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Ultima Online Increases Monthly Subscription Rate
Thanks to Blues News for pointing out an announcement from Origin/EA that Ultima Online's monthly subscription rate will increase to $12.95, though you can still buy 6-month prepaid packages for the previous rate of $9.99 per month. We covered Sony's flat-rate MMO subscription a few days ago, and it'll be interesting to see if EA would consider doing similarly for their properties, which would include Earth And Beyond and The Sims Online. But does Ultima Online still have certain charms that other MMORPGs can't offer?
Remember when they increased their prices from $0 to $9.95 a month?
The plan was
1. Sell games promising online play
2. Let people play for free for a while
3. Not make enough money
4. Start charging monthly fee
5. 95% of players don't pay
6. Other 5% don't pay as soon as they figure there's nobody left to play with
7. No need to support the servers any more
8. Profit!
If that's not asking for a class action lawsuit, I don't know what is.
According to the Wine App Compatibility database it works fine.
Does UO has something that other mmorpg dont have? A well balanced craft system. It makes all the difference seriously.
:)
There's nothing more fun than testing out on monsters your new armor suite and grandmaster sword.
You completely ignored the initial development cost which can be said to be paid for by selling the boxed copy.
Not nececarily. I know it takes money to develop, but the person who buys, plays thier month, and quits is also getting stiffed. They can't DO anything with that box without the fee. Its a pretty high bar to entry. IMHO, it would be smarter to roll the initial cost, and the cost of any expansions into the monthly cost. I'd pay $15 a mo or something w/o box cost. Thats $15 first month (no longer free) + $3*11 = $48 in the first year. Almost perfect.
The telco's for example know better than to pull a stunt like this. I know of few if any DSL providers that stick you with the full modemn cost (somewhere ~$250), and most have constant 'special promotions' that include a 'free' modemn. The cost of this comes back to them in the monthly fees.
I think that paying $50 for a box, that lasts only 1 month before becoming fairly useless on its own is a bit of a ripoff. They need a better buisness model.
I played AC on both Thistledown and Darktide, though mostly on TD. On DT everyone is trying to kill everyone else all the time and I found very little role-playing. It was more like Quake than an RPG. If memory serves me correctly, when I first made a DT character I was attacked before I ever got spawned in.
I haven't forgotten what UO was like in the bad old days, when solos would get killed just for being solos. That's why I switched to AC in the first place, because I thought I wanted a no PvP game. What I found out is that no PvP is more annoying because the punks and trolls have no concequences, which just makes them bolder.
In the years I played AC, UO changed and grew. As another poster said, they put in a really great craft system. They fixed some of the problems in the acquisition of gold, so I didn't have to "work" eight hours at tailoring or whatever so I could adventure for a hour. But especially they put in the "new lands" and made it so there were several grades of protection for characters, from guarded zones where attacking another character means certain death, to wild lands where there is no law but might makes right.
It's not that I want to just randomly kill people, but I want the choice. Some people just can't learn manners except at the sharp end of a sword.
Kelerain wrote:
> The telco's for example know better than to pull a stunt like this. I know of few if any
> DSL providers that stick you with the full modemn cost (somewhere ~$250), and most have
> constant 'special promotions' that include a 'free' modemn. The cost of this comes back
> to them in the monthly fees.
Actually, it turns out there are good economic reasons to have up-front box costs that has little to do with profits from those boxes.
What the online game companies have discovered is that you have to get the player to play long enough to become hooked into the game. They have found that the up-front cost forces the player to commit to that first "free" month so that they will overcome the steep learning curve.
Thus online games companies that have allowed you to download the clients for free have a much more difficult time getting people to play long enough to see if they like the game.
-- Herder of Cats