Words by Greywolfe
In this series, I’ve tackled the modern idea of monetization in the video games industry. We’ve talked about the problem a little and discussed the “bad side” of monetization: how games can turn into an endless money sink because of greedy publishers.
This week, I’d like to take one more look at the topic to discuss places where the market has got it “mostly right.”
Stay a while and listen! And buy packs!
The Hearthstone Model
Blizzard set up Hearthstone with a fifteen man team. It’s a fairly simple Collectible Card Game in which you use a hero avatar from a pool of nine avatars to build a deck around. Each of these has a specific little power and cards that are central to them. The priest has a theme of healing and buffing minions. The mage has a theme of control using spells. The druid has flexibility at it’s core.
Hearthstone is completely free. You can download the game and start playing right away. If you never want to pay a single cent for the game, you never have to: card packs can be bought for 100 gold a piece and gold can be earned through daily quests. Admittedly, you’re going to be earning cards very slowly if you never pay into the system, but you can earn every card in this manner [besides very specific golden cards, because these were given away as promotions. However, you can always get the regular version of the card, should you want to.]
This is arguably the best model: most of everything is earnable in-game through game play of some persuasion. Throwing money at the problem simply allows you to earn those items faster.
Buy some gems! Kill the dragon! Look snazzy doing it!
The Guild Wars Model
Guild Wars is an MMORPG in which you create a character and that character goes on adventures. Unlike most other games in the genre, you only ever pay for the box and the expansions. There are no game time cards and no real “subscription” services to speak of.
In the second game, Arenanet started selling a new currency in the game called gems. These gems are used on a market known as the “Black Lion Trading company.” Here, you can buy lots of cosmetic looks and various services for your character.
Gems themselves can be bought for gold through the gem exchange. So, if you find yourself flush with gold, you never need to go to a store and buy a card that grants this particular currency to your account, instead, you can simply exchange one in-game currency for another out-of-game currency.
Variants of this model have trickled into other games of various stripes: Neverwinter [the Cryptic game] has Astral Diamonds, which in turn are a refinement of a system known as Dilithium from Star Trek Online. The problem with these games is that the game itself places an artificial limit on how many of these crystals you can get in a day’s worth of playing.
Earn your way to a subscription by taking on Rifts
The Rift Model
Rift is another MMORPG much like Guild Wars. The slight difference here is that Rift launched as a subscription-based game. It retained it’s subscription for about two years when it changed models and became a free-to-play game. It has retained a “kind of subscription” in that you can pony up a fixed amount every month to retain some privileges that free to play players don’t get – most notably, doing away with the amount of currency you can hold at any given time. [free to play players can hold up to 2500 platinum – this being the top-end currency.]
Naturally, time cards for Rift are now impossible to find, however, Rift has introduced a system called REX. REX comes in token form and can be redeemed to your account for game time or for coin you can spend in the Real Money store. Again, most of the time, the store sells mostly cosmetic gear and style items. But there are some pieces of armour with statistics on them that exist primarily to do away with the grind. [I have issues with this, but these issues are small in comparison with the “mostly benign” nature of the store.]
As Daft Punk would have it, you should get your games: "Around the web, around the web." Well, not quite.
The Rise Of The "Web Stores"
Finally, one of the best modern innovations in terms of buying games has undoubtedly been sites like GOG.com – these sites sell older games for far cheaper than their brick and mortar counterparts. Very often, these sites have massive sales in which they discount the games even more so that you will be inclined to buy them. This is especially good for enthusiasts who might have missed out on games from the previous generations.
If I have one problem with this, it is that some of the games do not depreciate in value over time like they should if they’re on a web-store front-end like this: take the case of TellTale’s games. Some of these date back ten years at this point and are still sitting at their original price points.
Where's Michael Pachter when you need him? Ah well. I'll just do the predicting for him: "games as services" are here to stay :(
What This All Means
It means that games-as-a-service – a buzzword that publishers like a lot, because it means they can keep charging gamers for the game over and over again – could work out in the player’s favour, but only if the company that’s floating the money to make the game sees the gamer as something other than a walking wallet – a practise that few seem to aspire to in this modern day and age.
To many of the companies, the consumer is simply a fleshy meat sack that contains coins that the meat sack will trade for products which the companies – generally – don’t care about. We’ve seen Ubisoft launch turgid instalments of their Assassin’s Creed series with shoddy Quality Assurance. We’ve seen EA not really care about Battlefield [and Activision do the same with Call of Duty] rushing those games to market so that they can make quick money at Christmas. Those same companies have been making re-hash sequels of the same game over and over again in a vain hope that they will eke every last penny from the buyer.
We’ve seen some bad situations in these articles, but there is also good, of course. More publishers just need to see the good. That loyal, long-time customers are far better for their brand than short-term tourists.
