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."

Comments

Re:If you pay to play, make the game free to buy

[vukv]

everyone seems to fail to see the difference between persistant state online games and multiplayer games... there is a huge difference between them. Online games (EQ, UO, Sgalaxy, etc) develop your character, basically it is another world you play in and people find this extremly interesting while in multiplayer games you play single battles/games and when you turn it off, everything fades away.

There is a huge difference there in level of complexity between servers for multiplayer games and real online games. It actually costs developers to keep all of it up... imagine if all Quake servers were owned and operated by iD software... you think it would be free if they had to pay for bandwith and space for 2000 servers? ;-)

Is 10$ per month too much? not really... you cant really play more than one or two persistant state online games at the same time... even that will take up 4-5 hours of each day or whatever free time you have

Blizzard had it right.

[Restil]

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

Man standing on toilet is high on pot

[Graymalkin]

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.