Scott McCloud On Micropayments And Gaming

Thanks to Game Girl Advance for its discussion of a lecture by comic creator Scott McCloud at EA's Redwood Shores campus, during which he floated "the idea of using micro-payments for online gaming, which he analogizes to feeding quarters into the arcade machines of yore." The article's author muses: "Would you pay 25 cents for 100 credits of Bejeweled? What about a dollar for six hours on EverQuest? How about a virtual penny arcade that let you play multiplayer Joust or Gauntlet II online with people from around the world? No monthly subscriptions, just pure pay-to-play." We've previously covered McCloud's hands-on interest in micropayments on Slashdot.

Comments

No, I wouldn't

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

The problem that I have with micropayments is that if I am going to go to the trouble of handing out a credit card number to an online retailer, I have to see a real benefit or need for it to happen. Micropayments for a game on some website would be a great impulse buy if you had a means to deliver the spare change in your pocket to the retailer. As it stands, the consumer has to give out their credit card data to yet another website in order to make a payment of a quarter? Services like paypal might help allieviate this problem but I still am not convinced that it works well.

I suppose I need to get a change slot installed in my home so I can send my quarters down the pipe and have them pop out at pop-cap games.

Re:No, I wouldn't

[John Harrison]

You wouldn't be making a credit card charge of $0.25. The transaction costs would be enormous. You would make a larger payment up front and then have a digital wallet from which you could make small, efficient payments. If could pay a tenth of a cent for a game of Bejeweled with no fuss it would be attractive.

Re:No, I wouldn't

[ooby]

I think it costs somewhere between $.75 and $2.50 (but I may be way off) per transaction. This is where there is a $15 minimum for credid card purchases at the beer store.

Raising costs for the consumer.

[DamnRogue]

While I'm sure this is a great idea for content providers, the farther the fee structure gets from a flat-rate system the less popular it will be with the customers. Games like EverQuest have conditioned gamers to expect monthly billing (or no billing at all, if you look at Diablo II), so anything more frequent than that will be seen as an irritation. A linear cost per time billing scheme also makes products substantially more expensive for heavy users, who are a primary source of word-of-mouth advertising. They must be kept happy. Furthermore, consumers respond very unfavorably to volatility in the amount they pay from one bill to the next ("My cell phone bill is WHAT??"), and a micropayment system would only exacerbate short-term fluctuations.

Re:Raising costs for the consumer.

[roche]

For those of us, like me, that do not have the time to invest in EQ or SWG, this isn't such a bad idea. I only have time to play a hour or two a month these days, and I am not going to pay 15 dollars a month, per game for that. I could see paying a dollar though for one hour when I was in the mood to play for a bit. If they had something like this, I wouldn't have had to cancel my accounts.

The only way I could see this succeeding though is if it was a alternative method of payment. By having it as a second payment option, it could potentially draw in new customers and keep some of the ones around who do not play as much as they used too. If they completely replaced their payment options with this method, it would do nothing but chase away the hardcore gamers.

Re:Raising costs for the consumer.

[*weasel]

The number of gamers who don't continue playing persistent online games past the 'free' month is the vast majority of the persistent gaming market. Compare Everquest's box sales ( > 2m) against its peak subscriberbase ( < 400k ).

imo (given these similar numbers across all persistent worlds) - these monthly fees of $10-15 are the primary barrier for most gamers. Anyone less than wholly-devoted to the product is extremely unlikely to find these monthly fees acceptable. Everquest's fans may well seem to all be obsessive-compulsive primarily because only obsessive fans can justify $13/mo for that one game.

Lowering the monthly fee won't work very far either. Once you drop past $8/mo or so, the cost of making monthly CC charges (and dealing with card expirations, contested charges, etc) looms large over your profit margin.

Yearly subscriptions may get around that, but you may lose your posterior at the end of that first subscription year when the bulk of players who had completely forgotten your game contest the charges.

Imagine the following scenario instead:
Blizzard creates a 'ledger' for each player of Worlds of Warcraft. After the 'free' month they switch over to their 'micropayment' scheme. With this, they charges $0.25/hr, up to a monthly maximum, against that ledger. Instead of regularly recurring billing, players are able to infuse their WoW ledger 'up-front' in transactions of $20+ as they desire. (the monthly cap is very important, as hardcore gamers are incredibly important to the 'health' of any persistent world).

Essentially you have implemented pay-as-you-go micropayments in Worlds of Warcraft, but you aren't beholden to a proprietary public key infrastructure of a third party. You also didn't need any technical expertise outside of what you already needed to handle monthly billing. You're bringing you average transaction up, and mitigating the cost risks that come with recurring billing. (Though you would likely want to retain optional monthly billing for the hardcore players' convenience.)

