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Planned Obsolescence and MMORPGs
Thanks to Stratics for their column discussing the concept of 'planned obsolescence' as it relates to MMORPG expansion packs. The author explains: "Planned obsolescence is, at its root, a strategy to get you to buy more... a design mechanism that would encourage additional purchases by creating the impression that a product had been improved over its early - though still perfectly functional - incarnation." He argues that expansions for MMO titles are controversial because "MMOs are service-based products [and] it is difficult to justify this double charging of the customer for development", and ends on a cautionary note: "While a full sequel... certainly merits an additional purchase, I fear that the practice of planning obsolescence into MMOs by subtly out-moding earlier releases of a given title will ultimately undermine the genre and, therefore, the industry."
I don't play MMORPGs because I dislike paying for a game that I may not play during a given month. That aside, this practice is insane. Go pick up any Blizzard game. $30 max for any one right now (check pricewatch.com if you don't believe me). Not only do you get the full game, but as much online time on their battle.net server included in the purchase cost. When I buy an expansion to a Blizzard game, I get the same deal.
If Blizzard can charge only once up front for a product with online play AND remain profitable, why do Sony and Microsoft not only charge for their products, but for a subscription as well?
(I realize there are centralization issues, but a monthly fee from 20 players (at $20/month) could easily buy a new machine to serve them for the rest of the year if they were logged in 24/7).
Bottom Line: MMORPGs cost too much for a little Skinner box you experience with other people.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I am sure that isn't what he was intending - but his annalogy can sure be built that way.
Also if you drive his arguement to where it finally ends up - why should I buy the game at all. After all - I will be paying 20 a month for the game, why kick out 50 for the game to start with. I buy cable and EVERYONE gives free installation (and many months free too sometimes). So why buy the game, give it to me free for download from your website when I give you my credit card for monthly service fees
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
This is just the problem with MMORPG's, no matter how hard you try, and unless you have absolutely no life, no job, and don't mind going a few days without a shower, there's absolutely no way you can expect to complete any MMORPG in any satisfying amount of time. In fact, they'll usually take years to complete even if you *do* spend obscene amounts of time working on it.
Then, in about ten years from now, it'll be gone. Unlike the other games on your shelf, which you can play for nostalgic purposes whenever you like, the MMORPG won't be available for you to play. At least now I can still check out my old Final Fantasy IV games, or play through again in a matter of 30 hours or so. MMORPG's don't offer that, and nobody will be saying "hey, let's check out Everquest" 10 or 20 years from now.
This is all notwithstanding that most MMORPG's are boring click-a-thons, of course. Click, watch your character go *hrf* over and over, and then watch as you gain a fraction of a percentage to advance to the next level. Yay.
Strangely, MUDs still retain their appeal for me even after these MMORPG's have emerged. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I need to fork out nothing as opposed to a bill for an MMORPG that rivals my power bill? Who knows.
On a businness model point of view MMORPG are just a wonder: develop once cash forever, as long as people continue to play.
Is a matter of fact that the occasional players can't stand a chance against the pro who spend tenth of hours a month online, so I suppose that a dramatic explosion of the number of players isn't likely to be expected, as long as people are used to also do other things in their lives.
The key of making money with MMORPG is that the customers/players pay for the service, but once the server is installed and runs in what does the service consists? I mean there's no need to be a fortune 500 to set up a machine and play with friends online more or less the way people gather to play paper & pen RPG.
Of course home brew server could difficulty manage hundreds of thousands of players (as long as distributed system are not developped), but as MMORPG player tend to buy them homes and settle down I am likely to think that in to the long run there's the tendency to play almost "locally" and to become part of a quite small community.
Hey I bought Civ III and thought it would be great to have more automation in the workers, and more tribes...but behold a little later the expansion pack has all the items the original seemed to lack. This is a new tactic by software developers to squeeze more money out of us. Look at Neverwinter Nights, with two new expansions, but what is in them? A new module, which can be done for free, and a collection of_fan_made tiles and hacks. I like the above mentioned games, but I'm getting teed about the expansion syndrome.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
How am I supposed to play my Arcane Archer in a NWN LAN game if not everyone has bought the expansion pack that adds that prestige class? How can everyone play nice in the same virtual world if everyone doesn't support the exact same set of world rules?
A good MMOG would use the machines of the players to distribute the load of persistence. They would also encourage user created content instead of artist and programmer created content. Building the world should be part of the game!
