Please help an old, out of the loop gamer dad understand this please.
Why is this a thing when we PAY TO PLAY?
I could understand a F2P game but Actiblizz gets my $15 a month whether i log in 12 hours a day or 12 hours a month.
What gives?
Reasons and stuff. No doubt there’s some business logic behind it like a correlation to cash shop purchases.
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F2P games are much more expensive - at least the MMO ones are.
You can play the game for free. But do you want good armor, a mount, a fast mount, a good weapon, player housing, furnishings? Each of those costs money. Real dollars. Everything. Most things are only a few dollars, but you end up paying a whole lot more than $15 per months.
WoW doesn’t do that. You pay once, then get all of those things for free. You might have to quest or grind for things, but you don’t have to pay Blizzard for them.
I tried ESO and others. I can’t afford them. So I play WoW.
OP isn’t complaining about the subscription, he’s asking why blizz keeps reporting time played metrics in a subscription based game.
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The original logic when WoW came out is that MMOs were very expensive to maintain. You were paying $15/month for the server access as well as the content updates.
This was before the idea of F2P was really around, otherwise WoW might have gone that route.
As for why it’s still around? Most likely because people are just used to paying it by now. That and I imagine it acts as a barrier to them going completely nuts with the cash shop.
Which I’m more of an old school “Just let me buy a game and get a full game” kind of person, myself.
Edit: If you’re talking about why they report MAU/DAUs to investors, that’s probably because of stuff like the cash shop. People who play more often are more likely to buy stuff, and micro-transactions are pretty lucrative even if they haven’t gone completely nuts with it yet in WoW.
In their latest financial report, the new metrics is MAU. But they didn’t say the exact number of WoW’s MAU, only the total for all Blizzard games.
Monthly Active User (“MAU”) Definition: We monitor MAUs as a key measure of the overall size of our user base. MAUs are the number of individuals who accessed a particular game in a given month. We calculate average MAUs in a period by adding the total number of MAUs in each of the months in a given period and dividing that total by the number of months in the period.
There are a number of reasons all of time played metrics come in to play but the biggest is they need a steady subscriber base for their business model. This is why so much software is now subscription model. Wall Street does not like companies with big windfalls and not much else every couple of years. It doesn’t look good.
They also use (at least I am 99% sure) gaming theorists and psychologists to make sure we stay subscribed and engaged. People who only log in a few minutes a week are more likely to not feel attached to the game, therefore more likely to cancel.
If you look at how the game has developed since WoD, there is a pattern of acquiring currencies at a limited rate that are important to moving the story forward. Slowly, since the introduction of garrison resources they have become more and more entwined in the game - and us used to the system.
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The time played metric is somewhat over-stated. Blizzard absolutely engages in MAU (monthly active users), and also they do use “engagement metrics” as well but this amounts more to what you’re doing while you play and not how long you’re playing overall.
Blizzard feels that tracking their overall game success by how many people are consistently coming back is better than how many people are subbed monthly. A good reason this might be is because there are a whole group of players who sub for 6 months at a time, but may not actually play very much for various reasons. So looking at how many players are playing every month, rather than how many are subscribed, is an effective tool to look at actual playerbase rather than payer-base.
Then they can fine tune that by looking at what players are actually doing. Is no one really doing WQ’s, or it’s massively the smallest time spent activity? Maybe somethings wrong with it. Perhaps players are spending all their time doing WQ’s, and that means they’re either too rewarding or other content is problematic somehow.
It’s really not as simple as “we get the average player to play for 10 hours a week.” It’s more to the tune of “we have a healthy user base per month, and they seem to engage in a wide diversity of content evenly, so things seem like they’re going well.” This sells to investors, a lot. A lot more than “hey we’re still losing players year over year” would ever achieve.
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The time-played metric isn’t an hourly one. IIRC, it’s a monthly one.* As long as you log in once during the month, you’re counted as having played just as much as someone who plays 17 hrs a day.
That means that the time-played metric works as a better version of the subscription count. Subscription count doesn’t include people who bought game time cards or who use tokens to get game time. Time-played, though, does not count people who didn’t play, even if they have game time. So, it ends up working like a better version of the subscription count they used to report.
*See jesminia’s post above for their definition of monthly active users.
i see what you are saying but i dont understand how grinding out tedious gameplay makes me more likely to buy battlepets and mounts
i do see how it would encourage character boosts tho
You’d think that would clue you in that time-played metric (as per what the forums consider it) is a complete fabrication because… like you said: They get the same money regardless.
But… apparently not.
Don’t you have world buffs to dispel in Eastern plaguelands or something?
My guess is that it’s much simpler than that. Most of the investors probably know very little about the game, heck might not even know much about MMOs. Sure, they know vaguely, but ultimately they want to know they are getting a good return on investment.
So it’s razzle-dazzle. Saying the average player now spends X amount of time playing per month, and giving a concrete number showing this has increased from the same metric a year ago, makes investors think “things are going swell now!” (Couldn’t resist the use of “swell” there…)
And, that’s probably all it is. Maybe it’s a consolation number to offset any decrease in subscription size. In other words, a “Yeah, but…” to show investors that something must be going right, players are spending more time playing by gosh.
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Its not. Its a thing bitter players have clung to due to resentment for their preferences not being heard by the development.
Regardless, the entire game has a heavy interest in having players be invested in their game hours.
Its an MMORPG, so logging on more than once a month certainly matters to the game world, even if it doesn’t technically matter financially.
This likely stemmed from a very loud criticism of WoD and prior being “there is nothing to do in the game besides raid.”
That certainly has changed, huh?
By hook or by crook, they won’t let that be said aloud again, perhaps to the dismay of some.
Still, a level head should admit that more is better in a game this large.
Avoid the things you dislike, and pursue fun at all costs.
I have found its the best way to enjoy this game long term.
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You specifically maybe not, but in general people who put more time into the game are more likely to buy micro-transactions.
It’s also worth noting that when Blizzard reports their MAU/DAUs they don’t give the number by game, it’s just an overall across all Blizzard games.
and WoW isn’t really their flagship title anymore. Overwatch and Hearthstone are bigger games for them now, and they’re heavily based on micro-transactions for continued profit. Especially Hearthstone, which is F2P and pumps out expansions at a crazy rate.
Also as far as WoW goes, they wanted to stop reporting the actual subscription numbers because they kept decreasing and it was looking bad so they claimed something about “it doesn’t best describe the health of the game as a whole” thing.
I could be wrong since I dont work in this side of things but from my perspective in short, its mostly a shareholder metric.
Im pretty sure subs fluctuate up and down a lot during an expansion, so to show shareholders they needed something positive to say about their game, thus time played is a better response to show a positive outlook on the games health than amount of subs.
Also as several others have mentioned, there probably is some science behind the time played metric and amount people will pay for this game.
Becuz they are capitalists and want all our money for the least amount of effort.
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My suspicion is the metrics are about justifying the allocation of resources by content segment rather than the game as a whole.
When Sunwell Plateau was current, less than 1% of players experienced it. Someone must’ve looked at that and said it was bad ROI.
Once…per month
then get all of those things for free
They are included in the service you pay for. Important distinction to make