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Impeccable Timing

How Free-To-Play Games are Taking Advantage of a Stagnant Market

By Cody “Micajah” Bye

To many observers, the World of Warcraft subscription machine slowly grinding to a halt. People have played through the Burning Crusade and constant raiding for items is the only thing that remains to be done. The hardcore players are looking for other outlets, other venues to take up their MMOG time. However, these players still want to maintain their WoW accounts and maybe jump in a raid or two every week, thus taking away their $15/month that they’ve allocated to MMOGs. They are stuck in a conundrum: Do they quit WoW and use their $15/month on something new? Or do they find a game that won’t break the bank?

Until recently, there wasn’t an answer to this problem. Gamers everywhere were forced to either give up the game that they had friends and high-level characters in, or continue playing that same game and suffer from extreme bouts of boredom. Game developers scrambled to put out high-level content to appease those players, and games continued to get more and more high-ended.

MU Online shook up E3 2004 by announcing they were free-to-play and had million of users.

Enter the free-to-play game. In 2004, patrons to the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) were barraged with blow-up balls with MU Online written on their sides. There was a palpable buzz about this game, and I went to go investigate. I remember not quite comprehending the game when I watched people play, wondering what the draw was. Then I heard the magic words: “It’s free-to-play.” There may have been games that were free-to-play before MU Online, but it was the first big contender that caught my attention.

Since then, free-to-play games have been slowly pushing their way into the marketplace, many of them coming from Korea or Japan and being imported straight to the Western audience. At first, gamers didn’t “take” to these games, still pursuing their characters in their premium games. However, the tide is slowly beginning to shift towards free-to-play games.

Many of you might be wondering how that could be possible. Often, free-to-play games lack many of the fundamentals of MMOGs that players have grown to take for granted, like expansive customer support, high-end graphics, constantly growing content, and more. Though free-to-play games may offer this, in one form or another, they don’t always provide the quality that players know and enjoy.

But the free MMOG market is still growing, and – in this writer’s humble opinion – it mostly has to do with timing. This year has been spattered with announcements and releases of free-to-play games. From Sword of the New World to Dungeon Runners, these games are making headlines and running ads on every major MMO and video game network. But aside from a small dabbling of AAA MMORPGs (Age of Conan, Vanguard, and Gods and Heroes) there aren’t many pay-to-play titles that are generating headlines.  

With World of Warcraft’s appearing to have slowed its momentum, these free-to-play games are simply outnumbering the pay-to-play market. They’re quick, easy, and often have no “guilty” feeling associated with them. You can play them as long as you want, and if you don’t like it, just send it to the recycle bin. The nomadic nature of many MMO gamers makes the free-to-play games very appealing to these individuals. They don’t have to worry about blowing their lunch money on a premium game to get their “shot” of MMOG diversity. Pay-to-play games often have several price tags associated with them, and money is always a big deciding factor.

Dungeon Runners is one of the first "Made in the U.S.A." free-to-play MMOs.

But this situation wouldn’t have even occurred if another game had been released in 2006 that had held it’s own against WoW. Without competition, Blizzard wasn’t forced to develop an expansion quickly, delayed The Burning Crusade, and they haven’t even mentioned another expansion since then. The lack of a premium MMOG competitor also opened up the news press to headlines being generated by the smaller games. The marketing and PR forces behind the free-to-play games are always working, generating as much content about their games as possible. Add the fact that free games outnumber premium games and the news machine is getting full of free MMO news.  

On top of all this, free-to-play games answer another issue that many players have been clamoring over: the need for “niche” games. Whether it’s dancing or transforming or golfing or fishing, these free-to-play MMOGs range the gamut in topics and settings. AAA titles, with their high production values and expensive requirements, simply cannot compete with the smaller niche games.

Combine these elements together, and you get a market that is progressing towards the free-to-play titles. The pump is primed for companies like K2 Networks and gpotato.com to scoop off all the bored and stagnated populace of the bigger MMOs like World of Warcraft and gather those players into their own stables. And the more users the free-to-play games achieve, the more people will be interested in exactly what these games have to offer.

Ten Ton Hammer is your unofficial source for free-to-play game information!