Except games like Guild Wars 2 has proven that you can make a game successful w/o making it pay to win.
Guild Wars 2 is B2P , Buy to Play, you can even convert the gold you earned in-game to “Gems, in-game currency to denote real money” , how do they make money? cosmetics, bank tabs , cosmetic finishers, infinite-use gathering tools that simply dont run out of durability.
thats it.
oh well, the reason WoW and FF still not going to F2P because it’s made by Blizzard and Square. They’re both dev and publisher and also, they make a lot of other games and merchandise. Just a portion of their funds pool enough to feed WoW or FF alive.
To other publishers, it’s different story, they don’t have enough resources to fill the gap.
IMC is the same boat, they don’t have much game to rely on and they need a long term income. When a game come from P2P to F2P, people already played other games.
P2P >= B2P > F2P. 
I already wrote a huge post about it, but having a separate P2P server would probably be the only sensible subscription model. Having only P2P will scare people off it, or they will just wait it out until it goes F2P and that isn’t good for business, either. But there are also lots of people who won’t play a game with a cash shop or at least won’t get as involved with the game as they would if it were subscription-based. So. Yeah.
there are only a handfull of games who can survive with P2P.
these games have a community over 3million players, and this is why they can do this.
Tree of Savior, would not survive this.
i hope a P2A or P2V will be used for tree of savior.
A game that depends on (sufficient) player base to survive cannot even consider options that will limit its availability to everyone. The following are all poor options:
Only very few games that used these models are successful for very specific circumstances. All of them honor the rule: “If you can’t pay for it, you can at least work for it.”
Good options must make available the full game experience, and full progress available to everyone, for free. The key to making profit is to encourage people to pay, without pissing off the rest of the player base who can’t. This can be achieved by the following examples:
In a game that requires active population to survive. It is important that everything that can be paid for (that counts), can be worked for in game. This makes your player base the biggest possible, and from that population, those with the financial means will support the game (and feel generous doing so).
ToS’s main hooks are its immense cast of classes, and its 2.5D graphics.
but not everybody likes this, 2.5D graphics in particular is a niche market.
excluding people via being subscription would kill this game EXTREMELY fast.
reaction to the original post:
personaly i think this game should be F2P…
sure it can survive on P2P but think about this… most player enjoy free games and later on use their real money as a support for the game… and P2P people are just few their would play the game since they have other prior games to pay with and competing with them might be a challenge to ToS devs…
and also… some hardcore players i know dosnt want a P2P game… since they cant pay monthly due to lack of money(poor like me) and have just enough money to pay their internet bills/ play at a computer shop …
hmm and i think F2P is for more people, more supporter, equals more supporting money for the devs that P2P, less poor poeple/more rich people, just the right amount of supporter, equals standard support money for the devs ( if i even make sense that is >_<")
F2P is the worst payment model possible. Do not be deluded.
Of course, devs want to make the best possible game, and make the cash-shop stuff purely cosmetic, but after a while, greed kicks in. It always happens. First it’s small pushes, adding things that are beneficial to gameplay, but are either very minor, or can be obtained without paying. And then another push. And another.
Right now, there is not a single f2p mmo without p2w elements in it. And even if ToS won’t have any, are you sure that won’t change after few months? I have a hard time believing it.
Unless they put every single character customization element behind paywall, they WILL be short on money. That’s how it works, servers aren’t free, developers need to eat and pay their bills, and money doesn’t grow on trees. There is always hope that Korean, Indonesian, Brazilian, Filipino servers will get them enough money. No wait there isn’t, because they are begging to not be region-locked from International, because they don’t want to pay a penny to their regional overlords. But the harsh truth is, you can’t eat cake, and have it too.
So what’s the best course of action? Maybe don’t region-lock the countries mentioned above, but DO make the International server either pay2play or buy2play. Devs will get the money they NEED, and as an added bonus, there will be less kids and entitled cheapskates.
There are many ways for IMCGames to get more profit without making the game P2P :
My preference is B2P or P2P. Never really been a fan of F2P, have seen very few games do it reasonably.
