Meh, I think ESO - if it fails - will do so because the market for these kinds of games is near exhaustion and everybody is entrenched. It's hard to pull players from other games without cloning their game and it's hard to keep them playing if it's mostly a clone. People keep going back to their beloved bunkers where they play their favorite games and it's almost impossible to change them to liking something else. I think EQN is going in the right direction with its turn towards sandbox features because I think things are getting sour and overbaked. HOwever, I think a lot of this will be won on the social media sites and on portables and on consoles. Unless a game can be truly modern and appeal to many different audiences it's going to be shoved back in the dusty room with the cobwebs where all the entrenched gamers and doom fills the air.
On teh subject of F2p, one good thing about F2P is it allows you to test the game fairly well to see how well it runs on your system and whether it's stable or not. Still, the whole F2P thing is lame to me, since why should it be free?????? Why should someone else give me something for free, unless they think I'll keep playing and eventually spend enough money to make up for the time I spent F2P?
I think the real story behind F2P isn't playing for free but the micro-transactions. The micro-transactions are enabling these companies to make far more money from their wealthy players than they did previously. So if you have a player that's rich you can get them addicted and spending more than $15/month, more like $100/month or more. This allows you to make some of the game free to new players while also gaining more profit.
All you gotta understand is hte rich players weren't being fleeced properly before on the subscription model. Some of them boxed, but boxers are more technical and have the time for it and are fewer in number. There're a greater number of non-boxer casuals who can now be thoroughly molested. If 20% of our population has maybe 80% of the wealth then there's no need to hire a math wiz to figure out what it means.
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