Many analysts, gamers, developers, and publishers alike feel that there is a shift in the PC game industry. One that is moving away from a pay-to-play approach and moving towards a free-to-play-then-pay approach.
The current growth of games like Guild Wars 2 and League of Legends, and the dramatic loss in popularity of Star Wars: The Old Republic and Star Trek Online have only cemented this opinion. It has gotten to the point where a game's failure or success is now determined by what model the developer/publisher use.
I think this is an absurd mentality. Bottom line is that if you make a product that is compelling enough, people will pay for it. I don't think people really care that much about if they are paying $15 per month or $10 for a singular piece of content. I think they care about value.
It's surmised that WoW's subscription success is a one time deal - the game was a breakthrough product and Blizzard was able to leverage that into a novel cash model. Since then, MMO after MMO have tried to emulate Blizzard's model and none have been met with very much success. Yet, maybe it isn't so much the model as the fact that every subscription MMO that has come out basically hasn't been as good as WoW. Each MMO has tried to different in some way - but none were different enough and overall, none were better. Often times it is because WoW has 7 years of development into the game that has resulted in an incredibly matured product - new MMOs are rarely at feature parity with WoW. Other times the initial population wasn't large enough to create a sustainable social environment - a necessary component of the MMO. SW:TOR leveraged their story, Rift had dynamic events, but at the end of the day, neither delivered as much fun as the full WoW experience.
On the other hand, League of Legends has taken the PC gaming space by storm. And Guild Wars 2 (not technically free-to-play) looks poised to capture many of the stranded ex-WoW players over the years. Games like Lord of the Rings Online have recovered and grown after converting to a free-to-play model. However, I feel that these are testaments of the free-to-play model working, not that the subscription based model is dead.
In the current PC gaming space I think you can make 3 solid premises. 1) Free to play is a viable model for the success of a wide variety of games. 2) Subscription based games that, overall, are not as good as WoW are not successful. 3) Games that are not successful with subs can become successful with F2P It is not logically sound to conclude that the subscription based model is dead.
In particular I want to examine with premise 3 is important - it is a lesson developers should take note of. In a subscription based model, developers have a tendency to be lazy or too long term in development. SW:TOR tried very hard to recapture subscription with huge mega-updates to try to impact the feel of the game itself. The result was long periods of very little apparent development. F2P keep developers honest. They MUST offer compelling features and product - and they get better feedback. As in an earlier post, simply trying to talk to the community won't give a developer a good idea of where to focus development time. But in a F2P model, the developer has direct sales feedback - if a feature is good, people will buy it. If it sucks, it doesn't sell well. Free 2 play is also far less dependent on an initial hook to overcome a pay-to-play game's barrier of entry.
But the bottom line again is that if your product is compelling enough, people will pay for it - and I say that they won't care if its piecemeal or a sub. If its good and you can make people want to play, they'll pay. I promise you if a developer can create a game that has an interesting IP, is at feature parity with WoW, has more than 1-2 elements that improves MMO gameplay over WoW, and developers actually deliver frequent updates continual content, people will sub, the game will grow, and that cash cow that every publisher has coveted will be theirs. I think the lesson that we have learned over the last few years isn't that the subscription model is dead, its that creating such a game is damned hard to do.
