Well, that’s me flummoxed. I’m sure you’ve all seen this by now:
Blue’s News: Shadowbane Free
At first glance, I figured this was just another MMO joining the growing ranks of the currently in-vogue movement away from monthly subscription, be it pure box sales - like Guild Wars, long-term free trial - like the any-day-now Planetside: Reserves thing, or just gaming sponsored by advertising - like the Anarchy Online Basic package now. Turns out its even more revolutionary than that – as far as anyone can tell at this stage, they just can’t be bothered to charge anyone any money for it anymore.
Now I’m not a business guru or anything, but…don’t MMOs cost money to run? Further details are expected, but at this point, it doesn’t really seem clear how the game can afford to actually continue to exist under the new plan, leaving me with number of theories:
- Wealthy Philanthropist: One (or more) of Shadowbane’s current players is Bruce Wayne, and has given Wolfpack enough cash that they can run Shadowbane for free, forever.
- Money Laundering: Shadowbane exists to cover up something far more sinister.
- Self Destructive Devs: Wolfpack themselves love their project so much, they’re willing to remortgage their own homes to keep it going.
Or more realistically
- Adverts: Nothing mentioned so far, and not terribly appropriate for a fantasy world, but billboards, or at least splash screens, could be going in soon.
- Expansion Sales: Like AO, they may be only giving out the basic game, and hoping to cash in on expansion purchases.
- Wholesale: Wolfpack maybe trying to bulk up the subscriber count in preparation to offload the entire thing to some third party operator, either as a going concern, or just for the customer email list for 'carefully selected companies'. Pure conjecture on my part of course.
MMOChart.com last had Shadowbane at 20,000 subscriptions in Jan-05, and falling at a fairly constant rate of 10,000 every six months. That is exists at all today means it must have levelled out a bit since, but in it’s present state, it can’t be terribly busy, and anecdotal evidence suggests that the various servers are all pretty desolate places today.
Opening it up for free can do wonders for numbers, particularly since very few people are fastidious enough to actually cancel a free account when they’ve had enough. If you sign for free, you’re a ‘customer’ forever, as far as the ratings wars are concerned. For example, Second Life boasts over 130,000 subscribers, thanks to their free Basic Account promo, but can generally only claim 4-5,000 online users at peak, and of those, perhaps less than half are paying subscription revenue in any shape or form.
But loss-leading PR numbers spin or not, each connected player is using bandwidth, and server resources, and these do cost the operator money. The ideal player, from the MMO operator’s perspective, is one who pays for the whole month, but then only logs in twice, for two minutes, to…say…set a skill training, for example…all the income, minimal costs.
One thing that does stand out amid this big shake-up in billing models, is that so far, all of the ones moving away from the subscription model, seem to be ones where gameplay is heavily dependent on PvP. Guildwars, while having a fun and interesting PvE story section at the start, seems to settle largely on the PvP before very long, which then makes up the main game. Planetside has NO PvE content whatsoever. Anarchy Online is has large elements of factional PvP and land control built into it’s design, and it’s forthcoming Lost Eden expansion is to be very PvP oriented. Could we see some kind of limited functionality PvP-based free 'foot-trooper' deal for Dark Age of Camelot some day soon?
Is it simply that people don’t expect to pay for PvP, what with a million LAN or Xbox Live lobby games also available; Halo, Counterstrike, Battlefield 2, etc? No-one ever charged for Battle.Net. Or perhaps it is more pragmatic than that? Without lots of people to shoot at, there remains little point in playing a PvP game.
Moreso than a more PvE based game such as WoW or EQ2, falling numbers in a PvP environment snowball rapidly. Eventually, you get to a point where you absolutely MUST have fresh meat for the grinder – when that happens, a free player changes from someone who is using up resources and not generating revenue, into someone who is stopping someone else who IS generating revenue, from cancelling...
Anyway, I briefly visited Shadowbane myself a while back – quick review here, but in short, I didn’t like it, probably because I’m a faggotey carebear or somesuch, rather than because...well, the review still holds up, most likely...see for yourself.
However, if you do want to see for yourself, do wait a bit and watch their website before blindly signing up, as the inevitable Part 2 of Wolfpack’s master plan is sure to be unveiled soon, and the catch revealed. There must actually be a Part 2, surely?...