What about a subscription model for Factorio starting with 0.18?

[brunzenstein]

I would give a good hard and sober look to consider changing Factorio from 0.18 to a subscription sales model where anybody having bought the game already owns it & could play the game as is without restriction infinite - but annual subscribers only will get future updates. Like the excellent writing software Ulysses has successfully (after fierce initial protests) has done.

This would lower the initial price, would be fair to standing customers as well as being attractive to new ones - besides (and that’s the vital point) it would constantly cover the future development costs.

Thinking is, that it will be hard to get new customers with 0.18 as who is interested in this kind of game will have bought Factorio anyway already and others will not give a rats ass for 0.18.

[Jap2.0]

This would be fair to standing customers

Do you mind if I ask how?

[Koub]

No. Subscription is cancer.

[brunzenstein]

No. Subscription is cancer.

Its not - quite the contrary.
Any sales only model is (at the end) basically a snowball scam relying on constant sales otherwise the system crashes.
Subscription is the only way company can, if the product is right and permanently serviced, stay afloat for a very long time.
Cancer is a pure sales model as when funds will dry out the product will seize to exist.
That makes nobody happy

[brunzenstein]

This would be fair to standing customers

Do you mind if I ask how?

For standing customers there would be no change at all.
That’s fair for a product bought. Actually commercial market works that way.
You don’t get a shining new car when you have bought one years ago. But you can lease one and are admitted to get a new one every year.

[Zavian]

No. Subscription is cancer.

Its not - quite the contrary.
Any sales only model is (at the end) basically a snowball scam relying on constant sales otherwise the system crashes.
Subscription is the only way company can, if the product is right and permanently serviced, stay afloat for a very long time.
Cancer is a pure sales model as when funds will dry out the product will seize to exist.
That makes nobody happy

I have pretty much the opposite viewpoint. Whilst a successful subscription model can keep a company earning money indefinitely, for me that only makes sense for a game that is online only (or at least focused around online play). Even then, in order to keep your existing player base engaged and interested enough to keep paying subscriptions, you need to push out substantial updates every 6 months or so, otherwise players will get bored and stop playing. Once that happens most of them will cancel their subscriptions.

I expect that a game like Factorio will sell for a few years after release, even without any updates. (And I expect the Windows version to at least run for 10 or more years, even after Wube stops issuing patches. I can't speak about Factorio's ongoing compatibility with new OSX or linux updates). Yes, sales will start to tail off after the first couple of years, but for almost no effort or cost, I expect Factorio to earn enough money for Wube to get another project into early access, if they so wish. (The single thing most likely to kill those ongoing sales would be pushing Factorio 2 into early access. Because given a choice between Factorio 1.0 and 2, most new players will choose Factorio 2).

Whilst Factorio supports online play, it is entirely playable as a single player only game, and I suspect that many players never play online. As a consumer there is no way I would want to buy a single player game that also required an ongoing subscription to play. To me that is an absolute abomination of an idea. I still occasionally play games that are roughly 10 years old, even a few that are around 20. But there is no way I would have forked out money every year/month for a game that I had already paid for, but only played occasionally. Whilst I'm actively waiting for 0.16, I haven't actually sat and played Factorio in nearly 6 months. Why would I want to pay a subscription, for a game that I'm not currently playing? (Yes I realise that I would be grandfathered in, under your proposal, but your proposal can only work if new players are prepared to buy the game, and also pay a subscription. In my opinion your proposal would be an absolute turnoff to many potential new purchasers).

The right way to encourage active players to pay a regular ongoing "subscription" is to sell expansions/DLC. Remember that to keep paying players engaged and paying, you need to provide them with new content anyway, so don't alienate potential purchasers by adding as subscription. Instead tempt them to pay more/again by offering them new toys as expansions/DLC. To me that is the right way to fund ongoing development of a game.

[Zavian]

What about a subscription model for Factorio starting with 0.18?

I would give a good hard and sober look to consider changing Factorio from 0.18 to a subscription sales model where anybody having bought the game already owns it & could play the game as is without restriction infinite - but annual subscribers only will get future updates. Like the excellent writing software Ulysses has successfully (after fierce initial protests) has done.

This would lower the initial price, would be fair to standing customers as well as being attractive to new ones - besides (and that’s the vital point) it would constantly cover the future development costs.

