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Pay to Play
nihilist_1137 writes: "Zdnet has a story on how companies are looking at making gamers pay to play online games. It goes over the problem of how to make a game great but yet at the same time appealing to people who pick it up."
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Personally, if I shell out 40$ for a game,
I'm not paying 11.95 or whatever a month, just to be able to play it against anything other than the AI.
Hopefully other servers will come out for games like these, like Opennap for napster
I'd pay to play online... if I didn't need to pay for the game at the store. (Download it, etc).
...I'll procrastinate tomorrow...
c'mon people, if you start charging people to play online people just arent going to play, rule of convenience.
I've been paying $30.00 a month (three accounts) for nearly two years to play EverQuest. Some games are just worth it. EQ would be incredibly boring as a single player game, but as a MMORPG it's unbeatable.
as long as i got my broadband and i'm happy... :-)
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
I've been playing Ultima Online for more than two years now. The game itself is cheap, it's in the bargain bin at most retailers, and it costs $9.95/month to keep an account to play the game. I have two accounts. UO boasts some 300K+ active accounts, and other games like Everquest are fairly popular as well. At first I too was hesitant to shell out a monthly fee - then I thought about it. I can pay 10 bucks to go to a movie and be entertained for 2 hours, or I can pay 10 bucks for unlimited entertainment in a month's time. Screw the movie theater.
May only be a niche market, but pay-for-play is definitely a viable model.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Although I've pretty much grown tired now of online role-playing, I once shelled out some $30(? I don't remember the exact amount any more) per month to play Gemstone III. That is, until I discovered MUDs. There were hundreds of them, they were free, and they were just as much fun. Of course I use Linux now so I wouldn't be able to play Gemstone anyway, but this is just one more example of free software triumphing over pay/subscription-ware.
There are a number of free alternatives of course.
In the beginning, the gamers will make games for the hardcore gamers and only the hardcore gamers will play them.
Then sooner or later, the friends of the hardcore gamers will start to get into it, someone will realise that there's money in the market, and make wildly popular games that will enthrall the hardcore gamers and bring some of the outsiders in as well. (Very early on, this was Doom, later, Diablo.) It will gradually move to a more general-gamer based market where titles are made to appeal to the general gamer en masse and will not attempt to develop gaming as an artform or innovate. This is why Diablo II was the worst day in gaming history.
Eventually, I predict, gaming will become so generalised (and therefore lucrative) and the serious gamers will get pissed and form their own independent development projects. The corporates will laugh and be merry because they are making money and that's what matters to them (as opposed to making good games.)
Sooner or later, the independent developers' games will get noticed by the general gamer and they will start gaining momentum ... soon corporates realise that there is a new source of revenue ... the cycle repeats.
They cost so much money to put together that they're designed only by a corporation.
Corporations are notorious for not understanding what is fun. People at E3 will honestly say they don't know what will be fun, and only make a crap shoot when making games.
Thats because they're made by corporations, duh. Ask the hardcore players what is fun, and then you can start charging for your game.
The only reason MMORPG's of today are successful is because there is nothing else out there...
Can't really jump in the market with a crappy game, and elevate your status over time with revenue like you could in the old days. Today its mainy super compu global corp feeding your material.
God spoke to me
The "department" line for this article presents an interesting concept. Of course it's ridiculous, but I'd be curious to see how players would behave with this pricing model. Would they compete for the lowest score? Would they make their objectives accomplishments that do not score points? Or would they just not give a damn?
Now, I don't play Everquest or UO, mostly because I use a Mac most of the time and they didn't come out for the Mac, but I do play Starcraft and Diablo2 online.
It's my opinion that if you are going to charge the person to play the game, then you should give the game out for free.
If I'm playing a game on-line, then I'm already shelling out for bandwidth, then I have to pay to play...make the game free to aquire.
I've got enough bills the way it is, I don't need multiplayer games to cost money as well.
Bungie's servers for Myth and Myth2 didn't have that many lamers or serious cheats on them, so you can't use the elitism arguement that paying will eliminate losers.
While companies will always find new ways to get money, this one will absolutely fail as long as there are cheaters. The only way I can see to stop cheating is to keep the source locked up, and if that's done then all the great mods will never come about. Things like Threewave and OSP for Q3, and Counter Strike for Half Life are all mods that have improved or changed the original game. So as I see it the tradeoff is either less cheating and no mods, or more cheating and pot luck with the mods. Personally I stopped playing CS because of the cheating, so I don't see how they can turn it into a profitable business. I'm not going to pay $x to get railed by an aimbot or whatever.
You pay, let's say, 50 bucks for a game in a store, or download it online for 50 bucks, and it comes with a year's worth of online playing, and another year would run, say, 25 bucks or something.
Of course a decent authenitcation scheme would be needed I suppose...
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
uproar.com used to(don't know if they still do) pay out cash prizes to winners of the games. Whenever I used to play their bingo game, there would be anywhere from 600 to 1200 players online and the cash prizes ranged from $2 - $15 for winners.
Now the tables have turned and the gamers will have to pay to win instead of win to get cash.
"the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached to it." - Grandpa Simpson
i rember back in the day before they had dsl and cable. when it was games like dukenukem 3d and a few others, quake was in its infacncy and still on if even out at the begining of that.
they had multiplayer onlinegaming avaliable for dukenukem3d and its counterpart games. but you had to pay. i thought the reson you didnt have to pay was cause it didnt take off.
vavle has a pretty good system for keeping people who didnt pay for their copys of halflife from playing online.
if im to pay to play its gonna be a lan party to coverfood and possiblehardware. none of this pay to play on line crap.
no more hosting games prolly just a huge megaserver with megalag someplace far far way.
whats the fun in that..
