Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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!
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.
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.
Yeah, that's one thing they need to do to be successful--create client software that only works with their pay online service that you can download for free, and a retail version that you pay for that you can play offline, online as a client and/or server, and use their pay service as well. That way the hardcore (or offline) gamer can buy the retail package, while someone who just wants to play the pay online version just has to enter their credit card # and download a file...
They should also have multiple games for a base subscription price. Say a FPS, an RPG, and a strategy game. That kind of selection would attract many more users--especially those that like to play all three types.
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.
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.
The Uplink guys are doing this and succeeding.
Also, you never heard of a MUD? There have been free "MMORPG"s since before the Internet. Someone could easily start with a free MUD, and slowly build it up over time, getting users, and then switch to a pay model.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
... 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.
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).
Don't you just love it when you would like to pay a game like Dark Age of Camelot or some such, and are willing to fork over the $10 a month to play, only to realize that they want you to pay full retail price ($40-$50) to get just the game itself? Even when they throw in a free month of play, I think it's a touch pricey. What I'd prefer to see is games that have a monthly fee to play (especially those that have *no* functionality offline) be sold at a vastly reduced price. $10 for the basic game and then another $10 to play each month would be reasonable. Even if you hated the game, you'd only be out $20 which is about what you pay for budget games anyway. Similarly, retailing at $20 and including a free month of access would work. Again, you're only out $20.
The bottom line is this: if you have a game such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein that has excellent online *and* offline functionality, and online gaming is free via hosting, then you are fully justified in charging $50-$60 for your product to compensate you for your work. But if your game is online only, only charge what you absolutely *must* to get your game into the hands of as many people as possible. Hell, if my primary revenue was to come through the online monthly payments, I'd be encouraging piracy of the baseline ware!
--My purpose set, my will defined. Caress the air, embrace the skies.
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
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 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.