Thinking is, that it will be hard to get new customers with 0.18 as who is interested in this kind of game will have bought Factorio anyway already and others will not give a rats ass for 0.18.

Responded in your other thread viewtopic.php?f=5&t=64078&p=391071 .
Please don't crosspost the same content to multiple threads.

[Koub] Moved because response to (now) deleted OP crosspost. Sorry for inconvenience.

[brunzenstein]

The right way to encourage active players to pay a regular ongoing "subscription" is to sell expansions/DLC. Remember that to keep paying players engaged and paying, you need to provide them with new content anyway, so don't alienate potential purchasers by adding as subscription. Instead tempt them to pay more/again by offering them new toys as expansions/DLC. To me that is the right way to fund ongoing development of a game.

Agree -
The difference between DLC and a subscription model is only in the wording (academic)- but the result is under the hood similar.
Minus the initial cash down payment for the game itself.That can be neglected as commercially at least partly recoverable by setting the DLC price accordingly and pushing put new content regularly.

And as I stated - that first timers are, after that many years Factorio was already as beta available, drying out like fresh cut roses in the Mojave
- so either go for DlC (not to name it subscription) is the way to keep the lovely rose alive.
Selling Factorio (Wubes single and only product) in future like today is similar to the Lehman brothers snowball system - expecting new customers covering old and new dues.
How this worked out is well known.

[astroshak]

If you bother to look at any newer MMO long enough you’ll see that many people there are against the subscription model. The reason for it (one of them, the main one I’ve noticed) seems to be they don’t want to feel obligated to play the game every month, yet they are paying for it every month. That said, buying the base game and buying the expansions while paying a subscription seems to be one of the best models a MMO can go with.

There’s one major problem for trying to bring that model here, however : this is a mostly offline single player game. Yes, you go online to download mods, and to play multiplayer. I’d love to see the breakdown, however, to see how many people are playing multiplayer and how many are playing single player only. In short, this isn’t a MMO.

TC, part of your post was that going subscription-based would “lower the cost” of the base game. I don’t know what the game costs where you are, but in the US, it is about half that of a big name developer’s new games ($30 vs $59.99). Halving that and then charging a subscription fee (the usual MMO sub fee is around $10-$15 per month) would significantly increase the cost to play Factorio for every end user. Even offering the base game software for free would only bring price increases to anyone sub’d for more than two or three months.

Personally, I like the subscription model for games that it makes sense to do it with : MMO’s. I like the “buy it to play it” model for everything else, and abhor micro transactions, avoiding many games that have those like the plague. As long as Wube is happy with their revenue from the game, that is what counts.

[brunzenstein]

If you bother to look at any newer MMO long enough you’ll see that many people there are against the subscription model.

Thats not a wonder.
Most folks are happy for a indefinite free ride - not considering or giving a thought, that that freebie eventually will kill the host.
A subscription model based on 30$ a year to play would be steal and a fair deal anyhow, besides economical profitable.

[Oktokolo]

I would give a good hard and sober look to consider changing Factorio from 0.18 to a subscription sales model where anybody having bought the game already owns it & could play the game as is without restriction infinite - but annual subscribers only will get future updates.

Kovarex in the Price change thread

[Oktokolo]

What about a subscription model for Factorio starting with 0.18?

Kovarex in the Price change thread

[Koub] Moved because response to (now) deleted OP crosspost. Sorry for inconvenience.

[brunzenstein]

What about a subscription model for Factorio starting with 0.18?

Kovarex in the Price change thread

Kovarex is not only a giftet dreamer but also a realist and will have to adapt to hard facts

[Koub] Moved because response to (now) deleted OP crosspost. Sorry for inconvenience.

[FrodoOf9Fingers]

What you described may be closer to paid expansions. Subscriptions implies paid access to the game. What you described is paid access to future content. The "subscription" part in your assessment only adds automation to spending, which is good and bad: more money by charging people who forgot to unsubscribe, but also masking important business analytics about the product by artifically propping up demand.

[featherwinglove]

A subscription is the wrong kind of pricing model for a primarily single-player offline game, and I'm quite surprised that people don't realize this after SimCity 4, No Man's Sky, Metal Gear Survive, and Fallout 76 tanked as single-player games just for having a connection requirement, let alone a subscription fee. (Granted, some were not intended as single-player games, but are de facto because their multiplayer functionality was broken.)

