Gamehackery: What Does the Subscription Boom Mean to Gamers?

It's not a coincidence that the new microsoft office (Office 365) and the recently announced Adobe Creative Suite (including Photoshop) are being offered as subscriptions (rather than products).

Everything is coming up subscriptions. You can subscribe to coffee, to tea, to cloud data services and to toilet paper.

No, seriously. You can subscribe to toilet paper.

So, it's no fluke that DDI was a subscription service. Don't expect that to change. From a pure business point of view, the subscription model is the most important development in the gaming industry in the past ten years.

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Smoothing Out the Boom and Bust

The big advantage of a subscription program is that it creates dependable revenue streams for the company. It may not be more than they would get selling products, but it's a lot easier to plan for and manage.

They may lose some subscribers, or gain some, each month, but even those changes will follow on fairly predictable trajectories.

It also means you have an ongoing relationship with that customer -- making it easier to continue to offer them additional products.

A Subscription is a Relationship

A purchase can be fairly anonymous. A fistful of lawnmower money may buy a players handbook, but it doesn't forge a connection between the purchaser and the company that produce the book.

A subscription, though.... that's a relationship. It builds a connection between company and customer that the company can use to offer additional products and services.

It's also a data mine that just won't quit. The company has your name, your address; they can build a history of your purchases and study what you're interested in. In the case of DDI, they're able to track what classes are being created, what rules are accessed in the DDI most often, and can get a pretty good idea of how many active games are going by studying the number of characters that are incrementally leveled up in a given month.

What Will We Subscribe For?

Assuming that we don't expect Charmin and Mountain Dew deliveries from our favorite game companies, what sort of things are gamers willing to pay an ongoing subscription for?

To date, the DDI has proven that we're willing to pay for digital tools. Character Builders, Online databases of game rules and data, etc.

Over at Paizo, though, is a towering demonstration of the power of good content to drive subscriptions. Paizo, by the way, will let you subscribe to just about anything they're producing -- including their monthly card decks (mostly item cards, with play support cards like chase decks and critical hit decks mixed in).

And that's not all. We've seen dungeon-a-day and adventure-a-week. New magazines are appearing. Subscribe to Obsidian Portal or one of the other campaign managers to track your game.


Fiddling with Knobs and Dials

So, the real alchemy that the brains behind the businesses we support is trying to strike the right balance of price and service for their subscription models.

For example, there's a limit to what we might be willing to pay to Wizards for DDI. From their point of view, any single individual's price point is not particularly interesting. They need to take a guess at what the numbers of their subscribers will be at each price point.

So, at the moment the price is $9.99. They've hit upon that price because they believe that more than half of the people who would pay $4.99 would also play $9.99, but less than half of those that would pay $9.99 are willing to pay 14.99.

Of course, they set that price during the 4e heyday, and now they're in the last trimester (we hope) of birthing their new version. But outside of the tabletop world, ideas about subscription services have changed. The Freemium/Free-to-Play model is becoming more and more expected across industries where a product's market position isn't so strong that there's no need for it.

"I want to Buy it, not Rent it"

Sure you do. And I don't blame you. But you're fighting a losing battle.

In typical subscription programs -- along the magazine model -- you get your content in the mail each month and it's yours to keep. But when we start looking at RPG Tools as a Service -- like DDI or Fantasy Grounds -- when your subscription ends you no longer have access to that data.

A subscription for a service offers so many benefits to the company (steady revenue, durable connections to customers, and awesome data) that it's critical for a company to propel you over those concerns. Maybe it's better price, or better services, or both. You can expect that companies with the necessary support structure to handle a subscription program of some sort to move in that direction.

What's more, as more and more products and services are available by subscription, fewer customers will balk at this sort of scheme. We will become used to subscribing to Microsoft Office, to Photoshop. It won't be unusual to have a subscription to underpants.

