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Where Is The Metered Pay Model For Online Games?
bturnip writes "I just cancelled my account with the game A Tale in the Desert. I really liked the game- it had a fresh interesting approach, a Linux client, a non-linear style of game play, and was just fun to play. The graphics were pretty good, the sheer amount of stuff to see and do was impressive, and the online community was extremely helpful and friendly. My problem? I didn't play often enough to justify paying $13.95 each and every month. Is isn't that the price is outrageous, I'm not having any problems paying the bills, I just didn't play enough to make it worth my while. Where is the metered pay model for the casual gamer? If a certain game has a monthly fee of $15, and the average player plays 40 hours a month, a metered model might offer 40 metered hours for $25. Hours could be set to expire after a set time, say 4-6 months. Some months I might pay more than a monthly subscriber, some months less. This is a win/win situation. I can have more fun playing my character at my own pace without feeling I need to play more often to justify the montly cost. The game gets money that it would not get otherwise. If I end up playing often, maybe I end up as a monthly subscriber. The downside I can see for game makers is the overhead of running two billing models, extra work in tracking hours spent, etc. What are the other downsides? Is the potential market for this type of billing not worth the effort?" Along these lines, I think that Planetside would have been a huge success if it had launched with a different subscription model.
World of Warcraft offers Game Cards, which give you 2 months at a time. You can let your account expire when you want and pick it back up when you want. Not quite the flexibility you're looking for, but it's an improvement over the hard line subscription model. Check here.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
You paid for something you enjoyed... don't worry about it any more than that. You should never feel that you have to amertise something after you've made the decision to buy it -- especially if it's not a large expenditure. In my experience, trying to "get your money's worth" ruins the fun, whether it's eating too much at an all-you-can-eat buffet or by playing an MMO past the point of fun.
Another good way to look at it is by percentages -- was the game worth $14/(your monthly salary)? This helps me justify (or reject) stuff all the time, because it puts purchases in perspective of their size.
A large portion of their player base are the players who do play for 40 hours a week. If they decide to charge these guys $100/month because they play nonstop, then they are going to go to a different game. Unless your thinking of letting players choose which billing model they want to use. Although I think the majority of people who would be interested in these games would be willing to pay the flat fee, and by letting them pay a smaller amount, they might not earn as much profit, even if they do pick up a few extra people.
You're forgetting the famous health club business model:
- Sign up as many people as possible in January and Feburary when everyone's fat from Christmas and being inside all the time and bored with life;
- Make things seem interesting for a while with 'fun' programs;
- Gradually make things seem less interesting;
- HOPE NO ONE SHOWS UP.
Health clubs make their money on people paying for a membership they rarely use, or at least start out using and then don't keep up with.
The MMPORG business model seems the same. They have less server cost if fewer people show up; They just want people to show up occassionally and keep paying their dues, guiltily or not.
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
it is easier for the companies to have a flat fee for monthly subscriptions. If they did meter, it would require more work for the company, now that they have to track time per subscription, and send varied amounts to different subscribers.
Players who play a lot of hours may get screwed in a metered subscription. They may end up paying higher than the flat fee because they are on more than the average player.
I like paying one fee, and getting unlimited play time for the month. If I feel I don't play the game enough I cancel the subscription.
Where's my metered usage for my ISP? I want to be able to surf one or two hours a week and pay a small amount of money. Oh yeah, the vast majority of users don't want that, and adding the extra code and overhead, along with all the complaints from parents who got $100 AOL bills ended that business model.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Puzzle Pirates -
There is an option in puzzle pirates to play in a "dabloons" ocean. Dabloons are basically a form of in-game currency that you buy with real cash. While you need gold to buy things, you also need dabloons. You can use dabloons to purchase badges which allow you to do certain things in-game, such as play certain puzzles or lead a team of pirates. These badges generally last for 30 login days (as opposed to 30 calendar days)... in other words, they only degrade as you log in and use them. You can play Puzzle Pirates perfectly well for free, if you so choose, or you can pay to access certain features of the game. And it's pretty cheap: a badge that will allow you 30 login days of access to the most commonly used puzzle costs the real-world equivalent of a dollar.
Certain Asian-style games, such as Gunbound don't require a subscription, but allow you to use money to purchase in-game items. Or you can play for a really, really, really long time to earn the gold to have those items.
The ______ Agenda
Nothing shy of launching as a completely different game with an entirely different set of developers would've made Planetside a huge success.
How about a free "pay model," like Guild Wars?
I used to play some AOL premium games. They billed you by the hour. There's sure to be something like that out there that's OFF the AOL network. Or why not play a free game?
