Slashdot Mirror
Pay-As-You-Play MMORPGs?
grubber33 wonders: "With exciting MMO games like World of Warcraft and others existing, the current monthly fee plans that all MMO games that I'm aware of aren't necessarily worth it for people that don't have as much time to play games as others. For instance, I have about 3-5 hours to play games per week, if I'm lucky. On top of that, I like more than one game but I'm still interested in MMO games. I was wondering what Slashdot thinks about newer MMO games implementing some sort of pay-as-you-play system or at least having that option alongside the current monthly fees."
My first ever MMORPG is Anarchy Online, which I've started playing last night.
If it wasn't for their BitTorrent download, and a free year of playing I wouldn't even consider it.
But now, I might not hesitate to pay the full price for an expansion pack, if that need comes up a few months from now, a few months after playing it for free.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
at www.ibgames.net used an hourly rate system for a long time. 60 cents an hour it was. They eventually went to a monthly subscription, so I don't think it was too successful.
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
i personally don't play play-to-play MMORPGs. there are a few free to play ones out there, like one i'm kinda hooked on called Maplestory. yeah yeah, goofy name. but it's a decent game, nothing fancy on the graphics, but it's still fun to me. and it's free.
the game's still in beta, but there are release versions in korean and japanese that are still free. the english is still being made.
the site is here
maybe check it out. you got nothing to lose, it's free!
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
FPFPFPFPFPFPFP!
Personally, I like the idea, but I don't see any reason the game companies would be for it. Currently, if I only use a game 3 hours a week, I'm still paying the full monthly fee. The game company is making out good in that situation. I don't think offering pay as you go would draw as many new people, as it would reduce the number of people paying for a monthly fee. Not to mention the technical aspect of tracking and billing people by time. And if a user has an issue with bugs or gameplay during the game, they are losing money, whereas with a flat monthly fee all they are losing is time.
If you have just 3-5 hours/week to play "exciting MMO games like World of Warcraft", I take it that you're working. They charge, what, $15/month? So that's around a buck an hour for you.
;)
My question is, where are you working that $1/hour spend on leisure time is too much? (Or did you mean to post this under "Troll Slashdot" rather than "Ask Slashdot"?
3-5 hours a week is 12-20 hours a month. So you're looking at a cost of $1.25-$0.75/hr. Find me another form of entertainment that's that cheap. People don't play more than one MMO for very long. And it's not the cost, you simplily can't dedicate your self in that manner. It's hard to only dedicate that small time your saying, becuase your peers who play more will outstrip you. Sure someone who started later will come up behind you and you can play with them, but they will also surpass you if they are playing more. Then your stuck in a situation of not playing with other people... well you might as well be not playing an MMO.
Risk Your Life -- http://planetwidegames.com/ .
Its more action then most MMOG's in that you can swing your sword and hit whatever is in front of it, even if you haven't targetted it! Spells are targetted but they can do splash damage. It makes the grind much better then most games but in the end its an MMOG so you just kill, kill, deliver, deliver, kill.
Personally, if I had to fork out about 40 quid for a game, and then pay by the month to play it online, I don't think I'd be forking out the 40 quid in the first place.
Also, like the writer said, I don't get much online play time. If I had to pay my the month to play online, I'd be paying more per game hour than someone with a lot more time on their hands.
Access to the servers should remain free. Either that, or the game should be a lot cheaper (free even), and a cost per hour or cost per day model setup for online play.
But they can't have it both ways.
T.
Whinging about having to pay a monthly fee for a MMORPG is a common theme on slashdot. I'll admit that I used to feel this way myself, until I sat down and actually thought about the economics of the whole thing.
Developing a MMORPG (I'm only talking about full-fledged, full-scale, commercial MMORPGs here, such as WoW, EQ2, FFXI and Galaxies) is an expensive business. The amount of game-content you need to put into one of these games is vast and completely dwarfs the work you need to do for a single-player game. As well as providing content, you have to do extensive testing and balancing, which probably entails running a large private, or even a public beta, for several months. This all costs a vast amount of money; at the end of the process, you're going to have pretty huge cash-flow issues. This is exactly why you need to charge customers to take the box off the shelf.
So, your game launches, your customers buy a copy each and you get a cash infusion which (hopefully) covers your development costs and maybe even gives you a profit (remember, this is the whole reason why you're doing this). What next?