Other Models

Here are a couple of other example subscription services that make interesting models for potential RPG/Gaming services:

• Bespoke Post - Once a month subscribers are offered a "Box of Awesome". Past boxes have included wine decanter kits, a himalayan salt block, and high-end shaving kits. Subscribers can opt out of a monthly box if you're not interested.
• Freemium Services - like Dropbox or Evernote. Or Free-to-play games. (next week's column will look at micro transactions, so stay tuned)
• Quarterly - A wide variety of quarterly subscritions to themed boxes of odds and ends curated by interesting folks like Veronika Belmont (Tekzilla, The Sword and Laser)

You've Got Mail

So, you tell me -- what's important for you in a service you'll subscribe to? Are you more interested in tools or content? What subscriptions do you maintain at the moment (besides your EN World subscription, right?)

 

[Radiating Gnome]

You've been completely gracious in handling my criticisms--thanks for that.

LOL. Having hung out a shingle that might as well read "Guy Who Dares To Be Wrong On The Internets" rather than "Gamehackery", I think it's important to be able to take criticism well.

At a guess, I would say that the future of publishing lies within some yet-to-be-produced electronic device, that closely resembles a dead tree book, but which can be configured to display different content on its pages with the press of a button. Also, and perhaps alternatively, I would speculate that we're going to see a serious print-on-demand boom, perhaps reaching the point where every middle class family has a book printer next to their computers in their homes.

But all this has been explored by people better informed than I, and we're still no closer to the solution. So who really knows?

Now all that being said, I don't think that the TTRPG brands will ever become shy about merchandising their lines into the CRPG space. Right now, I suspect that we're looking at the beginning of a low-end CRPG boom consisting of products like Torment: Numenera. It's more than possible that these products will evolve into a set of end-user tools that could be used by would-be dungeon masters easily create great content for online sessions. However, while such a suite of products might come to overshadow the TTRPG industry, I don't believe it could ever legitimately replace it.

As a web developer, working with designers, one of the trickiest things to do when working with a designer who had been a print designer before taking up web design, was getting them to think outside of the rigid, structured world of print design. Web design can be incredibly fluid and graceful as it adapts itself to different size screens and windows, but a print designer will want to force specific dimensions so their design works the way it would in print.

And, I think the same thing is true for our game content -- whether it's going to be text or text and graphics or text and graphics and maps and minis -- right now we're still living in the print paradigm. Even when we switch to digital, we're in a world of pages.

IMO, that new platform will be the one that breaks that paradigm.

And yet.... There's still theater. Movies, with all of their glitz and advantages, haven't eliminated stage performances. And sometimes, as in the case of last year's Warhorse, the stage performance is far superior to the filmed version. Some things are just better on stage.

So maybe I'm wrong, and the digital frontier for tabletop gaming will be the same as theater. MMOs will come and go, and get most of the money and attention, but TRPGs will carry on as more and more people find the pleasures to be had there.

To make that work, if that's the model we need to pursue, we need to make sure that our games take full advantage of the things that TRPGs do better than MMOs.

-rg

 

[Mike Eagling]

To answer your question about what I think the future should/will look like, I have to assert something that some people probably disagree with. Specifically, I believe that the spoken/printed word are the foundation of our hobby, and that map-orientated tabletop tools (and other visual tools as well) will always be somewhat peripheral to this market as a whole. Thus, I believe that the future of the ttrpg industry will resemble the future of the publishing industry (rather than, say, the CRPG industry).

Well I, for one, totally agree with you.

I know you've explored this in other articles, but the publishing industry is in flux right now--its old business model is dead, and nothing new has risen yet to functionally replace it.

I'm not quite so sure traditional publishing is dead but it has certainly been affected by the rise of the Internet and digital media. It will certainly have to adapt, just as the music and TV/film industries.

I've not seen much discussion of piracy concerning digital publishing. The subject does not seem to garner as much press coverage as it does in the music and film industry. Or maybe I'm just not seeing the coverage. I've certainly encountered pirated PDFs and I'm sure it is a significant issue for publishers. It is another reason why I can understand the use of a paywall for services such as DDI--and a desire to implement some kind of subscription model.

I'm both a kindle app user (on my ipad) and an avid technophile, and even I still yearn for the physical book when I'm flipping through my virtual pages. It's possible that young people will be exposed to only virtual pages and thus not be conditioned to read physical books, but I don't think that's the most likely outcome, as long as the dead tree publishing industry can soldier on with the blockbuster model.

