MMOs: Let us enjoy the games please .

I know I do a lot of harping on about business models and what’s the best one and why, but maybe it’s about time that we forget about this sort of stuff and just focus on the games and the amazing experiences which they can provide us with. There is so much talk about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to business models, and what’s best for the consumer, but are we forgetting about the actual games and how they play? Does a game having the pay-to-play business model or the free-to-play model really affect us and our enjoyment of these games?

Sadly, yes.

MMORPGs, and MOBAs and Arena based games, aren’t single player games which we can just pick up and play at any point in time. Rather these games are online worlds and communities which we’re going to invest possibly thousands and thousands of hours of our lives into so whether or not we’re charged $15 a month or not is a big deal.

The cost, or price tag of a game, is also a big deal because some of us who don’t have piles and piles of money.

I’m sure you’ve all seen that one guy who posts something like “unlike you children I go to work everyday so I have loads of disposable income and the payment model doesn’t matter to me”. Great! Good for you! The problem is lots of people the world over work every single day and yet some of these people barely make enough money to feed their families, yet alone pay the subscription fee for Final Fantasy XIV. Of course one could argue that if that is indeed the case, the person in question shouldn’t be thinking about playing a video game in the first place and I guess they’d be right, but we all have to relax and chill at some point in our life. As I’m sure is the case for many of you $15 is an awful lot of money to spend on a game every month, especially when you bare in mind that once you stop paying, you stop playing.

MMORPGs aren’t single player games which we can buy, play through, enjoy and then put on the shelf, they’re investments which can last for years at a time.

When I buy a game for my Nintendo 3DS, I don’t have to worry about the financial viability of the company who produced the game, or any sort of monthly fee.  I can just buy the darned thing, stick it in my console and play. However if you spend $15 a month on an MMORPG for three years and then suddenly the company collapses and they have to shut off the game then that’s $540 dollars wasted! Poof, it’s completely gone. That could get you nice trip away for a couple of days or even buy 7-8 $60 games. Simply put $540 dollars in 3 years is an awful lot to spend on a single game.

For most people it’s too much to spend on a past time. This is where free-to-play MMORPGs comes in. There is no need or requirement for you to pay a single dime for the game. At least in theory.

Subscription lovers argue that you’ll be so nickel-and-dimed in free-to-play games, and that they are pay-to-win, however they are merely masked under the disguise of free. But is that really the case? With some MMORPGs and MOBA games it really can be hard to tell whether or not the free-to-play banner is merely just a trick.

Of course for those with the fortune to have loads of disposable income free-to-play or pay-to-play aren’t issues or even things to think about. For they are the only people who can play an MMORPG and just enjoy it for the game it is, enjoy it for its flaws and its success and enjoy it as a piece of art. Lucky them, I guess. For the rest of us, we’re just stuck thinking and fearing about this sort of stuff when we prepare to start a new MMORPG.

But I don’t want to turn this article into a poor versus rich kind of thing, and nor do I want to appear as though I hate those with money. The question is, should it really be the case that only those with enough disposable income be able to properly enjoy games of the genre?

The free-to-play genre eliminates much of this division because at the very least the unwashed masses get to experience the game in some shape or form without being forced to make any sort investment.

We can enjoy single player games, or games which don’t require constant money input, as they are and this is part of their appeal. The Playstation 3 game Flower can be appreciated as art because we can give it the time and thought as a singular piece of work, but because MMORPGs are always growing and always changing, in some cases even completely, it can be hard to really enjoy them just as they are.

But games like Final Fantasy XIV, or Elder Scrolls Online aren’t made as pieces or art, but rather as a business tool to generate a beyond imaginable amount of money.  Perhaps this is the problem with subscription based MMORPGs, which typically focus on requiring the player to “grind” the same content over and over in order to get piece of armor. This grinding of content is no better than pay-to-win MMORPGs, because the content grind is designed for one thing and one thing only: to keep you playing and to keep you paying.

This is the reason why I struggle so hard to like subscription based games. Yes, Final Fantasy XIV is fun…but there are times when I know that a certain design decision has been influenced by the desire to further monetize the consumer to which I think…”You’ve already got my $15, what more do you want?”

Maybe if subscription based, and free-to-play, MMORPGs focused more on creating a piece of art, as opposed to squeezing every droplet of money out of a consumer, then we’d be able to just sit back and enjoy them for what they are.

With this in mind then, the only thing that is stopping us from forgetting a game’s business model and just enjoying it for what it is is the business model itself. In fact this is probably the reason for the decrease in customers who pay for subscription games. MMORPGs have always been about money, with gameplay frequently being changed in some shape or form, requiring the customer to pay for lackluster content.

Honestly, I don’t think the rest of us will ever be able to forget about the business model and just enjoy MMORPGs. Yet still we play them.

The social elements, and the idea of a large group of people gathering together to take down a common foe, is something which no other genre of game can provide us with. There is something truly amazing about content such as World versus World versus World (PvP content from Guild Wars 2), with a large group of people getting together to launch an attack of epic proportions on a castle or group of people. There’s something really inspiring about such content.

So we put up with all of the crazy different payment models, just so we can enjoy those moments of utter amazement. It’s these experiences which we can exchange with our friends and discuss with other fans of the game that are truly amazing.

I just wish it was easier to focus on these elements, and not on the business model that they’re attached to.

Hopefully the MMORPG genre will change this generation, with there being more of a focus on making amazing experiences accessible to all and allowing us to focus on the wonderful experiences which game developers have spent years making. To a certain degree Guild Wars 2 has already done this. It has already given us the opportunity to not worry about the business models that follow an MMORPG, but rather just the amazement an MMORPG can provide.

It’s interesting because whenever we go to the movies we don’t worry about this sort of stuff; however financial results, and the value of money, seem to be ingrained in some shape or form into the industry and our perception of it. I doubt that such an attitude will ever disappear.

I wish that we, gamers, could just be left to enjoy our games and not worry about money or other such things.  Perhaps we can be left alone; maybe we should just forget about such things and pay the $15 every month? But we can’t because last generation has shown us how much our industry loves to exploit us what with on-disc DLC, spiteful digital rights management and just downright hateful online passes. The second we forget about it, is the second the industry will try to exploit us once more.

If you enjoyed this article, you can head on over to our other article where we explain the different payment models MMOs utilize.

And to stay on the topic of MMORPGs, here is a list of our top 5 free-to-play MMORPGs of today, so you don’t have to worry about payment models at all!