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

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.

I don't think there's *any* service here in Oz

[Kris_J]

Remember that earlier article about slow boardband pickup in Australia? Well, because of it on-line gaming on the whole is pretty quiet here. As far as I know, since the Dreamcast on-line experience was ballsed-up so badly, no one has dared try again with consoles.

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.

Credit cards

[SmallFurryCreature]

In Holland at least credit cards are not nearly as widespread as they seem to be in the US. We have an excellent free debit card system in place. Of course this cannot be used with any of the online style systems (games or consoles). They all require a credit card. I suppose a simple bank tranfer (cheap safe and secure) is to difficult by them.

Why pay for a credit card then pay intrest when you can get better service (protection against theft) for free?

As usual, you Americans have no idea of Europe...

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason, that console online gaming is slower here in Europe has nothing to do with higher prices for broadband (which is wrong anyway) or fragmented markets. The main reason is, that Germany (the next largest market for games/software after US and Japan) is very PC centered and people play online on their Computers instead of Consoles. Consoles are still considered toys in Germany (though I prefer them for some games) and neraly everyone has a private PC that has a fast videocard and fast cpu (much more than in the US for example). People have no need to play online on their consoles since they consider PCs superior for this and usually have one or two PCs already.

creditcards, creditcrards, creditcards...

[Vincman]

Having worked for an online retailer for quite some time, I know that the average European does not use or have a creditcard. For example, when ordering at Amazon.de (Germany), you can pay via bank-transfer, which is much more common in Germany, than paying by credicard. Yet X-Box (the only system I can speak for) requires a creditcard to connect to it's Live-system.
Broadband is pretty widespread, and not too expensive either, is not as relevant a factor as this.

UK Broadband users ripped off

[Oakey]

It's all very well saying broadband is fast and cheap in Sweden, we all know that. It's the p2p warez capital of the world. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, broadband uptake IS slow because of cost. In the UK I pay £50 (USD$83) for a 2Mbit cable connection. My download is great, i regularly get around 300k/sec+ but my upload is capped at 30k/sec. There's no bandwidth limits though (as of yet). We get screwed. Who knows why, we just do. Man, I'd love to be like Sweden and have 26Mbit both directions for even less than I pay now. Shame it will never happen.