Everyone Loves Free

Is the big budget, high profile, pay to play MMO dying a long and painful death? There's no getting around the fact that the market and gamers can only support so many pay to play MMO's, and very few gamers have the time or money to play more than one MMO each month.

In the past year we've seen Turbine's Dungeons and Dragons Online forced into transitioning into a free to play model (subsequently leaping to the number three spot on the list of most popular MMO's according to the NPD group).

Not long from now, Lord of the Rings Online will also be going the same way as DDO, not because it was failing, but because the move proved incredibly popular and profitable for that game.

A year ago, Sony Online Entertainment launched its family friendly entry in the genre, Free Realms, which has proved to be a smash hit, drawing in millions and millions of players.

But why the success? Simple. Nothing draws the masses in like the word "free". It's like offering "no strings attached" AoC gold, or it's like when you're at the supermarket and that bored looking attendant shoves a free ice cream cone at you, or one of those little hot dogs on a toothpick. Sure, they might have been sitting there all afternoon, and you have no idea what they taste like or where they've been, but dammit, they're free!

This is the way it is with MMO's as well. All you've got to do is slap the increasingly popular "free to play" sticker tag on it, and all of a sudden gamers are talking about your game and actively rooting for it to be good. The truth is that to most gamers, a decent free game is as valuable as a good pay to play game, there are simply too many pay to play massively multiplayer online games on the market asking for people's hard earned dollars, and right now free games stand out and create a buzz.

Pay Won't Go Away

That isn't to say however, that the pay to play MMO is going entirely the way of the dodo. Pay to play is a proven model, and it's not going anywhere. If the current pay to play MMO's on the market start getting into trouble, they can always do what Dungeons and Dragons Online did to breathe new into their sales... go free to play.

The fact is that there are two sure fire ways to survive in the pay to play space.

The first, most difficult, and most profitable, is to become the de facto standard, the one MMO that defines the genre, the one that everyone wants to play.

Right now, that MMO happens to be World of Warcraft, 7 years ago, it was EverQuest. The standard bearer is always judged by a separate set of rules, actually, the truth is they make their own rules, and its loyal subscriber base is always willing to plow through quest after quest, raid after raid to earn XP and WoW gold.

There are secondary and tertiary successes, but MMO's like Warhammer Online, Age of Conan and Aion don't see anywhere near World of Warcraft's phenomenal level of success.

So what's the second sure fire way to success in the pay to play space? Well, if you're able to cater to a certain niche in the market, an untapped vein if you will, then you're going to be king of your own particularly small castle, but hey, a small castle is still a castle.

For an example, look no further than Eve Online, an MMO with probably a tenth of WoW's subscriber base, but one that has flourished and gone from strength to strength even as more ambitious, heavily marketed MMO's like Richard Garriot's Tabula Rasa have fallen by the wayside. Those who play Eve care more about the hardcore economically driven sci-fi world than they do about WoW gold and Aion Kinah.

Likewise, an MMO such as Star Trek Online will always have a small core base of subscribers that should be able to support the developers, assuming of course they follow a prudent financial model. Niche MMO's are harder to market, and don't often have the kind of financial backing of their more popular cousins, but they are still highly profitable.

Where you start to get into trouble, is when another, more popular franchise decides to move in on your niche, as might be the case with Fallen Earth and the tentative steps Bethesda seems to be taking towards making an MMO based in the Fallout universe. If you plan on making a niche MMO, don't make a WoW-clone, look for something fresh... like a wrestling MMO.

That said, you can't entirely discount the popularity of the pay to play MMO, or the value of finding new solutions to old problems. Crackdown developer, Realtime Worlds has seemingly found ways to merge elements of what we know of as the traditional free to play model with elements of the free to play model in its new MMO, APB.

In the coming year, SOE will launch Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures, another family friendly MMO that will likely go further towards merging pay to play and free to play, as will their other upcoming MMO's, the spy themed Agent, and DC Universe Online. EA and Bioware have remained tight lipped so far, but it's likely that their highly anticipated MMO, often mentioned by gamers and the gaming press alike as being a possible contender to World of Warcraft's throne, Star Wars: The Old Republic, will find new and unique ways of merging the two models.

A Happy Compromise

It would seem therefore, that perhaps the way forward is not as simple as choosing one or the other, but rather taking the best elements of both and finding new and more convenient ways for gamers to play MMO's. If gamers have the time, and financial ability for instance, to support two MMO's a month, a company like Turbine might actually make money on both their high profile MMO's, DDO and LoTRO from the same gamer. This is something that just doesn't happen at present, but as the genre continues to mature and developers find better ways of addressing gamers needs, this compromise will work out better for all involved.