IMO, Blizzard is one of the best online game producers because of the fact that Battle.net is 100% free after you buy the game. The reason I played Diablo 2 for a year instead of Everquest, Eltima, Asheron's Call, etc. was because it didn't cost me anything more that the 39.95 I spent on the original game. I would never put out for a "connection fee" or what have you just to play the online game.
The future isn't what it used to be.
For example, Ultima Online and Everquest are the only successful games that do this that I know of (I'm sure that there are more). They justify this by adding more game elements and storylines on a continual basis.
Everyone would stop p(l)aying as soon as they stopped adding features and fixing bugs.
I'm just praying that they don't try and and charge for me to play over my LAN. That would make me a very angry man. I can't imagine how cool this will be come 10 years when the only way to play online is to have an account on some server of a company that went out of business. How are you supposed to play online then?
Visit BobtheKing.com it's perhaps the best thing I've ever made to waste your time with.
My main hangup is that I don't know if I'm going to enjoy the game at all. However, if they allowed a trial period, I could make my decision before shelling out the money and then return it to the store if I didn't like it.
Or maybe I should get a job.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I've been playing Planetarion for almost a year and Archmage off and on. Recently both of these web-based games have moved to a p2p model (though Archmage has recently backed down I believe.)
;)
The move to p2p for Planetarion has not happened without alot of groaning however. In the end, though I think they have managed to convince people of the value of the game compared to a relatively minimal fee. The current round getting ready to start is $10 (as low as $6 or $7 if accounts are bought in bulk) for a 3 or 4 month round. Not to mention that PA has extensive and sophisticated external resources, e.g. battle calculatores, alliance sites, etc. The devoted players knew from the beginning they would pay, it was just a matter of minimizing the damage
One of the biggest problems has been the ability for kids without credit cards to find a way to pay. Clearly, many parents are less than willing to support their kids' gaming addiction.
On the otherhand, I play alot of PC-based games, especially Unreal Tournament. P2P for such games would be questionable as much of the online facilities are hosted by the users themselves. However, in the case of the game producer actually providing the facilities, I don't think it's unreasonable to charge a yearly fee for instance.
There is FAR more to 'paying' for games than what many of these closed-minded "Pay me for service" people want to believe.
First of all, they only mentioned MMORPG's and board games! There is no mention about the thousands of servers for FPS, or RPG games. Not only this, but what about the fact that many of these games aren't suited to a massive, central server (or server network). In fact, several servers are fully paid for (including bandwidth) by gamers who set up a clan/team site.
In addition, most of the ISP's in my area (Local ISP's, not the nationwide ones like AT&T or EarthLink) host a large number of game servers-- anybody on the 'net can play games on the server. It's offered as an incentive to use that ISP. (eg. they have a really great server... But you know (because you're a smart gamer and can use tracert/traceroute) that you are picking up an additional 50 ms latency; so for the same price you can use a local ISP with a great game server, and gives you lower ping time.) What's to lose?
Another item many dreamers don't take into account the fact that most online games (Real-Time strategy, FPS, 'Fighting', etc.) are extremely time-sensitive. Unless they plan on having servers in every city of >100k, and have them interconnected with an internal multi-gigabit digital backbone (the cost of which staggers me...), as well as very high bandwidth connections at each node to the internet, they will never achieve a reasonable latency for gameplay. (Believe it or not, tenths of a second count).
If you want a model for online gaming, for nearly every case, just look at how FPS games, and RTS-games operate online. It's community-supported, often with major companies subsidizing it. (Like extra bandwidth at night, etc).
The idea that you can make a profit on all but the most massively-multiplayer games is laughable. Game players aren't completely stupid. They know it's better to gather a bunch of friends, buy a server (and bandwidth), and share the server with the world (hence obtaining more players on the server, making things more interesting), than it is to pay even higher prices to get high latencies, the same game, poorer service, less selection, as well as padding some idiot's wallet.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
... someone is already paying. When you refresh GameSpy and see all those servers, someone is paying for all the hardware and bandwidth. Sometimes people are generous with their resources, be they time or money, but someone is still footing the bill.
Speaking as a former EverQuest Player and a First Person Shooter Fan, the game type will tend to dictate what pricing model is used. FPS shooter servers tend to be fleeting, both in terms of GamePlay and server support. Would such a model work for EverQuest or DAoC? No, of course not.
People who want a persistant gaming experience are gonig to wind up paying for that security and certainity.
I can also see some interesting things happening in the future with Never Winter Nights. I mean, would you pay ten bucks a month if someone wrote a compelling story would you consider paying for access to a private NWN server? I would, if it was good enough. Creativity will be rewarded, I think.
John Carney
Executive Director - QuakeCon 2002
eviljohn@quakecon.org
Less Talk, More Beer.
now that the notorious hits of EverQuest, Ultima Online, and the still-blossoming Dark Ages of Camelot have come to be, Sony (who really picked up the slack from UO and their publishers) and others will, IMO, be releasing all their RPG's like this. Reason being, one person can't really build/admin/keep free from cheaters a server that holds thousands of people playing a MMORPG. I'ts not economically feasible.
