[Thoran]

Originally posted by Luvian: Uh... no, that's not how economy work. It's a proven fact that most people will disdain something they can get for cheap.

Uh... yes, that IS how the economy works, or at least risk management is a PART of how the economy works. You're talking about human nature, and the above is true to a point... but it has nothing to do with why game companies charge you 50 bucks up front for a subscription based game. I didn't say let people play for free... I said let your subscriptions earn your money, people pay from the first month whatever the subscription rate is.

Originally posted by Luvian: 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.

You're talking about a fashion item when you're discussing shoes, the laws of supply and demand are skewed when you're dealing with fashion by appearances (or Percieved Value, which when it comes to fashion has influences that traditional retail doesn't have). MMO games are not in the same marketing niche as fashion items, and they will follow traditional economics to a much greater extent.

Originally posted by Luvian: 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).

How do you know it didn't boost their customers? A subscription only pricing scheme doesn't insure success, it only will insure that a wider range of potential customers will try out your product... if you've got a winner you WILL make more than a product with a high barrier to entry. You'll gain more exposure, which will equate to customers. If your game is good enough to hold those customers you'll make more money. As I said... simple economics.

Originally posted by Luvian: 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.

Everquest has 450,000 active accounts, that what... 5 million bucks a month. There's a whole lot of proft after accounting for 1000 servers and a development team.

Originally posted by Luvian: 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.

Anytime a new game comes out a developer is putting a LOT of up front cash into development. Other than infrastructure I tend to think that MMO games are only as expensive or possibly less expensive than cutting edge sp games (since MMO games typically use outdated graphics... at least all the one's I've seen have). Anyway, I said earlier that developing a game is risky, and large capital investments are part of that risk. It doesn't change the fundamental fact that the marketing scheme MMO's use is based on transferring risk from themselves to YOU. Of course selling a game for $50.00 up front makes sense to a company if they can get away with it, they're dumping a good chunk of their development risk onto YOU... I'd do it if I was in their shoes. However, that doesn't change the opportunity for a newcomer into a saturated market to steal significant share from the established players by A) having an excellent product, and B) Allowing players to play for a month for the price of a one month subscription instead of 5 months.

The research indicates that the market is barely growing... the current business model has gleaned as many players as it's going to, and now you'll get to see the catfighting as companies fight to gain share in a stagnant market. I suspect eventually someone will see the value in lowering the barrier to entry as a means of pulling new customers (growing the market is always more profitable than fighting for share in a stagnant one). Time will tell.

[ 11-10-2004, 05:46 PM: Message edited by: Thoran ]