
Those consequences in a few years will be a bit of an apocalypse.

“You know, free-to-play is just another model, and just like every other model in the industry, it will hold its special little place for a while but then there will be consequences. Just like every model that seems interesting works out in the short term. “I don’t think that model is going to work out all that well for anybody,” he continued, “not in the long term.

The cost can be staggering and as interest shifts so shall go the tide of money.
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With the explosion of games reaching into the free-to-play market there certainly must be a market-cap that will be reached: all of the players cannot be playing free-to-play games all of the time and not all of them “buy in.” Worse, MMO games require a much larger amount of infrastructure and maintenance than the casual solo games that appear on sites such as PopCap or arrive for Android and iPhone mobile gaming.
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Right now you’ve got everybody chasing it, going ‘Isn’t this great? Free to play, we’re going to make so much money.’” “The whole free-to-play thing isn’t going away tomorrow,” Jacobs stressed in an interview with VG247, “but let’s just see what happens in three to five years–and I’m betting closer to three–where free-to-play will become just another model. Now triple-A titles such as ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2 and Trion Worlds’s Defiance add a box price ($60) alongside the free-to-play no subscription and monetization of virtual item shops. Even as games such as DCUO had revenues boosted 700% by switching to free-to-play, new titles are forever entering the market seeking to get a slice of that gamer interest. The standard for subscription seems to be dwindling with towering giants like World of Warcraft looming with billions of revenue a year but newer titles such as Star Wars: the Old Republic, Star Trek Online, and DC Universe Online switching into free-to-play models to compete.Ĭamelot Unchained developer Mark Jacobs sees the free-to-play niche markets expanding too quickly for their own good and new publishers and developers entering the market as changing the rules-but at a price.

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) are currently in the throws of a highly disruptive market niche change: one that shifts publishers and developers attention from gathering money from users via subscriptions to one that monetizes free games much like how mobile survives.