This logic is exactly why FPS's like Half-Life, Q3, et al. will always be free, they don't have much of a choice. It doesn't take much for me to scrap together a server that will be able to play de_dust in Counterstrike with 15-20 people connecting. Even with the authentication process that HL has (and it is good), I'm sure there are ways around that and the ability to make a "separate network" of little game servers.
Sell a game in the stores, and allow online play for free. If as a company you excersize due diligence and keep creating new great games, the "lifetime play" for older games will be a non-issue as fewer and fewer users will play the older games to play the new ones. You keep a steady revenue stream from new games. This also keeps you from getting caught in the trap of wanting to milk old games for all eternity. Keeps you competitive.
However, if it gets to the point, where like with quake, I can't host my own server and have people play off of it for free, then we have issues. Blizzard's model (as far as I know) never supported any type of network play (other than local) except through their servers. There were free servers released for some games that permitted it, but the company itself never wanted to lose control of that.
Of course, I think they brought in SOME revenue from banner ads in the waiting rooms. I'm not sure what other software companies are doing.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
will i pay..
they charge I leave.
end of story.
I guess one of my main problems is the cost for us foreigners...
Example: Australia
Our dollar has "softened" steadily on the US$ over the years and is worth about 50 US cents. If we play a $10 per month game we are paying $20.
This is a real pain when you consider Aussie wages are a similar to US wages. But in AU $. Example most permanent employees working in IT are on about 50-70K AU$. High end IT jobs can be up around 100K. From what I can work out US wages seem to be very similar but in US$.
This means it is really costing aussies twice as much to play these things. That's all well and good when you aren't married etc but when you have to justify these costs to a wife $120 for one computer game in a year sounds a lot better than $240.
Play a couple? Forget about it.
Heaven forbid if you lived in New Zealand.
Client should be cheap though. I can't see paying $50, then paying by the month, then possibly not liking the game.
This does not worry me nuch though. There will always be alternatives. Online gamers include people willing to invest in the tech to get the gaming experience.
Games that let people host their own servers will always be popular if only for LAN parties.
Wonder if there is any kind of push from the big ISPs to limit their customers real need for servers....
Blogging because I can...
(inside the boardroom of Game Company X)
Executive 1: Ok, we've got a good pricing plan worked out, and we think we can make some real cash off this, go tell development to throw a game around it so we can ship it next month..
Executive 2: What about this Deer Hunter engine we've been sitting on? Logically, since it sold so well, it should do great online.
Executive 1: Good! Go with it!
(fin)
In short, in order for any business plan like this to work, you have to spend some time making an acual good game, which isn't happening for the most part, and then convince people that it's worth paying to play instead of going with free online play. EQ and company have done well, but I'd rather take Diablo 2 and being able to eat this month..
Appearently they would love to sell us game services online as they have been providing arcade and slot machines in the offline world.
People are used to all sorts of free online games, and thats hard to compete with.
To compete with free you need to have a killer product, remove the free game services, orprovide a near to free game service.
If it is the ladder we need a way of paying for these game services. credit card payments are simply too expensive if the product you are paying for costs less than a dollar.
Managed micropayment therefore seems obvious. To play the game services and use other services, you have an online banking account which is free to use for buyers and cheaper to use for merchants than paypal.
Another problem is the price of the games. Personally I would be compelled to purchase for online gaming services but there will be various game services. Some I only find worth a nickel, other a quarter, others even a dollar a game. The price will depend on the service I am getting.
And this is the problem with the net. Due to the cost of distributing such services over the net it may sometimes not even be sustainable business to offer the current games, large or small, because server equipment and bandwidth simply cost too much to keep alive in order to be able to offer these game services at a reasonable price. And the outcome of this, if sustainability can not be reached = chapter 11. game.DOT.NET|COM flushes down the toilet pipes..
but one day this will be it.
I personally have never played Everquest (I'm very curious but dont wanna get into anything right now, cuz I'm a med student and medical school+any addiction = chiropractor school!), but it seems entirely ignorant that you'd label someone as a loser for paying $30/month for entertainment. Many people, esp on this site, probably make $30 an hour. One hours work for 720 hours fun is a bargain in my book.
:-)
Plus, I believe, Kiss the Spork, that YOU are on a site called "News for NERDS." Go to maximonline and call the above user a nerd, but to do it on a Slashdot message board is throwing stones when you live in a glass house!
I always feel a bit, I don't know, weird, when I play games too much. Like I'm wasting my time. I feel the same way about TV (but at least TV is mainstream enough that everyone is watching too much). Regardless of industry sales, etc., in my age group (OAC... that's grade 13 in Ontario) at least, among MOST people, it is unusual to play for more then 1 hour each day on any console or computer (ICQ is a different story...). If I were to play for more then that (and I usually play for less, all I ever play is Diablo II as I can't stand firstperson shooters, but that's a different story) then I feel kind of like I've wasted a lot of time.
If I were to pay for such a service, then I would be caught, because I would want to use it more to get my money's worth, and then less, because I'm wasting my time.
Other people have brought up good points. All these things I have said really just are me. Even if I could overcome all of that, I would definetely need extra advantages over current systems of online play. The limit of my online play involves Starcraft and Brood war (not anymore) diablo I (not anymore, and even when it was new it was so screwed up from cheats that it was unplayable) and now, Diablo II [wow, I'm quite the Blizzard fan]. You'd need cheat monitoring, and definetly not have to pay for it in the store... that's what the monthly fee is for. That went on too long.