By launch day, you need to have servers in place, both game servers and registration servers. You can try saving money on the latter if you want, and using somebody's old 386 on a 28.8k modem, as your registration servers won't be too loaded after the first few days, but this will cause major headaches for all your new customers and will give you a bad reputation from day 1. Sorting out your servers costs money, as does keeping them up.
Next, you'll probably find that despite all the testing you did and despite that expensive public beta you ran, the hordes of new players who have taken up your game have managed to find ways of breaking it that you've never even considered. You're going to spend the next few months, at the very least, chasing down bugs and fixing glaring balance issues. You're paying your staff to do this, when, in the case of most other types of games, they'd have been working on the sequel for months.
So, you've launched the game, you've got your people fixing bugs and the game is running smoothly enough. That's all you need to do, right? Wrong. Some of your customers are paying 16 hours per day. They've finished all that content they put in already. Your less dedicated players are working through the content at a solid rate and are getting bored with the levelling treadmill. Your competitor is launching their own MMORPG next month and people are saying they might switch over to that. Now you need to start adding entirely new content to the game. You might get away with one or two expansions, every few months. But remember, expect your customers to pay for too many expansions and most of them, apart from a few of the truly hardcore, will leave. Most of the new content you release needs to be made available through patches that are included with the normal servives. And you need to pay people to develop this. This is why you need monthly fees. Moreover, you need to keep the influx of cash as predictable as possible, so you don't find yourself spending money you're not going to have.
Letting people pay at an hourly rate for a MMORPG sounds nice to a certain type of gamer, at least on the surface. However, if you allow this, then the quality of the experience for *all* players will suffer. Bugs won't get fixed, content won't get added and the trend will move further towards paid-for expansions as opposed to "free" content.
Come on, it's not as if MMORPGs are expensive. I play FFXI, which is $15 per month. Hardly going to break the bank, is it? Especially when you consider how many other "regular" games I'd have bought without a MMORPG.
That sounds like a great idea. Upside: the cost might keep folks from paying too much and losing a job/marriage/social life. Downside: the compulsive player with financial difficulties might go bankrupt (though perhaps a more ethical MMO might cap the fee, knowing their game has cracklike properties).
The way it works is that playing is completely free. However, equipment in the game costs game money, and the easiest way to get game money is to spend real money on it.
It is possible to play without spending anything, but you'll end up having to do a lot of grinding in order to make enough money to buy a piece of equipment that will let you make some more money, etc. Spending will let you shortcut this to a fair extent.
(Currently I've sunk $10 into it. This bought me some decent armour, a low-level newbie gun, and some ammo for the gun. So far, I haven't managed to break even when hunting, but that's because I'm crap at it. I'm also practicing sweat gathering, which is sort of like milking except they tend to maul you at the same time. You end up with lots of little bottles that you can sell.)
One interesting side effect of all this, plus the fact that equipment wears out and needs to be repaired, is that everyone is obsessed with money. Poke around on the 'net and you'll find detailed analyses of how much a weapon costs to use: per hit, per unit damage, per swing, etc. Newbies are better off with weapons with low cost per swing/shot; experts are better off with low cost per unit damage. All equipment wears out and needs to be repaired.
The first time I killed an animal I got 0.78 ped loot from it (== 7.8 US cents). The record is apparently 29000 ped (== just under three thousand dollars)...
There are other ways you can make money in-game: hunting and sweat gathering are the main ones open to newbies, but there's also crafting, shopkeeping, mining, plus all the various service industries like guides, distracting animals while other people shoot at them, trading, etc. PE has a thriving economy.
If you're interested, give it a try --- just download and run. It is, after all, free.
Guild Wars (still in beta) is currently set up so that there is no monthly fee. You buy the game at retail, and play online for free. "Chapter" expansions then will be a purchaseable item, but only required to access new chapter areas or items. So for someone who plays only occasionally they only pay once, or only pays more when they are ready for playing the expansion content.
Although there are some services that a pay as you go system makes sense for, I think that for MMOs it is unnecessary. The subscription price of around $15 per month is not an outrageous charge and given my varied play time I would not want to be subjected to a pay as you go system.
During school or other busy times I find that I can only play an hour or so a week, if at all, but during free times I've been known to pull 16 hour play sessions.
If I were charged hourly for the long play sessions I wouldn't feel as if I was getting my money's worth.
