So what's the cost of a "free to play" game?

It's a loaded question. Most free to play games really aren't. Most are really pay as you go, with some free content.

For a normal game, typically you get 50-200 hours of play from a good $50 game. That's .25 to $1 per hour. Some, like Starcraft or Warcraft 2, give you 100-500; that's really cheap. Others, like Portal, are really good even if shorter.

Online games, like WoW, you might get (4.333 weeks per month, 6-10 hours per week), 25 to 45 hours for your $15; that's about .75 to .33 per hour. If you spend another $50 per year for program upgrades, that's another $4 per month, or $19 per month total, making your per-hour even higher.

Some let you trade time for play. EvE, for example, lets you trade time spent earning credits for a PLEX; that's almost the same as the doubloon exchange, which lets you trade time for pay-as-you-go access to a game.

So what's the cost of a free to play game? It's measured in time spent to achieve stuff. The cost of a pay as you go game? It's measured in some games as cost per time, and in other games as "ohh, look at this crazy expensive shiny".

Games like YPP and SK, with the exchange, let you trade playtime for play, just like a PLEX; unlike a PLEX or subscription, it's not all or nothing.

So, looking at YPP or SK as a free game, what's the cost to play in terms of playtime spent to play certain things?

YPP had a cost to sail of 8 doubloons per 30 days, or 1 doubloon per 3.5 days.
The cost of a good sword was about 3 per 30, or 1 per 10 days.

So that's 4 doubloons per 10 days of play. You could earn those 4 doubloons by spending one day working for others (blockades, for example.). Or pay cash -- 4 doubloons for 10 days is about $1 for 10 days, or 10 cents a day.

(Now, you could pay more for other things -- parlor games, labor puzzles, dress-up. This is the basic level of play.)

So that's a cost of 1 day for 9 days of fun. For basic officer level play -- sword, sailing someone else's ship, a "free" bludgeon. Pay by working for others, earn enough to buy your badges and sword. Free play costs 10% of what you earn.

In SK? In one day of play, and putting the money earned into the exchange? Well, a Haven to Moorcroft run is 60 energy, reasonable to do without dying, and about 1250 crowns (variance not yet established). Three runs at the current prices will buy 100 energy, so one run buys 33. Two runs costs 120 energy (mist + 20). So once you've gotten your first energy purchase, you make a small profit per day, if you only make two runs per day -- you earn 66.7 in two runs, and spend 20, so you're spending about 1/3rd of what you earn to buy energy. But that's at the current, depressed prices -- they're expected to go up. If it goes up to double, then one run will buy 16, two runs will buy 32 and cost you 20 -- you're spending about 2/3rds of your income on energy.

So the price of SK? Cash isn't that far from the YPP cost, if you are only talking about 2 Haven to Moorcroft runs. A lot of people will want more than that. Free play has a much higher cost in terms of the time spent to earn play time. Spending more than about 3 hours in game (2 and a half in the dungeon, plus some time in PvP) gets very expensive.

I was hoping that other people would comment on this. This is just one viewpoint, and it may be way off. But it really looks like this game will be "time expensive".

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SK has to bring in money. That's a given. People have to want to send in money. If the game only has free players it dies. So how much do you want to, or plan on, playing when you play?

Right now a party with good equipment and high frame rate computers seem to take about 10 minutes per level -- when I "tag along", that's about the time of a level. So one minute per energy still seems to be a reasonable estimate for energy consumption. A run is a little over an hour. The "free energy" is about an hour and a half, maybe a little more for the socializing, and about one and a half runs from Haven. A three hour player will consume around 140-160 energy, allowing some socializing time, some down time, etc. So we're talking two days using 300 energy, or 100 crystal energy every two play days. At about 33 cents per 100, that's 16 cents per day -- so a first estimate is that this free game costs the paying players 16 cents per day. A second estimate is that weekday play will be less -- probably just mist -- and weekend play will be more. A heavy player might spend 6-8 hours on the weekend, or 360 to 400 total energy. That's 150 to 200 crystal in two days, or about 50 cents a day.

Per hour, that's still a really cheap game.
Even if it's $1 per weekend, and you play 4 days a week, that's still only 25 cents a day.

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So what other choices are there?

Is there a way to make "buying other player's time" viable, like YPP blockades? Do we want guilds to want to buy the time of non-guild members?

Right now the income earned from deeper play vastly outnumbers the income from shallower play. That's a silly relic from D&D of the 1970's, copied without much thought by virtually every game since then. Do we want that to continue? Should crown income be more or less constant over depth? To what extent do we expect to see energy prices dominated by high-end income rates (it was before the "tons of stuff in Haven" release)?

Can we have truly "Free play" without limit? Does it make sense, for example, to make Firefly (the initial 4 level easy dungeon) a zero-energy dungeon? Maybe zero is too low -- what if the firefly gate only cost 3 energy per level? 5 per level? 1 per level? 8 per level? How much lower should firefly be? Should it be less? It pays less, it has less variety, and you cannot get to the other towns. If the goal is simply to make sure that people can play for free, then letting people play more in a more basic environment makes sense; is the goal to make sure that people can play for free? Should the goal be to make people want to pay, or to play the not-so-free content?

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The bottom line: Right now it looks like cash play is really cheap (low cash cost per play day, or per hour of play, for an additional hour of play over mist), but free play is really expensive (many minutes to earn another hour over mist). Right now it looks like the energy exchange will be dominated by the income from higher level play, and even if that's tier-2 play it's still means low end players won't be able to play much. Right now it looks like free players will not be able to play much, and their whole hour-and-a-half will buy much less than another hour-and-a-half.

EDIT: 1250 crowns earned, not 1250 energy earned :-).