It seems like high production value box purchase RPGs have given way to live service RPGs, so I'd think it'd be neat to compare the differences and see what the inherent issues to each model are, the advantages and disadvantages, etc.
So you have an RPG story/campaign/series/etc that is going to go on for many years. Beyond just being an artist who wants to tell a long story that is too large to be just one game, you might be a businessman getting anxiety seeing how insanely difficult it is to acquire customers in Current Year when much of the population has adblock and thus won't see your ads and know your game exists, people's limited free time is being taken up by Youtube and Netflix, etc. Very very difficult to acquire an audience, so once you do find customers you don't want to lose them and start from scratch again. Hence, franchises. Maybe you also want to try cutting costs via asset reuse, so you are not building up an entirely brand game from scratch each time. So you set the story in the same world and towns that you have already modelled and textured and lit, featuring many of the same characters you have already rigged and painstakingly animated, same battle system you have designed and programmed and tediously debugged, etc. You can churn out new boxes/expansions much faster than building up brand new games from the ground up each time.
You somehow need to 1. get these chapters out to be people, and 2. you need to somehow make money off of it. AFAIK there are three established, popular ways to do this:
- Box purchase ie $60 box at gamestop or download off Steam. Hopefully you are releasing a new game at least once every 1 or 2 years max to retain audience interest. Ie the Trails series, which to my knowledge is the only RPG series that has managed to keep this up for over 20 years, and way behind that, the Yakuza series. A few other series like Sakura Wars, Suikoden, the Xeno series, etc, also dipped their toes into this but did not last for anywhere near as long.
- Monthly subscription MMO (usually is in addition to buying an expansion box at least once every 1 or 2 years). Aka WoW/FF14/GW2.
- Free to play where you sell individual characters for a premium currency that you doll out for free very slowly, incentivizing people to pay money (especially when you line up several highly coveted releases in a row, but you have carefully mathed out the average player's premium currency income so that they cannot afford to buy everything they want). Aka Warframe, Granblue Fantasy, Fate/Grand Order, Ark Knights, Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, Wuthering Waves, etc.
I'll start with the F2P/gacha model's plusses and cons first because it then highlights some things with the box purchase and subscription models that might not be immediately obvious.
► Gacha model
+ With a free to play format, the devs have to worker harder/be more responsive to satisfy customers and address complaints. The players don't have to give you money at all as they can already play the game for free. If they give you money, it is either because you are offering something that they really, really want, like a character (ideally, assuming you are not inventing problems to sell people the solution for), and/or they really like your game and want to give you money somehow. Each time, they have to chose to whip out their credit card info to pay. It is not like a MMO where they are already subbed and don't have to check the payment page each month to renew it, and thus they are less inclined to cancel. It is not like a box purchase game where you need to have first good word of mouth before people then buy your game and play it. People can play your game for years without ever paying, so you need to somehow make them feel good enough about the game that they will want to give you money anyway.
Because you have ongoing costs, you cannot afford to remain complacent. So gacha games tend to be very quick implementing adjustments or responding to backlash and then adjusting the content that is coming in a few months or next year. Whereas with box purchase series like Trails, you have the same fundamental issues people have been complaining about that appear game after game for years. There is less of a need for them to adjust when they get your money first before you then experience the issues.
After playing a new Genshin or HSR or WuWa patch for a few hours, a prompt to take an ingame survey appears in the menu, and some of the pages can go into specifics like whether or not you like the new character's animations, the new character's voice acting in a particular language, the new zone, the new boss fight mechanics, etc. I have never any MMO do this.
+ You can get regular content updates every few weeks to keep superfans sated. Box purchase games can theoretically release free patch content too, but in general you are going to play a Final Fantasy or Trails game for 2 or 3 weeks and then that's it. No more FF or Trails for you for a year. Overlaps with the above where people can play the game for free, so devs have to work harder to somehow endear players and get them to want to pay when they don't have to. Subscription MMOs seem to be content with dry spells and having only three major content updates per year, which upsets superfans who are subscribed because they are paying money each month only to not get new content for most months.
+ There is a huge roster of characters and they are designed to be as appealing as possible, so you will probably be able to find a few favorites. Whereas with box purchase RPGs with small casts, you might be lucky to find anyone to like, let alone assemble a full party of characters you like. Gacha game characters on average are visually better designed than your average RPG character.
+ While gacha games tend to have a main character for the player to control for most of the game, the main character tends to not be super customizeable (and in some cases like ZZZ, is even voiced and has characterization and goals), and the devs are much more open to having longterm POV changes where the player will leave their character behind to watch and/or play as some different character for several hours. Sometimes play through entire storylines in which the main character is absent.
