in that way, oversaturation might not be a bad thing.

I'll pay a sub for a really good game or a box price (thank you GW) for a fun game without a needed sub or microtransactions. I just can't put an individual dollar amount on a piece of virtual armor or whatever.

I'm liking DDO right now -- supposedly you can play the game to its fullest without microtransactions as long as you have the time. The microtransactions are only for those who don't have the time. That's fine with me.