User blog comment:Ikabite/The Elder Scrolls Online: P2P or F2P?/@comment-217.68.167.244-20130402225811

Clearly opted for monthly payment for several reasons:

1. B2P: A purely B2P game can't be an MMO of large scale, because you have a lot of monthly costs to maintain the servers, enlage the servers, exchange hardware, you've got to the pay the people monitoring all these process and not to mention the simple energy such a server system is consuming. Thus, any large scale MMO that wants to run for 10 years needs a monthly revenue. Therefore, it is ridiculous to assume that TESO even has the slightest chance to become a purchase-only game

2. B2P + commodities: Some mention the model of B2P followed by a shop that only sells commodity items. It would improve things, but not solve things, because if you only offer commodities, you can't GUARANTEE you will have enough monthly revenues.

3. GW2: many reference to the model of Guild Wars 2 as a good example for B2P... well, it's not such a good example. Because GW2 is actually doing the "right" thing. They offer short-cuts in your development. You are not FORCED to buy these shortcuts, but if you don't, you will live with ridiculous loots and drops and spend 10-20 times more of your free time to reach the end content than someone buying gems and therefore gold with microtransactions. So, it is indeed not P2W by definition, but if you don't want to pay, you will always stay way behind your friends who invested quite some money

4. F2P: is not an option. I have tried too many games that were purely F2P. If you don't pay money on them, you either die by age before you reach the end content or won't even reach it at all. The developers don't care about the game and the players, or only for the paying ones. Whenever a game that generates high monthly costs (like an MMO) and is free to play, it means that the developers have to think of other revenue sources and therefore have to build the whole game around these sources. Like GW2, I've quit the game rather early, realizing what they were doing with gems <=> gold rate... one by one, my friends quit afterwards because they were "rebalancing" all the mob drops and loots that way buying gems became more and more attractive. I've been in the gaming industry for a while and visited different conferences for game-design. All the experts there advised us to create F2P games, because the average F2P player will spend 3,5 times more money on the game than the average player paying monthly fees. That's how the game industry sees it

5.  P2P: It is right, pay to play is dying, because it generates less revenue than F2P. I've been playing EVE Online since it appeared in 2003 and didn't always "use" the full time of a month playing, but I didn't care. Because the skills you train, continue training when you are offline. And with the money I spend, the game has been constantly improved. There are 2-3 add-ons deployed in different steps each year which don't cost anything. And it's the community with the highest average of brain-activity I've met so far. And I've experienced a very high level of support and quality over the years in that game. Thus, I opt for Elder Scrolls becoming a P2P game as well. It generates stable revenues, allowing the developers to plan ahead, it makes the stupid little kids and narrow-minded people quit fast and sorts them out pretty well. Thus it creates a more stable and more agreeable game world, which is very suitable for a rather "adult" MMO like TESO is about to become