+ Most of these gacha games are meant to also be playable on phones that have small touch screens. So character kits are usually boiled down to just one or two or maybe three buttons max. You don't get nonsense like in MMOs where you have hotbars full of 20 different buttons that just deal damage and now you have to read a long Icy Veins guide and memorize the order to press them all in. Because the individual characters are being sold off, the kits receive more attention. Gacha devs will also scramble to adjust a character's kit faster. A lot of box RPGs have really lacking character kits, and MMO devs are complacent and will break classes and leave them broken for years before deciding to getting around to touching them, and even then they might not even actually fix the class to players' satisfaction.
I think those are the main positives off of the top of my head. After that, you're looking at a long laundry list of issues.
- To make money, you have to sell something. If you give players a complete experience like in a box purchase game, then you won't have anything to sell. By their nature, most F2P games are not complete experiences. Usually, playable characters/classes are sold individually, like in League of Legends, Warframe, gachas, etc. In RPGs with a story to undertake like gachas, quite often these playable characters are people you meet in the story and are ostensibly supposed to be working with, but then because you didn't buy them they inexplicably are not there with you in gameplay. It would be like playing a Final Fantasy game where you didn't buy Vivi and Steiner, so they are there in the cutscenes but not with you in gameplay. You get a bifurcated experience. In GBF you get the main story party members for free, but then for the side storylines about other parties like the Dragon Knights or the Society, you don't get those characters for free which leads to disjointedness. Some F2P RPGs manage to avoid this, like Warframe, where the Warframes are not characters you interact with in the story like the Lotus and Tenzen, but are just alt classes for your main character.
- If your main plan to make money is to sell individual characters, then you are strongly incentivized to almost exclusively just make young beautiful looking playable characters. This is why League of Legends eventually stopped making a lot of monster heroes, because they were only popular with American men. American women overall leaned towards playing beautiful women, and Asian players both male and female preferred beautiful characters. So the customers that liked monster characters were dwarfed by the preferences of the overall global playerbase, which resulted in the faucet of monster characters being turned off for them and LoL's cast becoming samey. Gacha game casts tend to be very samey. Even though Granblue Fantasy has several middle-aged and old guys, they are still dwarfed by the hundreds of beautiful young characters. This makes for samey casts, and also makes the world feel ridiculous after a while when everyone in the setting who is relevant is this extremely young person.
With the gacha game business model, the devs are incentivized to not make unique playable characters such as the guy on the left.
- In the 3D Chinese gacha games, everything has to be modelled and they want to pump out a new character at least once every 3 to 6 weeks. So what they do is they make a half dozen base model presets. "Teenage male. Tall male. Loli girl. Teenage girl. Tall girl". To maximize broad appeal, the characters are given skin tight clothing (so they all have the same slim figure. No Warcraft paludrons allowed) and a smooth babyface. Because these games are open worlds where you can climb any surface, no one is allowed to have a skirt or a robe that reaches the ground because then that would create clipping and require more programming/design time to solve or prevent that from happening. So characters become very samey. Tights + shoulder cape + asymmetrical boots or thigh band or arm sleeves. You do not get the wide variety of designs like you would see in a 2D gacha game like GBF or FGO. No broad shouldered men like Vaseraga, no death knights like Hassan, no people with bulky armor, no robed mages, etc.
- Because you sold people the fantasy of a character, you cannot take that character away from people, even when it makes sense in the story. In an RPG, a character could undergo a journey and get their arm chopped off and retire from combat to take up a desk job. In a gacha game, if you sell that character to people, you cannot cut their arm off and have them retire from combat and become unplayable, because people bought that character and expect to be able to continue using him. You cannot kill him, or have him become evil and desert the player's party to join the bad guys and eventually get caught and hanged, etc.
Characters leaving the high risk adventurer life behind to get married and move on to the next stage of their lives to raise their kids does not happen to gacha game characters.
- Because the devs' plan is to make their money off of selling characters, they try to make every character as safe and as appealing as possible. Every character is good and cannot make a mistake or do wrong. No one can get frustrated and say something unseemly in a moment of frustration or spite. No one can fumble or botch a plan, or make an error in judgement that leads to something really bad happening. No one can have evil desires that overcome them which leads to them betraying the party and becoming evil and then getting caught and hanged. Because that would make the character less likeable and make people less inclined to want to pull for that individual character, and if that character is already playable then it would inflame people who already spent money to acquire that specific character.
