I have seen too many ads to free online MMO games not to post a thread here and ask: Who pays for the development? Who plays such games? Are they any good? I'm not considering playing one, far from it. But looking at these strictly from a business point of view, I cannot imagine these projects to generate any profit or benefit, which is a requirement to make any project worth it, even the move of a muscle, let alone the development of an entire game. And then there's the question of budget. Of course I don't know the whole process of developing a game nor the amount of ads one has to hack through in order to play, so I might be missing something that is obvious to others. Now. You may enlighten me.
For one most (all?) of these are free to play, but if you want that one mount you gotta buy it from the game shop. Then there's this really cool sword. Then the character race, class, maps etc etc. In the end paying for all those little things costs you as a player more than a monthly subscription would. So here's your profit. I've no idea how they handle the budget before release them though
Most of these free games have extra options when paying. So they are only about as free as runescape. Especially Artix entertainment is horrible with this, as they seem to have stopped updating anything you don't need to spend real life money on (their games used to be like 13 bucks for a lifetime, but i can see how they would run out of money. Now it's just crap) A few don't try to make money, just cover the costs with a bit of advertising and selling shirts and stuff, like kingdom of loathing.
KoL is awesome because you have access to most of the game for free and the rest isn't adding all that much anyway. Save Items of the month maybe There's many mmo's where you shouldn't even bother if you don't plan on spending money on it (unless you dl it as a trial)
I've played D&D Online, the f2p is pretty fun. You're locked out of 2 classes and 2 races (one of which is possible to unlock for free), but other then that, not bad. Fairly basic gameplay, but I enjoy it. As far as funding, well... It's still owned by Wizards of the Coast I think.
So they're basically like "proper" games only they offer some free content. That would explain how they manage the financial aspect, but not why the ads have begun mushrooming. I literally see these ads on every other site I visit, and not even for the same title. Does today's average person really have nothing better to do than play 10 games at once? Or what do these developers base expected popularity on I wonder.
There's just so much competition between all these "free" games. I don't really think they have much of a choice. It's either advertise, or perish.
I played Voyage Century Online until recently, and it advertised as a free to play game. This is true if you plan to play casually, however, if you want to play competitively, it is practically a must to spend tons of money on it. Some people even spend 1K+ per month on new items and to help their fellow guildmates progress. Most items you need now require some sort of money investment by either yourself or another player. Even then it takes a while, took me about a month of collecting to get the strongest sword I could use(2nd strongest sword in the gameat the time), and that was with collecting using 2 accounts at the same time almost 24/7. You know it takes forever when mobs drop about 7k silver, but a single gem(which my sword required about 100 of) costs about 5-15mil each. (and no, I didnt spend thousands on the game...just about $500 over 2.5 years playing >.> )
As I said, these games as well as their ads are mushrooming, so I'm really not convinced that their content is on a par with, say, a Blizzard title, in which I would have no problem investing some money (maybe even more than a single purchase)... but in a game that took who knows how many months to create (as opposed to Blizzard's ~10[?] years for D3) I would feel bodgy. Although one can probably evaluate the content and how elaborate the game is by the free content, I don't think I would give it a chance when there are other, guaranteed to be high quality alternatives (i.e., D3) out there. Though I might not be as patient if I were a hardcore gamer and wanted moar games and variety...
Yep, dead serious. They say it's going to be similar to Mythos when it was still a project in beta. I've never played Mythos, but the people who did said it was an awesome game.
well AirRivals is the best I know. There is no weapon/gear or anything that is blocked and you cant buy item with money. weapon have prefix and suffix. with money you can remove a prefix/suffix and set another but it don't mean it will be good. With a lot of the game money you can make good weapon by asking those who bought real money to make good weapon.(recently the cash shop have added a couple of new thing. freaking annoying) But the game itself prove that uber weapon and armor are not all. Skill (and good connection) is important too. The game is really fun and you can really dodge attack (not like runescape or most of the MMo i saw) Anyway i'm better to show it. Those are my favorites videos ^^. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssH2_vopBPo&feature=related *zerk and co* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGGXURrrN7A&feature=related *outnumber II* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Go7rK1f1A&feature=related <----- really high quality http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZkLwN84GEg&feature=channel <------funny one The guy for the 1-2-4 made other really good video if your interrested.
I play a few F2PMMORPGs, mainly because I'm NOT paying 20 bucks a month for WoW. If they brought the price down to just a buck a month, more people would probably play, and more often. I mean, they would still get something like 32 million A MONTH if it was down to a dollar. I would play it
Well sure most free mmo's are kinda bad that has few things available for free members, like runescape. but Dead Frontier doesn't follow this way that much, it just has a shop that you can buy things using credits which you buy using real money (or boatloads of in-game cash) and gold members get a higher looting chance, way more experience, and even the ability to test new feature atleast a week earlier than free members. I'd say Dead Frontier is one of the only decent MMo's that doesn't require money to access the whole game world.
