Asheron's Call releases significant monthly content and storyline updates. City of Heroes also has content updates about every 6 weeks so far, promised for more like monthly. The monthly fee for these games covers the development costs for these props, in addition to the space the servers are kept (lease/rent), and the admin person or people to maintain those boxes. And yes, the bandwidth, which you should remember is a HUGE pipe on the MMORPG side, even though it's a trickle on yours.
Fair enough in my books. Whether it's fair in games like EverQuest where you don't get the monthly props is up to the consumer.
There are many many games. The fee doubles each time you add a game. Play EQ? pay X. Wanna play UO as well? pay 2X. Wanna play CoH? 3X
Then play less games. I really don't get any of the above posts at all when they complain about the "high cost" of MMORPG subscriptions. If your family has one car, and you want another but you can't afford it, you don't write a letter to your editor complaining about the high cost of cars and the need for a new pricing model for that lease. You don't buy the other car.
MMOs need an up-front fee and a subscription fee. The up-front fee covers the cost of the game development, which is enormous, as well as the costs of advertising, distribution, etc. The subscription fee can't be counted on to cover these costs, for a few reasons. First of all, the investors are antsy and want to see their costs covered by this point. Secondly, on any modern MMORPG, development does not stop once the game ships -- new content and gameplay have to be introduced on a monthly basis or close to it, or players will jump to the newest and shiniest game, and this costs money. Third, server maintenance becomes a serious issue as the server farm you had during development and the server farm you are now running for retail have vastly different upkeep costs. Subscription fees need to go to #2 and #3, meaning that there needs to be an upfront cost to pay for the original development.
An early poster threw out the old chestnut about a shelf cost on an MMO indicating that the game was unlikely to be good enough to keep subscribing to. Well, that is indeed the case. Certain MMOs aren't for everyone -- in that case, both the consumer and the developer/maintainer have to treat that game as a normal retail non-online game. I've purchased nine different MMOs over the years and only played three of them for any length of time. However, I only regretted the purchase of one of those games, and I got my "money's worth" out of the others as I played them as long if not longer as I would have a normal, off-the-shelf game. The "free month" is thrown in there for just this purpose: you can treat the game as an experience of under a month and then move on, or you can keep paying the dosh and stay in-game if you enjoy it.
The costs of developing and maintaining an MMO somewhat defy comparison. Comparing it to moviegoing, or non-online games, or a health club membership just don't stand up. There are reasons for the way the pricing model is set up. Yes, indeed, one of those reasons is greed. You may be shocked to find that the companies that make these games are indeed for-profit companies. If you don't like the pricing model, don't play the games. The vast majority of players are having lots of fun without you.
- Invented/installed the fireflys in Pirates of the Carribean
- Came up with putting the green-eyed rats at the end of Pirates as you go up back to ground level. We have a bunch of them at home and put them in windows and under the Christmas tree
- Invented the light flicker-ers that have been used at Dland for almost 30 years to make plain lightbulbs in opaque houseings look like they are flame
Tell your dad he's my new hero for today. Those three things are, no joke, three specific details that my brother and I were discussing a few months ago when we were talking about the old-school Disneyland detail.
By all this, it sounds like a polygamous pod, or at minimum an MMF triad, would make the most sense. The males still get the sex they want. The hunting gets done more efficiently. The woman gets the meat, and the, um, meat, as well as help with the youngin'.
I wouldn't call the virtual item buyers "sad". I picture these folks as having more money than time, and wanting to experience, say, the high level game in Everquest without having to go through the tedium of levelling their character to 60, plus AA, plus gear, etc. By spending a whack of cash, they can then get in game for a while to figure out how to actually play (you can spot these people a MILE away, level 60s who don't understand the concept of "proc"), and finally experience the end game.
No more sad than playing the game for hours a day in the first place in some people's eyes.
(I figured this out, making assumptions on pay rates for employees, bandwidth costs, server maintainence and replacement, based on 100,000 subscribers. At the $12 price point, a MMOG makes $50,000 NET PROFIT a month. That's AFTER all expenses (including personnel.)
Who modded this Insightful? If I had a large business that was pulling down $50k a month, or by your assumptions 50 cents per subscriber, I'd be damn sure that my company wasn't publically traded. We'd get absolutely killed in the market with numbers like that.
