34 replies to this topic

[Deathz Jester]

Because Free to Play is taking over, hell just look at the new Command & Conquer , End of Nations, World of Tanks, Warplanes, Warships, League of Legends, Heroes & Generals, Warface (Crytek has basically said after Crysis 3 they're going F2P), Blacklight Retribution, Ghost Recon Online, Warthunder, Star Conflict, Planet Side 2 just to name a few....

[El Death Smurf]

1ceTr0n, on 30 September 2012 - 11:09 PM, said:

Yeah yeah, get your noob comments done and over with, I just started beta this week because I just REALIZED that I could actually play the beta for free as I was under the impression I had to buy a founders package to play even if i was invited for closed beta. I know, silly me
...
If thats the case, why the hell not? It would dramatically increase their revenue doing so and if people wanted "bonuses" for paying extra online like an MMO going F2P, let them.

i like how anyone who thinks YOU are being under infromed is rendered a n00b before they even comment.
any who... videogame markets are changing, if they haven't already. putting softwhere on a disk and putting it in a box with pretty pictures doesn't garuntee profits. not anymore. this isn't Wii.

F2P buisness models can be quite lucrative for long periods of time if done right, and piracy and pre-owned games are non existant issues when a prodeuct is free in the first place.

people might be telling you to support the game, because soon comes the day when this game will be a fully developed game (or as developed as continually developed F2P format gets, what with the continually updated format) and if you are enjoying the product, you should show your appreciation by buying skins and cockpit swag at the very least if you don't want a premium account.

but im sure they'll find a way to make us pay for something weather we liek it or not. you wont have to but you will. (more than 4 mechbays, unique chassis, paint jobs, etc...) nothing game breaking taht you need, but things you will want.
could you imagine if they made the guass rifle a $ only wepon, oh the money they'd make. lol (they would never do that, oh the fans they'd lose)

Edited by El Death Smurf, 01 October 2012 - 12:35 PM.

[CMDR Sunset Shimmer]

oh yeah, going off of old info lol.

I long ago got into beta, so... yeah.

wow, that actually feels good to beable to say

[xxx WreckinBallRaj xxx]

Actually, it's a LOSS to sell boxes over digital copies, not a profit. You have to pay for them to be mass produced by a distributor, then you have to pay stores to sell them for you, and then every box on a shelf that doesn't sell is a total waste of its investment. Let's compare that to a digital store... 0 cost in distributing except for the bandwidth to share the file, 0 revenue lost to physical stores, 0 wasted investment on copies that don't sell.(Since it's a digital file just being copied a million times as needed and not physically mass produced)

In short digital makes the company more money and gives them a much bigger cut of the revenue, not less. Discs are a thing of the past and eventually every game(Or at least every multiplayer one) is just going to be purchased online and downloaded. Steam is already pushing this forward really well with the Steam store that downloads, installs, and runs games off your Steam account. Blizzard is moving towards doing that with their titles with the Blizzard store. F2P games basically do it already.(Else they'd be paying to produce discs which they would then just give away... not a good idea)

El Death Smurf, on 01 October 2012 - 12:18 PM, said:

but im sure they'll find a way to make us pay for something weather we liek it or not. you wont have to but you will. (more than 4 mechbays, unique chassis, paint jobs, etc...) nothing game breaking taht you need, but things you will want.
could you imagine if they made the guass rifle a $ only wepon, oh the money they'd make. lol (they would never do that, oh the fans they'd lose)

That is how a good F2P works. You won't be required to pay to enjoy the game nor be competitive at it... but you'll want to anyway to reduce grind times or simply to enjoy the game more. People fighting F2P models have no idea how many players on games like League of Legends owned skins.(Including me. I had A LOT of them. I paid 125$ for RP in the year I spent playing the game. Legendary here is 120$, so I'm betting that it'll even out 6-12 months from now.)

[1ceTr0n]

I gave into the desire to have that cool paintjob for founders, I'm now elite supporter.

[Belorion]

I hope they have additional backs later with special mechs as well... Like an unseen summoner pack or something.

[RCXpress]

1ceTr0n said:

Yeah yeah, get your noob comments done and over with, I just started beta this week because I just REALIZED that I could actually play the beta for free as I was under the impression I had to buy a founders package to play even if i was invited for closed beta. I know, silly me

El Death Smurf, on 01 October 2012 - 12:18 PM, said:

i like how anyone who thinks YOU are being under infromed is rendered a n00b before they even comment.
<snip>

Peculiar interpretation. Not impossible, but unlikely. I had read that as "yes okay I'm a noob for not quite getting it but here's my question anyway".
But hey maybe I'm a noob. <shrug>
To each their own.

[DirePhoenix]

Bloody Moon, on 30 September 2012 - 11:42 PM, said:

PGI couldn't find a publisher who'd support a retail game in the Battletech universe, well atleast that was the rumor about it. So i think that is the main reason (check the Mechwarrior 3015 intro that was from the old game).

After that PGI's choice was to make an online F2P Mechwarrior title, so this is it.

Pure online games can rarely support themself from retail money (an exception is GW for example) so no reason to have a retail version, anyway PGI initiated the founders program which is what counts as "retail" in this case.

