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Could The Sims 4 Be Destined To Become A Free Download?
netguysteve
Posts: 470 Member
For those who are shelling out (or already have shelled out) $50 or more for a title, the question may make you angry, but please hear me out in my reasoning before jumping down my throat. There has been a trend in recent years, predominantly in the MMO market, of releasing a game with an average or slightly above average price tag, then offering it free six to twelve month later, relying on microtransactions to fund the ongoing development and support of the game.
With the amount of money the average player spends on store content, expansion packs, stuff packs, and new worlds actually exceeds many titles. This makes The Sims 4 an excellent candidate for this approach, particularly if initial sales are low. The market for all of the additional content is only as large as the number of The Sims 4 players there are. By making it free, they are greatly expanding the size of the market for additional content.
The amount of money the average player spends on this content will be slightly lower, because a certain percentage of people who are attracted to free titles absolutely will not ever spend money on them, either because they never intend to and have the willpower to stand by that, or because they can't afford to. Even taking that into consideration, offering the title for free will greatly increase the overall revenue.
Regardless of the details of the "Premium Subscription" (which have yet to be discussed by anyone at Maxis or EA), this would only further increase the viability of making the base game a free game.
So what about the folks who are shelling out money now? Won't they be outraged? Some of them, yes. Some simply won't care. They will write it off as, "Hey, look at all this time I got to play that the free players didn't." It's nothing that gaming companies, including EA, haven't faced before and survived. The biggest thing that MMOs stand to lose if they tick off players is subscription revenue. The traffic and user numbers are more than made up for by the influx of new traffic from all the free players.
For a game like The Sims 4, even that is not much of an issue. Could they lose some of the premium subscription folks? Sure, they could. If that's an annual subscription though, the revenue fall off wouldn't show for another year though. In that time, they could have gained new subscribers from the folks they gave the game to for free to make up for that. Reports indicate that the conversion rate from free to subscriber for MMOs which go this route are fairly high.
Yes, I know that The Sims 4 is not an MMO. I am not saying that it is, nor am I saying that it should be. The business model is still very much applicable to The Sims 4 though.
Even in the past, the price of the base game usually drops the moment the first expansion is released (or soon after) to somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 bucks. What would be the real difference if they simply stopped producing physical discs of the base game at that time, put "INCLUDES THE SIMS 4" on the box, and made The Sims 4 strictly a digital download, then turned around and made that digital download free? What's 20 dollars per new customer when you are gonna make that back several times over for most of them?
So what are your thoughts? Could you see EA and Maxis taking this approach with The Sims 4? Could they have intended to move down that path all along, and perhaps that was part of the reasoning behind removing some of the favorite features from the base game?
With the amount of money the average player spends on store content, expansion packs, stuff packs, and new worlds actually exceeds many titles. This makes The Sims 4 an excellent candidate for this approach, particularly if initial sales are low. The market for all of the additional content is only as large as the number of The Sims 4 players there are. By making it free, they are greatly expanding the size of the market for additional content.
The amount of money the average player spends on this content will be slightly lower, because a certain percentage of people who are attracted to free titles absolutely will not ever spend money on them, either because they never intend to and have the willpower to stand by that, or because they can't afford to. Even taking that into consideration, offering the title for free will greatly increase the overall revenue.
Regardless of the details of the "Premium Subscription" (which have yet to be discussed by anyone at Maxis or EA), this would only further increase the viability of making the base game a free game.
So what about the folks who are shelling out money now? Won't they be outraged? Some of them, yes. Some simply won't care. They will write it off as, "Hey, look at all this time I got to play that the free players didn't." It's nothing that gaming companies, including EA, haven't faced before and survived. The biggest thing that MMOs stand to lose if they tick off players is subscription revenue. The traffic and user numbers are more than made up for by the influx of new traffic from all the free players.
For a game like The Sims 4, even that is not much of an issue. Could they lose some of the premium subscription folks? Sure, they could. If that's an annual subscription though, the revenue fall off wouldn't show for another year though. In that time, they could have gained new subscribers from the folks they gave the game to for free to make up for that. Reports indicate that the conversion rate from free to subscriber for MMOs which go this route are fairly high.