Besides, we've heard this recycled argument many times over, and it's apples vs. oranges. An MMORPG is not UT2004, or any other off-the-shelf, developer moves on game. It's a game designed to have content that changes on a monthly basis, and such a VAST amount of content that thousands of people can have "fresh new experiences" every time they log in. Comparing this to a game that just happens to have fan-created after-release content is ridiculous. Even if said company wanted to open up its servers in ANY WAY to have players supply their own content -- and they'd have to be certifiably insane to do so -- they run the risk of having this player-created content trample all over the developer's planned epic storyline.
You show me a game with no subscription cost that is massively multiplayer (no dude-in-Seattle-running a server 4 hours a night -- I'm talking 24/7, with TONS of equipment to assure little lag), is huge enough to run around for literally days and weeks and not see it all, and has constantly changing content and epic-scale storylines and characters, and I'll retract all of the above. UT2004 player-created content could not possibly stand against, say, Asheron's Call (the first one), with more content per month than a fan can generate in a year. The main difference is that UT2004 looks much spiffier, having a 4-years-more-recent engine, and games are quicker. I have an attention span, so I'll go with something where I can experience a vast amount of content over time.
I'm 6'6", 220. I played a Tarutaru for two reasons: first, in real life I'm tired of hitting my head. Little (har!) danger there. Second, I've played the large races before, specifically in DaoC. Not being able to see around your character is EXTREMELY annoying -- with a Tarutaru there's little (snort!) to get in the way.
Yeah, and there's the/panic:).
Clicking that MPEG is HIGHLY advised. I've never been more motivated to buy an import game. I actually cheered (quietly) when the parking sign went up.
Five months of beta mean a first-day-of-retail populace that includes two groups. First, the lucky, small percentage of people who will proceed to form cliques and keep their super-secret-squirrel knowledge of the best places to hunt, trade recipes, etc. to themselves, gaining levels and wealth in a very short period of time. And the vast majority that will enter the game, see these people, see all the content being solved by them on day two, and give up.
Happened to a lot of people when FFXI went live in NA. Several people from the Vault boards quit the game because they felt it was impossible to establish any sort of level playing field. Sure, not everyone is going to feel competetive, but it's like taking someone who's just learned to play chess, and throwing him in a tournament. That person's hopes are going to be crushed, and it's unlikely they're going to see the better players as something to strive towards.
You have never, not once, stood around camping something or roaming a small area, just to get xp? ALL your xp is from either quest rewards, or fighting things you had to kill to satisfy a quest, or maybe fighting while travelling? If so, that's very interesting. I'd like to know, though, how long these quests take. If there's a quest to, say, kill fifty ghouls in that cornfield over there, and it takes you three nights to do it, I don't see how it's different from the current camping-for-ghouls-cornfield in EQ/DaoC:).
Kill hellish creatures with guns and chainsaws? It's already been done in a great board game ("Zombies!!!"). This Doom board game is just going to try to ride the Doom name to a 30% premium over what it's likely worth. Fantasy Flight is really disappointing in the last while.
The full list of new games is quite interesting. Twilight Creations is coming out with "All Wound Up", a board game featuring WIND UP TOYS. A new edition of Kobolds Ate My Baby! The fun never stops!
The difference being, of course, that the likelihood that these diseases are being studied in the US labs for preventative purposes is extremely high, whereas the likelihood of the same in 3rd world labs is extremely low.
You forgot the utterly non-immersive combat. You know, where your character stands immobile in front of a monster, and swings his sword every 5 or 6 seconds, while the monster stands there and takes it, except for swinging ITS sword every 5 or 6 seconds. Remember that great Ali-Frazier fight where they just stood there in front of each other for minute upon minute, arms down, and occasionally one would raise his arms and throw a punch? Now THAT was fun!
Compare to Asheron's Call (the first one, not the second one that requires a monster PC and still has no content). Combat IS exciting and visceral. No wonder McQuaid got MS to dump the franchise when he came in. Good thing, as well, since AC now is run by the developers, Turbine, who are continuing to provide great monthly props full of content and upgrades, who plan an expsnion, and who are actually going to ADVERTISE the game.
You do realize that this is how every game developer in the history of game developers works, right? That's where they get the reputation for being horrid, 20 hours a day 7 days a week sweatshops: from the last 3 months of every project, not the first 33.
If you bought a convertible beetle between around May and November of last year, you got a free iPod, if I remember the promotion correctly. My wife was annoyed as she bought a Beetle but being Canadian was screwed out of the free iPod:|.
Yeah, I've seen 3 bodies piled up there. Given that there are ALWAYS people there, you think they'd ask for help. I've helped people recover in that place a bunch of times.
