Will Free-To-Play Kill MMOs?
I’ve really enjoyed playing two free MMO’s over the past month or so while my Target service plan was busy keeping my PS3 away from Sony as long as possible. Free Realms by Sony Online Entertainment and Runes of Magic by Frogster (both Windows only, sorry Mac-heads) have been quite a bit of fun aimed at two really different markets. The upcoming August 4th re-launch of Dungeons & Dragons Online as a free to play MMO also has me excited.
Really, this is what the MMO makers want – a big enough pool of people to try their game who would never try it as a subscription-only game and then a subset of those who want to spend money to make continuing to play more pleasurable or worthwhile. But it’s also what criminal hackers want, too. They want a teeming ocean of victims to fleece.
I used to think that criminal hackers probably only made bots to farm resources and maybe attack mobs automatically in MMO games, but an article I saw on CNet a while back covering online game hacking at a security conference opened my eyes to just how malevolent and far-reaching these criminal hackers can be in MMOs, and how apparently there’s next to nothing the game owners can do to stop them.
Hacking in online games happens, even console games — I’ve experienced it in an online PSP game first-hand — but you can always just take the ball and go home to play online with a friend or two if you can scrape them together at all hours, stats and rankings be damned. By their nature MMO games are always on, and free to play MMOs always have the front door open to anyone and everyone who wants to come in and liquefy all of your hard-earned assets in record time.
This is why I’m worried about spending money either in the all-microtransaction Runes of Magic store or on Sony’s Station Cash for Free Realms. With over 3 million accounts in Free Realms alone, and over 1 million in Runes of Magic to date, if my account on either was attacked and stripped of all items of value, what would my recourse be?
In a subscription game you’d get a GM involved, probably call tech support, and they’d probably do something to reverse the theft. Runes of Magic‘s model tells me that almost everyone walking around in that game hasn’t paid a red cent to Frogster, and those who do buy something probably spend less per month than a standard $15 MMO subscription. Can they afford to give anyone even an automated response against a problem ticket with those odds? How about Free Realms with three times as many registered accounts in tow?
Will either of these games look at how much I’ve spent before they would try to help me out? Not only that, but given the huge population of criminal hackers trying to constantly bend and break the rules of their game and steal accounts and/or items isn’t it inevitable that they would be overmatched and outnumbered by the malevolent, unwashed, non-subscribing masses? Who would want to play then?
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