Maybe adding a pay as you go as on option would be enticing to some users, but it would probably be along the lines of $2 per hour, so you wouldn't really save anything
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
3-5 hours a week is 12-20 hours a month. $15 for 12 hours of entertainment is still way better than a movie, and if you're the kind of person who plays videogames you're probably not looking for books. So there you go: you're paying more per hour than other people but it's still a good deal.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
If you can't afford ~$15 a month, then just don't get in to MMORPG. Having some sort of system where you pay for the amount of time you use is overly complex...so they charge 50 cents an hour or something, there are going to be people complaining they only played X hours and they over charged...really, $15 isn't much money and it gives you unlimited play time...I'd much rather it be that way than an hourly fee. So say they do that rate up to $15, that isn't so bad, but still a pain in the butt to keep track of and bill differently. But ultimately, if you are playing that little of the MMORPG, then you aren't going to get much out of it. I know that is a sad thing to say...but it's true, and because I can't (or don't feel like putting that much time into it) I am cancelling my subscription this month to FFXI. It was fun, but once you get to a certain point, the curve is too steep to climb to get to more of the story. Also, there is no incentive for them to switch to your model, they make more money on people who aren't playing at all (like me) but are not sure if they want to come back some time.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
MMOs are, to simplify things greatly, are both a combination of 'game' and 'world'. The gameplay for Everquest is relatively simple compared to something like Fable or Prince of Persia, but Everquest sees longer commitments because people become emotionally invested in the world itself.
If all the time you have to play is 3-5 hours a week, _most_ MMOs are not for you. You probably either aren't interested in such an experience or you don't have the ability to make that kind of connection.
As for pay-per-hour schemes of MMO play: MMOs aren't designed to be played that way. While the payment plans for the games should probably be a fee per hour up to a maximum fee per month, I've not seen an MMO yet where monthly fee was a problem.
Anyone remember Sierra Online? Whatever game portal type thing came out from Sierra, it had the RPG Shadows of Yserbius, some red baron flying game, and a couple other things. Was all pay-per-hour. Parents hated that heh. Altho, I don't think they're around anymore, so don't know if a lot of people were interested. Much different landscape today.
You may want to try Neverwinter Nights. I know, I know, it's not exactly an MMORPG, but there are static servers out there, the ability to interact with others online, and no monthly fee.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
In order to deal with the additional burden of customers who say they are being overcharged, the cost would probably not work out in your favor. They would have to charge at least $1 per hour, and at the rate your playing you'd pay more on that plan. You'd hate it when you went over your hours and were charged more than the unlimited players, and you'd want a 'cap' at the unlimited payment rate, but since there is an additional overhead there would be no reason for them to cap it for you.
In the end, it wouldn't work out for either you or the publisher. Perhaps once a viable micropayment system is in place...
-Adam
Mobile phone companies are already doing something similar. The thing is, when you go with a pay-as-you go type of plan, you end up spending much more money per minute. This would probably also be true if MMOG's did it.
Take a look at guild wars. No monthly fee. http://www.guildwars.com/ looks like it should be pretty neat.
Or, instead of paying, find a free one. Try Planeshift (http://www.planeshift.it/) when the new version gets released in a bit. It will have combat, guilds, money, etc. Their philosophy is to have a game with NO subscription fee, period. Sounds like a good idea to me...
planeshift is free!!!
http://www.planeshift.it/
There's even a Mac client in alpha!
Who do I have to blackmail to get some representation around here!?!?!?!?
2 Kids, WOW, X-Box, PS2...
All asking for 10 to 15 bucks per month!
Thats just plain nuts!
Sticking to the topic, I played Ever Crack for a while on PS2. While I liked to play, I couldn't afford the monthly fee. I would play for $0.50 per hour or something like that. If I play for more than 20 hours per month... then that is money ahead for company. The game would have to be really good for me to consider paying higher. Or another idea is $1 per 24-hour period.
Mike http://thenextgenerationofradio.com
People need to wake up and join the rest of us in the 2000's. Expecting a company to host servers for a game on their own dime might have been something that flew before the bubble burst, but you'd have to be an absolute fool to think that business model is anything but a slow death today.
Realize that you are paying for a service and that if you compared the money you were spending on a subscription to the other things you could buy with it, it's not that bad a deal.
And to those people out there who want to complain "They shouldn't charge me for the game, if they are going to charge me to play" quit being cheapskates looking for a free handout. Developing and publishing a game costs money too. It's not as if most MMO's don't give a free trial period or as if the amount of time you get out of that period is shorter than how long you'd normally be playing a non-MMO game at the same price before putting it on the shelf and letting it collect dust.