How we know is more important than what we know.
If you want me to pay $20 a month I think you can foot the bill for a piece of plastic and an overnight delivery..
How we know is more important than what we know.
The games companies actually have to keep making new content for their players every month or they get bored and leave. This is primarily because players cant make their own content, and this also happens to mean that they can't make a community.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Turning a PC into a thin client is not how to stop cheating, in fact, why don't we just use streaming video? After all, you can't trust the player's video card, they might be using a hacked driver! There are plenty of ways to maintain a consistent distributed database with assumed hostile nodes. One of them is voting. The load which is distributed amongst the nodes is done so redundantly and all nodes must be in agreement. When a disagreement occurs, each node votes for what computation was correct.
How we know is more important than what we know.
that kinda shit just sells itself. I used to mud, not these new-fangled-wizz-bangs the kids got now. But there's something to be said for addiction. While, to the casual observer, the dealer's crack might seem exhorbitantly expensive, or even prohibitively so, the junky and dealer agree, whatever he can get is fair.
I refused to play Evercrack and the like for exactly the reasons in the article (buying the game then paying $whatever a month for the priviledge of playing it). With Rubies, you're simply paying the monthly fee for server time. Heck, they even throw in a 10 day free trial.
The gameplay and community are really good, too. It feels a lot like a MUD with a pretty graphics frontend. GM support is on-server 24/7 for the primary, and pretty much any player will pipe up with help if they know the answer.
(Disclaimer: Yeah, this sounds like an ad. I'm just a player that's happy he's found a game that cares. But, if you decide to play, please put "Seeker" in the referral entry on the signup form. :)
I very much agree with this sentiment and have argued it myself. I don't like the concept of forced upgrades. In EQ, their expansions pretty much ruin the game for you if you don't buy them, lets say you're a level 50 monk, best FD puller around, suddenly Kunark comes out and its either buy it so you can get 10 more levels to keep on top of your game or shelve your character because no one would want a level 50 monk anymore, even in the old world zones that you used to pull. Then another expansion comes out and you HAVE to buy it, then another, then another...
... well ... consider Morrowind. Morrowind is one of my favorite single player RPGs. I own the Tribunal expansion pack and I love it. The thing is, the original game I bought is still playable. My old morrowind characters weren't obsoleted by the new expansion. I didn't HAVE to buy it .. I wanted to.
The thing about non MMORPG expansions
I still own warcraft 3, and I don't have the frozen throne, and I can go play an online War3 game without the expansion with other people who don't have it if I want to. I am not crippled in any way.
Back when I played EQ I didn't WANT to buy kunark. And in fact, I didn't. So I left the game. It wasn't about a $40 (at the time) expansion pack. It was about a $40 expansion pack this year, another one the next year, and another, and another, and another, all of which were "pay up or quit" type upgrades.
DAoC:SI (Dark age of camelot: Shrouded Isles) in my opinion was a good expansion pack for a MMORPG because it didn't force me to upgrade. My wife's account didn't have SI on it for the longest time, but she could still compete in the old world with every other person weather they had bought the new expansion or not, in Realm vs. Realm combat she could hold her own ground. Sure, she couldn't make one of the new SI classes, nor could she alt-tab ( a feature "added" with SI ), but the game she bought back in October 2001 still worked.
Almost everyone who plays DAoC that I know bought SI even though it was not (in my opinion) a forced upgrade.
In my opinion MMORPG expansions should add good content without going so far as to breaking the dynamics and balance of the game. Game balancing and dynamic changes should always be free updates that retroactively apply back to the original client that the company sold. After all, the people with the original game are the ones who paid $10-$15 per month every month while the new expansion was being made. I was very glad when DAoC made the housing expansion work for the classic client and made it free. Arguably housing changed a lot of dynamics. But it was free, so it was fine. SI didn't change much. SI added new zones, new items, new places to explore, new classes, new races, and better graphics. If you wanted none of those things you could stick with classic and be just fine.
But I still believe the best way to ruin the mmorpg experience is to force people to buy new software. The guy hit the nail on the head dead on when he said, "But is this the goal, to maintain profit margins in spite of the customer, rather than because of them?"
Even without expansion-packs they are already double-charging as they are service-based product. They should either: * sell the software and give away server time (Unreal Tournament etc.) OR * Give away the software but charge for connection time (AOL etc.) Until they do that, only hardcore enthusiasts will buy MMORPGs so through their over-greed they are bringing on their own failure. I am happy playing UT2003 for free. I'll never buy a MMORPG until they change theire marketing model.