Later
Sgs-Cruz
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
I see the potential of MMRPGs to be the perfect way for me to be able to spend time doing somthing I really enjoy: role playing. The beauty is that in a properly designed game system I could enter and leave the world as my meat-space life permits; even an hour here or there would be worth while.
If the game system were well done, my characters wold go about their daily life whithout me; jobs, leisure, etc. Best would be if I could script their actions while I'm gone and get periodic updates via email or, optionally, some sort of IM system.
Of course, if I were in the middle of an adventure of some sort, I'd best take care that my characters wellfare was provided for; Hiding, backing off to a safer area, or abandoning the current quest until I have more time. I think that would rock all over just saving and restoring when I came back. Hell, that would rock even for a non-multiplayer game; just leave it running in the background all the time.
Having a game system flexible enough to allow for human DMs to participate as well would be an added bonus, of course. The story telling aspect of gaming was always one of my favorite parts. A system where basic NPC behavior could be programmed and most traps and wandering monster type occurances were automagically handled would really free a person up to do some amazing DMinig. I would want the ability to overide any automatic mechanisms though; nothing messes up a well planned adventure than a poorly placed wandering monster encounter! Being able to step in and "possess" any NPC as necessary would be another necessary part of such a system.
Unforch, for this sort of gaiming to be really ideal, and for it to be profitable, it would be accessable to the widest possible audiance. Everquest looks interesting, but I run Linux on all but my wife's machine, which is Win98 right now. Shortly we'll be moving her to an iBook or Powerbook Ti running OSX. That leaves me (and thousands like me) out in the cold.
If it could be done, allowing console gamers into the system would be good as well (though problematic from a user interface POV unless the machine can take a keyboard).
Anyway, to bring this back on topic, if a game system like the one I've drawn a thumbnail sketch of here were available to me today, I'd break out my credit card in a heartbeat.
TTBOMK, though, it's not. So I won't.
I don't have a problem with pay for play, god knows I played Everquest a lot. What I didn't like was paying $70 for the game, and then having to pay per month, whether I was playing or not. I got busy doing some other stuff, and probably would have kept my subscription if it was based on how long I spent playing rather than a flat fee, since then I wouldn't have to pay for months that I didn't play.
I'd like to see a game have a pay by the hour scheme, with a monthly maximum, and a low shelf-price. That way those that only play for a short while don't get screwed.
Even for single player games that you don't play over the network, it would be nice to have such a scheme. Then I wouldn't be so worried about spending all that money on a game that sucked. It would also be an incentive to game companies to make games that don't suck.
lol good one. I'm going to use this in the future.
:)
There are currently some problems with online games, but most people are willing to put up with them due to the fact that they're getting things for free.
The most obvious problem is cheating. Right now, people as a community can harass and ban cheaters to keep them out of servers, but people still manage to cheat. I'm willing to put up with this in an occasional Quake 3 netgame, but I won't be if I'm paying someone to play on servers.
Servers brings up a new issue. If I'm paying to play, I expect a healthy amount of low ping and well populated servers. And I shouldn't have to use any third party program to find the best servers. This is the biggest problem with free games that aren't insanely popular. There aren't very many servers, the few that are out there are slow/high ping, and you often have to use a crappy third party program to hunt them down.
The idea of paying to play any game online besides something like an RPG seems foreign to me, and it will to many other gamers unless the providers can up the standards of online servers greatly.
Anyway, I'm one of the designers who worked on Dark Age of Camelot, a recently released subscription-based OLRPG (which now has revenues exceeding $1.4 million/month and climbing fast). Before that, I had a very minor role on the team that created EverQuest. These games are my obsession, my career, pretty much my Mission in Life (yeah, it's pathetic).
Anyway, there's a lot more going on here than just evil corporations finding a way to extract more money from consumers. Some of the companies involved do think that way, you can tell which ones by the red ink and failed games they produce.
If MMOG's offer no more gameplay than you can currently get from a boxed retail title, they will fail. This was the core problem with Motor City Online, it was not really an MMOG, just a "captive audience" matchmaking service for an internet-playable racing game, the actual game could have been released as a standard boxed title with a GameSpy Lite client, and have been accepted quite happily by the car-crazy crowd that liked the "Need For Speed" and "Test Drive" franchises.
MMOG is only one of the names we apply to these games, there's another that much more accurately reflects what they do: Persistent Simulated Worlds. The monthly fee isn't paying for the game, it's paying the company to safeguard the integrity of the *persistent* world.
The average MMOG player spends 20 hours a *week* playing his game of choice, at a cost around 12 cents an hour. How many forms of entertainment are that cheap? The game is only a focus, what's really happening is an artifical community (there's nothing virtual about it). People have friends, enemies, even romantic relationships (don't ask).
In all truth, it's not the game you're paying for, but the community that forms within it.
--Dave Rickey
Designer, Mythic Entertainment
sql> select e_mail from Customer where first_name = 'Preston' and Games_Played>200
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
the only way i can justify paying to play a game is if the content is worth it. the game has to have a ongoing plot, the world has to be constantly changing. it has to keep you guessing.
in short, not the same game month after month, but dynamic.
that is the ONLY way i will ever again pay for play. period.
sadly in the now flooded mmorpg genre there STILL isnt a game which offers this. every last one of them has a static world with a weak plot (if any)
in short, if you want my money, entertain me. so far ive tried UO, EQ, AC, DAOC, AO, WWIIOL, they all fail miserably on this point, & therefore they hold little value once the novelty of the whole webbyness of it wears off.
