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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?
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.