Publishers with larger online libraries (such as Popcap or SOE) could code the 'player ledger' outside the scope of a particular game, so players could easily switch between pumping virtual quarters into a registered version of Bookworm over to Zuma in the former; or EQ to SWG in the latter.

Many persistent worlds thrived (back in the day) with hourly charges, and Meridian 59 in particular switched back to it from a monthly fee (they had a monthly cap as well). Its worth noting that M59 did not witness a major player loss when they switched billing styles.

The key to micropayment acceptance, imo, is that the ledger is loaded with player's money 'up front'. There will be no end-of-cycle bill that shocks the socks off your clients, or run the risk of contested charges.

The primary 'con' to this type of billingis: Are a large portion of persistent world profits coming from people who pay, but don't play anymore? If you switch to micropayments you would lose the steady cash from these players who can't bear to cancel and risk having their character(s) deleted.

It's entirely possible that existing publishers see too much easy money in those payers to even attempt such a change in status quo.

Of course, this would not prohibit a forward-looking developer from stepping in and 'showing them how its done'.

Re:Raising costs for the consumer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hour or two per month? I don't think Everquest and Galaxies are the games for you, bud.

Re:Raising costs for the consumer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who wants to be paying for every second they're getting raped by some pr0-lamer? As soon as a player decide's he's not having enough fun to warrant the cost, it's /quit. With the current way of doing things, it doesnt cost anything to hang about and see if things improve.

When you start charging for every second of a persons time, they start to value every second of it. Minor irritances become rather more significant, because every time they occur you're paying the guy who made it that way.

Re:Raising costs for the consumer.

[metamatic]

I posted much the same thing in my journal the other day, explaining why I don't have an online adaptor for either of my game consoles, even though I'm in the target market and they're both sitting next to the router.

An hourly fee, capped at whatever the monthly rate used to be, would definitely get me interested in trying some online games. The other thing they need to do is drop the up-front price of the disc.

Re:Raising costs for the consumer.

[Dragoon412]

imo (given these similar numbers across all persistent worlds) - these monthly fees of $10-15 are the primary barrier for most gamers. Anyone less than wholly-devoted to the product is extremely unlikely to find these monthly fees acceptable. Everquest's fans may well seem to all be obsessive-compulsive primarily because only obsessive fans can justify $13/mo for that one game.

First off, think about the fee. It's less than $15/month. What's that? Half what it costs to take a date to the movies for a couple hours? One less case of beer? One less order of pizza and wings? Eating at home one extra night instead of going out? One third of a new game you'll most likely finish in a weekend and never play again? A DVD (assuming it's on sale)?

The argument that price is a barrier for entry is absurd. Even young kids can cut an extra lawn once a month, or shovel snow off one more driveway to make that kind of money. Chances are, if anything in the ballpark of $15/month is too much of a barrier for entry, you're talking about someone with so little disposable income that the marketers for these games are most likely completely ignoring that demographic. And that's not necessarily a bad thing; the 400k people already playing EverQuest shouldn't be gouged in price because 10k people out there are naive enough to think they'd actually be able to enjoy that sort of game without investing a significant amount of time in it.

And that's the second point: have you ever played EverQuest? You realize that high-level players literally have months of time logged-in? Sure, you could not have any desire to play at the high end of the game, but with a game that places so much importance on socializing, making friends, and mandated grouping, playing an hour here and there is pointless; it'd take you a month to get past level 5, and then beyond that point, you'd spend all your time logged in just trying to find a group, because you don't play regularly enough to have any friends to group up with.

I'm not arguing against micropayments so much as the absurdity of your argument that such a ridiculous amount of money poses a significant barrier to entry. A micro-payment system won't fix that. Sure, it may get a few more cheapskates playing the game, but you'd see the hard-core gamers leaving in droves.

Unless, of course, micropayments were offered as an alternative to monthly fees, rather than a replacement. But I honestly don't see that happening; there are too many penny-pinching execs in the gaming indistry that are completely out of touch with gamers, and would attempt to unilaterally enforce their micropayment structure on everyone just because there's the potential to make a few bucks more.

Re:Raising costs for the consumer.

[*weasel]

First, I'm not saying that $15/mo is alot of money. Simply, I'm saying it's too much for the casual gamer. They might have some fun playing Everquest, but they won't play it enough to justify paying $15 every month.

$15 isn't much when you compare it to other entertainment - but gaming has its own pricing structure. $15/mo is the same as renting 3 games for a week each. Every third month, you could buy a brand new game, or every month you could pick up a used game or price-cut older game.