I've been playing Ragnarok Online for quite some time now. Back to when it was still in the Beta. Over time, I've had less and less time to play. Eventually I stopped paying for it as I was only playing a few days a month. Recently, the've added the option to buy 30 hours of time for $7.99 or so, which I have done. Now I get to keep playing even if it is only a few times a month. Now I admit that for some classes in the game (Merchant specifically, who really has to sit online for hours or days at a time selling their wares) this will not work for, but for my knight and most other classes it works out just fine.
- If you did not log on at all, you would not be charged.
- Usage up to 10 hours would be charged at 50% standard rate.
- Usage over 10 hours would be charged in full.
I don't assume to have the correct solution, but it seems to me that the pricing model does need to change before these online games attract more casual gamers.Jay Bibby reviews Flash and casual Web games at... http://jayisgames.com
I haven't seen any comments regarding this. Currently, a few MMORPGs allow you to purchase monthly cards in store in lieu of having to use a credit card. A possible way of doing it is to allow players to buy timecards with a set number of hours on them instead of being valid for just one month's worth of gaming. IE: buy a card with 50 hours for 25$. That card could last you a week like it could last you a year, depending of how often you played.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Listen gamers MIGHT pay to play for a while but mom and dad are NOT going to pay:
$50 a month for the internet
$20 bucks a month for Xbox Live
$20 bucks a month for little Johnny to play WOW
MMORPGs became POPULAR becasue they were FREE to play online. Sure you buy the game but the online gaming was free. Start to charge a monthly fee and gamers and parents will begin to EXPECT A LOT MORE for their gaming dollar.
Soon some asshole is going to suggest that we have a pay as you go internet... 5 for this page and 5 for that page... please!!!!
Remember corps always want to carve their products into ever smaller sizes BECAUSE THE MAKE MORE MONEY... STUPID!
While you do have a valid point, if you're one to play multiple online games at any given point in time, the monthly costs can sure add up.
It would be great, really really really really great, if a single entity came along and provided hosting. I'm thinking something like what SourceForge does for OSS, only with some money changing hands.
Let's set they charge five bucks a month for developers to host their games. It's more of a commitment thing, than anything else; to keep the cheapwards off.
Now, let's assume they host, say, 50 different games. You now have to shell out, ohh, let's say a buck a month and get access to all of the hosted games. Since you commonly have a few hundred to a few thousand players at any given time per game, and most games aren't that bandwidth intensive, the hosting company now makes enough to pay their costs.
If they're feeling nice, they could even give any extra money back to the developers.
Ah, if only I had some money, I would love to start something like this myself. Yet initial costs would be an issue, until they managed to convince the popular games to switch over.
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
If you've ever played a MMO, you'd see that the games aren't made to be played 3 hours a week. Some quests can take up to 3 hours alone. If you played 3 hours a week, you'd be lucky to get three or four easy quests done. These games are made to be played 3 hours a day. If you do the math, you'll see that you really aren't paying much per hour.
.... if it doesn't come with satisfying single-player and LAN multiplayer experiences.
If you buy the game and all it does is let you log into a premium paid online service, you should get the game for at most the cost of the media.
I don't have a problem with paying to subscribe to a gaming service, especially if the game world is dynamic and the admins are coming up with quests, new objects, backstory, playing as NPCs, etc....
The questioner is thinking about the cost of MMOGs all wrong. The flat fee per month results in better cost per entertainment hour than you might think by just looking at the total fee.
If you live in a major city, you pay $10-11 to go see one movie (if you buy only the ticket, and you go alone). A fair estimate of average movie length is 2 hours.
If you pay for WoW (for example) one month at a time, it costs $15 per month. If you then play the game 3 hours per week (assuming four weeks in a month), you play a total of 12 hours a month.
Your cost per hour of movie entertainment is at least $5/hour, but your cost per hour of WoW entertainment is $0.8/hour. (I have left out a lot of costs, like the initial cost of the game, the cost of gas to get to the movie theater, the cost of internet access for the game.) And the more you play WoW, the more that cost per hour goes down. Unless you intend on playing three hours or less a month, the cost per entertainment hour of playing WoW is less than going to ONE movie a month. If you can't find adequate entertainment value by paying the monthly fee of the MMOG (compared to seeing a movie or any other form of entertainment), you shouldn't bother playing an MMOG in the first place.
