ImperialPanda

What?! Free-to-play pay-to-win making buttloads of money? Outrageous.

Winning the lottery is a pretty fast way to earn 27m. This is an even faster way to lose 27m.

Don't be dumb, just talk to a financial advisor and invest it.

@Wild Colors

It's not that you can't get your codes. You can't even buy the CE because no retailer knows it exists.

(and obviously retailers have no idea beta codes exist either)

Article misses the entire point of "F2P". F2P, or more accurately, microtransactions, gives players the option of paying for exactly what they want. It does not force potential players to overpay for stuff they don't want and it does not let other players get away with underpaying for extra content, therefore maximizing revenue and profit.

What you sell is irrelevant to the benefits/drawbacks of going microtransaction. And there's no rule that says the only thing you can sell are "convenience" items or vanity items. If you have a developer making a grindy game and then selling "convenience" items to skip that grind, it's just because the developer sucks, not because of any shortcoming of microtransaction games.

Making a grindy F2P hoping that people will buy convenience items is the same as making a grindy P2P hoping that people will pay more subscription fees to grind it out.

If you can't think of other things to sell, well, again, that's your fault, it's not a shortcoming of microtransaction.

Many games atm are P2P to F2P converts, which are poor examples of microtransation games. You don't take a compact car, put a trailer behind it, and expect it to work the same as a truck or van. Soon, inevitably, games will come out that are designed to be microtransaction from the ground up. And the successful ones will vastly outperform any current subscription MMO, including WoW.

Subscription has no benefit over microtransactions.

Just a final note, microtransaction model does not preclude a subscription on top of it. It just gives people options for different levels of financial commitment to a game. And that is the key benefit and why it's infinitely better than subscription only.

=/

But congratulations on getting a job at Arenanet. A good time to be joining them too, with GW2 pending. Have fun! :o

@vaajtswv

So resell it?

I played FFXI for 6 years, and during some of that time yes I woke up, played all day, then went to bed. Now I don't play MMOs much any more, if at all, and I do other stuff for fun. But I don't regret playing FFXi nor do I think badly of the time I spent playing FFXI. It was a lot of fun and I met a bunch of great people. =P

I think, during one extra scene in Avatar BD while Jake was up in the facility in the mountains, he describes his days as spent waking up then spending all day in his avatar, living in a different world as a somewhat different person. And he certainly enjoyed it I think. It was exactly like that.

@Stilllove

Enough. Believe what you will. If it weren't for people like you I would actually have to work to make money.

@Stilllove

That... matters... how...?

You asked why 13 servers = failure.

I answered you 13 servers = failure because it does not make enough money to justify the monetary and time investment.

@ImperialPanda

And some quick math.

Rift just announced they've earned 100m usd in revenue. Rift has 34 servers NA EU combined.

Tera has 16 servers KR JP combined. 16/34 * 100m ~ 47m. Assuming they make about 66% profit, pretty generous, that's about 31m usd.

According to BHS it cost them more than 35m usd to make Tera. They haven't even earned back their investment yet.

Of course the numbers can be very off. But Tera's obviously not raking in the money for BHS.