14 DAY TRIAL // Wildstar developer Carbine Studios has talked a bit about subscriptions and massively multiplayer online games, saying that fans are happy to pay a monthly fee if the experience is fun and they see that the developer is paying attention to them.
Wildstar is one of the most ambitious all-new MMORPGs launching this year, especially since it still uses a subscription alongside an upfront cost for the actual game.
More specifically, players must buy a copy of the title that includes a 30-day subscription. Afterwards, they can pay for another month of game time via a subscription or buy a CREDD item in the game using gold earned by actually playing.
This "play to pay" model is a great way of ensuring that all sorts of players stay connected to the MMO, and Carbine's Jeremy Gaffney believes that, as long as a game stays fun, players will be thrilled to spend money or time in it.
"We have a bit of a controversial stance, which is that if you have a good game people don't care that much how you monetize if it's fun. It's more about getting people to try the game. That's the nice barrier of the free-to-play and that kind of stuff, lots of people can try it. But at the end of the day, service costs money, updates cost money, the team costs money. You need to earn that at some point from people," he told CVG.
As such, player retention is quite important, and here studios must prove that they can crank up new content and listen to the community after a game is already available. If players don't feel well inside the title, then they'll go away and let their subscription expire.
"[Retention is] based on both what's in the box when you launch, because people are going to blaze up those hundreds of hours in a month or two because that's how they roll, and how good are you at maintaining a live update pace where it feels like the devs are strongly invested in the game, the publishers are strongly in the game, and you can see stuff rolling out month over month that is cool, isn't tone deaf, and is in line with what the players want."
According to Gaffney, two games excel in this area, in the form of Blizzard's World of Warcraft and CCP's EVE Online, which have received lots of updates and content since their release many years ago.
"That is where people need to earn their stripes. That's why you see such longrunning games like EVE or like WoW that are still just sitting there right on a subscription model for years and years and years post launch. It's because they have solid enough games that they slowly increase their user bases over time rather than slowly decrease as a rule. Or did so for years and years and years at a time."
Wildstar goes live next month and it's already piqued the interest of many fans with the alpha and beta stages.