Now consider the mechanics in nearly every massmog: the casual gamer gets screwed. They don't have as much time to play as it is, the mechanics ensure they won't be able to play with other people for very long, and they won't generally do anything really cool while they are playing. So they don't see the $15 as worthwhile for the experience.

Sure, someone could make a game that normally casual gamers like enough that they're willing to pay $15/mo for. But that's generally what's already happening. Everquest's players are (largely) not the same as UO's players. People who put 20 hours into DAoC this week wouldn't consider doing the same in Asheron's Call. When they find a persistent world that appeals to them, that they play enough to justify the $15/mo - they stay.

So if you want to increase the paying playerbase of a game, your options are: tweak the mechanics to appeal to the casual gamer, drop the price for the average player. However, tweaking the mechanics seems to alienate as many as it draws in. So this leaves us with: Drop the price for the average player.

It's not that $15/mo is such a huge investment. It's that the casual gamer doesn't play enough to justify it. I don't play EQ anymore because its mechanics (level-grind, camping, downtime, etc) don't appeal to me, and I don't have the urge to play anywhere near enough to justify a regular monthly fee. In contrast I gladly played DAoC for 8 months as the mechanics of EQ that bothered me were less of an obstacle. However, the mechanics of RvR (Instant AoE CC, long CC, etc) didn't appeal to me, and I don't have the urge to play enough anymore to justify a regular monthly fee.

Now, I do get the urge to play UO, EQ, and DAoC time and again. But $15 for a fix? Setting up recurring billing information when I won't likely stay interested for more than a month? Not likely. If I had a ledger with Mythic though, and I could drop $20 in it and play when I need a fix (and pay for only what I play) - I'd almost certainly still be fairly active. But I can't do that - so Mythic gets $0 from me.

Look at the number of mothly-fee gamers who go back to old persistent worlds. The guys who used to play a game, but quit - and then go back months (or years) later. This is an extremely common occurrence. Almost all gamers who used to play a persistent world and quit want to go back at some point. But we push off the urge unless we know we have the free time to play enough to justify $15.

Then there's the problem that casual gamers can't accomplish anything (fun) in the amount of time they do have to play, but i digress.

Re:Raising costs for the consumer.

[Dragoon412]

While I'm still reading through the article you linked, I took me about two paragraphs to be nodding in agreement. I'm actually writing up design documents for an MMOG that addresses a number of those problems, but that's a rant for another time.

Anyways, I think you make some very valid points. I still think the core design of MMOGs being so hostile towards casual gamers is a significantly larger problem than the monthly fees, but you're right: a micropayment system could, in theory, bring in additional gamers. And so long as it was not a direct replacement for monthly fees, it couldn't be a bad thing.

The trouble with micropayments

[scumbucket]

If micropayments ever become popular and easy to implement, I think we'll start seeing the old "salami slicing" hack again. When a lot of stuff you do online costs a nickel here, a penny there, a dime elsewhere... you can rack of some pretty serious numbers of transactions just browsing around. After all, if loading that New York Times article (free reg required) linked to from Slashdot is only 2 cents, who cares, right?

But perhaps some clever fraudster will see an opportunity here. Wouldn't it be easy to steal 1 cent a month from 1,000,000 people who use micropayments? After all, who's going to notice a line item titled "News article ----- $0.01"? So there's $10,000/month that nobody's really going to miss.

And for a single penny, would most people take the time to make a phone call or write an email to request clarification on where that charge originated? Even if all you make is a pitiful $3.60/hour, that one penny takes a mere 6 seconds to earn, far shorter than the time it would take to investigate. And is the micropayment company going to investigate your 1 cent dispute? Likely they would ignore you or even just automatically refund your penny without much thought.

Re:The trouble with micropayments

[miyako]

Your right, the 1,000,000 people who each lose a penny probably won't be bothered to do anything about it, but if this infrastructure was in place, there would likely be only a few companies at the top of this system, probably pay pal, the credit card companies, and maybe a couple of new companies.
These companies would notice something like that and they would be the one to prosecute. If a person did this scam and made say a million dollars (not hard to do over the course of some time with your system, scam 2 million people 50 times, multiple scams probably wouldn't be that hard because who would be paying attention, its only a penny right?), and the companies did refund that penny, then it would be their million dollars. A penny might not be worth going after, but 100,000 each from the say 10 companies that might be the leaders of this micropayment infrastructre would be something worth going after.

my beef

[Enrico Pulatzo]

I'm not cool with micropayments until the credit infrastructure sees some serious revision. With all of the transactions that are going to be happening "real soon now" with micropayments, there's bound to be a huge opportunity for massive fraud on a microscopic level. As it stands now, Visa seems more concerned handling fraud cases as they happen, rather than taking more initiative in stopping them at the root level.