Yep, it's reduced. But I'm not going to leave 8 100k+, under 100 bu items all of which I've tinkered up 5+ times over the course of months, plus two sets of Thorsten's Armor (boring quest), Ursuin Rugs (very rare), and so on, to rot. You need a corpse recovery.
I like my 180k value, 83bu atlatl, which will cover my bows forever, almost as much as my major life helm. Oh wait, maybe not...:)
It's important to note that carrying around death items in AC1 doesn't mean that you are eliminating the consequences of death. Good death items are a combination of expensive and hard to find. (Sure, you can carry around a pack of master robes, but these are heavy and don't always cover non-armor items). If you die and drop a bunch of DIs, you are going to be doing a corpse recovery to get them back. The carrying of DIs just ensures that the first time you die, you don't lose any of your valuable weapons/armor, which would make it difficult to do the corpse recovery at all without help.
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Fair enough in my books. Whether it's fair in games like EverQuest where you don't get the monthly props is up to the consumer.
It's on the Linux CD I have for it. (really).
Then play less games. I really don't get any of the above posts at all when they complain about the "high cost" of MMORPG subscriptions. If your family has one car, and you want another but you can't afford it, you don't write a letter to your editor complaining about the high cost of cars and the need for a new pricing model for that lease. You don't buy the other car.
MMOs need an up-front fee and a subscription fee. The up-front fee covers the cost of the game development, which is enormous, as well as the costs of advertising, distribution, etc. The subscription fee can't be counted on to cover these costs, for a few reasons. First of all, the investors are antsy and want to see their costs covered by this point. Secondly, on any modern MMORPG, development does not stop once the game ships -- new content and gameplay have to be introduced on a monthly basis or close to it, or players will jump to the newest and shiniest game, and this costs money. Third, server maintenance becomes a serious issue as the server farm you had during development and the server farm you are now running for retail have vastly different upkeep costs. Subscription fees need to go to #2 and #3, meaning that there needs to be an upfront cost to pay for the original development.
An early poster threw out the old chestnut about a shelf cost on an MMO indicating that the game was unlikely to be good enough to keep subscribing to. Well, that is indeed the case. Certain MMOs aren't for everyone -- in that case, both the consumer and the developer/maintainer have to treat that game as a normal retail non-online game. I've purchased nine different MMOs over the years and only played three of them for any length of time. However, I only regretted the purchase of one of those games, and I got my "money's worth" out of the others as I played them as long if not longer as I would have a normal, off-the-shelf game. The "free month" is thrown in there for just this purpose: you can treat the game as an experience of under a month and then move on, or you can keep paying the dosh and stay in-game if you enjoy it.
The costs of developing and maintaining an MMO somewhat defy comparison. Comparing it to moviegoing, or non-online games, or a health club membership just don't stand up. There are reasons for the way the pricing model is set up. Yes, indeed, one of those reasons is greed. You may be shocked to find that the companies that make these games are indeed for-profit companies. If you don't like the pricing model, don't play the games. The vast majority of players are having lots of fun without you.
Coincidence again, my dad's been my hero for close to 33 years as well.
- Invented/installed the fireflys in Pirates of the Carribean
- Came up with putting the green-eyed rats at the end of Pirates as you go up back to ground level. We have a bunch of them at home and put them in windows and under the Christmas tree
- Invented the light flicker-ers that have been used at Dland for almost 30 years to make plain lightbulbs in opaque houseings look like they are flame
Tell your dad he's my new hero for today. Those three things are, no joke, three specific details that my brother and I were discussing a few months ago when we were talking about the old-school Disneyland detail.
Disney does something environmentally sensitive, by developing this technology and then DONATING it, and it gets run into the ground. Sigh.
By all this, it sounds like a polygamous pod, or at minimum an MMF triad, would make the most sense. The males still get the sex they want. The hunting gets done more efficiently. The woman gets the meat, and the, um, meat, as well as help with the youngin'.
No more sad than playing the game for hours a day in the first place in some people's eyes.
Yes, there's nothing better for your CPU and magnetic storage media than putting more magnets in your PC case!
Who modded this Insightful? If I had a large business that was pulling down $50k a month, or by your assumptions 50 cents per subscriber, I'd be damn sure that my company wasn't publically traded. We'd get absolutely killed in the market with numbers like that.