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups. -- 0 1 My two bits
I suppose you'd like it even better if...
If I'm right, you may want to go cell phone shopping.
For my self, I far prefer a company that simply tells me what their product costs and then lets me decide if I want it.
--MarkusQ
You pay say $15 per month to play a game. Lets say you _only_ play for 5 hours. Was the $15 that month a waste? Or was it simply not used to its full potential?
Compare it to say, renting a movie (or watching one in theaters), its still quite affordable.
Stop quibbling about small sums, suck it up, and frag on.
I guess it's basically what you feel the product is worth and whether you don't mind paying for time you aren't playing.
With the current model a 40 hour play time (using your numbers & approximates) would be about $.34 whereas if the customer paid for the metered time they would pay about double the non-metered customer.
With your television you pay a flat fee. Do you ask for money back for the TV/cable/satellite that you don't watch?
This is what doomed Meridian 59. With UO already out and EQ in beta, a game built on the Build engine couldn't survive when unlimited play cost $35/month. It may have been cheaper than the original $9.95/month for very few people, but for the vast majority of players it was a $25/month price hike.
Firstly, if the model is 'pay as you go' I would worry that it would reduce enjoyment of playing. If the longer you play the more it costs, it will always be in the back of you mind that each minute / ten mins / hour you play costs you more - breaking the immersion. If you don't worry about the cost, you can explore more freely, experiment, and just have more fun.
Secondly, if I had kids who wanted to play a MMOG, but knew it was charged by the hour, I'd be worried about them running up costs. Even if there are parental control, I think many 16 yr old gamers can beat their less tech-savvy parents' passwords by guessing them / working out common family passwords / finding the post-it note ( will Pop have a 16 character alpha-numeric password, or will he use the name of the dog??).
That's my 2 cents (a minute) worth.
I don't understand the notion that MMOGs are too expensive. How much does it cost to go to a single movie in a theater? That's two hours for about $10. How much is a night in a bar? Even nursing cheap beer, you'll spend at least $10 in a few hours.
For $15 per month you can play an MMOG any time you want, for as long as you want. You get regular patches and new content added every few months. This seems like a decent entertainment bargain to me.
Do you have a landline phone? Do you pay "per call" for local calls or do you pay a fixed amount for local calls regardless of the number of calls?
In North America (and much of the rest of the world), you pay a fixed amount for local calls regardless of usage. Is this fair? If you're a loser with no friends and only makes 2 local calls, why should you pay as much as your neighbour who makes dozens of calls a day?
The answer is that some things are too cheap to meter. The phone company could bill you per call, but the infrastructure to track & manage those bills would be far more expensive.
I suspect this game falls into the same category.
When you look at how much early games cost such as Islands of Kesmai in 1984 ($12/hour) or AOL's Neverwinter Nights in 1991 ($6/hour). Then there was The Shadow of Yserbius, which for a time offered unlimited play for only $120/month.
How many hours to people think they need to play to make it worth the cost? I mean take something like the console version of Half Life 2 for the Xbox. Just released, list price of about $50 - with no multiplayer. You can complete the game in about 10-15 hours easily.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Asian games tend to support pay-by-usage and/or micropayments to unlock content. There is no technical reason why this isn't done in the states; it is just a cultural difference. North American publishers have done small-scale tests and they do not believe that there is a large market for pay-by-usage or micropayments in the US.
Case in point: World of Warcraft is pay-by-the-minute in China, and the client is a free download as opposed to a $50 boxed CD set.
(BTW, I'm lead designer of A Tale in the Desert)
Actually the main reason in this case isn't a business one. Many of the challenges in ATITD are formulated with the assumption that most players have a single character (account). For instance in "The Test of Octec's Ghost" you are given twelve identical crystals, and are given the task of trading to assemble a collection of twenty different crystals and using them to build a huge animated statue. I intentionally designed the Test in a way where there would be a scarcity of crystals overall.
Now I realize that even as-is, some people will just buy an extra ("mule") account, but most do not. Setting up a strictly hourly system would, I believe, tempt a lot more people to do so. And it's a slippery slope: Once that happens, the game would likely develop a culture of people buying their way through challenges, and that doesn't strike me as much fun.
There are some business reasons as well that other posters have hit upon, though for some MMOs such a model may make sense. FWIW, bandwidth costs per hour are negligible: $0.0065/hour by my quick calculation.
One thing I gave serious consideration to, and may still do in a future Tale - is a separate casual server that limits players to 10 hours/week, but still charges $13.95/month. Why would anyone opt for this? By *far*, the biggest complaint and reason that casual players leave ATITD is a feeling of being unable to compete with the hardcore 40-80 hour/week crowd. The game then becomes about playing the smartest 10 hours/week you can, rather than grinding.
