tl;dr is in bold at the bottom.
This comes straight from Turbine, INC.'s press release today.
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References to my two previous DDO:EU information threads:
1)Announcement information from July '09
2)Beta and release information from September '09
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This is actually very interesting on its own as a release, because previously Turbine (who is a privately-held company) decided to use one of its perks of being privately-held and not disclose its population numbers. The only "citable" population we've ever had before today for DDO was that, in the lawsuit between Atari and Turbine, Atari claimed that DDO had twenty-five thousand players at its peak.
On September 9th of last year, "Dungeons & Dragons Online?" was re-branded as "Dungeons & Dragons Online?: Eberron Unlimited™" to mark an extreme shift in the subscription model for the game. For its first three years (March 2006 - September 2009) the game was at a standard $15/month fee with bundle deals bringing the price down to $10/month if you paid per year. But, as of DDO:EU, this model was changed into what is commonly known as the "Korean" model of MMOs: The primary game is free-to-play, while some content is restricted to paying customers, with a featured in-game real money store. You can, however, still pay your recurring $15/month and gain "VIP" status instead of the previous "subscriber" status. You get access to all content and all but one race and one class (which are both unlocked otherwise in-game) for as long as your subscription holds.
The DDO Store works a little differently than traditional RMT stores have before it. It primarily sells conveniences such as cheap armor/weapons, ammo, teleport wands, and the like. But it does NOT sell high-quality gear such as raid-loot or rare drops. In order to be a competing high-end player you must still put in work and effort to obtain these items just the same as anyone else, no matter how much money you're willing to put into the game.
The store also sells "account options" to free-to-play accounts. This includes a shared bank that VIPs get for free, the Warforged race and the Monk class that VIPs get for free, and the option to buy the Drow race and the Favored Soul class (these are obtainable in-game through the "favor" system, which is based around completing adventures on higher difficulty settings than normal. If you do not wish do wait until you've obtained enough "favor" to get these perks for free, you can simply buy them).
Included in the account options are "adventure packs," which are packets of content that are available to VIPs, which do typically have better end rewards than free quests. This allows F2P players the option to pick and choose what content they want to own, rather than paying $15/month to have all the content even if they aren't using some of it. All raids that feature "raid loot" are adventure packs.
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It's quite obvious that the switch to micro-transactions has been insanely profitable to Turbine, INC. As previous numbers indicated, the other MMO they run (Lord of the Rings Online) had a peak of four times the amount of players DDO had. Now, LotRO has only a tenth of the number of players DDO has.
My question for this thread is simple: What do you think of MMO conversions to micro-transactions rather than a pay-to-play subscription model, and do you think this is where we're headed?
This comes straight from Turbine, INC.'s press release today.
---------
References to my two previous DDO:EU information threads:
1)Announcement information from July '09
2)Beta and release information from September '09
---------
This is actually very interesting on its own as a release, because previously Turbine (who is a privately-held company) decided to use one of its perks of being privately-held and not disclose its population numbers. The only "citable" population we've ever had before today for DDO was that, in the lawsuit between Atari and Turbine, Atari claimed that DDO had twenty-five thousand players at its peak.
On September 9th of last year, "Dungeons & Dragons Online?" was re-branded as "Dungeons & Dragons Online?: Eberron Unlimited™" to mark an extreme shift in the subscription model for the game. For its first three years (March 2006 - September 2009) the game was at a standard $15/month fee with bundle deals bringing the price down to $10/month if you paid per year. But, as of DDO:EU, this model was changed into what is commonly known as the "Korean" model of MMOs: The primary game is free-to-play, while some content is restricted to paying customers, with a featured in-game real money store. You can, however, still pay your recurring $15/month and gain "VIP" status instead of the previous "subscriber" status. You get access to all content and all but one race and one class (which are both unlocked otherwise in-game) for as long as your subscription holds.
The DDO Store works a little differently than traditional RMT stores have before it. It primarily sells conveniences such as cheap armor/weapons, ammo, teleport wands, and the like. But it does NOT sell high-quality gear such as raid-loot or rare drops. In order to be a competing high-end player you must still put in work and effort to obtain these items just the same as anyone else, no matter how much money you're willing to put into the game.
The store also sells "account options" to free-to-play accounts. This includes a shared bank that VIPs get for free, the Warforged race and the Monk class that VIPs get for free, and the option to buy the Drow race and the Favored Soul class (these are obtainable in-game through the "favor" system, which is based around completing adventures on higher difficulty settings than normal. If you do not wish do wait until you've obtained enough "favor" to get these perks for free, you can simply buy them).
Included in the account options are "adventure packs," which are packets of content that are available to VIPs, which do typically have better end rewards than free quests. This allows F2P players the option to pick and choose what content they want to own, rather than paying $15/month to have all the content even if they aren't using some of it. All raids that feature "raid loot" are adventure packs.
---------
It's quite obvious that the switch to micro-transactions has been insanely profitable to Turbine, INC. As previous numbers indicated, the other MMO they run (Lord of the Rings Online) had a peak of four times the amount of players DDO had. Now, LotRO has only a tenth of the number of players DDO has.
My question for this thread is simple: What do you think of MMO conversions to micro-transactions rather than a pay-to-play subscription model, and do you think this is where we're headed?
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