Yes you would

[fm6]

The problem that I have with micropayments is that if I am going to go to the trouble of handing out a credit card number to an online retailer...

No workable micropayment system would work that way. The credit card system just isn't set up to handle small transactions.

A micropayment system would require some sort of public key infrasturcture. You'd put money in your micropayment account (probably with a credit card, but only when you needed to top it off), and then every time you did something that cost you money, somebody's use your public key to verify that you were who you said you were, and a few pennies would be debited from your account. The whole transaction has to be very simple to work.

Yeah, I know what you thinking. Big opportunity for ripoffs -- steal one penny from one million people, and you've got a big haul. But that's a problem with any payment system.

The really big problem is that there's no public key infrastructure to support micropayments. Which, come to think of it, is also why spam is such a problem -- there's no way to identify people so you can say, "I don't know who this bozo is, but I don't want any more email from him." Hmm, I smell a business synergy....

Intrest?

[ivan256]

McCloud's hands-on interest in micropayments

read:

McCloud's hands-on obsession with micropayments

Just what we need. Single player pay-per-play video games. Um, no-thanks. Asside from the lack of a cap on the total price, suddenly your favorite game would stop working when it wasn't profitable to run the billing server anymore.

While I'm thinking about it, micropayments for online games is a bad idea too. The concept seems fine, but it would turn into a way for publishers to disguise price increases.

Scott wants to find a pet industry to use as a R&D department to build his micropayment dreams for him. The trouble is, once the infrastructure is there, all sorts of advertisement supported and fixed price media will start costing fractions of a cent per use. Don't think for a second that means the ads or the up front fees will go away either. If he wants micropayments so badly, he's apealing to the wrong crowd. The users aren't going to rally to his side, because from the user's perspective micropayments are a genie best kept in the bottle.

Re:Intrest?

[Myco]

Just what we need. Single player pay-per-play video games. Um, no-thanks. Asside from the lack of a cap on the total price

So put a cap on the total price. Sort of like rent to own, without the usury.

suddenly your favorite game would stop working when it wasn't profitable to run the billing server anymore.

Which is why there needs to be enough micropayment activity to support third-party billing as an industry unto itself.

One thing you're ignoring is the reasonably compelling argument that when products, services, and/or creative works are available via micropayments, the overall cost to the consumer can go down dramatically. In a market where a product costs dollars, potential customers who only have cents' worth of interest in the product just keep their money. With micropayments, the barrier to entry is miniscule, so more consumers are accessible. With the right kind of product (creative works whose chief expense is in the creation, with minimal reproduction costs are ideal for this), this dynamic can drive prices lower at the same times as profits increase. Ponder.

Re:Intrest?

[ivan256]

the overall cost to the consumer can go down dramatically.

"can" being the operative word there. What I assert is that you are correct for products that fit the description you have provided, but things we already have and take for granted will increase in price at the same time. That increase has the potential to be far greater than any savings elsewhere. That potential will be too great a temptation.

Even if you exclude monetary costs, imagine the implications of being able to cash in by getting a link to your website placed in a high profile location. You thought spam was bad now? Do you like google's cache? Do you like programming fees being included in your monthly cable bill? Want to rewind a rewatch that last scene in the video you're watching? The possibilities for evil are endless.

Micropayments done before

[Torgo's Pizza]

The early days of GEnie and AOL had games that were done in a micropayment fashion, only it was mostly by the hour, very similar to the gaming cafes you can find today. It works well for the occasional gamer, but it will nickel and dime you to death for games you really love.

If you try to apply this to games like Quake or Unreal Tournament where it's $.25 for each match then you quickly lose your casual fan base. Even if it was a fraction of that, I'd still be out $50 on the Unreal Tournament 2K4 demo right now. It gets worse with RPG games. Pay a few extra cents for a fancy hat, a few dollars for that ring of regeneration. Twenty-five cents each time you descent into the Dungeon of Dispair! You'll end up with a situation just like at the arcades when one friend runs out of quarters and can't play.

"Dude, a bunch of us are going down to attack the Red Dragon in the Dark Dungeon. C'mon!"

"Sorry, after spending $4.32 in the expansion area to get my Crystal Sword, I can't afford it."

Those that can afford their gaming habits now have an unfair advantage. Arcade games used to offset this with skill allowing you to continue on one quarter, today's games often have killzones designed to make the player shove in more quarters. Online games would surely go down the same route.

I also can't think off the top of my head of an instance where a product went from a flat rate back to a hourly/micropayment rate. Even long-distance and cell phones are edging towards a flat-rate with unlimited calling time.