Do you remember the online gaming service Kali? I think they're still around, though I can't load kali.net right now. They had a one time fee of $20, and after that you could play pretty much any game capable of IPX network gaming over it. They were marginalized by gaming companies offering free online gaming built in to the game, but if the companies start trying to charge a monthly fee for their service, Kali could make a really big comeback. They may need to change their business model so that you have to pay a couple of bucks to upgrade each new major revision of Kali, but they could probably easily compete with proprietary 1-game networks.
Even if that doesn't succeed, someone will probably make something like Opennap or gnutella for gamers. Once a free service like that comes along, that the companies don't have to pay money to maintain, I don't see why they wouldn't embrace it. Hell, the companies may even surprise us and do it themselves.
BlackGriffen
In the UK BarrysWorld has had a semi-successful p2p system for years - hosting servers for the most popular games and charging for league games, dial up access to lower pings etc. Sadly they went bankrupt last year but were happily bought up by (I think) EB.
;)
As many have pointed out a p2p FPS just isnt going to work because of latency issues - a ping over 50 is considered bad by many FPS players. MMORPGS over come this problem by having high latency tolerant game systems - however that really limits the type of play. Even now that market is starting to stagnate due to the number of poor clone type games being foist onto the market in order to cash in.
project entropia has an interesting slant on all of this - players get the game and play for free but to get the most from the game they have to put real money into a virtual economy - check it out, very nice concept.
Of course the REAL p2p market doesnt exist in the states - people are paying to play games via SMS now ( mobile phone text messages ) and download the games to their phones. Once 3G ( NOT 2.5 ) appears with high powered mobile devices and good quality displays the p2p gaming market is going to EXPLODE!! In fact I've been developing a 3G p2p game for the last 2 years - anyone wnat to through me a few million?
UO was the first, and only game I payed to play online. Granted, they kinda broke their teeth on the online rpg genre and probably got overwhelmed by a lot of gameplay issues that simply didn't come up in smaller scenarios. But the first 6 months I played it, it was a constant lagfest. Every feature of the game that made it worthwhile and playable, they kept getting rid of. They had a broken notoriety system and the few means we had to enforce rules against "good" players that played out of character they broke because a few players would whine.
I finally ended up quitting. I don't know if they ever fixed a lot of the problems or not. I would hope so after 3+ years, but you never can tell.
My point is, they needed a much longer and more thorough beta period to root out some of the big problems, especially with cheating, and get them fixed before releasing it to the paying public, after which you can't simply wipe the world to correct a problem. Then you have them offering silly amnesty policies to known cheaters who had been taking advantage of loopholes for months.
Forget the fact that other than names and landscape, the game had NOTHING to do with the series it was based on. That was the biggest travesty of all. I can see them wanting to appeal to a larger market, but I can assure you practically all the die hard Ultima fans had walked out within a year, when they were most likely the first to purchase the game when it was released, not to mention all those creating guilds years before the game was released.
Tis a shame.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
i have often wished that CS (Cheater-Strike) had a pay-for-play system.
it would seem to me that the only way sometimes to keep people from hacking a game and ruining the experience for others is to make a barrier to entry, ie a monthly charge.
sure it might suck a bit to play that way, but i think even a small monthly fee ($4.99) would go along way. besides requiring a CC to charge the monthly service to, the game makers would have set info for their players: how likely is someone to crash a game server when their CC #, IP, and home address are all linked to their user ID?
oh well, gotta run today and pick up Medal of Honor - my only hopes for a great multi-player shooter that hasn't been hacked.
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
A lot of people have stated the sentiment that they don't want to pay to play online. Or they've said it should all be free, or that they don't like the games. So let's get down to the crux of it:
What WOULD you pay to play online?
What would you be willing to pay for it?
How would you be willing to pay?
_____________
I'll bet / with my Net / I can get / those things yet.
--Dr. Seuss
Well.. here's the thing.
For a game like Quake and it's cousins.. I'll pay for the game itself. I will not pay a fee to play online, because the company itself does not really provide much in the way of servers.
For a game like Everquest, Asheron's Call.. I can see paying the $10/month.. but the box price should be lowered. The game has no value if not played online.. so the server fees make sense.. HOWEVER
I take real issue with how Verant has made it a violation of acceptable use policies to sell items in the game for real cash. That's just plain wrong. We pay them to play.. they shouldn't tell us not to do this; it has nothing directly to do with the game.
In short... I think games that are played solely online should be nothing more than the cost of playing said game online.. perhaps a media fee (20 bucks or whatever) in the store to buy a kit to get set up, or a free download online (or hell, even a couple bucks to pay for bandwdith/severs)
In a perfect world the only charge would be the $50, but I for one don't like the idea of paying $50 up front, and then having to pay monthly fee.. These game companies should adopt the aol model and give the software away for free. It'll give them a much broader audience to work with.
www.lonseidman.com
How about this: give the game itself away, letting players start out with a basic character/resource level for free. If players want, they could buy neat toys (armor, weapons, etc) from game-run "stores" with real money, but for the sake of play balancing the cost should be high relative to acquiring them the hard way, much like the "Build Now" button in Civ/Alpha Centauri/etc. Being able to buy the game's currency with real money is another strategy for games with appropriately elaborate economic models (Everquest)... actually, that's the simplest way of doing things in general, since it minimizes real-world currency transactions (overhead). The game should have an internal eBay-like auction market for items/currency trading, with the game taking an appropriate commission (3-5%). Just like the real world, money would be a substitute for time.
