Consoles Sluggish To Get Online In Europe

Thanks to Evil Avatar for pointing to a Reuters article discussing the relatively slowly developing online console gaming market in Europe. According to the article, "Since launching in mid-March, [Microsoft] has signed up to Xbox Live 50,000 European gamers across much of Western Europe." As a comparison, "Microsoft and Sony Corp have.. [signed up] over one million subscribers between them in the U.S. since launching services in the second half of 2002." Although it's early days for Europe, will the many separate markets/countries and varying broadband penetration help or hinder the big console manufacturers?

Comments

Phone System

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it has to do with most of europe having per-minute phone charges?

Re:Phone System

[Sebadude]

It most likely has more to do with broadband penetration as the poster suggests.

The cost of a high-speed connection is generally much higher in Europe than in North America, and if a lot of people can justify these costs for their professional needs, the number of people who will be willing to spend that much money for such a restricted form of gaming (relatively speaking... when you compare to online gaming on PC) is probably very low.

It's not the console, it's broadband access

[Torgo's Pizza]

If you look at how many people have broadband in Europe as compared to the US or Japan, that would explain a lot. It's too expensive for what you get. Sheesh, it's even worse in Oz with the monopoly situation there.

Re:It's not the console, it's broadband access

[PainKilleR-CE]

Well of course you're also paying money so the company can profit. That's stating the obvious. My point was that the cash paid for your original purchase of the game goes towards the development costs and not server maintanence.

My point was that at some point ALL of the money is going towards profit and/or server maintenance, if the game does well. If the game doesn't do well, then chances are that they'll never recover the costs. Of course, it all depends on how well their initial sales go. However, if a game is one (such as Star Wars Galaxies) that is predicted to do well in initial sales, there's really no reason to pay $50 up front for the game. I can understand that up front costs are going to have to be paid at some level for the development and setup costs, but the level of profit that's coming in on these games far surpasses the cost of maintenance or development, when they can manage to bring together a certain number of subscribers.

The idea that any company needs both the initial $50 and a subscription rate from $10-15/month to support one of these games when other companies are doing something similar (though obviously not quite the same level) simply by delivering a new game every couple of years and charging no monthly rate implies that the initial price for MMO games could be dropped to a lower point if the company can deliver a solid product.

Of course, the one company that everyone likes to point to is Blizzard, and it's likely that they'll fund most of Battle.net's continued growth and development through WoW if it's a successful product.

I'm not trying to say that companies should not make a profit, I'm simply trying to point out that when people complain about the prices for these games, they're making a very legitimate point. Companies that can create and maintain very successful MMO games will continue to use this pricing, and even increase the subscription costs, so long as they don't feel they're losing a significant number of subscribers and/or initial buyers (though in reality the subscribers will always be more important than initial buyers once the product has had a successful launch), because within 4 months' time they can bring in the same amount (or more, since shipping, packagining, and such costs don't figure into subscription rates, though billing does) that another company would have to ship 2 fairly successful games to bring in.

People simply need to adjust their arguments in favour of these pricing schemes if they really want a solid place to work from. Frankly, whatever justifications are brought forward, regardless of how good they are, won't make me pay full price for one of these games until I see something that truly looks interesting and gets good reviews of it's actual launch (rather than reviews of the betas, I want to know how well the game handles hundreds of thousands of people hitting their registration servers on day one and hitting the game servers 15 minutes later, if they aren't prepared for that properly, they're going to be playing catch-up for at least 3 months). Very few of these games (even the most popular of them) have had solid launches, and while that could be excused with the early games (UO, EQ, etc), the ones that have launched in the last year or two, as well as those that will be launching in the future, really have no excuse until we start to see even larger numbers willing to pay this kind of money to play these games. Who knows, maybe Star Wars Galaxies will bring that kind of audience, but I haven't seen that kind of ground-level hype for the game yet.