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Replacing Subscriptions With Seasonal MMOs
February 8th, 2009, By Duncan Gough
The vast majority of MMOs are subscription based. Those that aren’t are, in the main, free.
World of Warcraft, the Queen Mum of Massively Multiplayer Online Games, has been a subscription based service for years. The same goes for the Spreadsheet-In-Space of EVE Online, and no doubt the forthcoming Star Trek MMO will generate revenue from monthly subscriptions bolstered by fresh content released every quarter (at best).
The exciting thing about monthly subscriptions is the ability to do some simple maths to calculate the kind of revenue people are making on the back of these games. Pulling some numbers from the air, a million users paying £10 a month with an average lifespan of 6 months would, in theory, generate plenty of cash. The numbers never really stack up that easily but monthly subscriptions do indeed provide a method, now almost standardised for MMOs, for companies to charge repeatedly for the same content. Even if no new content is released from one month to the next, an MMO company will still charge players for access to the game.
However, will subscriptions remain the default method of paying for MMOs in the future? There’s nothing to suggest that this will change in the near term future, but there’s also no guarantee that MMOs will remain subscription based services.
Indeed, there was an excellent quote from Valve last week that made me realise the subscription-based nature of MMOs is likely to change at some point.
“we’ve learned that we’re no longer making stand-alone games but creating entertainment services”
From: http://blog.wired.com/games/2009/02/valve-announces.html
That’s Valve, creators of traditional boxed games, complemented with their Steam delivery network for digital downloads, openly talking about making games that are entertainment services.
If Valve are selling boxed games for an upfront fee and expecting to release extra content for the lifetime of the product, then the subscription-based tradition of MMOs starts to look a little shaky. Valve, too, have already proven themselves capable of doing this. Even more important is the fact that the additional content released over the lifetime of the game is free.
Games as entertainment services, then, is a combination of traditional boxed product sold at retail or digital download, combined with additional, ‘freemium’ content released over the lifetime of the game. Valve’s approach to selling multiplayer games is strikingly different to the MMO creators:
“[In multiplayer games] the content you’re playing is being created by the players you’re playing against, so the more people that get into the game, the more content you’re going to have”
From http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/valve-wont-charge-for-dlc
On top of this, it’s also interesting to note that Valve are able track a distinct rise in the sale of other games, whenever they release a free update to one of their existing games (see this piece on pirating software, a perennial problem for PC games).
Taking all the pieces together, if the future of games is to become entertainment services, then are subscriptions going to fall away in favour of upfront payments and free updates?
One company that seems well placed to show the way forward is perhaps not the first to come to mind. The EA Sports brand is huge, and has been a stable of the last few console generations. EA Sports has made a business out of updating content (and deprecating old content). Mainly as a result of the seasonal nature of sports such as football, baseball and hockey, EA Sports games set themselves up as being the game of the season, but as soon as a new season starts, the old one is inevitable outdated by a new release. Fifa 08, the EA Sports game for football fanatics in Europe, is the official game of the local sports leagues, with high quality production values set to ape the armchair fans experience of watching their favourite sport. Once the new season starts, though, Fifa 09 would be released, requiring anyone who wants to play along to pay along. Each new update, whilst supremely polished, is intimately tied to the current season in order to be as up to date as possible, but also as disposable as possible.
Taking this approach to MMOs, it’s clear to see that the seasonal nature of EA Sports games is based around a presumption that the people buying the games want to be as up to date as possible. Indeed, it’s the story behind the game that requires an update. In this instance, the story is the team lineup which changes frequently. Transferring that to the typically fantasy themed worlds on MMOs, it’s clear to see that there are many opportunities for the intricate and detailed story that often scaffolds Virtual Worlds like Azeroth. Mapping the boxed-game-a-year franchise of EA Sports to MMOs based around fictitious Virtual Worlds is certainly one way in which the subscription business model could evolve into a season update with freemium content between the releases. It’ll certainly be interesting to see if anyone takes note of the headway Valve is making.