Wow Introduces limited Free To Play, Eve-Online Moves Into Virtual Goods Market

This post is largely about developments in World Of Warcraft and Eve-Online, more the latter, but both have made recent changes that have something in common with Second Life, so I felt it was worth talking about these issues.

In a rather surprising move, World Of Warcraft has moved from a 14 day trial, to allowing people to play for free, although they will get capped at level 20 if they don’t move to the subscription model. World Of Warcraft has been losing subscribers but was rumoured to still have over eleven million paying customers quite recently, so it’s not as if they are in the desperation stakes. One does have to wonder if World of Warcraft is approaching the Gillette Mach 3 stage, people just keep damn well using Mach III’s even though it’s old and they want people to use a newer product!

This is also interesting when looking at Second Life because the market seems to be moving more towards the free to play model that Second Life has employed since 2006, several MMO’s have moved to free to play with people being enticed to buy subscriptions or buy items and whereas World Of Warcraft isn’t doing that yet, others have been, Lord Of The Rings Online for example.

There are a couple of stages to enticing customers, one is to get them interested in the first place, the second is to then get them to pay. The first part is quite clearly easier than the second part. However a lot of people call for Second Life to move to a subscription model, I’ve seen this regularly over the years and I’ve always disagreed with it, for a variety of reasons, but the main reason being that free to play (or engage) is a big draw. Linden Lab should be doing more to tempt people to go premium, but it’s a tad late in my view to be placing limits on basic accounts now.

Those who still want all accounts to be paid should be aware that the traffic is generally travelling in the opposite direction, with more companies coming to the conclusion that the Linden Lab style model has potential. However, Eve-Online is causing a different kind of kerfuffle … and I really do wonder what CCP are upto here, they are moving into the virtual goods market.

A while back I decided to take a look at Eve-Online and noticed they had an absolutely awesome character generation screen, really detailed and well presented avatar look, decent clothing …the problem here is that Eve-Online is a game where you spend your time in a ship, even when docked you don’t see your character …. well until recently, now you can get off your ship and walk around! Currently you can only walk around on your own but this has to be leading somewhere, which brings us to the big monocle debacle! I read about this not via Eve-Online, as I’m currently largely training in there, but via Scott Jennings (AKA Lum Lumley) via his blog post on the subject.

Now one thing I’ve learnt about Eve-Online is that players take the game extremely seriously, so they’re in a flap because CCP are planning on selling virtual goods … wait a minute, Eve-Online is getting into the virtual goods business, they have awesome character creation, they’re allowing people to walk around …. wait! The Devs behind Eve-Online, who seem to have misjudged the anger, even though they suspected there would be some, are flying in customer reps (I don’t know how this works, I did see it in a documentary once) to discuss the issue, Linden Lab are free to fly me into San Francisco any time they like!

However Eve-Online players aren’t complaining about virtual goods as a product, they are more concerned that people will be able to buy bigger and better weapons without going through a zillion days of training and trading.  Where this is all leading I have no idea, but there’s certainly gold in some of these virtual goods, with or without a subscription it seems.

Second Life is at a different place, there are virtual goods aplenty for sale, the issue for Second Life is creating new ways of tempting people to engage, World Of Warcraft are doing it with the free to play till level 20, Eve-Online are making bold moves with their changes, what do Second Life have up their sleeve?

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