In 2009, Dungeons & Dragons Online went free-to-play, which was a pretty big deal at the time. It was especially important to me, since it was one of the big stories happening when I first started writing about MMORPGs professionally on Massively-that-was. And it was the moment that presaged a seismic shift in the industry, a time when it went from free-to-play games being inherently low-rent ventures that were hastily imported to almost everything being free-to-play no matter what.
That was 15 years ago, and I’m looking back on it now and asking what this did to the industry as a whole. I’m not really looking at it purely from a financial or business perspective, although there’s definitely work to be done there; I’m looking at it from the perspective of someone who writes about these games for a living and what the net effect has been on a genre that I think is pretty cool. And the impact has been… weird, because what free-to-play was initially characterized to be does not match what the genre has actually become.
When free-to-play was first sweeping the industry, a lot of hay was made over the fact that these games which had previously been unprofitable were now making money and racking up player counts that most of them had never seen before. This provided a narrative, and in the larger sweep of events it’s a narrative that made sense. Free-to-play means that you get a swell of new players, you make more money, and players are happier. There’s absolutely no reason to not jump on this!
However, I shouldn’t need to stress this because I’m sure you already know it, but it bears noting… at this point, DDO is not in the Big Five. It’s a game that has kept itself sustained just fine and has definitely not run out of steam, but it’s also worth noting that the game got partitioned off and ultimately shuffled under Daybreak (although how tight Standing Stone Games and Daybreak actually are is something that the companies seem to like playing weird rhetorical games around). The bump that it saw lasted in one sense, but it didn’t turn the game from a niche title into a smash hit.
This is kind of a uniform element of the many free-to-play MMORPGs in the space. Games like Star Wars: The Old Republic going free-to-play have definitely enabled these titles to stay operational, but… free-to-play sure as heck didn’t save WildStar. Free-to-play did not enable a huge revolution in games where suddenly no box cost and no subscription fee has become the standard; rather, it has enabled a mid-tier of games that weren’t really able to reach the big time to operate with more revenue than a strict subscription model would have offered.
And it has also resulted in a lot of games that just completely failed to get any traction.
This is not necessarily unusual. A lot of MMORPGs do not have gigantic industry-defining impacts. That’s actually normal. But it definitely seems as if a lot of games have either launched free-to-play assuming there’s a huge groundswell of players just waiting for this title (and then failing to get players) or launched with a different model and then swapped over after the fact, looking for the free-to-play model to completely change their fortunes. Both of which tend to not work.
More than anything, my perception of the impact has been that free-to-play produced an illusion of a big playerbase just waiting in the wings if you can just get over the monetization hurdles. Which… isn’t totally the case. Sure, people want more video games for less money; that’s the case for literally everything. But part of why DDO found early success is because – and here I risk a very controversial opinion – DDO is actually a pretty good game.
It offers a lot of stuff that is otherwise uncommon or lacking, it has a load of care in its design, and it felt very novel in 2009 even though it had launched a few years before at that point. Its being free-to-play meant that people were willing to give it a shot in an industry where most of the people were dyed-in-the-wool players of a handful of games to find that this was, in fact, something fun that they might not want to subscribe to on a regular basis.
But it’s much harder to make that pitch in 2024 when you have so many free-to-play games and completely free titles that it all starts to feel rote. They’re all over the place on Steam, which means that their discoverability is choked out because when you’re crammed in on the most discoverable platform next to asset flips and cruddy temports, nobody is going to know you made an actual viable video game without outside information.
That’s not to say that I think free-to-play is a net negative for the industry. I do not think that a healthy-ish mid-tier of games itself is a bad thing; the problem is more that said mid-tier is games that were developed for much higher budgets and now sustain themselves on far less, and so it’s hard for new game to be comparably developed in that space. But the fact that you can still play games like EverQuest II is better than the game shuttering after it didn’t sustain a high enough subscriber base.
And yet the illusion of free-to-play as a license to print money has negative externalities, too. We wind up in situations with games like Maplestory 2 that never have the chance to build their quality and playerbase over time; they were developed on a model expecting a big groundswell of money that didn’t materialize. Which is not a great thing! It is not great for free-to-play to get treated like this One Weird Trick that solves your business model, especially when so many other things can go wrong too.
But on yet another hand, isn’t that always the case? Haven’t video games literally always been at war with people who see them primarily as a commodity? If it weren’t for dealing with the vagaries of free-to-play, would there not just be other problems impacting MMORPGs and their long-term health?
Probably, yes. But I do find myself going back to the idea that free-to-play as a business model has generally sold a concept of profitability to games which otherwise were struggling to find that path forward, sometimes through little fault of their own (it was not a great time to be trying to attract new players to a class/level fantasy game in 2009) and sometimes through immense fault of their own (no one made you include all of your hardcore cupcake nonsense, WildStar, that’s on you and there’s a reason you didn’t make it). When the reality is just… this is a tough industry, not everyone makes it, and sometimes even overall good games just don’t have the juice.
Does it look better or worse than it would have without free-to-play? I have no idea; I don’t have access to that universe. I think probably it does. But it sure takes a winding road to get there.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