PayPal could have fun with this.
This should include free online gaming. If it didn't I wouldn't buy it.
For me to pay $9.95 a month I would want:
1)guarenteed 24/7 stable servers
2)only 100 ping
3)always have a spot on server, no waiting or have reserved times like when you reserve a raquetball court.
Current they offer The Eternal City -- a romanesque RPG game, Castle Marrach -- a high-fantasy social game popular with women, and Galactice Emperor -- a weekly political game to become the Galactic Emperor.
They also have a number of other games announced to come out later in the year, including "Lovecraft Country" and "Paranoia".
The also have an active articles section with columns by MMPORPG pundit Jessica Mulligan, MUD pioneer Richard Bartle, and many others. If you are an online game designer there are many great articles here!
-- Herder of Cats
anybody remember that service? the rpg (whatever it was called) was loads of fun.
If you use words like "paki" we don't care whether you have a PhD or not, you can fuck off.
A British Citizen
AC has been 20$ with 1 month pre-paid for most of its life.
Here's a text-based MUD in it's 12th (I think) year of development. They pioneered some stuff the corporate RPG's are just getting into, like dynamic map generation and a 100% user-governed economy (they've even halted inflation for 2 years. Ha!). It is 100% user funded. Their revenue model? They sell in-game items that can only be purchased. Some items are just very hard to obtain in the game; others can only be purchased by sending money to the game. These items can be used to attack and kill other players... Some of these items expire, others last forever.
What else could be funded by virtual item sales? I don't know. But I don't think it's limited to games.
what's important is a flat fee for unlimited gameplay. i don't mind paying one fee and playing as long as i like.
if it ever gets to be pay by the hour or some other rediculous payment method, that's when i'll bitch and moan.
Nothing wrong with spending $30/month on entertainment, but three seperate accounts? Isn't one enough?
I'm not going to buy a game, then pay a monthly fee to play with other people online. What would be viable would be buying the game, playing for free forever. But continue to expand the universe. If I want to travel into another part of the universe, then I have to buy an expansion pack.
If I want "stuff" for my character, then I need to buy it... No big rip offs either - make it reasonable, and I'll keep buying it. Hell, if you have other games that are similar in nature - then guess what? I'm going to buy those too...
But telling people, OH, you have to buy this, then pay monthly... is a complete turn-off. Getting me to buy something, and use it online for free will cause me to drag my friends and their friends and so on into the game - each buying a copy so they can get a valid character (and if it's cheap enuf, then piracy/hacking will be low). We'll buy stuff for the chars online, maybe pay some small fee to trade items amongst the chars, etc... Keep it simple, and cheap and I'll go for it...
Make it complex, prohibited, or expensive and I'll just set up my own server, hack the shit out of it, and pirate it to everyone I know...
Now I'm sure that EQ and others attract their share of hacks and lamerz that act well below their age. But the $10/mo probably goes a long ways toward keeping that number down.
Bleh!
Unlike games like Quake 3 Arena, Counterstrike, Unreal Tournament, and even Starcraft or Diablo II (which despite the use of battle.net, play games peer-to-peer), all of the servers are hosted by Sony themselves, along with all character information. This article should give an idea of how many servers this requires. (For those who don't want to read the article, it says that it takes close to 1400 computers to run the 41 different game "servers".) Also take into account each server has anywhere from ten to thirty thousand people at any given time, and you're looking at a hell of a lot of needed bandwidth. Add into that paying gamemasters, guides, tech support staff, and maintaining those 1400 machines, and you've got one heck of a cash drain.
Would I pay per month for a peer-to-peer game like Quake? No. However, for a server-side-run game like EQ, $10 a month doesn't seem like a heck of a lot of money, especially considering the resources needed for such an endeavour.
Just my $.02...
If there weren't corporate giants funding massive man operations, little guys would compete against themselves. Eventually the little guys who were smarter and more successful would win out against the competition. We'd then have the best of the best game designers at the top. Since there are big corporate entities out there, they can slap together something 50% of what is desired, rush to market and then make it harder for the little guy.
Standard slashdot readers can understand that the products Microsoft releases are far from the best, but no one can compete so Microsoft dictates what comes next. Same holds true for MMORPG's.
When I say MMORPGS sell because there's nothing else out there, I mean to say that since they're so expensive to make only a few shots are made at them.
People don't understand what is fun, so the natural process of dumb execs making games and evolution saying what is right doesn't apply.
Less games in market = less to choose from.
Thusly MMORPG's don't get the evolution of quality they should in the current buisness model.
God spoke to me
This article was priceless. I especially liked thinly disguised
four-paragraph ad for the "Microsoft Zone" built-in, and the other
"AOL should shut up because IE is better than Mozilla, and they should
have put the browser into the OS and I am the ultimate Microsoft
shill" editorial posted while the talkback feature is conveniently
disabled, but that's another thread.
Here's a gem:
"Analysts were more skeptical."
No kidding. Really? Gee, what *are* analysts if they
aren't skeptical? Don't these people get paid huge amounts of
money to say "it'll never work?" Easy to be skeptical of everything
they see; their paychecks show up every two weeks as long as they go
to their meetings.
These are the kinds of people that generate the loudest chorus of
"more more more" in the public marketplace. They CANNOT be impressed
by anything except an all-out #1 tidal wave of profits from a
never-before-seen glitzy all-sizzle "innovative" product. Everything
else (and I mean EVERYTHING else) makes them "skeptical."
