Slashdot Mirror
Gamespot Goes to Subscription Model
-PS-Sangloth writes "Gamespot, arguably the best video gaming website will expand in July to a pay service(Gamespot Complete). It seems that while review scores will be free, the actual reviews for new PC games will cease to be available to non-payers 7 days after the review was written. This is a real pity, I suspect many PC Gamers, like me, don't have credit cards(or cash), and Gamespot has good, hard, objective reviews. Read what they said at
Gamespot Complete."
If you can't afford a couple bucks a month, how can you afford spending $40/50 a month on new PC games?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If this progresses, I can see broadband sales suffer. The only reason I got broadband in the first place was because of bandwidth intesive sites (like Gamespot's streaming video, massive MP3 downloads). If all the big-bandwidth things go "pay" then there'll be little reason to pay thru the nose for a breadband connection.
I'm already paying enough for broadband service; I can't justify the expense of paying for content.
Alot of gamers are in college or below, and have no money. I make 6$ an hour, there is no way I would even spend 2$ a month on this subscription service. And I am sure that 99.99% of others agree with me on that. Is that .01% of people who actually pay going to make them more money than the 100% of people that would otherwise just deal with the ads?
If gamespot charges, now I will just go somewhere else. Until it is a proprietary service, and gamespot only offers it, will I pay. And I still probably won't pay either! This is just like fileplanet. Either pay 50$ a year, or wait in line for an hour. I just run an internet search on the file and get it elsewhere, its not like they are the only ones with it.
Use all have to recognise the difference between buying a subscription and a tangible product. With the subscription you have fun for that year or whatever and then thats it, games over. Buying a game for $40 gives you the pleasure of playing that game ... forever. And don't give me crap about once you beat the game the fun's over, if you are selective the fun never stops. Good examples of old games still very playable would be Starcraft, Baldur's Gate, Diablo2, and others.
:). As a final point I just reinstalled X-Wing after like a year of not playing it. (This time I will beat it!)
Heck, Diablo 1 is still a great game to pop on a zip disc to play on a Uni computer when all you have is a spare second, just install it on the zip, crack it and truck it around
Paying $40-$50 on a great game is not a problem when you know you will be enjoying it for years to come. Paying $24 to read reviews that you can read elsewhere? Unless you have a great income, and personally love Gamespot, I would say the answer is a hearty NO.
sigh... It's almost to the point where the comments can be written with only the headline.
:)
Myths:
1. Nobody will pay for content
2. People don't trust on-line transactions
3. "I'll never pay for anything on-line"
4. I don't have a credit card therefore I can't buy anything on-line
Colloquialisms for "pay" that ALWAYS replace the word "pay" when describing an actual transaction of less than $100:
1. Plunk down
2. Shell out
3. Fork over
Example: "Before I [colloquialism] [$amount] I want [impossible amount of value]"
The reality is that the economy of the Internet will include many billions of dollars of purchases, and that these purchases not only will happen but are happening already. If people want to have any influence on this, then they HAVE TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS ECONOMY. "Vote with your dollars" appears in almost every group of comments. Fine. Everyone should not abstain when it comes to electronic commerce.
The Internet costs money. It always has, and it always will. It was never, is not and will never be free as in soda.
These articles are almost always on the same page with "Quake|Everquest|Neverwinter LXVII Almost Here!" and "Will E-books work?" articles, both of which routinely contain at least 200 comments with something along the lines of "Ooooh GIMME! GIMME! GIMME!" and the electronic equivalent of waving a handful of cash in the air.
The truth:
1. Free on-line content is only free if your time is worth nothing.
2. Even on the Internet, you get what you pay for.
The Internet is not free. There has always been a cost to get access to the Internet, and there has always been a cost to run a server on the Internet. These costs can only be donated up to a point (and usually are, and then some).
If people won't click and then buy from ads, then the sites go subscription. That's the way it is. It *cannot* work any other way, because the site operators and ISPs can't afford it.