I understand the posters predicament. I have to say that I myself also have a problem with shelling out a monthly payment for play when I would only be able to play it a couple hours a week. The pricing model of monthly payement only really works for those that can play it many hours weekly. Although I really have to say that they have their target market down pat, obsessive geeks with lots of time, their pricing model excludes many who would like to enjoy their service. For example I myself have wanted to join many of the MMORPG's but my obsessive work schedule would only allow me to play a couple hours a week, hours that I would like to spend with my girl instead. So the real problem with their pricing model is that I would get no value out of their sevice for the money that I shellled out. I really like the idea of a pay per play system implimented in an MMORPG, I would be very inticed to play if I could pay as I go. I have allways been interested in them, but allways have been unable to play enough of them to make them worth it. I like the poster's idea of pay as you play.
Guild Wars is still in beta, but they intend to have no monthly fees. As I understand it, they intend to support the game through frequent release of expansion packs. Whether or not they will be successful with this model remains to be seen, but I'm sure many developers are watching closely.
You are bitching about paying $1-$1.25 an hour on entertainment? Do you think an actual hourly rate will be any lower than that? Do you ask the cable company to charge you for only times you are watching tv as well? How about your ISP? This arguement seems rather cheap and petty to me.
Let me just put it this way...if you are worried about spending $15 a month on entertainment ask your manager at McDonalds for more hours because you have some serious finiacial issues.
Now quit daydreaming about playing WOW and give me my #2 SUPER SIZED.
"At first, we thought it was just another snake cult."
Try Ragnarok online, they have a Pay as you Play plan. www.ragnarokonline.com
While I like the concept, I'd have to remind you that the biggest cost in hosting an MMO isn't the bandwidth but the CPU time.
A "Server" for a game is more than likely not going to be one server, it's going to be a farm of 8-10 servers + a master server and maybe a database server. A game like WoW has maybe 20? "Servers" for their game. That comes down to somewhere in the area of 200 servers to run just for one game.
Lets say that you host 50 games, with the same ball-park figures. That's close to 10,000 servers. Ten thousand that you have to monitor and maintain. The sort of facilities you'd have to have to maintain that number of servers would be expensive enough that unless they are packing enough people into the games that you can't actually play, $1 a month isn't even going to come close to covering the costs. Much less giving the developers or the hosters any room for profit.
It would also allow faster uptake on newer MMOGs since it would be less daunting to try the game out since you've already got the plan bought all you need to do is purchase the game.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
I've made both MMOs and the more usual multiplayer games and the economics are quite a bit different. There are huge costs involved in creating the server backend to run MMOs effectively and an even greater expense to purchase servers for peak use capacity. Add this to the glut of MMOs that came on the market chasing those gaming dollars and we started to see monthly prices creeping up from $9.95/month to $12.95 and now $15. Keeping those servers running is a large expense every month and I think most game companies would prefer the known revenue rather than going back to a per hour fee structure that wasn't very good in the first place. What the industry calls the "churn rate" (% of users who cancel their subscriptions every month) is easier to manage when the biggest hit a user will see is $15/month rather than the possibility of a big bill after playing a lot on a per hour basis and then getting scared and canceling the game. This so-called "safety" factor is similar to what cable and credit card companies do with their tiered channel groups and minimum monthly payments. A pessimist would call it "bleeding them slowly so they don't notice".
It's not as if most MMO's don't give a free trial period or as if the amount of time you get out of that period is shorter than how long you'd normally be playing a non-MMO game at the same price before putting it on the shelf and letting it collect dust.
That's rich. Let's see, single player RPGs cost 60 USD on the high end. For that you can get 40 hours or more of play time. Now, for normal folk, 4-5 hours a week is pretty much all the time they will spend on a video game. This equates to two moths of playtime. As I understand, you usually only get a month free with a MMORPG.
Add to that the fact that people often put down a game and then come back to it months later. I know I've done that numerous times. Also, people will play often play other games for that 4-5 hours a week.
Given that, a MMORPG is a rip off for anyone but the hardcore gamer.
Is that they get nerfed at each new patch. How many MMO's have you played where after weeks and endless hours of the same repetative crap have you found it was for a character or prize that was utter crap? Or only to have that new charatcter/skill/weapon yo uaquired from those weeks, nerfed with the latest patch?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
I agree. I've wanted try out an MMO but haven't for the same reason-just don't have the time. I was recently looking at the Gamespy server numbers (not that I particularly like Gamespy) and saw how many Neverwinter Nights servers and players there were. I thought, "Oh yeah, there's multiplayer in that game." I already owned it anyway, and for the last couple of days I have been playing on the Pathway of Ascension I server and having a pretty good time. I'm sure it's not the same feel of having crafting and all that but I also don't feel the need to "Get my money's worth". You can find various servers to suit your taste as well e.g. story or action driven.
