EA's F2P strategy "vindicated" by Real Racing 3 performance

* deleted duplicate post *

Edited 1 times. Last edit by John Bye on 16th March 2013 10:41am

Posted:2 months ago

I can't express how dismayed I am if it is indeed true that RR3 is doing well.

Being dismayed that a game fellow (or soon to be fellow) people in the industry created, is doing well, i think is bad form. Some people put a lot of time, money and effort in creating that game. Nobody should actively hope it does not sell. Having an issue with microtransactions is of course fine.

Personally i have spent 15 GBP on the game now. Not because i had to, in fact i still have yet to come across a point where i dip into the in-game currency i purchased, but because after 2 weeks of playing (around 3 hours a day!!!! dear me!!) i felt that this is what the game was worth to me. If i keep playing the game in the coming months, i might well spend more and raise it to a total of a normal AAA purchase.

The microtransactions are fine with me. There are 2 high price options, the rest is as cheap as 70p. There are numerous packages you can buy, to suit your needs. And as i said, even if you play it several hours a day, there is actually no need to make any purchase at all. Currently i have around 1 million in in game cash and about 108 of the gold coins (which you get from leveling up and completing certain percentages of an event).

Posted:2 months ago

Like I said, I've spent a few hours playing RR3 so far, not spent a penny on it, and am thoroughly enjoying it. I'm nowhere near getting the high end sports cars yet, but I've been unlocking cars and events at a fast enough pace to keep me interested and haven't had to replay events any more than was necessary to win them. Given I've had all that entertainment for free so far, I'd have no problem spending a few pounds on the game later on if I need to.

Honestly, I've just read that Eurogamer review, and I simply don't recognise the game he's talking about. How on earth he spent hours grinding and £20 in cash and ended up with only four cars, I have no idea. I've got five cars already from a few hours' play and no money spent, and I'm no expert at racing games. Some of my races turn into dodgems by the end of the first corner, and I once had no less than 11 repairs waiting for me at the end of a race. Despite not winning that event, I still earned more than enough currency to cover all those repairs. Maybe EA rebalanced the economy before the official launch based on feedback from the earlier soft launch?

I've seen plenty of games with incredibly abusive MTX and early, near vertical paywalls, but RR3 (so far) is not one of them.

Posted:2 months ago

interesting - I will have to reinstall it and see - maybe they instituted some changes after some negative publicity.

Posted:2 months ago

John - EA are live tweaking the game's numbers, so it's entirely possible it used to be a lot worse than it is now.

Still, "abusive" is hyperbole that doesn't help the conversation at all.
edit: also if you think they're updating the game based on website comments you don't seem to understand how analytics works in f2p mobile games.

Edited 1 times. Last edit by Anthony Gowland on 16th March 2013 7:19pm

Posted:2 months ago

@Jose: we had the whole monetization chat last week - check that thread - so i am not gonna re-start that argument. You are of course entitled to your views and i don't in any way want to (or feel the need to) change them.

Personally i had the same experience as John - i now own 5 cars and i just bought myself an Audio R8, not upgraded yet of course. Every race covers repairs and you can race enough events to cover maintenance costs (oil change etc.). Due to having 5 cars, i never had to spend a gold coin on speeding up the process. I don't feel the need, yet, to purchase one of the super cars. Plenty of game to play before i feel i am ready for that :)

Sorry you feel i twisted your words, that was not my intention. You spoke with such venon and conviction, at least the way i read it, which was just a wee bit shocking to me. Your sentiment towards EA (and other publishers) still, at the end of the day, though means that developers will stop making games. If a game does not sell well, the publisher might well take a hit, but it's more likely the studio that made the game shuts down, than a publisher changing strategy or closing shop.

Posted:2 months ago

@Jose

Where does a game stop being a game and start becoming an exercise in habituation and operant conditioning to cynically extract as much revenue as possible?

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."
—Justice Potter Stewart, Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964), during the obscenity trial of The Lovers

You can apply exactly the same criteria to most subscription MMORPGs, who insist on charging around £100-200 a year (not including microtransactions) and who are equally if not more guilty of using cheap psychological tricks to motivate user engagement and payment.

Posted:2 months ago

Its only a matter of time before governments force LAWS which prevent these apps from taking advantage of a minority of their unwitting users (i.e. force a maximum spend per-user-per-month-per-app/device limit) ... and watch this economy collapse.

Posted:2 months ago

Anthony, "feedback" was maybe a poor choice of words, but obviously I wasn't suggesting EA are just trawling internet forums to balance the game. Feedback includes the analytics data they've been getting back from the game, and I assume the whole point of having a soft launch in a few small but representative markets was to gather data and tune the game's balancing and economy.

As I said myself, given some of the early reviews and comments about the game it does seem likely it's undergone fairly major revisions during that process. I'm sure they're still fine tuning it, but I've been playing RR3 since the day it launched in the UK, so unless EA are conducting some incredibly extreme A/B testing, any major rebalancing was presumably done during the soft launch period before it came out over here.