Re:Micropayments done before

[bersl2]

The early days of GEnie and AOL had games that were done in a micropayment fashion, only it was mostly by the hour, very similar to the gaming cafes you can find today. It works well for the occasional gamer, but it will nickel and dime you to death for games you really love.

Entirely true. Back in the day, when I was an AOL luser, I used to play Air Warrior, a MMO WWII flight sim. The lag was terrible, the graphics were shitty, but the game was very addictive. The best part was that it was free, even while the other games became "premium" (i.e., pay-to-play).

I came back from a vacation to find that they were forcing us to upgrade to Air Warrior III and to pay by the hour. I said, "Fuck that."

So excuuuuuse me, but some of us are just that cheap.

Re:Micropayments done before

[Luigi30]

I used to play Air Warrior also. I was pissed when it went to $2/hr. I still have my Air Warrior CD, too, not much use for it though, as it's hardcoded to use the AOL servers...

Re:Micropayments done before

[nifboy]

Online games would surely go down the same route.

Many already have. The typical MMORPG stretches the experience curve out over many many months, thus ensuring players spend many many months (and many many dollars in monthly subscriptions) playing the game. Well, those that don't get bored after the first free month, anyway, and if they paid just for the box the company still profits.

UT model

[WormholeFiend]

What's wrong with selling/giving the server software to the people who buy and play your games, like Epic does for Unreal Tournament?

Sure, at first there's a gazillion servers to choose from, with ping times all over the spectrum, but eventually things settle down and you can weed out the good from the bad, or even form closed servers (eg clan servers).

Re:UT model

[Sylver Dragon]

What's wrong with selling/giving the server software to the people who buy and play your games, like Epic does for Unreal Tournament?

That method doesn't make for a consistent revenue stream. Sure, you get a bunch of sales up front, and then a few sales here and there from people picking up the game, but that's it.
What the author of the article wants, is to get you to pay him every time you fire up your copy of UT. You log onto a server, you pay him a quarter. You finish up a round, and start a new one, you pay him another quarter. Any idiot can see that this is going to add up to a lot of money fast, that's why he wants it, he's just putting a consumer friendly spin on it, to try and sell it.

Mmmm.... Joust.....

[rudeboy1]

Anyone know where I can find an online (Java/Flash/Shockwave) version of Joust? I miss that game...

Raising money for Evercrack

[Anonymous Coward]

What about a dollar for six hours on EverQuest?

Don't cast that spell yet! I'm in the middle of auctioning off my kid's liver.

Re:Raising money for Evercrack

[rholliday]

But Mooooooom! I wanna staff of mana regen nooooooow!!

Micropayments = Not Gonna Happen

[duffbeer703]

People have been pontificating about micropayments for like five or ten years, yet nothing ever comes of it.

Why? Nobody wants it but webmasters and tech types looking for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Face it, if anyone on the web comes up with a high-volume, pay per use application -- why would they want to join a micropayment consortium and share the revenue? Being a member of a "micropayment network" would actually expose customers to competing services as well!

They would rather license additional content and sell a higher dollar value "unlimited" subscription -- look at Yahoo Games as an example.

Insert $0.25 into your USB Slot to Read This Post

[superultra]

I like McCloud's stuff, but after reading this I feel like he's a creepy guy in a trenchcoat following me around waiting for me drop a coin. Enough with the micropayments already!

Why? Because if I drop a quarter in an arcade cabinet, the quarter serves as physical proof that I dropped a quarter in there. Now, if I were actually in a real arcade (which is darn near impossible anyway), I can go to the arcade employee and tell him that the machine "ate my quarter," (another modern impossibility since the game would have cost no less than four quarters) but the fact remains that I've dropped a physical quarter in the machine. The machine just can't take a quarter out of my pocket without me looking.

But online payments reverse this. The power of the transaction is now firmly in the grip of the payee, not the payer. With micropayments, Scott McCloud's dream machine can take quarters from my pocket whenever it feels like making an error. I understand that there are checks and balances with the credit card companies, but what if some 10 year old kid uses his mom's debit card? How do I know that the game didn't charge me for 11 games when I only played 10? Who's going to go over their credit card statement to compare how many times they've played a certain game? Moreover, with a physical arcade, when I place the quarter into the machine it is physically me placing it a machine. Using a credit card for gaming micropayments across the internet is like giving someone all your quarters, telling him to pass to the next guy and so forth until someone is close the machine, have him to put one quarter in and then kindly hand back all the other quarters you didn't use. Repeat 5 times an hour, more if you suck at the game, each time, of course, becoming yet another opportunity for someone you don't trust to interupt that line and snag a quarter.