Personally, if I had to fork out about 40 quid for a game, and then pay by the month to play it online, I don't think I'd be forking out the 40 quid in the first place.
But what if these 40 quids covered the game and a couple of months of a game play ?
I think it's a fair and pretty decent deal. You are getting a chance to play the game for a while and if you like it, you start paying for a gameplay. And the money go to compensate the provider for support, bandwidth and hardware expenses.
In fact, World of Warcraft is packaged exactly like that (only it's 1 month though AFAIK).
3.243F6A8885A308D313
People that compare gaming entertainment to other entertainment, while bringing up a valid comparison, are missing the point. Gamers don't really care how much they pay to see a movie or game. Instead, they compare the price they are getting comparitivly. For example, people don't generally complain about movie tickets costing $5. Now, if every movie but one start selling tickets for, let's say, $3 then they would start complaining. The issue here is that they are able to get a great experience from free MMORPGs or single/multiplayer games at a generally lower cost. You can't really play HL2 with 5,000 people at once but does that detract from its story? No, its still a supurb game. Why pay $50 and then $15/month when you can shell out $50 and play HL2 and have just as good of a time?
Perhaps they could sell it on an hourly basis.
Let us say that someone plays 2 hours weekdays, 4 hour weekends. That's 18 hours per week. That would be 72 hours per month. We'll use 72 hours per month to figure this out...
Charge like an initial fee for just having the account. Like $5 per month. Then charge like 5 cents per hour. Have roll over plans too, when unused hours will roll over to the next month for up to 12 months.
I do belive the Eve Online play card system only subtracts days as you use them.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
Roma Victor is apparently planning on avoiding subscriptions altogether. I'm really looking forward to a non-fantasy MMORPG that let's me truly pay as I go. It's not totally free, which makes sense - if it's free how long's it gonna last? What incentive to the devs have for not just wiping the database when their bills are too high? I'd much rather pick how much I pay according to how much I'm actually going to play.
I beat HL2 in the course of two weeks, it would have been one had I not stopped to use the G-gun on every loose piece of trash and burnt out car I could find.
I beat Dues Ex 2 in the course of a week. It would have been even less if I hadn't been telling myself "this can't be all there is, maybe they hid something over here".
I beat most single player FPS games in far less than a month. I beat most RTS games in far less than a month. The only games out there that can even CLAIM to hold me longer than a month are RPGs and they normally don't take that much time except that I'm spending all my time doing EVERY quest and looking for EVERY easter egg because I know that when I put it down I won't pick it up for another year.
If you are a 'normal folk' and can't even spend an hour a day playing games, then frankly you might be normal but you aren't a normal game player. I might or might not be able to spend an hour a day playing a game, but I most certainly have time during the weekends.
If you can't put 30 hours into a game in a 30 month day, then you really don't need to pretend you are a gamer and really don't need to worry about MMO anything.
I am not a hard-core gamer, I have a life outside computers, I have a job that frequently goes well over 8 hours a day. But you don't have to be a hard-core gamer to get a value out of an MMO you simply have to actually PLAY games.
If you can't do that it's much like the little boy who complains that he can't afford that new sports car on his $5 a month allowance. Who CARES, you can't drive it anyway.
I was really looking forward to World of Warcraft.
Really. I was checking the forums every day, reading all the stats on Thottbott, and it was getting quite pathetic.
But Blizzard keep "nudging" back the release date. Americans got it in november... we in europe get it in December. No, late december. No, late december/early january.
And thats only the FINAL BETA. We get to wait until "early 2005" till the game officially opens. Which probably means late 2006.
It wouldnt bother me so much, except the game if DONE. Theyre just waiting cos they dont give a rats ass about the european market.
So Im playing Anarchy Online, I'm enjoying it, and im not buying world of warcraft.
Fuck you blizzard. If you gave half as much attention to europe as you do to america, im sure europe might have actually been a viable market to you. As is, Im telling everyone I know to play Anarchy instead.
Is that why MMORPG are taking the place of table top rpg games? Because of the overpriced books WOTC are selling? Or do people just like MMORPG better?