I agree with this too. I have owned a computer for more years than I've been playing RPGs and even work in IT. However, I love books and only started to enjoy reading PDFs since owning an iPad. I still prefer the physical article but my collection of PDFs is getting larger by the week.

I've not seen the actual product but the "augmented PDF" of Nova Praxis [http://voidstar.squarespace.com/nova-praxis] seems like a first step into the future of RPGs.

 

[dd.stevenson]

As a web developer, working with designers, one of the trickiest things to do when working with a designer who had been a print designer before taking up web design, was getting them to think outside of the rigid, structured world of print design. Web design can be incredibly fluid and graceful as it adapts itself to different size screens and windows, but a print designer will want to force specific dimensions so their design works the way it would in print.

And, I think the same thing is true for our game content -- whether it's going to be text or text and graphics or text and graphics and maps and minis -- right now we're still living in the print paradigm. Even when we switch to digital, we're in a world of pages.

IMO, that new platform will be the one that breaks that paradigm.

Totally agree. Sometime down the line, I'm certain there will be a communications breakthrough that blurs the line between print media and other media. Personally I think that google glasses are the tech to watch, but if not that then something else will step up to take presentation off the screen once and for all. But I'm nearing my mid thirties, and I have little hope that this will happen in my lifetime.

And yet.... There's still theater. Movies, with all of their glitz and advantages, haven't eliminated stage performances. And sometimes, as in the case of last year's Warhorse, the stage performance is far superior to the filmed version. Some things are just better on stage.

So maybe I'm wrong, and the digital frontier for tabletop gaming will be the same as theater. MMOs will come and go, and get most of the money and attention, but TRPGs will carry on as more and more people find the pleasures to be had there.

To make that work, if that's the model we need to pursue, we need to make sure that our games take full advantage of the things that TRPGs do better than MMOs.

At the moment, I think the TTRPG market is unsustainably depressed, owing mainly to the maverick management of its flagship brand. At the same time, I think the MMO market is functioning in a bubble, owing mainly to Blizzard Entertainment's incredibly talented design team moving into this new market. So I think the future may look a bit brighter than current trendlines would imply.

Still, I don't disagree that MMOs will remain much more accessable than TTRPGs for the forseeable future.

I'm not quite so sure traditional publishing is dead but it has certainly been affected by the rise of the Internet and digital media. It will certainly have to adapt, just as the music and TV/film industries.

Traditional publishing is not dead, but its old business model is. Right now, if you want to make a living writing books, your options are to move up into the JK Rowling league (the blockbuster model) or to cultivate your own following on Amazon, using your own money to cover advertising costs.

 

[Shingen]

I'm not quite so sure traditional publishing is dead but it has certainly been affected by the rise of the Internet and digital media. It will certainly have to adapt, just as the music and TV/film industries..

This.

I think the subscription model, also, is very profitable to publishers because of people forgetting to cancel subscriptions. I have many friends who don't play certain MMOs who kept (or still have!) their subscriptions active.

 

[Radiating Gnome]

This.

I think the subscription model, also, is very profitable to publishers because of people forgetting to cancel subscriptions. I have many friends who don't play certain MMOs who kept (or still have!) their subscriptions active.

I've been that guy. It's one of the reasons I like free-to-play MMOs like Guild Wars, which I have played quite a bit of, but not in a few months, but I don't have to decide if it's time to give up on my account and stop paying, since it's free.

-rg

 

[wingsandsword]

Here's why subscriptions have a limiting factor. . .

I've got 2 bookcases full of gaming books. 1st through 3.5 editions of D&D, WotC and WEG Star Wars, White Wolf, LUG Trek, GURPS, lots and lots of stuff. I've got boxes and boxes of miniatures for many settings and genres (and game mats and scenery for them), I've got pounds of dice. I've got dozens and dozens of issues of the late, great Dragon Magazine on my shelves. Thanks to real-life, I've barely been able to play at all in the last few years (and I post here way less often than I used to), and I've only bought a few books for a few games. If I had to pay a subscription to keep playing, I'd probably have lost all that, and instead of looking at those shelves of books and browsing them, I'd just walk away from the hobby.

