Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Pay to Play

Posted by michael on from the nickel-a-point dept.

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."

4 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Re:they are gonna try this again. by Mahrin+Skel · · Score: 4, Informative
    Here's what you are missing: EverQuest, Ultima Online, and Lineage: The Bloodpledge (state religion in South Korea) are the highest grossing PC games *ever*. Bigger than Starcraft, bigger than Quake 3, bigger than Myst. That $10/month adds up when the typical player sticks around for more than a year. And you don't have to share the subscription revnue with the retailers and distributors (who typically take 3/4 of the purchase price).

    That's why the industry is suddenly waking up. This is a genuinely stronger business model that *works*. Online games are almost certainly going to be a $1,000,000,000 (that's one *billion*) dollar industry in 2003, after the release of Star Wars Galaxies and The Sims Online. It's already worth hundreds of millions in actual revnues companies are collecting *now*.

    --Dave Rickey
    Designer, Mythic Entertainment

  2. Re:Free games! by Mahrin+Skel · · Score: 3, Informative
    It's been tried, it doesn't seem to work. You need to have a full-price unit on the shelves for people to actually buy. Hell, our piece of the retail sale barely pays for the "free" month, we'd *gladly* just let you download it. People just don't do it in enough numbers to make a viable business model.

    --Dave Rickey
    Designer, Mythic Entertainment

  3. Multiple games, one price by herderofcats · · Score: 2, Informative
    Rather then charging for each game, Skotos is offering multiple games for a single monthly fee.

    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

  4. Concerning server-side games like EQ... by D'Arque+Bishop · · Score: 2, Informative
    When Ultima Online and EverQuest first came out, I too was very leery about paying $10 a month to play a game. In fact, I had sworn never to do so. A few friends of mine finally convinced me to do so, and I now have a high lvl cleric on EQ with intentions to create alt characters. After thinking about it for a while, I can see why $10 a month is reasonable for this kind of game.

    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...