Either that or some people are playing the game very differently to me and Andreas and the economy is breaking down in those situations.

Edited 2 times. Last edit by John Bye on 17th March 2013 10:32am

Posted:2 months ago

Yeah I know, the thing analytics comment was in response to this from Jose "maybe they instituted some changes after some negative publicity."

Posted:2 months ago

Ah, the way the comment was worded it sounded like it was all in response to my previous post. No worries.

Posted:2 months ago

I'm sure they are vindicated or it wouldn't be so well adopted and recieved on the whole.

After all, we have the option to choose what we pay for. Micro-transactions are quite controversial amongst a large group of people, and I'm hearing it all the time - but it doesn't mean they can't work or will go away.

Its a business model that's been around for some time and users have choice. If you don't like it, don't buy into it. Feeback and suggestions if you're that passionate about a particular game is another option. The idea that players are being abused because a game uses this business model is a stretch to say the least.

Business models always use some device to bring profits to the business in question, and some wish to use methods to extent that profit over the product's life-cycle - subscriptions, micro-transactions etc. There can also be advantages to the user, like getting most of the game content for free and playing something that is more likely to evolve over time.

Edited 1 times. Last edit by Adam Campbell on 18th March 2013 8:58am

Posted:2 months ago

Personally think they have it pretty much spot on. I have been playing it on and off for a week or so and had a really enjoyable experience without yet putting any money into it (not saying I won't be putting money in). There are no real blockers in this game once you get a second car, and even before that, I had no real problems breaking up my play sessions to fit the servicing times etc. Not really sure what all the fuss is about to be honest - good game doing well!!

Posted:2 months ago

If EA updated the game to be less hostile to the customer - either due to publicity or due to what their metrics are saying - then good on them. I still don't trust the business model - there's only a few F2P games I play that weren't originally paid (see: Team Fortress 2), and the reason for that is that I don't like being coerced into spending money to advance in a game - I'd much rather pay upfront - but if EA's paying attention and it means a benefit to consumers, then that's mostly what I care about.

I also need to keep this in mind myself: I, and people like me, are a market segment that desires to be catered to just as much as the gamer who's being sucked into these F2P games. I think it's an insidious business model, at least in the Korean/Zynga model, but there will always be games that charge an up front fee, and give gamers what they want for that money. Our games aren't going away, they're just going to get smaller in scale, I think. That's fine with me.

Posted:2 months ago

I haven't played RR3 so my comments are not about this title specifically but on the general point of whether ethics does or should play a part in monetising games. I've played my fair share of MMOs and F2P titles full of micro-transactions ranging from browser flash games to the MechWarrior Online open beta. I group the mechanisms in which games successfully encourage players to spend money into 2 categories.

The first category includes allowing access to enjoyable but unnecessary bonus content or purely cosmetic changes, indulging in temporary but fun bonuses, or allowing users to skip grinding parts of the game which are otherwise repetitive but still fairly fun (I.e. re-doing challenges / races / fights / etc).

The second category of mechanism includes buying access to features which are necessary to perform well with, buying randomly chosen loot that includes 'collect them all' sets, skipping delays which are in no way fun to get through without paying for (E.g. waiting for countdowns), or additional 'content' which is actually just the same content with no difference in difficulty, strategy, or sometimes even appearance, but which has bigger numbers (E.g. level, gold, position in a public daily ranking), to provide the illusion of progress or achievement on an arbitrary, never-ending scale.

I don't mind paying money for the first category because I get enjoyable and memorable gaming experiences out of them and I always feel I have a fair choice. The second category can be equally compelling, but they succeed because they've been designed to exploit psychological quirks that we've evolved to instinctively react to. Afterwards, I don't feel like I've bought anything that was worth the money, it doesn't lead to anything more memorable or enjoyable than before, and there's usually no limit to what a user can pay for. These are the games designed to milk whales: the users with either more money than sense, access to someone else's money (E.g. kids spending their parents' money), or people with compulsive / addictive behavioural problems.

Both are effective business strategies and there are well known examples of financially succesful games. The general trend which I think angers Jose (regardless of whether he's incorrect in singling out RR3 as a culprit), is that more and more companies are latching on to the idea that the second way of making money from a game is quicker and cheaper to build / re-skin content around and throw out there. Just because they're more profitable though, doesn't mean they're 'good games' by anyone's standards except the shareholders. In fact, I'd say the more extreme examples are exploitative and immoral, and should be legally regulated in the same ways that many forms of gambling already are.

Posted:2 months ago

I would have gladly paid an upfront fee of $29.99 for this premium title with a full feature set and could have been convinced to even pay $4.99 for a few robust car/track packs

Unfortunately, there are simply not enough people like you anymore. I think it's harsh to call EA 'evil' - mercenary perhaps. But then they are a business. I think many core gamers forget that all publishers exist first and foremost to make money; not to entertain core games. That is the means to an end, not the end in itself.

Posted:2 months ago