Board Thread:Online Discussion/@comment-5107008-20130420101529/@comment-7153552-20130515160402

The majority of current games are going Free to Play, Buy to Play and Pay to Win. Neverwinter if Free to Play with microtransactions (like all the Cryptic/Perfect World games). The microtransaction system actually seems to bring in more cashflow than a subscription-based game. That's the reason Blizzard introduced the pet store and mount store for WoW.

In the Cryptic games you can buy everything that costs Zen (their real world currency) without spending a single bit of your cash. You have to put the time and effort into it and it takes a lot longer than just dropping the cash. One Zen is equal to one US cent, and you can use a currency exchange (that fluctuates like a real life currency exchange rate based on what people are buying and selling the Zen for at that moment) to purchase Zen with your in-game resource. In Star Trek Onine you trade Zen for Dilithium, in Neverwinter it's traded for Astral Diamonds. Things you can get readily and steadily in the game environment through various tasks, and even spend them to purchase special items from vendors. But you have the option of trading it out for the Zen and buying those items other people are buying for real money.

The reason these microtransactions bring in such great profit is because you have the option not to do them. That sounds odd, I know, but it's true. In the world we live in there's a thing called "instant gratification" and we want it all now. So you can do the work and earn the AD or the Dilithium or whatever and exchange it at a potentially worse or better rate, or you can just drop $20 and get 2000 Zen. Also, the fact that you can buy in such a seemingly large number makes it easy to justify in the impulse-buying brain of the average person. We see that for every dollar we spend we get an apparent ten-fold return on that dollar. Without a decimal to seperate it, 2000 Zen looks better than $20.00 thus making it such a good deal and easy to make happen.

All of that I say to make this ultimate point, subscription-based games still make money, but the business model is losing ground. In the world of current MMOs we have so many free choices or one-off purchase and play choices, why would we ever go back to paying every month? If ESO is purchase + subscription, I will not be on it.