I hate p2p.... games aren't fun when you're forced upon it...

I hope all you peeps on mmosite realize now that the F2P model is very different from P2P. What you buy in a free game is superiority, and thus it thrives on the imbalance especially between those who pay and those who don't. However in a P2P game, what you buy is consistent quality and service, which makes it counter-imbalance and sensitive to all sorts of flaws. Perhaps this can explain why certain attempts at P2P games like AoC flopped miserably and finds it very hard to match the kind of popularity that WoW has.

I am one of those p2p fans, as much as I hate to say it. The f2p business still just doesn't work for me. To spend enough money to have access to the same amount or type of content as WoW, for instance, usually ends up costing more than $15 monthly. Look at Mabinogi, one of my favorite f2p games just because of its fun combat system. The cost of having full access to storage space, advanced play, Nao's support, a rebirth card once a month or every two months (We'll go with one premium card every two months, so slicing the price in half), a pet and its rebirth, can cost at least $24 a month, then throw in a mount for $10. Of course you do not need all of this extra stuff to play, but you can get the very same content for $15 a month in WoW. Either they realize they can make extra money off someone willing to pay it, or they're forcing us to pay to make the game free for the people who don't spend a cent, which, in my opinion, is more likely the case. F2p games have to be more expensive to make up for the people who use the resources of the devs/host/publisher/whatever and don't pay for it, regardless of whether or not it is a good game, and it usually isn't. Also, the current f2p cash shop norm actually deters me from spending. What if I die and drop my cash clothes? What if they release the next best thing tomorrow? Will I even be playing this game enough to make my dollar count? Is it worth all of the people who are going to ignorantly hate me in envy? How many of these damn gacha coins do I have to buy until I get what I want?

I'll support big-budget f2p games as soon as the price is worth their content..

Developers of F2P MMOs seem to be build around the concept of the game being free, so low standards can be accepted.  The day such a concept is gone will be the day F2P games will flurrish.  This doesn't only apply to developers however, it also applies to the playerbase that look at F2P and expect low standards from them.  I'm sure we've all seen at least one comment or forum post that says, "What do you expect, its free", or "For a free game it's quite good".  Such categorization is the reason behind so many sub-par F2P MMOs.  F2P and P2P MMOs are still MMOs, and should be treated as a whole.  There is no reason for a F2P game to have lower standards than a P2P game.

Lets face it, we can deny it all we want, but we only play F2P titles now because they are free, and they meet our perception of how Free stuff should be like, "not as good as paid stuff".  We don't play F2P because they are "better" than their P2P counterparts.  As I said, deny it all you want.

For every F2P game, players will buy only up to the point where they hit the level cap and have the best items available, they will eventually stop spending on the game. Also, not everyone who plays will end up having spent a single cent. I don't think this will be sufficient to match the revenue that WoW recieves from its players every month. Unless if you were to release new content into the game at an extremely rapid rate that players will keep purchasing 'the new best item this month', but creating this much content will incur a lot of development and maintenance costs, perhaps almost defeating its purpose. Seeing that what you consider to be a 'Triple-A' F2P game is also going to incur about the same level of minimum operating costs as the industry average, it is going to be hard for such a game to earn nearly as much as the P2P model.

No, I won't spend US$15 every month just so that I will always have the best items available, and I believe hardly anyone will.

I'd like to see some context to the info you're saying because I can't find any of that other then here.

Well sorry I had got some of the info wrong.

In this interview one of the two guys says the MMO will be released 18 months - 2 years after release of single player. www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setView/videos/gameID/432/videoId/1484

what means triple A?

Torchlight is not a MMO, its a singleplayer game. They are planing to release a MMO 2-3 years after the release of Torchlight. The two games will have many similarities. www.tentonhammer.com/node/69637

 I understand.

Yeah, but then the costs are relative to the game size, look the ammount of players WoW has, the price paid for servers and internet bandwith is high, also there's an whole team of people to manage a comunity of about 6 million players (the other 4 million are chinese and those costs are managed by chinese companies) that receive sallaries too, yet per year they "only" spend around $66 millions to support the game. If the number of players was smaller, the cost of maitaining WoW would be smaller too, you can bet that if wow had half the number of players, keeping the servers running (and of course, they revenue) would be less costly. You should relativize a bit when analyzing such matters, a smaller game with a smaller players base (and thus smaller server and management team) is spending in 1/20th of its $500 million yearly revenue to keep it running, as does WoW that with it's bigger player base (and bigger server costs, bandwith, management, etc) is spending $66 million (1/26th) of with it's $1.6 yearly revenue to keep the game running too.

I agree with you and have to say that there are already some "AAA" F2P games - even if for having full access to its features you'll be paying a few buckets for some itens or in-game services  - and that's why people play them, those of poor quality get out of the business really soon. Just because a game didn't had a Holywood-like budget doesn't mean it's a bad game, don't let yourself to be fooled, $500 million is in itself a lot of money, most of those MMO developers rarely will spent more than $5 million in a game (even most blockbuster games for consoles rarely break the $15 million mark, only the biggest titles that developers are sure will have good sales such as  Final Fantasy XII - that had a buget of around $43 million dollars - break that mark). If you check the whole costs of development, hosting and management for the game's first year of life and deduce it of a revenue of $500 million, the company will most likely have more than $450 in their bank account by the end of the year - and most of those companies will keep investing to improve the game (Flyff is out there in its 13rd version losing old players but winning a lot of new ones - it recently expanded its operations to Brazil to captalize over the big number of potential players, Rappelz is in it's 6th Epic, Granado Espada started P2P but it seems to be doing well and receiving updates regulary since it became F2P, Mabinogi is probably one of the best MMOs out there due to gameplay and content).

When will the people understand that "AAA" status of a game is just a merketing trick to get you to buy the damn game no matter how bad it is or a blabering of deluded fanboys to justify how much their console is better than the other just counting the games that are highly advertised.

AAA means nothing when it comes to how good a game is. I have played both amateur and "AAA" games, both free and pay to play MMORPGs. Often the amateur games are better than the AAA games and the free mmorpgs are better than pay to play ones. This is why people are playing them. It is not an anomaly it is a simple reasoning behind this fact.