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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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