2012-04-02, 01:11 PM
Satellite Wrote:I really do believe F2P with premium content is the best model nowadays. F2P will always get the biggest playerbase, and even the non-paying players will make profit for the company. And there will be those hardcore addicts who pay astronomical sums for virtual currency like NX.
P2P isn't that good however. Take minecraft for example, game costs only 20euros, yet there's millions of cracked clients. For a small company like Mojang it's not easy(or possible) to fight against piracy either.
[COLOR="#cc8899"]WoW has the current largest playerbase and is subscription based (though it has incorporated some virtual currency/cash shop type features). Cash shops have a lot of potential to go wrong when they start impacting gameplay - for example, DFO and Maple. If it's too easy to buy items with real money and sell them in-game (or in any way profit in-game by spending money) the market is at risk of becoming trivialized. Pay to Play games tend to have economies that encourage farming or raiding as opposed to spend2win.
Your minecraft example...makes no sense. People crack EVERYTHING - movies, games, e-books. Why should Minecraft be any different? There are also "millions" of private servers, which are ethically similar to cracked game clients, for MMOs, F2P, Pay to Play, or otherwise.[/COLOR]