Among the many reasons I had nothing to do with 4e was that WotC made it clear that to play it, you were expected to have a subscription to DDI to play.

It's not a "losing battle" to want to buy something instead of subscribe to it. Funny thing is, that roleplaying games are a luxury item, and the ones already in circulation are durable items. I could game every free night I had for the rest of my life and never have to buy another gaming product from anybody. There are still people out there playing older editions of D&D who haven't bought anything new in a decade or more (or decades).

Also, with a subscription if the creating company collapses, you lose the game. How many RPG's have you liked that the company folded? Even if the company doesn't fold, if it's a licensed game then the license itself might expire after a while for the company and the game go away.

In the Microsoft Office example, you think people won't go to OpenOffice or other competitors if they don't like having to pay MS every month? That or use pirate copies of older editions, which are ridiculously easy to get. A corporate IT department might have no problem with a subscription, but you really think that typical end-users want (or can afford) a monthly Microsoft subscription?

My wife's laptop died a couple of months ago. She went out and bought a new one. . .and has hated Win8 with an undying passion. Among the reasons, the few games included apparently require an XBox Live subscription (so she tells me). It's asking her to pay money to pay games she's already paid for by buying the computer and OS.

If the "industry" wants to move to a subscription based model, it better be prepared to deal with the consequences such as permanently chasing away lapsed fans, more casual fans, and people who don't have money to spend every single month. You might think that this is nothing, after all, they weren't spending a lot of money to begin with, but they are part of the community, and you're helping to chase away community members and break up the community. Don't expect subscription based RPG's to have the same widespread community support when everybody in the community has to pay a fee just to be a member.

 

[Mike Eagling]

My wife's laptop died a couple of months ago. She went out and bought a new one. . .and has hated Win8 with an undying passion. Among the reasons, the few games included apparently require an XBox Live subscription (so she tells me). It's asking her to pay money to pay games she's already paid for by buying the computer and OS.

Of course, Microsoft would claim your wife hadn't bought the games by buying the hardware and the operating system--she'd just bought the hardware and the operating system. She hadn't paid for the games, she'd just been given the free programs allowing her to play the games if she wanted to buy them too.


There's a question here about "what is a game?" We have traditionally seen games as products but, from a certain point of view, a game is a service that delivers an entertainment experience. The Internet has enabled computer game producers to reposition their games as services. Piracy is a factor in this but there are other reasons, including a change in revenue stream.


This "works" for computer games because of their ephemeral nature and the ease with which client computers can be connected to the company's servers. This isn't the case with a traditional tabletop RPG. As I said before, I'm currently unconvinced there's any way it could be viable. However, I can understand why WotC, etc. might see it as attractive.

 

[wingsandsword]

We have traditionally seen games as products but, from a certain point of view, a game is a service that delivers an entertainment experience.

In 1987 my parents bought me a NES. I still have it, and about two dozen games. Am I still receiving an ongoing service from Nintendo of America in through standalone cartridges with a few dozen kilobytes of ROM on each of them?

If I buy a chess set, am I buying an ongoing service from the company that made the chess set? If I sit down and craft a checkerboard and checkers, am I providing an ongoing service to the person who buys it?

If somebody sits down with D&D core books and runs an out-of-print edition, are they receiving an ongoing service from the now-defunct TSR or from WotC for a game they haven't made in years or decades? How can they be providing a service when they don't have any clue if the game is even being played, or where, or have any way to contact the people who are playing the game?

I say not. To provide a service you must be providing something of worth after the initial purchase, on an ongoing basis. That's why I have nothing but scorn for "software as a service". Bolting a subscription fee onto an existing program fails that test. Even "updates" fail it when they are nothing but bug fixes and security patches for things that diligent and competent coders should have handled before the software was ever released.

Yes, games can also be an ongoing service, like an MMORPG. In that case, besides just the "game", you're buying the ongoing services of live GM's to host GM events and provide troubleshooting/support, as well as regular updates and additions. When I subscribe to Dungeons and Dragons Online (which I do, at least sometimes, if you're ever on Cannith server I've got a 24th level Half-Elf Favored Soul named Zarachiel) I am paying Turbine for the time of the GM's and for the special events, and for new additions to the game, as well as the bandwidth and server capacity for running the actual game. I am not paying simply to pay an existing game.

