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.

Comments

WoW game cards

[Southpaw018]

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.

Re:WoW game cards

[Seumas]

That isn't exactly "metered" as you acknowledge.

The reason metered doesn't work so well in the game industry is that developers and publishers need more stable revenue. It's easier to calculate how many people were playing last month, this month and how many will play next month. Then you can figure your revenue, expenses and so forth based on that. It would really throw a wrench into the works if you had to somehow figure out how to properly account for whether users were going to play more *minutes* this month than last month or next week than last week. Not impossible, but more difficult.

I think the current pay model is quite a bargain. Most games are around $15/mo for unlimited play. If you're one of those rare people that only plays the game 10 hours a month, you might prefer to spend only 50 cents per metered hour (you'd save $10). But how many of those people are there? I mean, if you're only playing 10 hours per month for an MMORPG style game, you probably aren't very into it and aren't going to make much progress with it anyway.

Still, it would be kind of interesting if they had the same kind of pay model old BBSes used to have. Systems like Major BBS / World Groups BBS let you set the price and you charged it on whatever you wanted (900 number, credit card, etc). Then it counted every second.

Anyway, I just don't think the current play model allows for that sort of pay model. It wouldn't work for most gamers and it definitely wouldn't work for the developers and publishers. Maybe for a different type of game - but not MMORPGS. Not world of warcraft or Eve Online or ATITD.

Re:WoW game cards

[screwballicus]

Around release, Sony had stated that characters would not be retained after account cancellation. There was a rather large, prolonged and furious response from the community over this policy. Doing some further reading on fan experiences in resubscribing a while post-release, it looks like they never stuck with that policy, perhaps as a consequence of the extremely negative response over it or perhaps because they were never serious about it to begin with and were merely attempting to fearmonger people into not cancelling in the first place.

Metered Pay Model?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about a free "pay model," like Guild Wars?

Re:Lose the big gamers?

[AlphaDecay]

Although there is a reason why they won't, there is no reason the company couldn't roll out a system whereby a less hard-core player could pay by the hour and those who want unmetered access pay the $15 a month.

The company has access to every online metric for their product, I'm sure they could determine a decent per-hour rate. I'd still be subscribed to World of Warcraft right now if that was the case. This way if a casual player gets alot of free time and wants to go hard-core all they have to do is upgrade their account for the month.

The reason why the above will probably never happen is because companies like Blizzard most likely make a metric-ton of money off of very inactive accounts that are maintained by card debits. For example, if you aren't paying attention you might miss your payment date, thus you've already paid for the month (one where you many not be playing). Or you may not be playing alot this month but plan on it next month, so rather than start and stop payments you just let the month ride...

--AlphaDecay

Re:$15/month is cheap entertainment

[NeMon'ess]

If I'm paying ten bucks to see a movie, I'm pretty sure it's going to be a good, if not great show. I have never seen an MMO that came anywhere close to that level of enjoyment for a full two hours. Meanwhile I don't bother with bars because I'm trying to save money. If I'm going to spend ten to fifteen dollars it'll be at a restaurant so at least I'm not hungry. Beer and pretzels don't do that.

Basically at fifteen a month that works out to 45 every three months, or the cost of buying a new game. Truly great games can offer months or years of enjoyment. Merely good games, probably a month or two. So for a MMO to be worth it, it has to be good to very good for the entire time I'm playing it. Except now factor in how much time casual players can afford to give to gaming. Folks playing ten hours a week could make a great game last for four times longer than someone who games forty hours a week. Bringing that back to MMO's, for many casual gamers it then is not worth paying $15 for 1/4th the enjoyment.

My suggestion, meter playing time up to 15 hours per week. Anyone playing more than that pays a flat $15/month. Everyone playing less could be charged $0.25 per hour. So anyone playing 8 hours a week pays about $8 a month.

Re:$15/month is cheap entertainment

[Targon]

I used to play EverQuest, and I can remember some GREAT times in that game before everyone knew about every little item and a lot of the fun was just exploring. I can honestly say that the magic of not knowing what was next, or on the next floor was great in those days.

The thing that killed EQ for me and for many others was the raid only mindset. That in order to get an equipment upgrade for most people, you need a group of at least 20 people, all of which needed to stay focused for four or more hours at a time. After a while, it got to the point in my life where I couldn't stay up until 3am just to complete the raid where out of the 20 or 30 people present, perhaps 3 of them would actually get an equipment upgrade. That means that for every one of the people who went on that raid, in order to get an upgrade for all of them, they need to go through 6 of these raids. Because of the random nature of the reward as well, you need to do the same damn raid over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. That's why the fun fades for so many people.

For good times though, I remember one dungeon in EQ called Dalnir(Kunark). Because the equipment that people had when Kunark first came out wasn't great, this dungeon was a lot of fun for those who explored and discovered this place. It had a fun feel with three dungeon levels. You could adventure there solo, or pick up a small group of people and just hang out and chat. As you grew in power, you could go down to the second level and adventure there. Or even go all the way down to the third floor which was very tough for the time.

Now, it's all about set encounters that the players are supposed to beat. The journey stopped being fun and it was all about the destination. That's why I've been looking but not finding a new MMOG that's worth the monthly charge.