Elder Scrolls Online Director Explains Opting For Subscriptions

[StriderShinryu]

I am happy, whether I am in the minority or not, that it's a subscription model. F2P is too scattered. Why does everyone think and compare it to GW2? GW2 is successful, maybe but it has only been out for a year and I know tons of people stopped playing, due to content. With that said, subscription worked fine for a while and if they actually intend to take some WOW players, those people are used to a subscription.

Most people who stopped playing GW2 due to content did so because they were expecting your standard end game dungeon/gear grind. GW2 does not provide that, and the publically stated plans they released prior to the game even coming out confirmed that they weren't really ever planning to. Instead, GW2 players get a series of storyline and activity oriented releases every two weeks (not to mention content additions and patches). It's apples and oranges, really.

 

[Yuuki]

Still doesn't justify charging $15 a month, i.e. the same as World Of Warcraft.

I could see $8-10 a month working out a lot better for them.

 

[LordNerevar]

This Firor guy talks but all I hear is "Bullshit excuse, bullshit, blah blah blah. Oh and did you want some extra excuse to go with that bullshit?"

 

[carlh267]

I really hate to be the nitpicky one here, but...

Firor said The Elder Scrolls Online is a "world," and Bethesda doesn't want monetization options taking players out of it.

Bethesda also wants a "steady forecastable revenue stream" so it can effectively plan and pay for content updates. TESO will launch with the Mages and Fighters Guild questlines built-in, and Bethesda plans to add the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood in a future update.

Bethesda is not the developer of TESO. Zenimax Online studios is. From the source article:

The Elder Scrolls Online director Matt Firor has explained to Eurogamer why Zenimax Online Studios has decided to charge a monthly subscription for the massively multiplayer online role-playing game at a time when most observers consider the business model outdated.

This isn't even the first time that this error has occurred with the news reports on this site.

 

[cidbahamut]

Firor said The Elder Scrolls Online is a "world," and Bethesda doesn't want monetization options taking players out of it. "It's like, I go into a dungeon, if I don't have access to the dungeon it pops up a window: you don't have access to this, go buy 50 credits. We didn't want that experience. That's not an Elder Scrolls experience," he told Eurogamer.

Neither is an MMO.

I don't understand how this project got approved at all. The reasons I play MMOs and the reasons I play Elder Scrolls games are completely different and in many cases mutually exclusive. The serene solitude of exploring the wilderness is not something you can achieve when there are other people present, so I'm sitting here scratching my head trying to figure out why they'd want to undermine at least one of the core tenets of The Elder Scrolls series.

It's utterly baffling.

 

[weirdee]

counterargument: while we avoid the perils of upselling, we still have the original issue of subscription games, which basically incentivizes the skinner box model, which grants us the treadmill with no actual reward, and the most recently demonstrated flaw in which content does not last nearly as long as it seemed when it was being developed

 

[Feylynn]

My problem with that perception is that I find it to be the opposite.
I find the subscriptions loom over me with their dark cloud of obligation and make me feel bad about the game. I like being able not need to play a game, sometimes I don't feel like playing or have something else to do. On its own the previous is not an issue but I also am a fan of efficient use of resources. The idea that not playing is actively making the times I do play a worse $-Time conversion tends to make me bitter and constantly aware that it is just a game.

Just to jump to the extreme end of the scale I tend to just assume something like League of Legends is an immersive world. I identify pretty in lore with the champions I play and don't find micro transactions or lore breaking skins detracts from the integrity of their setting. A more agreeable example might be Guildwars 2 or Firefall that have very coherent uncompromised worlds with no subscription. I don't even find NeverWinter distracts me and that's pretty excessive and vocal secondary currency.

I respect their vision but they have chosen the more distracting monitization as far as I'm concerned.

 

[RJ 17]

"It's like, I go into a dungeon, if I don't have access to the dungeon it pops up a window: you don't have access to this, go buy 50 credits. We didn't want that experience. That's not an Elder Scrolls experience," he told Eurogamer. "We wanted to do monetization outside of the game. So, if I pay for a month at a time, I have 100 percent of the game. I don't have to worry about paying one more cent. I'll never run into a pay gate and I'll be in the world."