It should come as no surprise that McCloud pushes micropayments, and it should come as no surprise that someone at EA Redmond probably has several whiteboards full of micropayment ideas by now. They're content producers so, as I've illustrated, micropayments place power firmly in the grip of the producer.

Is it just me, or are McCloud's micropayments remeniscient of the old Office Space-a-roo, only legal?

Re:Micropayments done before, Yea, in SuperMan III

[potus98]

With the proliferation of cracks/hacks to online gaming cheats, imagine a clan that developed a way to skim $0.01 from each member of the [fill-in-game] community.

OR, what if you could combine "on-line gambling" with pay-per-play on-line games. Imagine a scenario where your PayPal account is credited $0.05 foe each head shot kill, or deducted $0.10 for each death you experience attributed to being killed by a head shot. Not really gambling, but you get the lightbulb.

Can you suggest other cool pay-per-play (or get paid for performance) micro-incentives?

Micropayments could be nifty

[XellDx]

See, I'm not big on MMORPG's. I like playing FFXI and SWG's. They're both fun, hours at a time hack and slashers.

I am not however, interested in playing them fo 10 hours per day in order to be at a very high level and keep having fun. I'm not a instant high level kind of guy.

However, whats stopped me from playing both of them recently are two factors:

#1: Both charge a flat, montly fee, which I do not get the good end out of.

#2: Both delete your character off of the server after a month of a cancelled account. There is nothing you can do to keep the character from being deleted.

If I could pay, say, 5$ a month, and and only expect to get 10 hours of play time, and anything over that gets be the premium 12:50$ a month, I'd probably never cancell my account.

This is why I've given up on PC online RPG's by the way. The developers use the helpfullness of server side characters to completely screw players into paying money. If I could drop a dollar or so whenever I started playing until I logged out, then hey.

Re:Micropayments could be nifty

[randomdef]

No they dont, i cancelled my SGW account in august after the inital launch, i gave it a shot again last month to find ALL my characters in perfect order.

Re:Micropayments could be nifty

[XellDx]

Huh. I'll be damned. I apologize then.

Re:Mmmm.... Joust.....

[-kertrats-]

Here

Legally Required Penny Arcade Link

[Jeff Reed]

Magic: It's What's For Dinner.

Check the news post for that strip for more commentary.

For Gauntlet II

[MMaestro]

How about a virtual penny arcade that let you play multiplayer Joust or Gauntlet II online with people from around the world?

If I play Gauntlet II online, how will I push my teammate away from his controls so I can steal the food before him? (Believe it or not, my friends and I actually do that when we play only to have someone "accidently" shoot it)

Easy Fix

[rhakka]

If anyone DOES contest their payments, even one person, you investigate the company that made the transaction (as the micropayment company that receives the complaint). See if it's legit, first of all. That doesn't take long. If multiple people are complaining about the same company, they probably have a problem with their billing, your own software, or are trying to run a scam.

Everyone doesn't have to complain. As soon as a few do and the MP company investigates and finds a scam, everyone who was charged fraudulently could easily be refunded whether they noticed originally or not.

And finally, it's a fucking penny, who gives a shit? I wouldn't even get mad at bleeding a whole quarter a month, so hell, I'll chip in on feeding 25 scammers until they get caught, ok?

Re:Insert $0.25 into your USB Slot to Read This Po

[Jad LaFields]

Well, two things:

1) Of course most people wont pore over their credit card statement to verify that they're not being scammed... but some people will. And they will complain to their credit card company. And the credit card company will, if enough people complain, investigate the game company to see if their customers are being screwed. And if they find something, the game company is going up the river.

2) Your quarter analogy is not a great one, because how does the arcade manager know that you actually put a quarter in the machine and it didn't work? If there are 500 quarters in the machine, and the machine has recorded that it has been played 500 times (even if a bug made that 500th game unplayable), then there is no proof.

Of course, since the arcade has a reputation at stake and few people would have the desire/patience to go around scamming arcades for quarters, he's probably going to give you a free game, something sneaky online providers will not. But the physicality of the quarter doesn't make anything more certain.

But yes, I do see your point that you have to take an active role in placing the quarter into the slot, which is a somewhat different action than just going to a website. But still, wouldn't you have to activate the website to work with your micro-payment anyway?

PLAGARIAST

[Anonymous Coward]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=78407&cid=6955 981

How To Make MicroPayments Work For Me

[Dr. Wu]

Every time Scott McCloud says the word 'micropayment', he has to pay me a quarter

Every time Scott McCloud comes up with a 'uniquely inventive' way of using micropayments on the internet, he has to pay me a quarter

Every time Scott McCloud tries to convince us that micropayments are the wave of the future and can work, he has to pay me a quarter

Then, once I have few hundred thousand dollars, maybe I'll buy him a 'clue'.

