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

The pay-for-play concept works

[ShaunC]

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

It's a cyclical process

[Jucius Maximus]

When you try to bridge the gap between the casual and the serious gamer, a cyclical process will ensue:

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.

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

Rest Assured...

[EvilJohn]

... 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

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

My Porsche Needs Performance Upgrades

[Mahrin Skel]

Just FYI, the title of this post is an inside joke, I'm not sure how many of you will understand the source. Just rest assured I mean it in fun.

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

Re:they are gonna try this again.

[Mahrin Skel]

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

Re:Free games!

[Mahrin Skel]

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

Semi-real-world business model

[Brian Stretch]

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.

What an article

[The Cat]

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.

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.