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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?
Mine's movies. I compare it all to movies. I'm often willing to pay $10 for two hours of entertainment. Whereas I'll spend the same money for many hours a month playing an MMO (puzzle pirates).
no, i don't play MMORGs, but i've had points in my life where i played way too many video games, simply because there was nothing immediately better to do and i didn't have an interest in actively seeking out real life stuff to do.
No matter what they charge, people will still buy it. Works for drugs, works for MMORPGs. Addiction is a terrible and wonderful thing, depending on who you are.
Moo.
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The traditional monthly fee structure in most games makes some users a bit anxious about how much time they can allot with the game. If they don't have the time or interest to put enough hours into a game, they'll feel that they're wasting money. This is why few people subscribe to more than one MMORPG at a time. But since Guild Wars doesn't have a monthly fee (and because combat effectiveness doesn't rely as much on levelling as skill/spell selection), gamers with existing accounts in other MMORPGs will feel more at ease picking up Guild Wars on the side, even if they don't plan to spend a lot of time in it.
Nor will the historically authentic MMORPG, Roma Victor
Not sure how other MMORPGs work, but City of Heroes cost $50 for the first month of live playtime (non-beta). So, you can either look at it as the game was $50, and the first month is free, or the game was $35, and you paid for your first month. The montly fee was hard for me to accept as well, especially since most of my gaming has been either PC FPS (free) or console, but I went out for lunch one day and spent $15 on a meal I didn't like. That made me think I waste $15 here and there all the time, so why not use it for something that will entertain me over the course of a whole month?
I guess one reason to put a price on the initial purchase is to discourage people who just want to troll, etc from coming on board. It's not like they can fine your trolling, the worst they could do is disable your account, but if you didn't want to play anyway... I'm not kidding myself, I know the main reason they do this is to get your money. :)
I definitely like your idea of paying per time played with a cap at the monthly fee, though. :)
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
You can't just push the boxed product out and then maybe do a few bug fix patches, you have to actively develop new content for it over the span of multiple years, while paying your bandwidth bill, and supporting the massive customer service department you have to have. 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.
So the cost of the game in present value is really between $190 or $200 (I forgot the exact charge.) So forget about this complaining about paying each month/paying an upfront fee. Just look at that amount and decide if it's worth it.
i would like to see some study on the MMORPG cost for the developer/publisher. Everybody says that they have huge maintenance cost, but I have never seen a detailed study about that. Anyone care to clarify me on that?
Eh, to me, this is more of an issue of a "price point"... the public perception of "expensiveness"... Music on CD is expensive at $18, but not expensive at $12. Goung out ot the Movies is cheap at $5 matinee, but expensive at $8.75. Now a month's subscription to an online game is cheap at $10 and expensive at $15.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter. It will remain at $15 for a long time, because of the relative price to purchasing a new game... if it goes up to $20, we're talking on the order of your dial-up ISP bill, or more importantly, the value of half of a new game. If people feel that they are not getting enough "content" for their subscriptions (can an old game provide as much new content as a fully new game every two months?), then they will cancel their accounts, and the game loses their income streams.
Now some games push it (Everquest took about 8 months to get the first expansion) and some are actively delivering new content to their users (City of Heroes, with new zones, new costumes, and new enemies, delivered in one month's time). If the customers feel that they are getting enough new stuff to justify the $15, then they'll stick with it, and everyone's happy in the end.
Funny, last I checked, A Tale in the Desert was doing just fine.
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