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On The Rising Price of MMO Subscriptions
An anonymous reader writes "With the ever rising price of online games and special offers like Anarchy Online's free trial where you can play free until September for $9.95. I've been wondering - how much do people feel is too much to pay for an online game? The 'normal' price used to be $9.95 per month, and EverQuest is now $12.95 a month, with Star Wars Galaxies, City Of Heroes and others at $14.95. How much do increasing monthly fees affect your playing habits, and does the price of an MMO subscription affect which game you might choose to play?" Perhaps schemes such as the Sony Online All Access subscription are a possible solution?
The upcoming MMO Guild Wars will have no monthly subscription fee.
On a per month basis.
If you purchase 3 mos at a time it goes down a dollar. 6 mos it goes down another dollar. And a year is another dollar lower.
Also IIRC the first 2 expansions are free.
They already released one expansion free. Although much of the content in it was supposed to be available at launch.
Also this is for the North American release.
No idea how they're handling it for their Asian or European markets.
If they ever do a European server farm.
I played from open beta, thru release and quit right before the first expansion.
I think a lot of people in the NA market did the same.
Here's hoping EQ2 and WoW are more fun.
Like the original EQ was in the beginning.
L2 was kill monsters until you lvl, then run further out the road where there are higher lvl monsters.
The battles were the same at lvl 40+ as they were at lvl 1.
Then play less games. I really don't get any of the above posts at all when they complain about the "high cost" of MMORPG subscriptions. If your family has one car, and you want another but you can't afford it, you don't write a letter to your editor complaining about the high cost of cars and the need for a new pricing model for that lease. You don't buy the other car.
MMOs need an up-front fee and a subscription fee. The up-front fee covers the cost of the game development, which is enormous, as well as the costs of advertising, distribution, etc. The subscription fee can't be counted on to cover these costs, for a few reasons. First of all, the investors are antsy and want to see their costs covered by this point. Secondly, on any modern MMORPG, development does not stop once the game ships -- new content and gameplay have to be introduced on a monthly basis or close to it, or players will jump to the newest and shiniest game, and this costs money. Third, server maintenance becomes a serious issue as the server farm you had during development and the server farm you are now running for retail have vastly different upkeep costs. Subscription fees need to go to #2 and #3, meaning that there needs to be an upfront cost to pay for the original development.
An early poster threw out the old chestnut about a shelf cost on an MMO indicating that the game was unlikely to be good enough to keep subscribing to. Well, that is indeed the case. Certain MMOs aren't for everyone -- in that case, both the consumer and the developer/maintainer have to treat that game as a normal retail non-online game. I've purchased nine different MMOs over the years and only played three of them for any length of time. However, I only regretted the purchase of one of those games, and I got my "money's worth" out of the others as I played them as long if not longer as I would have a normal, off-the-shelf game. The "free month" is thrown in there for just this purpose: you can treat the game as an experience of under a month and then move on, or you can keep paying the dosh and stay in-game if you enjoy it.
The costs of developing and maintaining an MMO somewhat defy comparison. Comparing it to moviegoing, or non-online games, or a health club membership just don't stand up. There are reasons for the way the pricing model is set up. Yes, indeed, one of those reasons is greed. You may be shocked to find that the companies that make these games are indeed for-profit companies. If you don't like the pricing model, don't play the games. The vast majority of players are having lots of fun without you.
True to a certain extent, but to me it seems that some MMOG developers don't pay the current game enough attention. Rather, they have most of their guys work on a bloody expansion pack which people have to pay for, while they only fix some bugs and address some balance-issues every now and then.
It depends on the game, and this is also part of the balance of whether or not you keep paying them the 15. If you're not seeing results for your money, they stand a chance at losing a customer; this is good and normal and in keeping with things. If they're doing their job and you see routine attention paid to issues, even if it's not 100% bug free and perfect, then they're using your money wisely.
City of Heroes is using the money wisely. Developers post every day and recently they've been starting open discussion threads for suggestions of how to balance the classes, what the players want to see. Changes occur frequently. Even with an expansion on the way regular content pushes are in the works.
Then you have the Star Wars Galaxies. Eek. There's no rhyme or reason to why they address some issues and ignore others, and some (smugglers) have been shoved back repeatedly and even told directly that they wouldn't be addressed in favor of the expansion.
The money issue is one of service, and if service isn't what you're getting, money isn't what they're going to get in return.
I have a friend who is working working on an upcoming MMORPG and I asked him the same question: "Why not give away the game and just charge a monthly fee?"
He responded with the following points:
1) MMORPGs are extremely expensive to run (new content must be generated so the game doesn't become sterile) so you _have_ to have a monthly fee.
2) In order to sell enough copies of the game so that you reach the critical mass of players in order to be profitable, you have to have a boxed game on a store shelf. To completely abandon retail would be suicide. In order to have a store willing to carry a game on a shelf, you can't also be giving the game away for free on the internet.
So according to him, in order to have a profitable game you have to both sell the game _and_ charge a monthly fee. Of course this is not good news for us game consumers.