Is that nobody has thought of simply making it so that you still pay $12 a month to play the game, but that actually buys you 30 days of play time which are slowly ticked off your account as you use them. That way the company makes just as much money off of the super-players but also gets tons of extra business from the once-a-week players that otherwise wouldn't bother.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
"Can you kill me now? ....Good. I mean bad. Bad! Augh!"
I konw that Ragnarok Online has a metered payment method. You can buy 10 hours at a time for a set amount of money, and you can just play those hours any time. I don't think they expire either. This is the preferred method for mules, usually. Lot of other MMOs in Asia also offer these pay-by-hours set up...but I guess it's not very popular here, since people usually just accept (I mean, people eat the cost of the box in addition to the monthly fee anyways...so the publishers know they can get away with it).
I have a bias but Roma Victor has a crafting system a lot like, if not better than ATITD's and also has real-time pvp combat amongst other things. There's no subscription fee and it's been in testing since May.
He's not saying "why don't the game companies *CHANGE* their pricing model", he's saying "why don't game companies *ADD* add this as an *OPTION*"
The answer is pretty simple: because it would mean a rewrite of their accounting software, and they don't believe that the cost of doing that would be offset by the number of people who would use it.
I personally think that its a great idea, would probably get me paying for some MMORPG's. But the added cost of generating a billing system to support that along with them losing money from people now only paying $3 a month for their time where they used to think it worth the $10-15 would stop it quick
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
- Winston Churchill
I think this would be a good poll to see on the main page. I'm curious to see how many readers prefer the types (and choice) of subscription models.
Hourly rate, with no option for the standard monthly plan. Hourly rate, with the option for the standard monthly plan. Standard monthly plan only, no other option available.
I'm sure that power gamers would definitely hate choice #1.
Casual gamers would appreciate the opportunity to 'pay as you play'.
But the moral of the story is that its always nice to have a choice.
Trivial Omnipotence
I just got back from the movies, where it costs $9.50 for a movie(which is between 1.5 and 2.5 hours generally).
So, for less than the cost of two movies, which might give you 5 hours of entertainment, you can play an online game. If you play less than five hours a month, then yea, I can understand not wanting to pay that much, but that's the nature of the entertainment industry.
In all seriousness here is the answer to your question.
Casual MMO players are actually more expensive than more serious ones.
The major expense in operating an MMO is customer service. Casual players on average require more customer service than regular ones. This is coming from a friend of mine who works at Blizzard.
Obivously not all casual mmo players really cost more but as long as that is true on average, it wouldn't make economic sense to charge less to casual players.
---
I support spreading santorum
We moved away from this years ago, as the last of the pay-per-hour online services faded into nothingness.
You'd be here complaining about how you got raped when you fell asleep or had some general emergency take you away from your computer for several hours while you were logged in.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
But also mind that Puzzle Pirates is vastly different from the majority of MMO's *because* it is puzzle-based, and not the "kill stuff, get bigger, kill bigger stuff" model.
(that sucking sound you hear is my karma plummeting)
It's all about making money. Monthly costs in no way reflect the costs in development or maintainance.
They want to make revenue. They want to make as much as they can. And sadly publisher are just happier when their customers are paying an overly inflated price every month.
I played WoW for 4 months.
Minus the free month, I payed for 3, so that makes 40 Euros. Did I cost them 40 Euros when I was playing? Shit no!
The bandwidth costs next to nothing.
Support? I wrote them an Email once, they didn't answer.
Content updates? Bugfixes and stat corrections, done by maybe a few dozen people. Based on the amount you pay, the game should be getting signifigantly better every few months.
Character storage? Complete bull! Are they seriously suggesting this is an Issue? Even with quite a few characters the Data from one account could hardly exceed a few Megabytes. Gmail gives me 2.5 Gigs for free. The price I payed for the game, Blizzard should give my characters guarantee of existance for the rest of all eternity. Instead Blizzard deletes them if you go 6 Months without subscribing. Mine will be deleted next month. Why? They hope to scare me and get me to take up the subscription again so that I can keep my precious characters.
There is no reason why MMORPGs couldn't be completely free after paying full price for the game.
But the way it is, the publishers are making a fuckload of money, and they damn well want to keep it that way.
I don't want to start too much of a discussion about value, but there is no real reason anyone should have to pay 15 Dollars a month so they can play a game they already bought.
The price is totally unjustified. They say they've got 4 Million subscribers.
What kind of black hole have they got that needs $50 000 000 plus every month?
