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| DarkZero
44th Post
 
Rare Customer
 
|  "Re(1):How the Pay To Play business model came"
, posted Wed 7 May 21:45
quote:
This long post from a Star Wars Galaxies developer won't be news to anyone who knows or can infer the standard business model of an on-line service. Still, though, it's a nice read, which includes a bit of history -- something as a reminder of why a game like Ragnarok Online will eventually need direct financial support.
One thing I'd really like to know is how RO is doing what it's doing. That's something that I've been wondering about for quite awhile. They've been having open betas with thousands of players in many different countries on and off for a year now with just a few closed betas that cost very little money ($5 per month for two months). That means that they're either seeing it as an investment and planning to charge a sick amount of money per month for the subscription fee or they've found a way to do this so much cheaper than everyone else that a subscription fee of less than $10 per month should work fine for them when the game goes retail.
Anyway, it's a pretty good article if you didn't already understand how the business model of MMORPGs works, but I don't think it addresses the issue that a lot of other people bring up: Is it worth it? Warcraft III cost me $60 and has provided me with monthly entertainment since, what... August of last year? Somewhere around eight or nine months. MMORPGs, on the other hand, would require you to pay $60 + $10 per month for seven months to get the same amount of entertainment. Is Everquest or even RO really worth $70 more than Warcraft III, totalling $130 for a single game? Does it even come close to being worth it when about two weeks to a month of that is spent being a pathetic little peasant that gives the higher level players a sense of atmosphere and accomplishment? And it's not as if Warcraft III really stands out, either. I could say the same for Tribes, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, or Starcraft, and many people could say the same about Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Half-Life. These are games that people have played for months or years for $50-$60 and I don't see why games with subscription fees are really so much better that they warrant two or three times as much money (counting unnecessary expansions to get free press for the game).
I guess what I'm really saying is that when articles like this appear, people start to act like MMORPGs aren't whacky and eccentric forms of gaming like buying Steel Battalion or buying a console system just to play ONE SINGLE GAME, and I don't understand that. Normally when people buy a game that costs $120-$200, they're considered sort of obsessed, or at least really hardcore. But when people dump as much money into an MMORPG, everyone's reaction is "Dude, that's just how much it costs. MMORPG developers need to eat, y'know."
Yeah, okay, so that was sort of rantish, but I think I've seen a subscription fee discussion slowly boiling over on this board since the RO beta came out and I just wanted to hear everyone's opinions on the subject.
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| Grave 316th Post
Bronze Customer
 
  
| "Re(2):How the Pay To Play business model came" , posted Wed 7 May 21:58
Eh... some people can get sucked in. Some can't.
I beta tested Asheron's Call in the open betas, the final ones leading up to the game's release, and I had a pretty great time. Mostly because I was playing with friends and for free. I was really impressed with the game's scale and its feel in general, but when I got screwed, I got screwed hard. Things like losing all of my awesome items when dying and never getting them back frustrated me a lot. I decided I didn't want to pay for a game that could make me feel like that on a regular basis as a punishment for, god forbid, exploring somewhere new while unprepared.
Plus, my friends wouldn't be paying either. So we finished our time and quit.
I was in the Anarchy Online closed betas, but my software didn't work. It was fun for a couple of months... bitching about broken software, but since I was under NDA, I couldn't tell anyone what exactly I was bitching about. The next upgrades weren't shipped. They were 500+ MB isos I had to download. On dialup. With no resume. Hoo boy. No thank you.
But yeah, paying a fee for MMORPGs has never appealed to me, but I'm not ruling out the chance that it will someday. The worst case, though, I think, is PSO. When I played PSO on DC for free, it was a lot of fun. I'd play with friends in locked games, which wouldn't keel the NOL hackers out, but by that point, hardly anyone but those people played the game anyway.
Would I pay $10 a month for PSO? Not a chance. If it was an MMORPG with a huge world and lots of new things that the DC version didn't have, sure. If it would be easy to find people of similar level to adventure with online (it may be now, for all I know), maybe. If I had broadband and could use voice chat instead of having to tap out words on the keyboard in my lap between fights, I'd be a lot more interested.
But yeah... the pay to play model is a real hard sell. But obviously some people find it worth it.
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