Quote:
Originally posted by Thoran:
Well I started the monthly paying debate in the other thread, but by gripe isn't with the monthly payment at all, in fact I think for that sort of server resource intensive game a subscription makes perfect sense. My gripe is with the large upfront cost.
Comparing an online only game with a single player game is apples and oranges.
SP or Lan games... you pay your $50 bucks and ever after you can play that game, anytime, anywhere. There IS risk that the game will sink, but the up front cost is the only way for the developer to recoup their costs, they HAVE to charge you at that point... and you HAVE to accept that risk.
MMO have access to a longer term and potentially FAR more profitable revenue stream, subscriptions. They don't NEED to charge 50 bucks up front, a good MMO will make far more money than a good SP game... because they can keep people on the hook... month after month. As long as the value proposition is there, the people will pay.
Essentially good MMO's don't need to charge you A CENT for the client, and the MMO that distributes it's client for free is saying "OUR GAME ROCKS!, in fact it's so AWESOME that we know you'll be hooked by it after playing once... so WE'LL take the risk, we'll let you have our client and in return you'll pay 15 bucks a month to connect that client to our servers"
The rest of the MMO world is saying "We're not really sure how good our game is, but look at how much money we've spent developing it. We're going to charge you $50 bucks up front just on the off chance that our game sucks. We're going to force you to take on some of our risk because we don't trust our product."
Simple economics, risk transference. If you're comfortable accepting that risk than the current business model for MMO's is fine for you, personally I'm waiting for an MMO that's so good that the developer is willing to stand by that product and sink or swim on subscriptions alone.
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Uh... no, that's not how economy work. It's a proven fact that most people will disdain something they can get for cheap.
I even saw a NIKE doccumentary where they tried to sell a particuliar pair of shoes at a resonable price, and got almost no sells. They removed it from the market and put it back a little later for 200$ and it was an instant and spectacular success in sales.
Some games have given their game for free. Like Asheron's Call 1. For a while you could get the basic game for free, and the extension that was sold in shop was sold 10$ with a free months of play, if I remember well. It didn't boost their number of customers. People probably thought they were desperate, and you dont want to play a MMORPG that might be running out of money. (They are not, it's still going and a new expension is coming soon).
I saw a dev post about this once, and he explained that the up front cost was mostly to pay for Shipping, Distribution, and buying the servers and such, with a little profit left.
The monthly fee was to pay the support/gm team, the devs you need to keep for the new content that get added every month, as well as bug fixing and such. Then they get profit.
MMORPGs cost way more than a single player game with a multiplayer option. They need servers that can accomodate thousands of players at the same time as well as the bandwith and they need the money to set up and maintain those servers. Most conpanies don't have that money from the start, so they get it from retail.
So really, selling the game for a price make sense both for marketing and finance. You don't want your game to seem cheap, and you need money to pay those big servers you just bought and set up, pay the development team that made the game, and hire the live team/gm/support for the future.