Where other games put out "expansion packs", the developers add new content to the game on an ongoing basis - new stuff seems to appear every few days (and all client patching is done seamlessly while you're actually playing) ...which from the players point of view is great stuff...
BUT...
According to the developers, not releasing expansion packs is actually *hurting* their PR! The thing is, each time the likes of Anarchy Online brings out something like "Shadowlands", they suddenly get big spreads in glossy magazines, headlines on all the news sites, and a new boost of publicity. Expansions that are given away for free, on an ongoing drip-feed basis, just don't blip on the gaming press radar. It's actually becoming a problem for the ATITD people; they're adding new (and pretty revolutionary) content to the game all the time, but the gaming press won't touch them because they assume the game is the same thing it was back at launch, and therefore old news... Seems they're just not interested in revisiting games unless there's a new shrinkwrapped box on the shop shelves... and, of course, no publicity = no new customers.
Sadly, it seems that this is one MMORPG company that's suffering by using a payment model that treats it's subscribers the "right" way :(
"What this amounts to is having the customer pay for the development of the new content twice: once while it's being developed, and again when it's ready for prime time. Huh?"
And then there is the SOE model - pay before it's ready for prime time, and then pay while it's being developed. Genius!
If you read his whole article, his argument boils down to this sentance in the end: "If this service model continues to be developed and rammed down the throats of the game-buying public, eventually, people will tire and walk away from the genre."
Given that this doesn't seem to be happening (people don't seem to be walking away), I have to question the logic behind the rest of the article. Color me simple, but I think capitalism will decide this in the end: as long as the game is priced to the tastes of the market, people will buy it however it's packaged and delivered.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
So when a new season of The Sopranos comes out it is sold to the cable channels, who *do* have to pay for it again. But they absorb the cost because they are already making hefty margins on all the $30/month subscribers.
So his HBO example is more like if you have a little brother who pays you $3/month to watch you play EQ. If you buy an expansion pack you don't necessarily charge your little bro' an upgrade fee for watching, because his $3/month is gravy over and above your fixed $12/month cost that you pay whether or not he's watching.
But, given all that, I agree that the price for a "box" should be minimal at worst (just enough to cover distribution, retail shelf space, and enough profit to make it worth it for retailers), and zero at best (e.g. for a downloadable version). I think the market will inevitably drive the MMOG companies to this point. Alternatively, they will have to start packaging "goodies" with the box to give you something concrete and/or essential for your $.
#man woman
segmentation fault - core dumped.
Sure you can have the game for free, your just going to pay extra per month for it.
I don't have any statistics here, but lets just say 1 in 10 people that purchase the game initially play it for year. 3 in 10 don't play it more than a month.
I bought Ultima Online many years ago. I never subscribed to it -- I played on a free server.
I'm guessing that a whole lot more people keep HBO for a whole lot longer than people who purchase MMORPGs.
So, here are our choices, as a company that runs a MMORPG: 1) charge everyone $50 for the game, charge then $15 per month after that, and $30 for an expansion or 2) game is free (yes there are MMORPGs like this), $25 a month, and free expansions (major game content updates.)
Either way someone is paying. Running a MMORPG is not easy. I'm sure EQ is raking in the dollars, but alot had to be risked to get there.
When the game no longer is profitable and no one is willing to donate their time to keep it running (there are alot of volunteer run places, especially MUDs) the game closes, this just happened to Motor City Online.
Bottom line, there is a reason game companies price their products the way they do. The way I see it, if I'm a long term subscriber (which I currently am not), new users who use the service less are subsidising costs for me. If you really hate the prices, then your not going to pay for them. Back in the early days 3 hours of internet access was equal to what you pay per month now for dial-up -- and yet there were still people who populated MUDs and other online worlds. To them the price was worth what they got.... ok they were addicts, but anyways.
You have to pay gas every once in a while, but with this MMO gas, it keeps going even when your not using it, and you WILL be charged either way. They really need MMO's that charge for more specific time like by the minute and have a little rating on screen to see how much money the costs would be. Atleast getting repairs is free if you can even get a hold of tech support. Then if you're one of the people who want to race without learning the skill, you can always buy better parts or expansions, which can either help alot, or almost not at all, it really isn't an equal world in RL or in the MMO realm and people with more money WILL do better.