It's amazing. All of these free sites have been giving away millions of dollars worth of bandwidth and information for years, and nobody ever said "hey, thanks." Now that they want to pay their own bills, it's "WE'LL NEVER PAY!! NYAAAAHHH!!!!"
sigh...
The way I see it, there are only 3 viable Internet business models. They are:
1. Advertising. Advertising works only if there are enough advertisers paying you to advertise on your site vs. what your costs are in bandwidth, colocs, etc. With a decline in advertising spending across the board for ALL media, Internet advertising has taken a hit, especially with the dot.com bust.
2. Subscriptions. Obviously, charge your users for the use of the bandwidth and server storage. You have to charge enough to cover your costs plus profit, but not too much that the market won't bear it. A year or two ago, the answer to what the market would bear would have been close to zero. It's starting to change now... people are realizing that yes, you have to pay for certain kinds of content, or it simply won't be available at all...
3. Sell stuff on your site. You basically use the info on your site as a means to entice your users to buy your products. For a site like Gamespot or Slashdot, it would be very hard to maintain objectivity and credibility in their journalism, since they'd basically be representing a product.
And really...that's it... in the end, I'd rather PAY for a service rather than have the site sell a product and hurt the integrity of their information.
My journal has hot
Having read through the information on their site, I think that's probably the best subscription model I've seen launched so far. The balance between "what you'll get for free" and "what you'll have to pay for" seems pretty much spot on, and by keeping ALL of their new content (with the exception of downloads and video streams) free to view for seven days there will still be plenty of reasons to visit their site without a subscription (and for new subscribers to see why they should sign up).
The price is right too - $25 a year or $5 a month allows dedicated fans to make a big saving but still lets new users try things out for a month or two before making a bigger commitment.
Provided they get their payment model right (there need to be alternatives to paying my credit card) I reckon they could be on to a winner. That said, I probably won't be signing up but that's because I hardly ever visit gamespot as it is. Hopefully GameSpot fans will react differently.
I think there is a fourth viable business model. I click on a page with content, and a dialog box comes up: "The charge for this page is $.10. Choose an option: Pay via PayPal. Pay via Amazon. Add a new payment service. Do not view this page."
The third option connects to some (possible user selectable) directory of payment services, where the user can communicate with various services and register, thus adding the service to the dialog box in the future. That's how the first two options would have gotten there, or they would have been installed by the PC or system seller.
Clicking on the dialog box is all that is necessary to authorize payment. All other details have been dealt with previously in registration with the payment service, so web surfing is still fast.
Small payments would be economical once the infrastructure is there. Software should give the user additional control and convenience. For example, the user could authorize payment of the next 100 charges of $.10 or less at GameSpot, so their software wouldn't bother them with a dialog box for a while, but spending wouldn't get out of control without them being reminded.
Content providers would need to give the user some indication of what they would be receiving, to entice users to pay. E.g., GameSpot could show the first few paragraphs of a review, with a for-fee link to the whole review.
My experience with GameSpot has been that a) reader review scores of a game have been more accurate than the score given by a professional game reviewer, since most of us aren't as hung up on minor details if a game plays well, and b) most all of the salient points of the official reviews are repeated many times in the reader reviews.
I know that *I* won't now or ever be sending any money GameSpot's way. As others have said, the content is available free on a bazillion other sites, so why pay?
Not to mention that this is turning into a general trend on the internet, paying for content that was previously free. Just yesterday it was announced that a game I've been playing for free over the internet for the past couple of years is going back to a subscription model. I won't be paying, because there's just too many other good games out there that are free (and, frankly, more important things I really should be doing with my time, like finishing up my master's degree, not spending untold hours on a game).
Plus, they say the GameSpot cost is only $4.95/month. Slashdot is roughly $5/month. Salon premium, $6/month. On and on. When they say "it's only $5," that doesn't account for every other site that you visit wanting your $5, too. It adds up. I won't be paying for any content, because I believe in the essential "free-ness" of the internet (which I'm already paying $25/month to access). There's too many folks out there who would like to be competition for these sites that are willing to do it at no charge.