Cthulhu Could Have Predicted? The Secret World Goes Guild Wars

In amongst the mass of reporting around The Old Republic's move to gratis-to-play, one more hugely multiplayer online role-playing game, also part-published by EA, has been a small lost in the schadenfreude stampede.

In spite of this, today has noticed The Secret World announce that, despite the fact that it is not yet embracing a completely free-to-play mechanic, it is moving towards a Guild Wars 2 model where shopping for the "client" (that's, obtaining the game) provides access to subscription-free gaming.

Biting the eldritch bullet

Joel Bylos, the Game Director who has taken over the day-to-day creative management of The Secret World from its original Whedon, the mercurial Ragnar Tornqvist, is spinning this, with disarming honesty, as a mechanism to bring in new players:

Most players end up having a ton of fun once they delve into the myths & legends of 'The Secret World', & we believe the game has the potential to be even more profitable without the subscription entry barrier.

There is a lot of following stuff about ambition and excitement, but this really is the key. The basic message of 2012 for MMORPG producers has been that the finest way to get players to pay a monthly fee for a game they may or not play is to invent a time machine, go back in time to 2004 & release it under the name World of Warcraft.

In defence of this business plan, it worked for Blizzard, & also means that we have been spared the tyrannical rule of the Emperor Morgan of the Independent Republic of Texarkansas, who got distracted by WoW and never embarked on his campaign of terror in our new timeline. Nonetheless, it is a trick that really only works once, and it is questionable whether it will continue to work in the future.

The Secret World was ordinarily going to be something of a tough sell. Funcom, its creators & online distributors, had no illusions about the decay curve of the MMO, having already steered Anarchy Online and Age of Conan into free to play incarnations. However, both held out for longer than The Secret World, which was released in July 2012. FunCom's Q3 report noted that sales were lower than expected - billings for October were $1.one million, which represents subscriber numbers underneath the upfront "poor sales" scenario at launch. In the face of this efficiency, Funcom needs to change at each ends - by cutting costs, but also by altering the way revenue moves into the technique.

Zero cost-to-play isn't zero cost

The new model for The Secret World is not precisely gratis. Rather, it operates on something resembling the Guild Wars 2 model, where the thrust of monetization is taken out of the subscription. Acquiring the "client" - that is, paying to register up to 3 characters on the Secret World servers - allows access to the straightforward content of the game (conservatively, 80-100 hours of gameplay before the endgame). Individuals who chose to subscribe will get numerous bonuses - €10 pocket money to spend in the virtual shop, a 10% discount from virtual goods & - perhaps most importantly to the truly normal player - the Time Accelerator item - a "energy hour" which doubles experience points for one hour each day.

Guns, goths & gasmasks - The Secret World's contemporary-day setting is a attainable selling point

Subscribers will also get access to content packs which will be sold as add-ons to non-subscribing players.

Analysis - Keeping secrets

The Secret World plus the Old Republic, it might be argued, each launched with a payment model descriptive of their lengthy development cycles. Too significant to fail - or at least too big to be pulled when there was the possibility of making revenue on them, industry watchers predicted that both would must be open to many type of free-to-play model, and the only genuine question was when.w

The Secret World has positive aspects The Old Republic lacks, in spite of this also problems that The Old Republic will not. As the product of a relatively minimal publisher, it does not have the buffer of EA's size, but it also has higher agility, and was in a position to moderate its costs by means of development - as well as more conveniently sharing the technology of its Dreamworld engine across Funcom's other MMO work. Each traded on the traditional strengths of their respective studios - Bioware's facility with dialog & Funcom's reputation for character and narrative (founded on Tornqvist's by now legendary single-player adventure gw2 gold games The Longest Journey & Dreamfall).

We are seeing a series of experiments with diverse MMO monetization models at present, but all have the same issue: games which expense as much as or more than a full-sized game are hard to fund with a model greatest applied to small, repetitive mobile & social games. The Secret World and the Old Republic made rods for their own backs with dialog-heavy, story-driven games which each expense money to make & provided hardcore grinders - those who burn through the complete campaign and max out their characters in the very first month of release - little reason to stay around.

Funcom's selected method is good for my type of player, whose approach to MMOs isn't as opposed to my procedure to the gym - the membership fee largely functions as a monthly reminder that I have not spent adequate time there. In spite of this, it does modest to monetize me. Bylos has recognised that Funcom will need to work tough on escalating their average profits per user through the online accessory store, & several variation of "play to win" is likely to start creeping in. The Secret World has ensured that PvP is not too essential to the game, and can in all probability rely on the averaging impact of the three game factions to keep the balance of bought advantage level.