Guild Wars 2 and the Death Rattle of the Subscription Game

Polygon is offering an interesting interview/editorial piece with ArenaNet’s global brand manager Chris Lye centered on the subject of subscription-based MMO and the alternatives to that model. Unsurprisingly, given ArenaNet’s original Guild Wars and its upcoming sequel chose to go “pay to own”, the developer is unimpressed with how the subscription model has been faring lately, but he also offers some interesting thoughts on free-to-play and its audience.

Here’s an excerpt:

“If you’re an up and coming business I would definitely advise you don’t naturally assume that subscription model is your business model,” says Lye. “Two years ago [developers] were all like ‘of course it’s going to be a subscription game, why would we think of anything else?’ and now they’re backpedalling like ‘No, no, it’s not necessarily a subscription game, we haven’t decided our business model.’ Now there’s an awareness in the industry that requires a serious amount of thought as to whether you will support the subscription business model. The notion of the AAA launch-and-leave type game is declining. There’s much more emphasis on building a long term relationship with the community.

“I think that any developer who is looking to do an online game and wants to retain a long tail of an online community that they’re going to continue to work with has to seriously consider is subscription the best model or has that really been ridden to death? A lot of players are telling us ‘we don’t want to be locked into a subscription, we want an a la carte model of what we spend our money on.'”

However, this is still a relatively experimental business model that is experiencing its own transformative period. While many developers rely on microtransactions to offset the cost of the game, this is not a fix-all solution, says Lye. Most users will ignore microtransaction items and studios must be aware of this.

“Some amount of your audience is willing to pay for microtransactions and some of them simply won’t. And that’s okay. As the developer of the game you have to totally respect that. There’s a good portion of the audience that will never pay for microtransactions. But you know what, they add value to the overall game and franchise by being in the game and providing people to party up with and running guilds and adding to the social fabric of the game. So you need to provide ongoing updates for both sets of audiences.”