A subscription model is appropriate only if ongoing value is being added on a regular basis, e.g. you're getting a new magazine every month, or, for something like this, a new story told through the engine (and Factorio's not a very good engine for such things, and our fanbase is not so interested in such things. E.g. what was the name of that studio that was jerking around its devs in such horrible ways and that's why I heard of them and not because of their episodic game model? (flip flip) Telltale Studios.)

I'd say that anyone proposing a subscription model for this game has lost the plot, and might even be an enemy trying to create fodder for anti-gaming activism. On the other hand, there are a few games (just a few) where a subscription model is appropriate, and the best examples I can think of are actually free-to-play with cosmetic/league microtransaction models and do it very well. That, incidentally, is an even worse idea for Factorio than a subscription model.

[astroshak]

What about a subscription model for Factorio starting with 0.18?

Kovarex in the Price change thread

Kovarex is not only a giftet dreamer but also a realist and will have to adapt to hard facts

[Koub] Moved because response to (now) deleted OP crosspost. Sorry for inconvenience.

The fact is .. subscription based models work for some games, but Factorio is not one of them.
Factorio isn’t even of the same genre as the games that subscriptions work for.

I don’t know where you’re getting your “hard facts” from. Your name is the wrong color for being an insider. That means either you know something which you have yet to reveal the source for, OR you are making unwarranted assumptions about a company you know next to nothing about.

[MeduSalem]

[...] anybody having bought the game already owns it & could play the game as is without restriction infinite - but annual subscribers only will get future updates. [...]

This would lower the initial price, would be fair to standing customers as well as being attractive to new ones - besides (and that’s the vital point) it would constantly cover the future development costs.

Splitting the community into two camps is never "fair". I have seen crap like that being applied to other games and what it does to the community and honestly it makes me want to puke.

The only way it works is if the company manages to turn new customers into hating on the old customers and vice versa... where both camps envy each other for certain reasons... because if both new and old customers gang up on the company for not treating everyone equally then the game is done for. Can't stop that bad-rep avalanche anymore.

Thinking is, that it will be hard to get new customers with 0.18 as who is interested in this kind of game will have bought Factorio anyway already and others will not give a rats ass for 0.18.

I agree to that...

... but a subscription model won't change anything about it either... subscriptions scare away even more people, especially if there is literally no content being delivered for the money paid (a reason why most people already hate Season Pass stuff which is basically what you suggest)... and it is not like wube is exceptionally fast at delivering content updates. Just look at how long it took them to deliver updates in the recent years.

A one-time-pay addon might work... yet even finding a working theme for that would be hard because with so much modding capability added to the game pretty much everything exists in one way or another for free already. But that would also only work if their content team would already have started working on the addon while some are only polishing/finishing the main game. But that isn't the case either since everyone of their team is still working on the main game... so it would take at least another 2-3 years for them to push out a proper addon that can call itself worth of an addon. (Hence why most companies plan out possible addons already during the design stages of the main game which they pick up when they are done developing the main game, often reusing/finalizing assets they cut for some reasons from the main game).


To be honest after 6 years of development and early access on Factorio people should become realistic that the peak has been surpassed quite a while ago (I would say somewhen around 1-2 years ago) and that it's almost over and that there is not really much that can be done about it. Nothing lasts forever... Life goes on and so forth.

At least if the devs/wube would be realistic then they would know when to stop and move on to other projects while they have the chance... if they don't want to share the same fate as some other companies in the past or even right now who eventually got stuck with whatever sole product they are selling being their only IP, having to work on it until they go out of business or have to sell out to some other company due to lack of sales and lack of fresh ideas due sucking the genre dry and missing the opportunity to move on to something entirely different for once.



There are reasons why most companies have IPs in different genres so that they can bury some when the market is oversaturated and they are currently not popular and dig them back up for a new installment once the genre is popular again.

Only some huge companies with a truckload of cross-financing and subventions can afford to keep certain games - mostly MMOs - artificially alive... and even they shut down eventually because they get trapped in slow death spiral of running out of ideas and in the resulting lack of new content, which results in losing subscribers... which then results in the company even less being able to afford developing new content, which then results in even more loss of customers. Then they change to f2p model hoping to survive a few years more until the point even the premium features don't pay for the running costs.

[featherwinglove]

Splitting the community into two camps is never "fair". I have seen crap like that being applied to other games and what it does to the community and honestly it makes me want to puke.