 

[Mike Eagling]

In 1987 my parents bought me a NES. I still have it, and about two dozen games. Am I still receiving an ongoing service from Nintendo of America in through standalone cartridges with a few dozen kilobytes of ROM on each of them?

I would say no. I would also argue that your SNES is a product. The games were supplied on cartridges and it had no networking capability. The experience of playing the game and the media/device used to deliver that experience were intrinsically linked back in 1987 in a way that isn't true of video games today.

A similar argument could be made for your chess example--meaning it is a product--and I happen to believe the same is true for traditional tabletop RPGs too.

If somebody sits down with D&D core books and runs an out-of-print edition, are they receiving an ongoing service from the now-defunct TSR or from WotC for a game they haven't made in years or decades? How can they be providing a service when they don't have any clue if the game is even being played, or where, or have any way to contact the people who are playing the game?

I didn't say TSR or WotC were providing a service. Neither did I say ALL games are a service. What I did say was that games can be seen as a service from a certain point of view. This is especially true of computer games and increasingly so.

That's why I have nothing but scorn for "software as a service".

Unfortunately a lot of software producers disagree with you. I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying that's the way the (software) industry is currently headed.

 

[Radiating Gnome]

In 1987 my parents bought me a NES. I still have it, and about two dozen games. Am I still receiving an ongoing service from Nintendo of America in through standalone cartridges with a few dozen kilobytes of ROM on each of them?

If I buy a chess set, am I buying an ongoing service from the company that made the chess set? If I sit down and craft a checkerboard and checkers, am I providing an ongoing service to the person who buys it?

If somebody sits down with D&D core books and runs an out-of-print edition, are they receiving an ongoing service from the now-defunct TSR or from WotC for a game they haven't made in years or decades? How can they be providing a service when they don't have any clue if the game is even being played, or where, or have any way to contact the people who are playing the game?

I say not. To provide a service you must be providing something of worth after the initial purchase, on an ongoing basis. That's why I have nothing but scorn for "software as a service". Bolting a subscription fee onto an existing program fails that test. Even "updates" fail it when they are nothing but bug fixes and security patches for things that diligent and competent coders should have handled before the software was ever released.

Yes, games can also be an ongoing service, like an MMORPG. In that case, besides just the "game", you're buying the ongoing services of live GM's to host GM events and provide troubleshooting/support, as well as regular updates and additions. When I subscribe to Dungeons and Dragons Online (which I do, at least sometimes, if you're ever on Cannith server I've got a 24th level Half-Elf Favored Soul named Zarachiel) I am paying Turbine for the time of the GM's and for the special events, and for new additions to the game, as well as the bandwidth and server capacity for running the actual game. I am not paying simply to pay an existing game.

Well, now, the two primary operating TRPG subscription models shouldn't offend you, if I understand your position correctly.

Paizo's model is a subscription to a product line -- but once you have the product, it's yours, you don't lose it when you cancel your subscription.

WOTC's model provides online tools as a web service -- Character builder, Monster Builder, Reference database, and access to PDFs of content (pdfs which will still be yours, if you've downloaded them -- what you lose when you cancel your subscription is access to the archives, not access to the copies you've already downloaded). Parts of this are a web service -- not quite software as service, but close enough, I'm sure, to draw your scorn. But I think you're missing a lot of the work and value that they include -- or at least, that they did include when 4e was in it's prime. At it's best, they were releasing content updated that added content from newly published sourcebooks into the database each month -- from the books and dungeon and dragon articles both. New character options, monsters, magic items, rules -- all added to the compendium and released right about when the book hits the shelves. That takes a lot of not-trivial work, and at least for me it's worth paying for that service. And by delivering it as a web service, they make it available to subscribers in a far more effective way than they did before with the downloadable tools.

In the future, I don't think there would be a viable program that wasn't offering either one or the other -- although a free-to-play/microtransaction version might be interesting, it's not clear to me how that one might work.

-rg