The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) is one of the most anticipated MMO releases in years, riding high on the phenomenal success of Skyrim, the most recent Elder Scrolls title. Coming to PC in April and next-gen consoles in June, The Elder Scrolls Online carries a hefty monthly subscription fee of £8.99 a month, and that’s on top of the price for the software.
Whether this model will work is a major question; many other MMOs have failed to maintain a pay-to-play system, so does The Elder Scrolls Online stand a chance at succeeding where its predecessors have failed, or will it be forced to plunge into the world of freemium and free-to-play games?
There’s a lot about The Elder Scrolls Online to suggest that a pay-to-play model should work. For starters, fans have been clamouring for an Elder Scrolls MMO for years, and after the vast success of Skyrim there are immediately a huge number of potential subscribers available. The fact that there aren’t many other MMOs for the next-gen consoles yet is another good sign. Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn is the only one launching in the near future, and that’s not even coming to Xbox One.
On the face of it, The Elder Scrolls Online looks like it has a chance.
However, there are some pretty big obstacles standing in the way of a successful pay-to-play model for The Elder Scrolls Online. There’s no way of ignoring the sheer cost involved in playing the game. £8.99 a month on top of a £40-£50 pound software purchase cost quickly adds up to a really significant amount of money. The news gets even worse for Xbox One players: an Xbox Live Gold account is required to play the game as well. Even if players pay for a yearly membership (which works out cheaper per month), it’ll cost nearly £200 a year to play The Elder Scrolls Online on Xbox One. Most players will likely be running the game on PC, but even then it works out at nearly £150 a year when it’s all said and done.
These figures are undoubtedly going to be enough to put off more than a few potential subscribers.
Another major factor which hasn’t received much attention is that the game isn’t even being developed by the same team as Skyrim. Rather than Bethesda Game Studios, who have developed all of the previous Elder Scrolls games, The Elder Scrolls Online is under development at ZeniMax Online Studios. While both studios are owned by the same umbrella company, there’s still a bit of question mark over whether ZeniMax will be able to live up to the high standards set by Bethesda’s previous offerings.
Star Wars: The Old Republic was the fastest growing MMO upon its release, but a pay-to-play model didn’t last.
It’s easy to look at the budget and prestige of the Elder Scrolls franchise and claim that the game will undoubtedly do well, but the world of gaming is a little bit more complicated than that. A look at some previous MMOs just proves that it’s impossible to equate budget and prestige with pay-to-play success.
For example, Star Wars: The Old Republic is a perfect example of brand power and budget failing to succeed with a pay-to-play model. With an initial budget of somewhere between $150 and $200 million, The Old Republic was the most expensive game ever produced upon its release in December 2011, and it seemed to work. Within three days there were over a million subscribers, and totals peaked at 1.7 million by February 2012.
This initial success didn’t last, with subscriptions dropping below 1 million in July 2012, prompting the publisher, Electronic Arts, to introduce a free-to-play system across all servers. The new system kept the option of subscription, but allowed free play with limits on gold and leveling.
The Old Republic just stands to prove that budget and initial success doesn’t equate with a successful pay-to-play model.
World of Warcraft holds the world record for subscribers, reaching 10 million in 2008.
World of Warcraft is the most successful MMO of all-time with 7.8 million subscribers at the end of 2013, almost ten years after its initial release, but even that phenomenal success didn’t stop Blizzard Entertainment from introducing a free-to-play element in 2011. Players are heavily restricted unless they subscribe, with limits on trading, joining guilds, levelling and collecting gold, but still, a solely pay-to-play system like that proposed for The Elder Scrolls Online wasn’t maintained in the most successful MMO ever, so does The Elder Scrolls Online really stand a chance?
It is worth remembering that free-to-play doesn’t mean that the game isn’t profitable or successful. It gives players a taste of the experience without having to commit a monthly fee in advance. The Old Republic and World of Warcraft are both still extremely profitable, despite adopting free-to-play elements, and it’s likely that The Elder Scrolls Online would have the same success.
On balance then, it doesn’t look good for The Elder Scrolls Online as a solely pay-to-play experience. It’s likely to be an extremely good game, but the issue is getting players to fork out a huge sum of money up front, just to try it. It’s a huge risk, especially for Xbox One players who will have to pay roughly £60 before they can even play the game.
Even some of the most successful MMOs of all time have adopted a free-to-play model to give people the chance to play before they invest, with highly promising results.When everything is weighed up, it seems foolish not to implement a free-to-play element into MMO titles.
Anticipation, budget and popularity just aren’t enough to support a solely pay-to-play experience.
Quite frankly, only including a pay-to-play system would be a huge mistake, and it’ll be a huge surprise if The Elder Scrolls Online doesn’t follow in the footsteps of its predecessors in adopting a free-to-play element before the end of 2014.