None of these people have *ever* had to actually run a business or
build anything before, and they haven't the foggiest idea of the
incredible amount of effort it takes to build a product and bring it
to market. Its disgusting to watch these people line up to say
"so what?" to every new idea.
This habitual cynicism absolutely sickens me.
The snap-180 that takes place when the topic is MMORPGs and not Loki ports, online comics
or pay-per-view DVDs.
"People will never pay for $PRODUCT"
"There will never be a market for $PRODUCT"
Hundreds of comments echoed these and other statements, and the message was clear:
"there will never be a viable revenue model for this, so give up and quit trying to
make money"
Yet, now all of a sudden we get "pay for play is definitely viable" and "I have fourteen
accounts already!! Where's my credit card? I want another!!"
What changed? What was the subscription to online comics? $12/year or something?
This is ten times that amount.
The dream of every revenue-ambitious company is to connect a clock to the cash register
so the bell rings every 30 days or whatever, and the ceiling opens with a new deluge
of cash. Then the products don't have to be of any particular quality, because the
likelihood of next month's paycheck arriving is proportional only to the unwillingness
of people to exert the effort to cancel their account.
So if the average customer stays signed up for 18 months at $9.95 per, every box sold
becomes a $230 profit bonanza with upside instead of a $50 one-time sale with a
0.8% margin.
No wonder the economics of the retail game market are broken.
what made the wntire quake series a massive smash was that you could play your buddies ,fello Spazs, whatever online for FREE.. I dont have topay someone, or give up my personal information via WON (who can disappear at any time and make all those games worthless) and play. If you had to pay $9.95 a month to play online with quakeI,II,III it would have been a dud. The draw of Q3 is to have an insane fragfest in a rocket arena that is too small for the 18 players. it's fricking nuts.... but it's also a blast. I gotta pay to play?? well then I dont buy. I pay my entrance to lan parties. I also pay for other gaming items and services. if anyone tried to force me to pay then they lose. entice me to play and I'll check it out. Pay for play will work if you give meawesome ping times and very low latency. try to make me pay for a simple 10 person fragfest? nope. and that is asking to be cracked and havethecrack spread throughtout the internet.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
To cheating.
They do the same thing with ultima online and as far as I know you can report a cheater and get their account terminated.
This might be good for cheating since there will now be a central place to report cheating.
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Why game makers need to charge a fee to play their games: nothing is free. While this seems like an obvious statement it doesn't seem many slashdotters get it. Playing Quake or CS online doesn't cost a whole lot. Severs run by [whoever] are as a relay server giving a central hub which lets people with the game get together and play the game. Tons of of bandwidth and equipment isn't required on the vendor's end because they don't actually host the games. Said bandwidth and equipment is the onus of the clients playing their P2P game. MMORPGs however are the hosts of the game and the users are merely clients. Thus the onus of equipment and bandwidth falls entirely on them. They need X equipment to support Y users which costs Z money. No matter how efficiently you get the network design down you've always got Z cost. This cost only goes up as the number of users increases.
Why I won't pay to play a game online: it isn't because I feel a game publisher owes me something, I just don't feel that I ought to spending both time and money on a game. Subscription services I get a decent amount of use from I will obviously pay for but a video game which only eats up my time I'm not going to throw money at. Some people of course will throw money at them yet not at something like cable TV. Whatever floats your boat. However with the whole persistant environment thing you end up investing a fair chunk of change into the service. If the game employs an economy where virtual items have a real monetary value what sort of security guarantee do I have that my investment is going to be secure? The game would have to be effectively unhackable so some joker couldn't hack himself The Armor of Mostest Rareness and sell it on eBay for ten grand. I also don't want to invest hundreds of dollars into building up a character only to be PK'ed by some jackass who got a lucky shot. Hell I don't want to invest hundreds of dollars (hundreds of dollars is easy if you've been playing for a couple years paying upwards of 10$ a month) into a character that gets bitten by a rabid squirrel and dies.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I suggest everyone take up Baduk(Go in japanese). It will take a life time or two to master it and it's cheap. Internet Go Server(IGS) is free for the most of the world, and you only need a $25 book to get started. IGC(=clinet) can be purchased or you can get a free version. No more games to buy. No monthly fee. Every once in awhile you can even watch the pro torney on internet TV as well.
I know people who pay alot more than $30/month for their cable/satelite + premium channels, so $30/month for a game isn't that bad.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
The quote was from Milo Cooper, the modeller for Everquest. He did an obviously short-lived "Ask Milo" column on Everlore.
"Shut up and pay me your $10 a month, little man. My Porsche needs some performance upgrades."
Yeah, I know. But why would he need three accounts?
I've never played UO, but I played Everquest for a year and eventually opened a second account. The reasons? Well I had two characters, one of which was a cleric. When you die in Everquest you lose experience which, at higher levels, can take hours (of mindnumbing exp groups) to regain. Clerics get a line of spells that can be cast on a corpse that will restore to the player a percentage of the experience lost (50%/90%/96% depending on the level of the spell). Now if I die with my other character, I can't get my cleric on to ressurrect me because that would require both characters to be online. So I fought it worth it to spend an extra $10/month to put my cleric on a second account to save myself hours of experience. So there's one reason to have more than one account.