Zalbag's momentary outburst here actually wound up making the character feel more real and a later scene much more powerful, as later on he dies trying to save Ramza. He was better realized as a person and you felt that he really did love Ramza.
- As a live service game, one day the servers will be turned off and its content will become inaccessible. The overwhelming vast majority of live service games will not survive longer than 10 years. Sometimes private servers exist but then you are having to progress from scratch which is a tremendous loss of time. The devs have to plan in advance to prepare their game to have a playable offline version ready if and when the plug gets pulled and online service is terminated. Only a small handful of live service games are still playable offline, such as Atelier Resleriana. The vast majority of live service games do not plan for this eventuality and become lost. Gacha games are in the same bubble that the MMO fad was during the 2000s/early 2010s. 20+ new high production value 3D Chinese gacha games have been announced and I think we are about to see the same WoWkiller esque mass extinction event to play out over the next few years.
- For live service RPGs with open worlds, the devs are loathe to nuke locations, so there are even less stakes. Nuking a town in a live service game where you cannot reload an earlier save before the town was destroyed means that whatever quests there that the player hasn't done yet become permanently inaccessible, and some essential services have to get moved elsewhere which requires work. WoW is the only live service RPG I know of that blew up several cities (GW2 blew up one, Warframe blew up a few copypasted space stations no one cared about), but in each case you can just talk to an NPC to go back to the old location anyway. Locations also don't visibly develop over the years with new buildings going up, stores getting renovated, new streets being expanded, etc. With 2D visual novels like GBF, the devs are more likely to draw/paint new backgrounds to represent a location changing or being destroyed, and quests are started in menus and take place wherever rather than being started by talking to an NPC physically in the town. All essential services happen in menus that can be accessed anywhere rather than being tied to an NPC physically in the town.
On the same note, in live service games it is rare for the mobs and NPCs of a faction that has been eliminated/pacified in the story to get removed from the game world like in a box purchase JRPG like Phantasy Star, where after certain story progression an entire enemy type vanishes from the overworld. In WoW, the Burning Legion has been defeated, but Legion army mobs are still roaming around in Felwood and Desolace. The Garlean Empire was defeated but there are still Garlean Soldiers standing around in Eorzea, Ala Mhigo, Doma, etc. In each HSR world you Phantiliya but her corrupted mobs are still on the worldship and respawning forever. In Genshin we are going to defeat or befriend the Fatui in the Snheznaya expac, but their agents are still going to be everywhere in the game world aggroing on sight.
- You never get the satisfying of an ending. There is no climatic final act in which most of the world is destroyed, you have completed all of the quests, you liquidate your assets to make your character(s) as strong as possible before setting off to the final dungeon to save the world. No exhiliartion of battling your way through the strongest enemies and then the final showdown with the true final boss of the game, the stress of his boss fight, the euphoria of beating him, and then getting an epilogue seeing everyone getting a happy ending, and then the credits rolling and thinking "wow, that was a great game" and then going online to talk about it. The only live service game that has come even vaguely close to this endgame climatic build up was FF14 Shadowbringers, but even then it was not challenging, you don't get a satisfying epilogue following the final boss fight, and the game isn't actually over for real when the credits roll.
Subscription model
► Subscription model
+ Almost everything you acquire is carried over to the next installment/expac. You still have the mounts and transmogs and levels you had earned previously. The worst thing that usually happens is that the gear you grinded for gets powercrept and becomes worthless. The only catastrophic theft of stuff that was bestowed upon players was the removal of Gladiator stance (ie prot warriors with a shield who can queue as DPS) when WoD ended and Covenant powers when the WoW Shadowlands expansion ended.
- Theoretically, the subscription model means that players should receive a complete experience where they do not have to pay for anything more. They get everything with their box purchase and subscription. In practice, all sub games nowadays have extensive cash shops full of cosmetics and mounts that should have been obtainable ingame, like the Enchanted Fey Dragon which should have been a Draenei rep reward, or the Cruise Chaser mount which should have been an Alexander raid reward, etc. So you get an incomplete experience, though not to the same glaring extent as gacha RPGs where you are missing main story characters.
Fey Dragons are native to Shadowmoon Valley and were domesticated by the Draenei. Draenei flightpath masters will put you on these mounts. You would think that the Fey Dragons would be a reward from a Draenei rep... but no, you have to buy it off of the cash shop.
