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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.
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!
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.
Don't cast that spell yet! I'm in the middle of auctioning off my kid's liver.
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?
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.
X
Check the news post for that strip for more commentary.
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.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
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
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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