Ummmm...is this actually a thing? Honestly, I'm asking...are there MMO's out there that say "Please pay to enter this dungeon"? The last (and only) MMO I played was WoW up until the end of Burning Crusade. Now WoW obviously had a subscription fee, but that's not really relevant to what I'm asking. Quite simply I want to know if there's ACTUALLY MMO's out there that charge players before they can enter a dungeon. Because that's honestly the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. More ridiculous than Ben Affleck as Batman. More ridiculous than Don Mattrick going to Zynga to save it. Even more ridiculous than the new Killer Instinct charging people to unlock fighters.

....ok, that last one is actually the fighting-game equivalent of this situation. Still though, are there actually MMO's out there that do this? If not, what the FUCK is this guy talking about?

 

[UltimatheChosen]

...Are there pay gates or pay worlds? I was under the understanding that the F2P model had things you can purchase but didn't restrict access to areas/portions of the game.

It varies from game to game, LOTRO has pay-gates, as does DDO Online, I believe SWTOR does too, the only F2P game I can think of that doesn't is Rift, but you can't access the expansion content without paying sooo?

You can access the expansion content for free in Rift, actually. (If by "content", you mean "areas".) The expansion souls are not free, but those are basically one extra spec for each class rather than actual areas-- it's never a case of being unable to go somewhere or do something, there's just a single playstyle that you won't be able to access.

 

[iseko]

I dont like f2p models. rather have subs. very few games make good f2p models. and to be honest those games suck. teso should be subbed. like he said, teso is always about exploration and wandering around. finding caves and forts and what not. trying to enter a cave and having a popup asking you to payup... well that would suck.

im a little puzzled by the fifteen hour content bit. u think that is alot? djeezes on an mmo thats terrible! this is not an offline game. make guilds 15 hours of contents and your ship will be sinking faster then swtor. unless ure going for more of an swg experience where u can be/do whatever.

ps: typed this on phone so... yea.. srr

 

[Lieju]

That explains why want that model, but why they think it will work.

Now the question is just how long it will take them to change to free-to-play, and how many gamers will wait until that happens.

 

[misg]

If they deliver an exceptional MMO, that had new features and game-play that has never been done sure I would pay 15 a month, I have with many different mmo's for years. Here is where the problem lays for me, I'm older and busier then I was in my 20's. I'm not going to buy the game if I don't have the time to play it with it being p2p. If I figure I can only play 10 hours in the first month that may not give me enough time to know if I want to continue my sub. Which means unless I find myself with what I consider a reasonable amount to experience the game during the first month, I'll probably skip the purchase until I do. The means they may get no money from me at all.

I wish them the best but I don't see this as a positive right now.

 

[dementis]

I've lost all interest in this game by now, as a few others have said Guild wars 2 is a great example of how a MMO should be done. Once you've bought the game you have access to everything and the new content is all completely free, all the real money transactions don't have any effect on the game and there are no pay gates for dungeons or any sort of advertisement for the paid stuff.

 

[Kahani]

I don't think it's such a terrible decision, although obviously it will depend very much on whether the game is actually any good. It's not just about paywalls for dungeons. Even games like GW2 which have a pretty decent F2P model still constantly remind you that they want you to buy more stuff. Things like locked inventory slots, boxes you need to buy keys for, items that need paid currency to buy, skills you can only get after upgrading your account, and so on. Even if you're not actually prevented from playing parts of the game, you're constantly reminded that it's a product trying to make money off you, and that really isn't great for immersion. The subscription model has its drawbacks, but so does F2P. It always seems odd that people are always so desperate to attack subscription games as if there's no possible reason anyone could ever want to do anything other than F2P.

Your most direct competitor, the game you've been modeling yourselves off of, is Guild Wars 2. GW2 is releasing "major content patches" entirely for free every two weeks.

