The Daily Grind: Which titles should try F2P?

I think we'll see the economy fluctuate in the early part of the year, due mainly to tax returns, but then by the end of the summer we'll be in deep shiite

I think all games should adopt the buy it and play it for free model. Then pay for the expansions if you want them.

Add another vote for Vanguard to turn F2P. It's not a bad old game, from what I saw of the trial, with enough differences from the WoW format to attract immersion-seekers.

Problem is, if you espouse a large seamless world, with corpse runs, and oldschool systems that emphasize grouping, you'd better have a good critical mass population to support those kinds of mechanics before all your customers hit a frustration wall alone and quit. I heartily doubt Vanguard has that kind of critical mass. It's probably on Station Pass life support.

F2P would probably draw in a second wave of folks, playing casually, leveling slowly, PUGing it, and maybe of that subset, you'd find a few who want to go hardcore, level fast and unlock whatever prestige goodies (raid content?) you gain from a paid subscription.

Honestly, I don't think you can really just flip a switch and turn a game F2P. There are a lot of fundamental design elements that need to be considered to make a good F2P game.

DDO worked well because of the game's basic design to begin with. DDO is an extremely gated game thanks to the instanced dungeons. You can't really do that with an open world game. Sure, with heavily zoned games like STO, CO, WAR or AoC you could lock out zones but that ends up meaning that a player would HAVE to buy content to level up; a no-no when it comes to the F2P model. With Vanguard it's even more difficult because that game is so completely open world with even the dungeons being non-instanced.

In order for these other games to go F2P the developers would basically have to require you to buy gear or abilities. There's no way to make enough money to stay in business from just things like mounts or bank and bag slots. But that in turn means that people would need to buy from the store to ever be competitive, which in turn means that people won't be attracted to the F2P model. You might as well just have a trial if all you want to do is give people a taste of things and try to get them hooked enough to spend money.

I think the best idea that has been mentioned is to simply reduce subscription fees. Combine that with a good trial and a media blitz about how the game has changed and you'd be likely to get enough attention to more than make up for the reduced sub price. SoE totally screwed Vanguard in this respect. They got the game to where it was vastly improved, and also released the new starting experience with the Trial of the Isle -- but they never did any advertising to get the word out. They should have put a bit more money into the development to improve the animations, then released that at the same time as the Isle and at the same time they should have done a full "relaunch" of the game to get the word out about it.

Bottom line, going F2P is not a magic bullet. In most cases it just wouldn't work.

I think people assume free to play is free. It usually costs about the same to play the F2P games. You get micro'd to death instead of just paying all at once. I like the P2P model much better, devs spend less time thinking of ways to MAKE you buy crap and focus on retaining what players they have.

Free to play is nice for games you just want to dip in and out of. You only pay when you are playing and actually buy something. You can still enter the game when not paying and are not tied into 30 days at a time.

I wish DDO would open its business model to Europe.