- The subscription model makes the devs complacent and slow. You have already subscribed, and will remain subscribed indefinitely. You do not have to go to their website and input your credentials every month to buy a battle pass. You will remain subbed until you go to their website and click to unsub. The lethargy of players to go to the website and click to unsub means that they will remain subscribed even when the devs are not delivering regularly or delivering very satisfying content. Subscriptions typically do not spike down massively over a short time frame. The devs can coast off of inertia for a long time. This is why we get into a 2010s WoW situations or a 2020s FF14 situation where the time between patches becomes longer and longer and you get less bang for your buck, but the subscriber bleedoff rates remains low, so the devs don't get off their asses to start delivering and addressing complaints. (This also crosses over with general American corporation issues where once the company thinks their product has achieved market saturation and they can no longer easily raise profits by increasing revenue, they then try to increase profits by cutting costs. The cost cutting in WoW, FF14, GW2, etc after their peak popularity is blatant). You do not have this issue with box purchase and gacha games where the customer has to actively open their wallet to reward devs, meaning the devs must be more proactive to get paid.
Despite the negative reaction to the direction the games were heading in after a certain point, the subscription system means that the devs don't have to change course as they will make enough money off of the diehards who remain anyway. The devs give lip service about how they are going to listen to the players now, but the game does not fundamentally improve or revert to the direction that players originally loved about it.
- Subscription based MMOs almost always take place from the perspective of a single, highly customizeable player character that players are too invested in, which severely hamstrings the storytelling possibilities. Devs are loathe to make anything bad happen to the player like them getting an arm chopped off or becoming a pariah in their home country and being ousted and losing their home. It is hard to be invested in a story when nothing bad will befall the protagonist. Devs are also loathe to have longterm change of POVs from your customizeable character to another. At most, you might play another preset character like Illidan or Alphinaud for a few minutes for one quest before going back to your customizeable character. WoW players tend to complain about these "vehicle" quests (part of the issue with WoW is that the story is DOA due to it being presented as paragraphs of quest text, which players quickly become accustomed to ignoring, so people do not build any emotional investment in the story and thus see these sections as intrusive rather than a delight). This makes it near impossible to see the story from a longterm POV of a antagonistic character or country that is not on the same side as the player.
And then lastly, a series of box purchase games (ie Trails, Sakura Wars, PS1 Final Fantasy, Yakuza, The Banner Saga trilogy, etc):
► Box purchase games
+ The customer buys the game and gets a complete experience. They buy a game, put it in, get a beginning, a middle, and an end. They get all of the party members and mounts and features. (Note: Trails has been making costumes that characters wear in cutscenes exclusive to steam store addons now).
+ Because the devs are not trying to make most of their money off of selling individual characters - because the player is buying the holistic experience/package - the devs can kill off party members, and create party members that are not very handsome or are monstrous. An unattractive party member or a character who dies is unlikely to be a dealbreaker for someone's interest in a box purchase game.
+ Because this is not a live service game with the promise that you are going to be continuing your character indefinitely across every installment/expac, the devs can have you play as a different character in every installment, massively expanding the amount of perspectives in the world and adding more nuance to the story. In Trails, you can be playing as Liberlians who were invaded by the Erebonian empire, and then in another installment play as Erebonian characters, and then in another installment play as an internationally hated fugitive who is a pariah even to his home country of Erebonia, and then in another installment play as someone in the country of Calvard which is aligned against Erebonia. Etc. In live service games where you only get the perspective of the Horde/Alliance or Eorzea, it is very difficult or impossible to get a long term POV from say a Mogu or a Garlean.
- The fastest rate of release for a serialized box purchase game I have seen is one game per year from the Trails series. That means that the game comes out, gets discussion for a month or two, and then that's it. The fans don't have anything to munch on for another 10 months until the next game comes out. Live service games with new content coming out every 3 months or 6 weeks are able to keep superfans occupied year round.
- Serialized box purchase RPGs typically do not carry over your character progression/inventory from entry to entry. Series that do this like The Banner Saga are sadly a rare exception. It seems that most devs of these serialized series do not plan their character progression and battle content far enough ahead, so each game you lose everything you earned and get reset. That is not to say that MMOs and gacha's execution of carry overs between expansions is perfect, though. MMOs often have an ilevel treadmill reset whenever a new expansion comes out, so almost all of the gear you acquired before becomes mechanically worthless. For pre-Genshin gacha games, you could outgear the content and crush it, harming the experience. 3D Chinese gacha games tend to have an unusual form of world level scaling that correlates with your account's level, not the levels of your characters. So you can acquire a new character that is at level 1, but as you are doing stuff trying to level that character up, your account level is still increasing and making the world more difficult.
