The Indie Game Magazine January 2015 | Issue 45 | Page 11

GAME WATCH

by Nick Cescon

T

here are two popular things I’ve heard about MMOs
over the last few weeks; one is how good Draenor is, and
the other comes from people wondering when WildStar
and Elder Scrolls Online will be joining the free-to-play community. It is definitely true that this year has seen a roller coaster of
highs and lows for the MMO community in general, however I
don’t agree with the knee-jerk reaction that just because a game
of this size and caliber doesn’t fully succeed in its first few months
it should be corralled into the pen with other struggling games.

reasons to stay in your game, meaning
they need an IV drip of new content
throughout the year to keep them
subscribed. This has become an expectation over the last fifteen
years’ worth of MMO’s. On the other hand, MOBA games have the
expectation set that you log in to play the same game over and
over and over, and don’t suffer from this issue, so it’s feasible to
make cosmetic upgrades with one or two content updates annually
to keep your game fresh.

The free-to-play stigma seems nowadays to be closer akin to the
field where you put Ol’ Yeller while finding your gun, which is completely unfair. It is a payment model which has seen some success
in the MMO market, however there are an increasing number of
payment models in the world of gaming nowadays. While free-toplay sounds very alluring to most players who have grown up in
the pirate age, it isn’t a one size fits all payment model.
There are a few reasons why this model has worked for certain
games, the easiest example is League of Legends. In a game where
the gameplay is relatively fast and requires little time investment
at its most basic level, it’s much easier to rely on a steady income
from players. This is partly due to the fact that you’re going to
have more of a fluctuation of new players coming in, old players
leaving, and older players coming back in to play the game, and
all of them have a want and need to customize their characters
in-game. In an MMO, this is something that is a major feature of
the game, and a lot of manpower and time goes into figuring out
ways to make characters feel more personalized.
However, the larger and more difficult difference is that in a game
like League of Legends, they release post-launch content that’s primarily cosmetic changes to the game and current character roster.
This means that they don’t have to spend as much time coding
in-house to create new content. In an MMO, your main source of
income is your endgame subscribers, and you need to give them

The point is that the people who make the MMO’s, like Carbine,
need to pay their employees, and living off an unreliable paycheck
that completely undervalues your work is no way for anyone to
make a living.v
Developer: Carbine Studios
Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux
Website: https://shop.wildstar-online.com/
Twitter: @WildStar