As far as I am concerned, the author is a joker.
What he thinks is costly is just the cost of two visits to the cinema, and at least the cost of bandwidth.
Even some alternatives, like playing a newly bought single-player game, cost more.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Why not have an hourly rate that caps out at the standard monthly fee, so that if you go away or can't play much you don't have to go through the process of cancelling and re-subscribing your account. The hourly rate would probably be higher than the average usage hours of a standard player, but would end up costing no more than monthly models.
The cost of tracking the billing details, dealing with disputes (What if your account was hacked by someone playing 400 hours?, what if you just said it was?), and itemized billing isn't worth it.
If we take the World of Warcraft model with this gem of an idea, we get a very cool system where once you run out of the X amount of time you payed for, you're automatically billed for the next. It doesn't kill immersion like metered play would, but it also would be prohibitive costwise for crazy nuts like myself who are willing to plug in 24 hours worth of gametime every two or three days. As Blizzard keeps your characters around regardless of whether or not you have a subscription, it won't cost them anything extra to have people who have characters and time they bought to play with but aren't playing.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
If I was on a metered pay model, I would be /PISSED OFF/ having to sit around looking for a group just so I can start playing while paying for every moment. Every little tiresome game mechanism designed to waste your time would start to drive me insane since I'd have to pay for all the time they intentionally waste. Slow leveling curves, unnecessarily long travel times, long cooldown/rest periods. Anything that keeps me from actually playing would drive me insane.
The reason such time wasting methods are acceptable is that people accept using up their time. They don't mind because they're on a flat rate. If some are playing on a variable rate in a game paced for flat rates, then all they'll think about is "When the game does this to me, they're just taking my money without entertaining me." The gameplay for a variable rate MMO would not be compatible for a flatrate MMO. In order for the two pay models to work together, the MMO itself would need to be designed to accomodate variable pay first, and then have the flat rate as an option, not the other way around.
What the original poster talked about is a big deal. A lot of people talk about how $14 bucks is less than going to the movies and buying popcorn, but the problem is that now that these games are so ubiquitous, many players may have multiple subscriptions to multiple games, which means that they will eventually pick and choose which games they prefer to keep active. Otherwise, you're paying 50 bucks with three subscriptions open.
On the flip side, others have said that we could be charging nothing in the monthly fee department. Sorry, not an option. Most online games cost about half as much what they charge you in order to maintain their support, meaning they have a 2-to-1 return on investment (maybe 3-to-1 if engineered well). You could concievably cut down the subscription fee to 4-7 dollars, but no game will be approved by anyone with a lick of business sense if they didn't return a decent profit. Businesses exist to make money, not to charitably provide fun for the masses. Most successful games provide a 5-to-1 ROI, which already makes MMOs seem like money losers to myopic bean counters who can't see that the lower ROI is a much more steady profit earner for the company.
As for the metered system, we don't use it for a number of reasons. The first is that watching the clock isn't fun. Period. The second is that, in order to maintain a relatively smooth level of profitability while lowering your casual gamer rates to $5 dollars, your hardcore will end up paying $25 dollars, at which point your hardcore will simply choose to go elsewhere. Your hardcore are important, they act as the bedrock of your community and you can't afford for them to wander off.
At $14, that's two tickets to a movie with no popcorn. Given that he said he liked the game, and that $14 wasn't much in his eyes, he's basically saying he didn't play more than 5 hours a month (rough number).
The pricing model wasn't for him, I guess, but I don't think a new one is needed.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
Sony does something like it with Gamecards. Cept, it's a matter of play one month, dont play the next..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Metered Pay doesn't work because these games want you to be emotionally invested in your characters. It's a lot harder for you to drop your account when your character(s) have friends and history.
Business-wise, it also makes sense. The games want to squeeze the casual players: those are the ones who are most likely to leave on a whim. They contribute relatively little, and are usually only around for a couple months at release. So they bill them the equivalent of $.30 an hour. Hardcore players, those are going to be around for years. They are going to be the ones who build social groups and provide energy. Those are the people you want to bill $.5 an hour.
I'm coming a little late to this discussion. I am not an online game developer, but I know a few :)
The single biggest problem with a Metered Pay Model, is that if you have a night where all you do is grind through a few levels and search for an item you couldn't find, and you've paid specifically for those hours, you are likely to get pissed quite quickly. Paying monthly means you only have to feel you got your money's worth at the end of the month.
In a similar vain, if you have a night where you are going through a dungeon and get knocked off when you are half way through it, and have to start again, you might want to have the money back if you explicitally paid for that, instead of it just being in your monthly account.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling