Many of these items are also available by simply playing the game and spending in-game currency. Want to hunt down monsters while wearing a golden tuxedo? You can absolutely do that. So Funcom now sells ways to level up faster and power up weapons more efficiently, but mostly itвЂ™s cosmetic items, pets, and vehicles. With free-to-play, we had to make the decision: do we gate content? Do we sell missions? Or do we sell vanity and convenience? And thatвЂ™s what we ended up with: convenience.вЂќ

вЂњWhen we went buy-to-play, there was still the box sale. вЂњHow do you make money with a free-to-play game? With a subscription model you can always rely on people giving you their $15 a month,вЂќ says Junior. It might not have gone as well had Funcom not spent a lot of time considering how it implemented the free-to-play model.

There are still some areas we need to address, so weвЂ™ll be constantly listening to feedback and making changes, but weвЂ™re very happy with it so far.вЂќ New start, new model вЂњBut obviously when you launch something new, youвЂ™re never exactly sure how the user is going to consume it. вЂњWe had more people playing than we expected, and revenue has succeeded our expectations,вЂќ says a relieved Junior. And it seems to have paid off, with areas and hubs that were once ghost towns coming back to life. More than an update, it was a reinvention. So one of Secret World LegendsвЂ™ biggest additions was a level system that not only made progression clearer, but allowed players to gauge how challenging an enemy might be from their level, as well.Д¬ombat, quests, dungeons, the graphics - they all went under the microscope and were reconsidered, tweaked, and upgraded. вЂњThereвЂ™s been 20 years of games with levels to teach you what a level means, but we didnвЂ™t have that,вЂќ he says. Junior jokes that the system gave them buzzwords they could use in marketing and press releases, like вЂhorizontal progressionвЂ™, but it put too much of a burden on players. The Secret World had a classless system with free-form player progression and no levels. When youвЂ™re doing those band-aids, you get very annoyed that you canвЂ™t do specific things, like why did we make this decision five years ago to have no levels? ThatвЂ™s one of the big problems we had.вЂќ вЂњYou donвЂ™t want to disrupt the core audience, but you need to fix things that are causing attrition, so a lot of the time you come up with band-aid solutions. вЂњWhen youвЂ™ve got a live game, youвЂ™ve got to be careful about what you change,вЂќ Scott Junior, Secret World LegendsвЂ™ executive producer explains. The result was new systems sitting next to the things that The Secret World had always excelled in.ДЄ lot of the changes simply wouldnвЂ™t have been possible in a live game.

This was also an opportunity for the team to take a birdвЂ™s eye view of the game-to explore what wasnвЂ™t working and what was holding the game back. Three top investment pros open up about what it takes to get your video game funded.ДЇuncom realized that there was an untapped market: people who had never had a chance to play the game because of the barriers for entry, like the subscription and, once that was dropped, the box purchase.

The secret world legends