Guild Wars and Anarchy Online are both free to play.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
You explanation may make sense to you, but it's complete nonsense.
Go look up "sunk costs" somewhere, and then post a 500 word report.
(Score:-1, Snooty)
that is a good idea, but companies do not want to charge in nickels and dimes. you will just end up having to prepay for however million hours in advance anyway, and then there will be scandals on TV about how some retarded teenager spent $3000 on some online game, and their parents want to sue the makers because their teenager is becoming obese.
Jeff Strain: I definitely think that Guild Wars will change the way gamers think about online games and subscription fees in particular. As a passionate gamer myself, I like to play around with a lot of games at once. I may not finish them all, but I love the fact that I can play Zelda: Four Swords Adventure for a few weeks, put it down to play Half-Life 2 and Burnout 3, and then come back to it a few months later on a rainy afternoon. I don't have to feel guilty about not playing. I don't have to feel like I can only have one game that I am actively playing at a time. We think subscription fees are contrary to the way most people want to play games, in that they force you to pay every month, even if you are not playing. Our goal is to provide an online experience with all of the support and evolving ongoing content that you get with a traditional MMO, but without the need for that subscription fee; that is exactly what Guild Wars is all about. There are no gimmicks, hidden advertising, or fees in small print. You will not be paying in installments, or paying more than you would for any other AAA game. It just works exactly like you would expect: buy the game, play online for no additional charge, and when a new chapter comes out every six months or so, decide whether you think it is cool enough to buy. The choice is always yours. Do I think players will want to see more of this type of business model for online games? No, I think they will demand it!
Guild Wars: http://www.guildwars.com/
Complexity Happens
I look at from the "risk vs reward" paradigm upon which many MMORPGs are based. I spend, say, $10 a month for a game. That's my risk. My reward is playing that game as much as I want over the course of that month. I'll admit that my free time isn't what it used to be a few years ago, back when I was able to make giant comments like this in passing about an MMORPG, but I still think that I get my money's worth out of $10/month.
Think of it this way. Earlier this week, I went to go see Ocean's Twelve. It's the first time I've gone to see a movie in years. I saw Ocean's Eleven on TNT awhile ago, and enjoyed it enough that I decided to pay for the sequel instead of waiting for it to show up on TV. I went alone. The ticket was $8.50. A small popcorn and a medium Dr. Pepper were $6.75. (Aside: I can buy two three-packs, or SIX FULL SERVINGS, of ACT II microwave popcorn for about 4 bucks. Any theater complaining about revenues being in the gutter does NOT have my sympathy.)
Anyway, I spent $15.25 to see Ocean's Twelve. The movie ran just over two hours, if you subtract the 6 commercials and 4 previews. That's $7.63 per hour for entertainment. Suppose I'd smuggled in a chilled can of Dr. Pepper and a bag of Doritos in my jacket pockets, instead of buying the ridiculously priced concessions. An $8.50 ticket to a two hour movie makes $4.25 per hour. That isn't too far under minimum wage!
My point is that I paid - depending upon how you see it - either $4.25/hour or $7.63/hour to be entertained. I have a subscription to the MMORPG Ultima Online which costs me $9.99/month (caveat: I pay 6 months at a time, if you pay monthly, it's $12.99 a month). $9.99, or even $12.99, spread over the number of hours I play in a month, is far more of a value than the price of a movie ticket which only gets me two hours of entertainment.
Your time is what you make of it. I figure ten bucks a month for the ability to play Ultima Online 23 hours a day if I wanted to gives me much more of a reward than paying $4 or even $7 an hour to go to the movie theater.
YMMV.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
For $20, I got 20 "health points" to start playing online poker a few months ago.
I've played a ton, and now have a whopping 29 health points. I get into major battles a couple times an hour, a few times to the death, surviving every time. There are elements of both skill and luck, you're free to walk away from any battle with minimal damage.
You can take as many health points from your enemies as you have yourself. So in a battle with many opponents, wisely applying your spells and demonstrating force can sometimes triple or quad your health.
I'm not a major player. I don't know the game that well. I hang at the lowest limit tables. I'm still up 9 bucks, and it is Seriously Fun.
I won't pimp my poker room, but it's the only one that works for OSX.
Wake up.
Actually, I'm a Mac alpha tester, and the game really is good, albeit somewhat buggy. But what are you to expect for an alpha version of a game? I believe beta is coming soon. The game runs smoothly on my three year old mac, which is more than I can say for some other games. Of course, it won't be comparable to other RPG's until its "finished" (of course, the game will never be truly finished, the idea is to keep making new parts of the world)
...
