MMO Monotization : The not so F2P option

The Top F2P Monetization Tricks

 What is F2P ? It stands for "Free to Play". 

Tanstafl you say ? (Tanstafl = There Aint No Such Thing As a Free Lunch )

You are correct . 


Coercive Monetization
A coercive monetization model depends on the ability to “trick” a person into making a purchase with incomplete information, or by hiding that information such that while it is technically available, the brain of the consumer does not access that information. Hiding a purchase can be as simple as disguising the relationship between the action and the cost as I describe in my Systems of Control in F2P paper.



 It's long. It's complicated. To simplify ... 
Your playing a game, we'll say "Bejeweled" , with slowly increasingly difficult levels. 
This is called a skill game. You need skill to advance.
Suddenly , you reach this level you cannot get past no matter what , but they'll let you "buy" your way past with in game "Jewels" , the game currency. How do you get jewels ? Well, you pay for them. With real cash.  And you get volume discounts, and maybe one or two jewels drop once in a while in game. 

this is called the money game. You need money to advance. 

Money games are tricky. They do everything they can to hide the fact that you're paying real world cash every now and then.  Common tricks are , as I mentioned , volume discounts. Now it's hard to calculate how much real world cash you're paying to get past this "money game" level and back to the skill game. Other tricks include occasionally dropping in game currency (the afore mentioned jewels as an example) but not often enough , you will have a hard hard  road if you don't drop some cash. 

The first purchase is the hardest to get. After that , you are marked as a spender , and from then on , most of the game is the "money game" , difficulty levels now explode to ridiculous levels and the only way to get past any level is to buy your way past, though the game will always advertise there are people who get to the end without paying a dime. This is like a casino advertising it's winners. For every winner there are ten thousand losers. 

Three online MMO's I have played are this kind of "Coersive Monetization" model. They are the Star Trek Online game, Guild Wars 2  , and the new Star Wars The Old Republic has switched to it. And they all use the same mechanism. A box will randomly drop (very frequently randomly) , but you need a key to open it, and that key costs special game currency to buy. (never real world cash , that would trigger a response from the user and you'd realize you're being tricked, always there is an in game currency of some kind) . And inside are random items that are far more powerful than what regularily drops from the mobs you're fighting 

In effect , you can't have the good stuff unless you spend cash. You're a second class user. 

SWTOR is a specially abusive model in that they charge you 15$ a month to unlock anything , and then they still sell these packs full of good stuff that you simply cannot get by just playing the game. So they're collecting from the free to play crowd and they paying customers indiscriminately, thus abusing the people who pay the 15$ / month. 

Different from this is Wow's free to play model. They basically let you play until level 20 for free. And if you want to keep on playing it's 15$ / month and away you go. No packs, no special keys to buy , none of that "coersive monitization" junk . Just an honest "play our game for 15$ / month" , and the guys with the impressive gear got that stuff honestly , by playing , not because they dropped 100$ real money on packs or special keys to unlock f2p treasure and stuff.