Of all the IPs to be licensed, Dungeons & Dragons is actually the one where real money transactions (RMT, or microtransactions) make the most sense. Â Why? Â Because D&D has been doing microtransactions for decades. Â In fact, of all the games on the market, Wizard101 is the game that currently mirrors the pen & paper D&D model the closest.
Think about it… to start playing D&D, you need to buy a couple of rule books, namely the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s Handbook. Â With those two books and some dice, in theory, you never need to buy anything else to play. Â You can make all your characters, make your own dungeons and monsters, you can even make your own loot. Â Of course, not everyone is as skilled or as imaginative as everyone else, so D&D sells gaming modules which include a dungeon, monsters, loot, and perhaps even a city or town, story lines and quests and events. Â You need to buy each module to play each module (or at least someone in your gaming group needs to). Â This is pretty close to how Wizard101 functions, only the DMG and PH are free. Â Create an account, download and log in. Â You can play the first few areas of their world for free, and then you have to pay a small fee for additional areas. Â Of course, there are other things you can buy in the game, items and houses and whatnot, but if you just want to play the game, I believe currently you can get everything for around $80. Â For many MMOs you’ll pay $50 just for the game box and the first month, and at $15 a month, just three months in and you’ll have spent $80, and you can’t really finish all of most MMOs’ content in 90 days, so you’ll pay more.
Money amounts aside, however, DDO should have been built this way to start. Â The base game with a small number of dungeons, the base classes and whatnot should have been a fixed price, or even free. Â Then, much like games release expansions on Xbox Live, put out new dungeons, new modules, for a small fee every month or two. Â New classes could even be released for a small fee, much like how D&D puts out expanded books to introduce new classes. Â Perhaps they could have even run a hybrid model, charging players $1.99 or $2.99 a month for access to the game, and then $5-$20 per module (amount based on size of content).
Anyway, that’s just my thoughts. Â If they’d started with that design, perhaps they wouldn’t have had to switch to their new Free-to-Play/Pay-to-Advance model.