Micropayments are not feasible, micropayments will never work, micropayments are a buzzword of an internet bubble that burst nearly five years ago.

Move along, nothing to see here.

Dr. Wu

If I had a nickel for everytime...

[Tetrad_of_doom]

Scott McCloud talked about micropayments...wait, that can't happen.

Re:Insert $0.25 into your USB Slot to Read This Po

[superultra]

But the physicality of the quarter doesn't make anything more certain.

Well sure it does. You yourself said that he's going to probably give me a free game, and while the physicality of the quarter may not necessarily help in that situation, my own physical presence does. He knows, because I stand in front of him, that this is not the 1037th time I've tried to steal a game. But with physical presence removed and replaced with equal amounts of anonymity, the content producer has to assume that every person who wants a free claim is, in fact, doing it for the 1037th time with a script.

The same could be said of any kind of online payment system, to be sure, from McCloud's dream arcade to Amazon.com to ebay. But the difference with micropayments, and particularly in the online gaming he's talking about where there is no physical product whatsoever, is that the dangers associated with online payments are exponentially increased.

With regards to my assertion that the Pac-McCloud virtual arcade cabinet can "steal" a quarter while a physical one cannot, you're right. You would have to activate it. But after you do that, your pocket's open, right?

Nope, I won't

[AuMatar]

Micropayments won't work, and never will work. First off, they'd look for a free source. If they couldn't find it, they'd look for a similar replacement (Bejeweled is a quarter? Ok, I'll play this tetris game for free instead). Finally, if given no other option they'll pay- but only if the content is worth quite a bit to them.

If the web ever becomes micropayment based, we won't see a great surge in income for website owners. We'll just see a decrease in the use of the web.

And personally, I find the idea of pay-per-view webpages disgusting. I'll go someplace free, thanks. Or if I like your site, I may be willing to pay for additional content. I won't pay everytime I want to see an article from you. For games, I'll pay a monthly fee for bandwidtth and new content, but not a per hour fee for a game I already bought!

Lets face it- micropayments are a dead idea. Consumers don't want it, and will never accept it. Stop wasting your time.

Seems familiar...

[Absurd Monkey]

Didn't they do that in Superman?

Charge through the ISP

[scott_davey]

The problem with the internet is that it happened too fast.

Had it have been controlled by the telcos it would have been rolled out slowly and in a considered fashion - of course, we would still be on 9600 baud modems paying $60 per month, but we would also have a micropayment solution built into the infrastructure.

It would be something like the telephone billing system, where I can call a pay-per-minute telephone service and the charges get billed via my phone account.

Now, back to reality, I like the internet the way it is, but a good micropayment system may work if it was charged to the ISP in a similar fashion to my telco nightmare above.

In fact, pay-per-view was considered in HTTP/1.1, which has the response status code 402 Payment Required reserved for future use. Presumably it would work like HTTP authentication, popping up a dialog asking for approval. At that time, (somehow) the cost needs to find its way back to the ISP.

I'm guessing that billing-the-ISP is the hard part, but here's how I'd approach it:

0. The browser requests a pay-per-view page.
1. the server returns 402 Payment Required, plus sends back some response headers for things like Payment-Amount and Payment-Currency.
2. the browser pops up a "payment required" dialog box, similar to the "authentication required" dialog box.
3. the client has a SSL certs signed by the ISP, which provides both the proof that the purchase is OK, and a path to the ISP to charge them.
4. the server connects to the ISP (derives the 'billing server' from a DNS info record, then connects via HTTP using a new HTTP/2.0 method) with the proof of payment.
5. ...
6. money money money!

The 80's called..

[JavaLord]

Hey McCloud, the 80's called, they want their pay per play idea back. In case you haven't noticed, the only gaming platform that uses this type of payment system is dying....the arcades.

Micropayments are dumb.

[Eivind]

They've been touted as just around the corner for atleast half a decade now, and in the real world, they're just as far away as ever. Thing is, they are fundamentally dumb. And I don't think they can easily be fixed. Here's a small sampling of problems I've not seen solutions to;

Either, the cost is *very* low, so that I can ignore it, *or* it forces me to make a consient decision for every 5-minute game or every newspaper-article or whatever if this item is really worth the price. People don't like to be nickled and dimed. Witness the popularity of flatrate over pricing pr GB for dsl, even for people and usage patterns where the pr. GB pricing would be cheaper. Predictability itself has a value. Loosing the stress of managing your spendings (or you monthly GB-quota or whatever) itself has a value.