Free to play, but you can unlock the whole game for $12/yr.
Less than 1hr/day will get you up and rolling in no time.
No sharp objects, I'm a programmer!
Given the very nature of MMORPGs and having played Final Fantasy XI, I can't even imagine you deriving any benefit to playing a MMORPG 2 to 3 hours a week. MMORPGs are time pits, they require a large investment in time before they become fun. True, "World of Warcraft" seems to be breaking the mold but I doubt even with that title 2 to 3 hours a week is enough. Just as a frame of reference, 66% of the FFXI licenses have lapsed into an "inactive" state. As in, people bought the game, played for a time and have *not* returned. This does not surprise me at all. I spent quite a lot of time with FFXI before I truly started having fun with the game nearly quitting several time in the process. About the only thing that kept me going is a friend who I had played with online in another type of game. After playing FFXI, I simply can't imagine a pay as you go MMORPG model. Or perhaps I can, but that's an altogether different experience. My advice would be to either stick to single player titles or simply play a game like "Neverwinter Nights" with some buds if you want some RPG gaming with comradery.
People don't want plans that charge them for what they actually use, they want to pay a huge lump some for all they can use, even if that cost is way over what they would normally use.
Consider: All-You-Can-Eat Buffets, Unlimited Internet Access, Unlimited Phone Minutes
But I thought I'd add in anyways.
Long ago, on a Service provider that should be long gone as well, there used to be a game called Neverwinter Nights, or NWN for short. No, I'm not talking about THAT game where you get to write scripts and have pretty graphics, and the gameplay is based on the 3.0 D&D rules.
NWN was a game based off the Gold Box series of D&D games, such as Gateway to the Savage Frontier, for example. The game was a pioneer in it's field, a graphical multiplayer game. The servers allowed, I believe, 200 Players at any given time. Unfortunatly, you could only play the game if you subscribed to America Online.
At the start of this game, players payed a per hour fee to play. Many an AOL bill was racked sky high because of this. Some even had hundreds of dollars a month racked up because of this game.
After a while, AOL removed it's hourly fee from a lot of it's games. The servers were swamped, and the people were Merry.
Then along came AOL Version 3.0! Oh noes said the execs at the added expense of making AOL3.0 compatible with NWN. So they decided to go back to an hourly rate for playing NWN, as a premium service game.
The players revolted by their bait and switch tactics, refused to pay the fee. Seeing the game collapse, AOL decided the expense wasn't worth it, so with the upgrade of AOL, so went Neverwinter Nights.
That is my story of why Pay per hour is a BAD idea.
To an MMORPG service provider, casual players are the main source of their income. To make things cheaper on casual players would reduce their income drastically. If it were given as an added option, in addition to a monthly fee, it wouldn't be worth the headache to the MMORPG provider, because it would be used so rarely as to not even pay for itself.
So wether you play 1 hour a month or 10 hours a day, the providers would rather charge you monthly and be sure of their subscription income than waste resources trying to make things cheaper for those who only want to play an hour or two a week.
- They made back their development costs in under a year (which is a stupid amount of money).
- The average amount of time spent by a player online is 80 hours per month. That's a part-time job. And that's only the average (there are some crazy people out there).
- Almost everyone checked in at least once a month. So there were very few people who were just holding onto accounts because they didn't want their characters to go away.
- He said that he thought that if they'd charged $20/month, people would have paid up (actually, he seemed a little bitter that they hadn't).
I think that for the big games, it doesn't really make sense - they're on the big end of a fat paycheck, and there's just not a lot of incentive for them to choose a different model. Also, they're trying to develop a core group of hardcore fans. The people who're only stopping by for a couple of hours a week are the aberrations, not their core audience. And by developing a pay-per-play system they'd actually be punishing the exact people they're trying to attract.
Clay Shirky had an interesting op-ed piece on micropayments and why they wouldn't work. I don't know if he's right, but I don't think that the pay-as-you-go model makes a whole lot of sense.
daniel
Many comments here have indicated that $15/mo is really nothing, less than a movie, etc. All that seems fair. For me the barrier to starting an online game is setting up the recurring billing and then the whole process of CANCELING the account when you are sick of the game/don't feel like playing it anymore/think it sucks. I would be more inclined to try a game that won't bill me if i don't log in, even if it's a $10-15 hit when i do.