I should have read his post more closely, had I noticed this, I would have responded similarly.

To be honest after 6 years of development and early access on Factorio people should become realistic that the peak has been surpassed quite a while ago (I would say somewhen around 1-2 years ago) and that it's almost over and that there is not really much that can be done about it. Nothing lasts forever... Life goes on and so forth.

I don't think it was that long ago, but it was definitely before FFF#266, which started gutting classic features at the expense of modders and the part of the core audience most interested in exploration and progression mechanics. A lot of people were left with the impression that they were getting sick of adding new functionality and want to get the release version out the door.

There are reasons why most companies have IPs in different genres so that they can bury some when the market is oversaturated and they are currently not popular and dig them back up for a new installment once the genre is popular again.

All bets are off in this era. It seems that most of the gaming industry is experimenting with new and appalling ways to cash in decades of customer goodwill for quarterly gains as though Jesus Christ is returning by the end of 2019 at the absolute latest. (Fallout 76 alone has six scandals and counting.) It isn't working out too well for them since the big ones (Acktivision/Blizztard, EAvil, Bung G, Bugthesda, Yooby Soft) have been in a woke-slide for the past several months: the best kept secret of the gaming industry at the moment is that a stock crash is now in progress that makes 1983 look like a good year.

[Jap2.0]

This would be fair to standing customers

Do you mind if I ask how?

For standing customers there would be no change at all.
That’s fair for a product bought. Actually commercial market works that way.
You don’t get a shining new car when you have bought one years ago. But you can lease one and are admitted to get a new one every year.

No change at all?


No change at all?



I bought the game under the assumption that I would receive all major updates to the main game indefinitely for free (with the possible exception of major expansion packs, but I won't get into that). Is it fair if I made that assumption and then they changed that?

I bought the game under the assumption that multiplayer would continue working without the player base fragmented between numerous versions. If they stop providing updates to people who don't pay more money, that'll split players into at least two groups: the new group, and the old group. You'd have less people playing together at the same time, scripting on servers would become less common (as scripters would be limited to one version, have to spend twice the time making two versions, somehow make their scripts compatible with multiple versions, or just give up), and overall multiplayer would not be what it was when I bought the game, directly because of an action by the devs.

I'm not buying a car. I'm buying a video game - and while video games sales models might change, I don't think Factorio changing to a subscription model is a good idea.

What about a subscription model for Factorio starting with 0.18?

Kovarex in the Price change thread

Kovarex is not only a giftet dreamer but also a realist and will have to adapt to hard facts

I don't know much about Wube's finances, but from what I've gathered they're doing very well.
I'd also like to point out from personal observation that there are plenty of times Kovarex has made hard decisions, some of which many people did not like. Some people still don't like. Some I don't like. I don't think him being a dreamer would prevent something that would be necessary from happening.

[brunzenstein]

What about a subscription model for Factorio starting with 0.18?

Kovarex in the Price change thread

Kovarex is not only a giftet dreamer but also a realist and will have to adapt to hard facts

[Koub] Moved because response to (now) deleted OP crosspost. Sorry for inconvenience.

The fact is .. subscription based models work for some games, but Factorio is not one of them.
Factorio isn’t even of the same genre as the games that subscriptions work for.

I don’t know where you’re getting your “hard facts” from. Your name is the wrong color for being an insider. That means either you know something which you have yet to reveal the source for, OR you are making unwarranted assumptions about a company you know next to nothing about.

The hard facts are:
„If you can’t pay the rent you have to move out.“
This counts no matter if you sell toilet-paper, cars, cookies, jewelry or computer games.
Anyone requesting or expecting free updates to a once bought product in infinite is a childish dreamer as this doesn't work in the real business. (Venezuela tried and failed miserable even with the providing of toilet paper)
Anyone arguing for such a „after I bought the stuff once then please fill my plate infinite for free - business model“ is the enemy of any company in a capitalistic market as it means voting for bankruptcy.
At the end, even BMW cars would (by not charging hefty for servicing the cars regularly) ran out of funds - especially in an already highly saturated market segment - and finally seize to exist.
My bet is, that Wube will either change course or soon not being able anymore to get enough fresh cash (depending on a cash flow only by ongoing new sales) and will have to stop servicing Factorio.

And thats not what I wish for.