The reality of many games is that they could not exist if they relied on game sales alone. Whatever the reason is: constant development, more content, servers, staff... some games need the additional income to be what they are. Traditionally, this problem has been solved by the inclusion of a subscription charge to play the game.
Subscriptions are most common for persistent, massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, Eve Online, Star Wars (both Galaxies and the Old Republic), Everquest, Elderscrolls et al. Recently though, these games have increasingly moved to other forms of monetisation, joining free games like World of Tanks, Heroes of the Storm, Albion Online and the insanely successful Fortnite in offering options like loot boxes, in-game items and premium accounts.
Whilst we can’t argue with its success for some games, monetisation is a touchy subject for many gamers. Regularly, comments mention money-grabbing tactics by developers and their publishers.
If a game doesn’t offer enough to tempt players to part with their money, the monetisation won’t work and the game risks failure. Offer too much and it will be exploited or there will be accusations of operating a pay-to-win scheme.
(This is interestingly why mobile gaming isn’t considered ‘real gaming’ by many. The level of progression and game features locked behind a pay-wall on mobile games just isn’t tolerated on PC or console).
The importance of that balance cannot be overstated. The general rule seems to be this: monetisation can be tolerated as long as it doesn’t give people a competitive edge. So skins, other cosmetics and currency are in. But buying weapons, armour and other things that directly affect how players perform seem to be when players have a real problem with it.
Common to all the games that charge subscription is the time that players need to sink into them. Obvious, because subscriptions don’t work if you can see all the game has to offer in a month. But charging a subscription for something you need considerable time for – especially when it comes to keeping up with gear and new activities/reputation/dungeons – causes a real-world money problem.
Those with lots of time to play games generally don’t have a lot of money to spend on them. And those with lots of money to spend generally don’t have anywhere near as much time.
Clearly, that just a generalisation so it won’t apply to everyone. But it does make sense. If you’ve got spare money, it’s likely because you’ve spent time earning it. And as much as I’m sure some of us would love to get paid to sit at home and do nothing but play games, we’d soon run out of money doing so.
It’s a tough nut to crack. How do you make sure those with less time but more money don’t get left behind? At the same time, how do you make sure you have enough content and desire to keep people coming back month after month?
Blizzard’s solution to this problem was an interesting one. Those with more money could buy ‘game time tokens’ for real world cash. These would then be sold through a price-controlled auction for gold, the game’s currency.
The result was that players with less disposable income could switch to just playing the game to earn their game time rather than paying cash for it. The players who had less time but more money wouldn’t get left behind as they could buy the stuff they needed with the gold.
It effectively made gold-farming a legitimate activity controlled by the developers, and ended the gold-trade overnight.
Other factors helped the scheme work for Blizzard. Firstly, it didn’t solve every problem for players with less time. There are still plenty of achievements, items, mounts and titles you can only get with a significant investment of time.
Secondly, it didn’t flood the market with gold, it just moved it around. Especially when you consider that the real-world cost of a game token is almost twice the cost of the monthly charge to play (£15 versus £9.99), players weren’t going to be going out and buying loads of them.
And crucially, though you could buy weapons and armour with the gold, you could only buy the items that other players didn’t want, already had, or had better than. It wasn’t the same as having unlimited access to every item/weapon in the game from an in-game store or NPC.
Although they have said it won’t be a subscription game, I am convinced that Star Citizen will need to find a – possibly completely new – clever way to monetise given their plans, not least for server meshing and all the costs that will involve.
So the monetisation "problem" isn’t going to go away anytime soon (if you require further proof, look no further than the loot box/gambling debate ). The best we can hope for in the gaming community is that we continue to be listened to, and pay to win becomes a distant memory (and the curse of those mobile-gaming noobs).
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