In most proposed solutions you need an "aggregator", the way it'd work is something like I owe hundred different online vendors 10 cents each, but that's impractical to transfer, so instead I'd pay $10 to the aggregator, and the vendors would get one large transfer from the aggregator instead of thousands of tiny ones from individual users.

Thing is, I don't nessecarily *want* some "aggregator" sitting in a controlling position, and compiling enourmous amounts of infor about my spending-habits online. You can see everyone from Visa to MS positively drooling over getting themselves into this role. All of them prefer systems where they alone control it offcourse, a more open system with competition between different aggregators migth be better for consumers, but none of the financial powerhouses want it.

It creates barriers. Some clever person said that the value of information and services increase with the number of interconnects. Demanding money, even a single cent, is going to cut the number of interconnects *dramatically* and thus destroy value.

It's also typically poor value. Look, I'm sorry to say so, but $1 a track for music, for example, is not very impressive in a world where I can in most cases buy the CD used on ebay for less than what it'd cost me online. I realize that's not micropayments fault, but thing is, when distributors save money, I as consumer expect to save money too.

A copy of Jak-II on Ebay is $30 or something, I can play it for a month, until I'm tired of it, and probably resell it for similar price, let's say $25. So, I'm out $5 + porto. $15 a month for access to a online game is simply not good value.

I realize that companies providing "content" is drooling all over themselves at the prospect of having consumers pay for items with every use, rather than buy them once and own them, with all rigths that confer, such as the rigth to re-sell stuff you're tired of. But unless the price under such a pay-per-use is orders of magnitude lower than what is today being offered, it's simply a shitty deal for the consumer.

micropayments are stupid, GGA is pretentious

[Allison Geode]

I really don't like the idea of micropayments. never have. I'd rather buy something all at once, and not have to worry about making dozens of tiny little purchases. in this idea, it seems to be what amounts to an online, virtual, coin-op arcade... I'd much rather shell out a bit more, and be able to play whenever I want. also: I started reading GGA right after the Rez vibrator thing, and stopped soon after. they're so pretentious, over-analyzing my favorite hobby. games can be art, yes, but I don't want to hear art students reviewing my favorite games, because they completely miss the point of what makes games good.

Yeah, pay to play.... right

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a reason arcades are not popular anymore... its that very pay to play concept.
I prefer to OWN what I pay for.
My Anime, my games, my music, my dvd's.
I don't rent, I don't wareez, I don't P2P, but I want to own what I pay for, even if its just a license.
The exceptions to that are of course my internet service, rent, bills (ick), and 2 everquest accounts, and since I play those a LOT more then the (1 dollar per 6 hours) scheme, no thats bad.

Pay to play is just another way to squeeze every last penny out of somebody before that game or system collapses.

100 quarters = $25

[Anonymous Coward]

We pay monthly fees for online games now.

Why should we step backwards to a system that will ding us every hour instead of every month? I don't think the current system of monthly fees is _that_ inefficient: I've never heard of a game going under because their playerbase spent too _few_ hours connected.

Scott McCloud may be widely respected, but I can't for the life of me figure out why. It's one thing to advocate a micropayment system for things like online comics. Granted, those comics could still make decent money with publications and merchandise...

Its another to make a suggestion to the one aspect of the MMO industry that _isn't_ a source of constant contention.

What McCloud wants

[Anonymous Coward]

"What the author of the article wants, is to get you to pay him every time you fire up your copy of UT."

That's actually not what he wants... he wants writing comics to be a reasonable profession.

This thing with games is just another attempt to get a micropayment system jumpstarted so that comics can be profitable for more creators, thus encouraging the medium, and letting it grow into one as important as TV or movies.

Which is fine, as far as it goes. Nobody's just going to sign up for a micropayment system so that they can read webcomics.. you need bait, something people already pay for, that maybe they can save money on using micropayments instead.

We don't put quarters into arcade games anymore

[ILL Clinton]

There's a reason arcades used to be a good business and now they're not. In the days of Asteroids, there was no alternative to paying a quarter. Even after consoles like the NES came out, the games in the arcade were better looking than the home systems.

But now the games on a console or a PC are better than most arcade games, so there's no incentive to pay that quarter anymore.

Maybe if there was no alternative, micropayments would work. But I can't foresee the day when every single game developer decides to stop selling games to people willing to fork over $50 per title.

Scott Mcloud is great when it comes to "Understanding Comics", but maybe he should stop trying to understand Video Games.

Somebody tell him I said that.

Open source sig, feel free to modify and redistribute.