I have to disagree there. GW2 isn't releasing major content patches at all, let alone every two weeks. What they actually do is put in a couple of extra side quests that are only available for a very limited time and which often require you to play every single day to have any chance of actually seeing even that. As far as a casual player like myself is concerned, the game is still essentially identical to its original release.

 

[UsefulPlayer 1]

He should have been honest and said something like "The MMO business is as expensive as shit and we still want to make a ton of freaking money. This franchise has a large and dedicated fanbase, so this is the best chance we're gonna get to enslave them in a subscription based system."

I wonder if it ever occurred to them that the Elder Scrolls games probably have the best Content vs. Dollar ratios ever.

Anyway, we are just trying to you out. At $15 a month, gamers would have to believe that there are massive additions or improvements to the game every month. At $15 a month, you would also have to expect us to be massively invested in that game to experience all that shit day in and day out.

And we both know those things aren't gonna be fucking true so stop trying to do it. Scale back the subscription fee, offer some other freemium player friendly options for other revenue options, and release new content on budget with what you're getting.

Because no one is gonna be on board long enough at $15 a month. If anything, I recommend those people just end their subscription every month and hop back on when new/really good stuff hits the ESO.

Again, it'd be different if you were releasing a Knights of the Nine every month. But you probably aren't and nobody probably wants to keep playing that much consistently every month anyway. Every two months wouldn't be so much worse.

 

[Vrach]

The subscription model also keeps out quite a lot of trolls and griefers. People tend to be less of a dick when they have a monetary investment in a game.

Of course, EVE Online would be the exception to that... ;P

Also WoW. So, basically, the two working PPM games.

 

[Vrach]

Also WoW. So, basically, the two working PPM games.

WoW is subcription-based, but it's pretty easy to play it for free (up to a point).

There's been some recent talk (last month) about it going completely F2P though.

I really don't enjoy the "F2P" business model though. Then again, I don't play much multiplayer.

How do you play it for free when it requires a monthly payment? And my point was that despite being subscription based, it's another (completing the full set of two working) MMO that has a predominant collection of dickbags.

 

[Vrach]

snipparoo

Yeah, but that's more of a demo than a FTP option.

But it's beside my point, even when that didn't exist (ie. several years back when I was playing), most of the people you met were douchebags of some variety. I've played with a ton of different people, but every time I was meeting someone new, there was an 80% chance they were assholes.

 

[AzrealMaximillion]

Unless you your WoW or Eve, you can't survive on subscriptions anymore.

Or FF11, it's been chugging along nice and quiet like with a subscription model in the background of all the MMO hullabaloo. Its successor, FF14:ARR, will be following the same model.

The FF MMOs are a bad example of surviving on subscriptions considering they almost destroyed Square Enix. Especially FF14. Even so, WoW, EVE, and FF are the only games to have any success with a subscriber system. Everyone else either went F2P or went bankrupt.

"Square Enix president Yoichi Wada announced in June 2012 that Final Fantasy XI had become the most profitable title in the Final Fantasy series."

I kind of doubt it ruined square. Though XIV 1.0 almost did, XI subscriptions helped it survive to even attempt ARR.

A GOOD game that votes for Subscriptions, can help hold a company well. A bad game, however, can cripple it.

To be fair Final Fantasy 11 took 10 years to become Final Fantasy's "most profitable installment". In the scope of MMOs, its still chugging way behind most subscription based MMOs. And I never said FFXI almost ruined Square. That achievement goes to FF14.

 

[Zac Jovanovic]

...Are there pay gates or pay worlds? I was under the understanding that the F2P model had things you can purchase but didn't restrict access to areas/portions of the game.

It varies from game to game, LOTRO has pay-gates, as does DDO Online, I believe SWTOR does too, the only F2P game I can think of that doesn't is Rift, but you can't access the expansion content without paying sooo?

What? No. All content in Rift is free, zones, pve, pvp, endgame and all. Only thing you get from the expansion is one additional soul per class (on top of the 8 souls per class that are free).