There’s been a lot of kerfuffle recently amongst the WoW-playing community, since an upcoming content patch is currently live on a special test realm — something which is a fairly regular occurrence in Blizzard’s development cycle. Having defeated all the current bosses in-game, new content on the test realms gives players something to do, and a reason to get excited (and continue paying Blizzard subscription fees) until the patch is actually released.
However, there is a lesson to be learned in here about expectations, and whether releasing unpolished content is necessarily a good thing. Imagine, if you will, that you’re a seasoned dungeoneer just waiting for the next big challenge to come out. Then you get a chance to have a shifty at it before you have to pay. Instead of the tough encounters, the epic battles and the fantastic rewards you were expecting, all you see is disconnections, crashes, bugs and woefully simple fight mechanics. Are you likely to stick around to pay for all that, or will you saunter off into the distance, confident that if you quit now you really won’t be missing much?
This doesn’t just apply to WoW among MMOs. Before becoming a paid subscriber to Blizzard’s magnum opus, I beta-tested literally tens of games, including — much to my shame — an entire Christmas holiday spent in the joint throes of glandular fever and The Sims Online. None of the developers for these games ever got a penny off me, and I’m still amazed at how Blizzard managed it. Having logged in, levelled up and seen what there was to see, my natural gaming boredom threshold (usually around five minutes) kicked in and I was happy to drop the game, knowing I wasn’t missing anything.
Games are perhaps a slightly special case compared to software products as a whole. The consumer itch you are trying to scratch is merely the need for entertainment, and that by its very nature is a far more fickle desire than wanting to do something better, faster or in a new way. Still, I believe some of the lessons learned from MMOs setting up expectations and then allowing customers to experience disappointment without paying can be applied. If a customer can get everything they want for free, they aren’t going to pay, so look at models that will leave money in your pocket as well as satisfy the customer. For example, games like Guild Wars front-load their costs by charging an upfront fee but no monthly subscription. Others are entirely free to play, making money from microtransactions, advertising, currency exchange or corporate clients.
Practically, we can learn a little about the freemium model and its parameters by looking at successful examples, as well as take lessons in when and what to release as beta. The ideal situation: you get your customers hooked with what they can get for free, but not entirely satisfied; the carrot of paid-for outweighs the discomfort and limits of free, and not using the software isn’t an option. MMOs manage this with lock-in; you can’t transfer your level 80 warlock from Azeroth to Norrath, nor can you fly an EVE spaceship into Second Life. Once you’ve invested time, money and learning into one virtual world it becomes harder and harder for you to leave, especially if you have a social presence there (games have been ‘doing’ social networks for ever).
This is some of the thinking behind userbase lock-in on sites like Flickr, Twitter etc. While the spirit of Web 2.0 and CC sharing means we have some delightfully open platforms, flexible APIs and lots of happy data sharing, I’m not going to leave a service where I have over 1,000 photos stored for some new upstart. I also pay for extra features with those photos, after being gifted a premium membership and then finding it very difficult to go back to the limitations of free. (It’s also a reassurance, of sorts: if I pay them, then the chances of them losing my photos seem lower.)
But fundamentally, there’s no point locking people into your service if you make it easy for them to walk away, providing them with glimpses into a future where they no longer want to use your product. This is the mistake Blizzard have been making, and surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to be impacting their gargantuan customer base (yet). Unpopular game design changes, new content that fails to live up to expectations, and the promise of the same again in a few months still hold no weight when compared to the investment players have in the world and their guilds within it. Which is perhaps the ultimate lesson: if people can’t stop using your service, you can do very little wrong.