The road from subscription to F2P is dark, and no one has a decent flashlight. Someone is going to get hurt along the way.

You may have heard that LEGO Universe was shutting down. You may have also heard that LU went F2P somewhat recently. It sounded like a good move at the time, right? Lots of fee-based MMOs are doing it: Lord of the Rings Online, Fallen Earth, City of Heroes, DC Universe Online, Lineage II and probably more I’ve conveniently omitted so I can get on with my point. Since Turbine announced that they’ve seen an uptick in revenue since converting LotRO and Dungeons & Dragons Online to F2P, making the switch for other subscription games seemed like a no brainer. F2P is the wave of the future, and your pay wall is just preventing waves of would-be players from assaulting your login servers who are eager to embrace the future of mini-transactions. Right?

Sadly, no, as LU found out. I’m never pleased to see an MMO go out of business. While we pontificate, elevate and denigrate these products on social networks from the comfort of our consequence free consumer positions, there are scads of people who are losing their jobs in this crappy economy when a game service shuts down. It also means less choice for consumers. The F2P conversion stories have mostly been on the cheerleading side, where stories of improved revenue have been probably more common then not. We may have been lulled into thinking that all companies have to do is to remove their subscription, and the masses will come rolling in.

A lot of the other F2P converts had subscribers. Their conversion was an attempt to get more subscribers by making the game more accessible. Some games float in people’s peripheral vision; they’re aware of them, know people who play them, and intersect with news streams about them – but they themselves don’t play them. Maybe they can only foot the bill for one or two MMOs at a time, or don’t play others because their friends don’t play them. There’s an interest in these games, even a casual one, that converting a sub game to F2P can solve by removing cost from the adoption equation.

Word on the street is that LU couldn’t convert enough free players into subscribers. I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that the free content wasn’t compelling enough to seduce people to subscribe. I don’t know about the demographics, but if it was mostly kids, then that’s a shame. If it was mostly adults, then I guess there wasn’t enough content compared to what other F2P conversations offer. What to offer is as important as making the offer in the first place, actually. LotRO’s payer-and-free player-on-the-same-server model is superior to EverQuest II’s model of each on different servers, IMO. Deciding what is free and what is paid, and how one goes about unlocking paid content, is also key. This is the unspoken secret of F2P conversions, I believe: no one knows which a la cart options to offer for a slam-dunk successful conversion, so casualties in the pay-to-F2P race are bound to occur while the industry tries to feel its way around. Sadly, it doesn’t look like LU’s business decisions panned out in a way that was attractive enough to make free players pony up the cash to subscribe. Really, why would they? If they weren’t willing to pay for a subscription in the first place, how will extending the free trial make them think any differently?