Yes, I know that The Sims 4 is not an MMO. I am not saying that it is, nor am I saying that it should be. The business model is still very much applicable to The Sims 4 though.
Even in the past, the price of the base game usually drops the moment the first expansion is released (or soon after) to somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 bucks. What would be the real difference if they simply stopped producing physical discs of the base game at that time, put "INCLUDES THE SIMS 4" on the box, and made The Sims 4 strictly a digital download, then turned around and made that digital download free? What's 20 dollars per new customer when you are gonna make that back several times over for most of them?
So what are your thoughts? Could you see EA and Maxis taking this approach with The Sims 4? Could they have intended to move down that path all along, and perhaps that was part of the reasoning behind removing some of the favorite features from the base game?
"UR" is NOT a word, it's the sound stupid people make when they try to spell "You are".
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No I would not pay a monthly fee for something that should have been there in the first place.
In all seriousness........not for a long, long time. No way EA will give up that easily.
I should clarify: EA will charge full price for the game and then charge a subscription or sell items via microtransactions for as long as people will buy it and they're turning a profit. There was no subscription in TS3, but plenty of people emptied their bank accounts on Store items. A subscription is just one more thing that these same people will pay for. And if EA can get them to pay for all of these things AND get them to buy the base game and all EPs at full price, they will not offer it as a Free-To-Play.
Hopefully I understood your post correctly.
Same here, not buying and no thanks on monthly/annual fees.
They ruined this franchise to me. :evil:
complete forum tutorial
Thank you @MDianaSanders for halloween-fying Golluma
Oh, I agree with you 100%. To me, these two things are merely a drop in the bucket. I actually came to the forums 5 or 6 weeks back, looking for info, and hoping to hear something I could look forward to. The official information that had been released were all about build mode and CAS and not much on gameplay. Instead I find a lot of information which dampened my spirits. Some of them (such as no pools), I actually laughed at. I mean, of course they weren't gonna take pools out. Surely they just haven't gotten around to talking about them yet. Of course there are cars silly! Why in the world would they take out cars?
The one thing that dampened my spirits the most though was when it was disclosed there would be no story progression. It seemed to contradict all of their talking points about every sim in town having their own unique story, and being smarter, and the neighborhood being richer. None of these things are actually possible without story progression.
I am still not in the hate category yet. I still haven't canceled my pre-order. I still have every intention of giving the game a fair try. I also still have every intention of cashing in on the "Great Game Guarantee" within the very short 24-Hour window they allow. Would it be more fair if I were to wait for them to patch it and get some bug fixes out? Absolutely, but under their terms, I can't afford them that luxury unless I am willing to forfeit my right to request a refund. If they can't instill enough confidence in me, right from the start, then I will not be a fool about it.
Why?
Because to this day, people pay subscriptions to modding website for content.
There is too much demand.
And the Sims 4 is looking great. It will sell just fine, in my opinion. We'll see.
But I am not sure the numbers won't be way down from past versions in the franchise. I was around the SimCity forums prior to the launch of reboot. I saw the uproar there, and was actually one of the SUPPORTERS of the product. I stayed positive, I told people to give it a chance. I was wrong. It was a total flop.
In all honesty, the uproar here is even worse. The percentage of people who consistently come here who are absolutely livid over what they are seeing far outweighs what was seen even with the SimCity reboot. I doubt anyone will argue that, despite the attempts to appease long time fans by patching in some of the features that were missing (namely offline play), I doubt anyone would argue that it was a massive commercial failure. If The Sims 4 fails nearly as badly, they could be making this move within the first twelve months.
This^^^ :evil:
And this^^
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-play
"Hey Guys! We're going to fill the shelves at your favorite store with empty game cases with a pretty Sims cover! If enough of you buy them we MAY at some point in the future give you something to fill that case! See how great the case looks!? Awesome, awesome."
and there are people on this forum who would literally camp out overnight in front of a store just to get one!
Actually, now that I think about it, that's kind of what they're doing!
SWTOR is unsalvageable, no matter what you do.
But since I've already paid out $70 for the pre-order, if the game is sold for cheaper and I am not refunded, I will be.. unhappy.