Besides, we've heard this recycled argument many times over, and it's apples vs. oranges. An MMORPG is not UT2004, or any other off-the-shelf, developer moves on game. It's a game designed to have content that changes on a monthly basis, and such a VAST amount of content that thousands of people can have "fresh new experiences" every time they log in. Comparing this to a game that just happens to have fan-created after-release content is ridiculous. Even if said company wanted to open up its servers in ANY WAY to have players supply their own content -- and they'd have to be certifiably insane to do so -- they run the risk of having this player-created content trample all over the developer's planned epic storyline.
You show me a game with no subscription cost that is massively multiplayer (no dude-in-Seattle-running a server 4 hours a night -- I'm talking 24/7, with TONS of equipment to assure little lag), is huge enough to run around for literally days and weeks and not see it all, and has constantly changing content and epic-scale storylines and characters, and I'll retract all of the above. UT2004 player-created content could not possibly stand against, say, Asheron's Call (the first one), with more content per month than a fan can generate in a year. The main difference is that UT2004 looks much spiffier, having a 4-years-more-recent engine, and games are quicker. I have an attention span, so I'll go with something where I can experience a vast amount of content over time.
I'm 6'6", 220. I played a Tarutaru for two reasons: first, in real life I'm tired of hitting my head. Little (har!) danger there. Second, I've played the large races before, specifically in DaoC. Not being able to see around your character is EXTREMELY annoying -- with a Tarutaru there's little (snort!) to get in the way. Yeah, and there's the /panic :).
Wow, typing in those long greps will be a bitch using just that gamepad. Who was saying these jokes aren't imaginative today? :)
Clicking that MPEG is HIGHLY advised. I've never been more motivated to buy an import game. I actually cheered (quietly) when the parking sign went up.
Happened to a lot of people when FFXI went live in NA. Several people from the Vault boards quit the game because they felt it was impossible to establish any sort of level playing field. Sure, not everyone is going to feel competetive, but it's like taking someone who's just learned to play chess, and throwing him in a tournament. That person's hopes are going to be crushed, and it's unlikely they're going to see the better players as something to strive towards.
You have never, not once, stood around camping something or roaming a small area, just to get xp? ALL your xp is from either quest rewards, or fighting things you had to kill to satisfy a quest, or maybe fighting while travelling? If so, that's very interesting. I'd like to know, though, how long these quests take. If there's a quest to, say, kill fifty ghouls in that cornfield over there, and it takes you three nights to do it, I don't see how it's different from the current camping-for-ghouls-cornfield in EQ/DaoC :).
The full list of new games is quite interesting. Twilight Creations is coming out with "All Wound Up", a board game featuring WIND UP TOYS. A new edition of Kobolds Ate My Baby! The fun never stops!
The difference being, of course, that the likelihood that these diseases are being studied in the US labs for preventative purposes is extremely high, whereas the likelihood of the same in 3rd world labs is extremely low.
Compare to Asheron's Call (the first one, not the second one that requires a monster PC and still has no content). Combat IS exciting and visceral. No wonder McQuaid got MS to dump the franchise when he came in. Good thing, as well, since AC now is run by the developers, Turbine, who are continuing to provide great monthly props full of content and upgrades, who plan an expsnion, and who are actually going to ADVERTISE the game.
Long story short, Vanguard will just be EQ.
You do realize that this is how every game developer in the history of game developers works, right? That's where they get the reputation for being horrid, 20 hours a day 7 days a week sweatshops: from the last 3 months of every project, not the first 33.
Can't we just feed code from Second Life into this thing?
Funniest post I've read in ages. Replying as way of apology for not having any mod points. :)
If you bought a convertible beetle between around May and November of last year, you got a free iPod, if I remember the promotion correctly. My wife was annoyed as she bought a Beetle but being Canadian was screwed out of the free iPod :|.
Yeah, I've seen 3 bodies piled up there. Given that there are ALWAYS people there, you think they'd ask for help. I've helped people recover in that place a bunch of times.
I like my 180k value, 83bu atlatl, which will cover my bows forever, almost as much as my major life helm. Oh wait, maybe not... :)
It's important to note that carrying around death items in AC1 doesn't mean that you are eliminating the consequences of death. Good death items are a combination of expensive and hard to find. (Sure, you can carry around a pack of master robes, but these are heavy and don't always cover non-armor items). If you die and drop a bunch of DIs, you are going to be doing a corpse recovery to get them back. The carrying of DIs just ensures that the first time you die, you don't lose any of your valuable weapons/armor, which would make it difficult to do the corpse recovery at all without help.