I totally agree, I’m playing FFXIV and I couldn’t be more happy. The P2P barrier gets rid of bad players, makes everyone more mature and nice and makes the game stay alive. I’m pretty damn sure most of us RO folk are like 10 years older now and have the money to pay to play. Locked out would be stingy people that won’t pay money for something and the children that can’t afford it.
stingy kids? so u guys who have money just want to play the game for ur self? what about the poor people out there like me who want to play the game but couldnt/cant afford to pay monthly to play the game (schools monthly tuitions hikes/rents/ internet bills/on work and just want to play to relieve stress)?
sure there are bad guys out there but there also good guys that wants to play for free due to the fact that they dont have the money or dont even have pc to play with but play on net cafe’(my highschool life) …
all in all… the money player can only play this game >,…,<… us poor people who want a decent awesome game have to forcely play free games that dosnt even interest us on playng cause of these money related bariers… i earn my way to the games i played without using real money and thats great cause its challenging! and earning money ingame gives me the opportunity to buy cash related item… that way, i can say im supporting the game indirectly @_@" but if this game REALY tends to be P2P… illl just sat in the corner and play me ye old games … and wait for it to be F2P if thats even gonna happen 5-10 years later =V
The Free Market ain’t communism not everyone can play, free to play was basically invented for rich people who had no problems with spending hundreds of dollars on an mmo to finance a huge community, free to play isn’t free at all the 10% that do pay are paying the game for you. I’m not American or anything, far from that I don’t even have a job. I’m a student but still 10$ or 15$ a month to play a game I like isn’t that much for me. Especially since MMO tend to be HUGE time sinks and take up like 6 hours a day of my life.
I play tons of Dota 2 and FFXIV and I can tell you there is a huge disparity in the community where FFXIV players tend to be mature, polite, decent people. While the average dota player I meet is a angry russian kid who takes the game so seriously he screams at me with his full voice over voice chat. Not that the kid isn’t skilled 4K MMR is pretty decent but then again I’m also 4K.
All in all I literally Dota 2 for me was always a team game I’d play with friends. Even if you get 1 random person in your group the whole game changes. So these days I play Dota 2 exclusively with friends in 5 stacks preferably ranked.
Well VPNs and Proxies always tend to increase you ping, and honestly ToS seems very ping dependent with all the AoE and ■■■■ form monsters. So I’d rather play on a server with max 150 ping and not VPN to one and have 300.
I’d be okay if they did it like FFXIV did with starting servers begin located in East Coast America be in US or Canada. I’d also be okay with France/Ireland. Then maybe if the European community grows we get our own server later down the line. Not to mention FFXIV again but yet again they did it like this. With the new expansion we’re getting European servers
Fortunately, ToS doesn’t look like a game that whiny casual fools would play. Not to say that the art style, gameplay, or graphics of ToS are bad, but they are not exactly in line with current standards regarding graphics.
Popular games will naturally attract a large number of unsavory folks.
welll thats true we need to pay for the game to make it alive… but that can be done indirectly… u care less for poor people? well thats ur decision
i just want to play this freely… i dont want to be a bird in cage that pays for his freedome! no way! i mean i earn through playing and thats hard work! dont i desive to have some merit there? maybe not… but as i said… earning my way through nothing… is my way of life and its decent for me… maybe not for u… but for a poor people like me who can only deceantly earn money and pay my bills and still play… well i apposed to P2P biased to F2P cause thats the only way i can play this game… it my only option… well i can get a better job… but to decrease my playing time? no way… u may call me lazy but i like playing games and that makes me happy…
for me a strong vote for F2P!
I’m talking based on friend’s experience. You use VPN just to log-in, and then continue playing without it.
This is my personal opinion :
P2P : Very limited players, stable monthly-yearly income from those players who paid + cash shops.
F2P : Super huge amount of players, unstable income from cash shops (can be very high or very low), developer can’t make sure that everyone will pay for the cash shops.
B2P : Limited players (There are players who can afford to buy the game once and that’s it, rather than pay regularly), unstable income from cash shops (can be high or low), but the developer already had their first huge amount of income from the amount of buyers.
What’s best? That depends on the developer.
We can’t say that P2P will be the most money maker for the developer because I think the amount of players will be cut off in half, maybe more. On the other side, F2P players will greatly outnumber the amount of P2P players. There is a possibility for huge income, but there’s also a possibility for low income as everyone only spend their money on cash shops based on their needs (exp pots, costumes, etc). For B2P, the amount of early income will be similar as P2P system, maybe even higher considering there will be more people who can afford to pay the game once rather than paying regularly (paying regularly is like forcing them to play in order for their money aren’t wasted). For the later B2P income, it’ll be similar to F2P one as the players will spend their money based on their needs.
free to play is for rich people? wow i did’nt know that…
im not a rich person… im just a plain poor guy who wants to play this game with the option of not paying monthly for it… i want to support it too… but i was saying… i cant earn enough money to pay for it its pushing my time for playing… i want simple gaming life and the F2P!
it may look that way that most people invest thier money of cash shop but thats their way of supporting the game they play… my way is indirectly… call it a cheapskate or whatever but thats the only way i can support them… sadly
this barriers are what making me and my freinds sad… try living a hard poor life then ull know my pain T^T