Game makers are getting enough money as is. If their game is really good enough, then people will buy it. A new game will cost $50. I don't think people will be willing to pay much more than that for a single game. I can rerely afford the $50. Only one good thing can come out of this and that is it will help me loose my addiction to computer games.
Are you telling me that you don't see the connection between government and laughing at people? - Interviewer
WWII Online was originally a fiasco in that they really released a beta not a functioning game. However they have fixed it up and right now it is very playable. What's very unique about WWIIOL is the degree to which the developers are taking direction from the user, and will even show up in the middle of games to talk and play. From a business perspective they have to be breaking even or losing money. The value in the company now is the code that could be repurposed to some other kind of FPS game. An urban car wars game comes to mind. I would gladly pay up to $15/month for this service. But even at $20 the entertainment value is hard to beat. You just can't get tanks shooting at planes that shoot at infantry that hide behind bushes, all run by players not AI, and everyone is realistically squishy vulnerable. Yeah I'll pay. In a more general sense the ultimate online game would be the IRC community rendered as a virtual world. Folks build their holodeck program/chat rooms and invite them in. The community is the message.
Pay-per-play is actually a better idea than Microsoft's monthly subscription. As it is, gamers generally do, and always will pay for games on a regular basis. You can only play a game for so long and you get sick of it, then you buy another.
My roomate has about eight games for his PS2 that he's bought and kept over the last year and a half. That's like $25/month. For people like that, a $30/month fee that would allow you to play any game you want, whenever you want would be great. Want to play a couple of rounds of GT3? Download and play. Want to try out the new NFL2003? Go ahead. The stores save money on packaging, gamers get more game for less $$ and more control of the content.
This will never happen, though, because it prevents shitty companies from marketing the hell out of shitty games and convincing people to fork over their $$ for a lousy game. Most are too lazy to return it and the game company makes an easy buck.
-Erik
I am sure mr.carmack will like my praise when it comes to marketing a product in a moral fashion. The pay for play system is for suckers. If you wanted to be raped for your money, be my guest it is just a stupid idea that benefits nobody but the game developer. I believe that with 3d there is still yet much work to be done in developing standards. We've already made one with quake, host your own server and it's tonnes of fun. There are other methods for massively parallell computing environments for games like everquest which could work just as good as having a multi-million dollar mainframe host it. With the host your own server you get much more diversity and much more availability. Quake also set the standard for mods, an impossibility with everquest! That is why I know ID software has charted a course that puts them outside of this type of marketing, and rightfully so, I am disgusted with any company that resorts to such methods. I agree with the competition aspect of things, and that there wouldn't be as much of it if the industry widely adopts this format. The problem is, there may be too many suckers out there and they may just outnumber us smart folk. Yes the interactivity of the environment is increased, but perhaps if I could talk with mr. carmack we could throw around ideas in regards to doing the same thing without the P4P marketing system. So what-->when a company decides that supporting an old game is too expensive they just pull the plug on us?
The thing that I find most offensive is the fact that these business's have the gall to charge you for the game in the first place. Take everquest. I read the reviews, thought it looked ok, but then didn't notice that it was a monthly service thing because of the obscure warning on the box, written finer than their damn normal legal disclaimer print. How annoying. Many people bought that game because they heard good things only to have problems taking it back after opening it and attempting to run it when it won't without handing over a credit card number.
Geez---games are more for kids anyways, how many of them do you suppose have credit cards? Only the big kids do, and this one sure the hell ain't paying 1 red cent for P4P type models because the more we support them, the more prevalent they will become.
They are the newest scourge of the industry, the whole lot of them should be boycotted.
There are other more creative ways for building up extra money without forcing people to send their CC numbers online, without making them pay sh*t. I have an idea, it has enormous profit potential, probably more than a measly $20 a month per player, which I am not going to freely disclose here. LOL. If anybody wants it they will have to prove to me who they are, make some sort of agreement to not use it without cutting me in on a piece of the action, and then they can have it. Anything short of carmack himself emailing me will not illicit that information (in fact even he would have to call me direct anyways because email communications are by far too easily faked and email servers to insecure and easily hacked). I am a problem solver, I know what problems and and I can usually figure out how to fix them. (or a classical term for me would be "tinkerer"). I need to be as I am a web-designer/computer programmer. Sure I don't know everything but I do have a solid grasp and understanding of how things work (I repair busted computer hardware, I got my dvd-burner for free that way, it was sitting in the junk pile at a computer parts distributor's warehouse, and yes indeed it was broken but I fixed it...lol). In fact I can even go off on a rant and tell you how windows and even the internet itself is obselete and cluttered with useless formats that only serve to convolute things and make people with jobs like mine have to be a freakin rocket scientist(or jack of all trades). I'm telling you everwhere I look in computer software I see less and less innovation as these companies keep milking us, another compliment for carmack was that the curved surface support (model tesselisation, which is something that was already thought of long before there was computer hardware that could actually do this!) along with the shader support in quake 3 was THE MOST IMPRESSIVE advancement I've seen in games. And while I gotta give props to the unreal developers for their excellent visual quality (and the water algorithm was sharp!), quake 3's improvements even beat that out because curved surfaces and shaders are so damn nice. It will be interesting to see the unreal 2 engine, as well as the quake 4 engine, it should be a pretty heated battle and I wish john the best in "beating the piss out of unreal" take 2. LOL Anybody here still play quake 2? I need more victims to try out. MUHAHAHAHA! Look for me if you do--I play OSP tourney alot on instagib servers. {XTO}Rage