IGP (Infinite Games Publishing) is the publisher for MWO. PGI (Piranha Games, Inc.) is the development studio. I know, I know... PGI, IGP, it's easy to get those mixed up and think they're the same entity, but they're not. Just to add to the confusion, IGP is also publishing MechWarrior Tactics, which is being developed by A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. Games

RCXpress, on 01 October 2012 - 03:08 PM, said:

Peculiar interpretation. Not impossible, but unlikely. I had read that as "yes okay I'm a noob for not quite getting it but here's my question anyway".
But hey maybe I'm a noob. <shrug>
To each their own.

Yeah, I was pretty sure the OP was saying "OK, I made a noob move, go ahead and call me a noob and get it out of your systems" too.

[OverTrue]

Lawrence Elsa, on 01 October 2012 - 12:09 AM, said:

I think the primary goal of making this game Free to Play was to market the fame of Mechwarrior and Battletech among the populous of the gaming world.
sadly, Mechwarrior has been slowly dying since 1995, and has hardly improved since,

• moving from tabletop games that frequently switched companies and died out (such as Mechwarrior Darkage),
  
• to TV shows (the Battletech TV show)
  
• and games that where forgotten and buried by their own fans (like Mechassault).

Mechwarrior 5 was even canceled until a fan group run by WhiteFeatherMoon, Pukenetto, and several dedicated fans developed an expansion for Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries that even sparked a total conversion mod named Mechwarrior Living Legends.


the very fans who loved Battletech and Mechwarrior revived what little hope Tom Wiseman had in the franchise, and moved him to devote his support into making new Mechwarrior games.
the development for Mechwarrior [reboot/5/2025] was most likely moved to a Free to Play online game for the sake of one thing: To make MechWarrior more famous

obscurity has been Battletech and Mechwarrior's greatest enemy for the longest time, and hopefully this project will do everything it can to save my most beloved franchise of all time

The battletech cartoon is what got me hooked on mechwarrior. Canon or not its what lit the fire. Will the clan invasion be similar to how battletech the cartoon depicted it? Why did they change the look of the centurion so drastically. Always like Vals centurion

[Jkillin]

even if they only sold it for like 10 bucks for retail would still be cheap and give the option to down load it for like 5

[Cochise]

Retail is baaad, people can mess with and hack the game code, servers get populated with millions of cheaters and hackers, people can pirate it up on the torrents, all kinds of evil stuff. Publishers and developers have much more control with this distro model and they can earn more and generally control people hacking the game and address exploits easier.

The box is gone.

[Hayashi]

A game client is a game client. If it's hackable via installer it's also hackable via server, if it's going to be downloaded anyway.

And if it's not going to ever downloaded in entirety, but streamed... gameplay-critical information is streamed via the server in both DVD-based games and browser-downloaded versions. Cf. Diablo III.
I expect IGP will eventually publish a box version with MC included in the purchase price just to reach that crowd. There's only so much space in stores, so just selling it there gives it some exposure. There are, however, a LOT of online games, and it's much harder to market effectively there.

Bottom line, retail is not all that bad. The main disadvantage really is the cost involved in making and shipping the physical material... and unless consumers are willing to pay more for the same content just to have it in a disc form, that cost will probably have to come out of the marketing budget.

[Wolfclaw]

1ceTr0n, on 30 September 2012 - 11:09 PM, said:

Yeah yeah, get your noob comments done and over with, I just started beta this week because I just REALIZED that I could actually play the beta for free as I was under the impression I had to buy a founders package to play even if i was invited for closed beta. I know, silly me

ANyway, i've been doing a bunch of forum searching all over and im getting the sense with people talking frequently about how so important it is to be"supportive" of company and the people for PGI and to buy a founders package.

I was hearing this so much and about the "value" of the founders that I can't help but ask, is MechWarrior Online not going retail for people to buy off the shelf?

If thats the case, why the hell not? It would dramatically increase their revenue doing so and if people wanted "bonuses" for paying extra online like an MMO going F2P, let them.

Or did I miss the reasoning for this in the great digital archieves that is the interwebz?

My understanding is they could not find a publisher who would fund a retail version because they felt there wasnt enough money to be made by the title.

Also they wanted to go F2P because they can add updates on a weekly basis to improve the game.

[Romulus Stahl]

The only thing retail has ever done for PC games is - drive the cost up. Thankfully we are past the days of being forced to go that route. Retail forces release dates, from the shelf space requirements to getting a slot in line for box/manual printers to media copy. By the time you actually got a physical copy from the store, there was hopefully a patch to download (as the games were rushed out the door). The only thing you have in the end is a dust collector if you kept them (I have a stack of them).

[Shismar]

Cochise, on 03 October 2012 - 09:50 PM, said:

Retail is baaad, people can mess with and hack the game code, servers get populated with millions of cheaters and hackers, people can pirate it up on the torrents, all kinds of evil stuff. Publishers and developers have much more control with this distro model and they can earn more and generally control people hacking the game and address exploits easier.

The box is gone.

Umm, really?

I think you got on the wrong track there somewhere. The OP was asking about a boxed version of MWO, not a standalone, offline game.

Add Lords of of the Rings Online to those games that still sell boxes even though it is F2P. The disks have the complete client (outdated by when you can buy it) and some codes for ingame goodies and currency.

Generally it is good to have boxes in shops for advertisement purposes. If MWO is reasonably successful, I am sure we will see them as well.