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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.
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.
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
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.
Lasers Controlled Games!
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.
roche
Bah Humbug!
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?
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'.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
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.
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