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| How much are you willing to pay per month for a really good MMORPG game? |
| There is no limit |
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5% |
[ 1 ] |
| $20 is a definite max |
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5% |
[ 1 ] |
| $15 - $20 sounds good |
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0% |
[ 0 ] |
| $10 - $15 |
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22% |
[ 4 ] |
| $9.95 is my standard |
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22% |
[ 4 ] |
| $5 - $ 10 |
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16% |
[ 3 ] |
| I'd not pay one cent |
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27% |
[ 5 ] |
| Play free, pay for special items and services |
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0% |
[ 0 ] |
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| Total Votes : 18 |
Xanaki
Ghost of Asheron
Joined: 07 May 2002
Posts: 398
Location: Helsinki, Finland |
| Paying for playing? Comments and a poll |
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All the major MMORPGs are pay-when-play. They have monthly fees ranging from $9.95 to whatever . Asheron's Call has a fixed price of $9.95, Anarchy Online had discounts if you buy months in advance etc.
Considering the fact that MMORPGs mostly have evolving content and usually also gain new features along the years, how much are you willing to pay for playing a MMORPG?
Would you pay more for extra service you gain in the game (The EQ model in their elite servers)?
_________________
=Moderator of General MMORPG talk forum=
Senior Editor @ www.mmorpgdot.com |
Wed Jul 24, 2002 8:45 am |
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Provis
High Emperor
Joined: 01 Jul 2002
Posts: 872
Location: Middle of the Forest |
I think it really depends on how the company handles expansions and distributions. For example if the game and any expansions would be offered as a free download or a shipping cost only cd then I'd be willing to pay more to play the game. Of course games like this would have to offer a free trial so one could see if it was worth the cost, as I just found out AO crashes when I use the newest drivers for my vid card, that saved me some money.
But if the game was being marketed like EQ, pay 50 bucks for EQ when it first came out, then $30 for each expansion every six months when they come out, I'd feel cheated if the cost per month would be higher than say $15 bucks.
I know the EQ way is actually cheaper in the long run but my mind says getting the game for free then paying a slightly increased price per month is a better deal. 
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"Yea, so what I didn't like Planescape: Torment, what are you gonna do about it?" - Provis |
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Wed Jul 24, 2002 5:19 pm |
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MoonDragon
High Emperor
Joined: 25 May 2002
Posts: 1254
Location: Waterloo, Canada |
I believe monthly fee games should be free to get (or cost minimal distribution fee, the way you can buy CS in the stores or download from the web for free). If they cost to buy initially, than there should be no montly fee.
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Wed Jul 24, 2002 11:37 pm |
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Xanaki
Ghost of Asheron
Joined: 07 May 2002
Posts: 398
Location: Helsinki, Finland |
Sadly, it is mostly not possible  . Think about the developing costs of this kind of a game?
The company must get the costs back somehow if they want to survive in case if the players find the game not so appealing after one month. They get something from the sales of the game client and manuals etc.
I'd like myself too that the game client would be free (or have very minimal costs) and I'd only pay for playing. Hmm, I am not absolutely sure but I think Mimesis Online has this kind of a deal (they also have a free trial going on at the moment).
Project Entropia has completely different way to get payment. You get the client free and you "play free". If you want to buy something in the virtual world you must convert dollars into virtual dollars (using some ratio like 1000 virtual per 1 real etc.). We'll have to see how this succeeds.
However, the thing is that usually with MMORPGs you guys will have to pay some monthly fees. Since the games are not static, they evolve. More and more content is added (like in Asheron's Call monthly events): new items, quests, landmass, monsters whatever) during the time you play it. They also can add totally new features to the game like in DAoC for example. Well, I won't speak about Anarchy Online because it was released unfinished anyway 
In my humble opinion, this 9.95$ (like in AC) is not much to pay for this kind of stuff.
_________________
=Moderator of General MMORPG talk forum=
Senior Editor @ www.mmorpgdot.com |
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Thu Jul 25, 2002 7:08 am |
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MoonDragon
High Emperor
Joined: 25 May 2002
Posts: 1254
Location: Waterloo, Canada |
I did think about the developing costs. Let's also not forget that Diablo series was one time payment and then it was free gaming online. I don't recall Blizzard ever hurting over it. I'm also sure they would've made a lot more money if initial software was for free and they charged $10 per month to play online. Or even $5.
I don't know. I'm not a marketing or an accounting expert. But I'm sure they can come up with some scheme. Sell your shrinkwrapped s/w for $60 then give people 6 monts online for free. Something like that.
Before anybody gets any ideas, Mimesis Online isn't really a game. It's a showcase of a graphical design company to show off what they are capable of doing. The game is absolute dog poop. Or at least was when I downloaded it. They broke just about every rule in the book of usability. Every single decision they had to make they made in favour of visuals rather than playability. In fact, they probably had graphics first, then decided to make them into a game second. Don't waste your time on it.
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Thu Jul 25, 2002 3:58 pm |
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Provis
High Emperor
Joined: 01 Jul 2002
Posts: 872
Location: Middle of the Forest |
About Project Entropia AKA Project POS.
The conversion rate is $10 to 100.... uhhh whatever they call money. 
About Mimesis AKA Why the frell can't I connect to the frelling server.
I'm begining to agree with you here, I've been searching for a MMORPG to pass the time and everyone I try something goes wrong, AO I have problems with my Video drivers, Ragnarok I can't stand the broken english, Project Entropia LOL , Darkspace fun but I spent most of my time Jumping from here to there "I'll be there in 100 secs"  , now Mimesis I can never connect to the frelling server. Maybe I'm just not meant to play MMORPG's this summer.
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"Yea, so what I didn't like Planescape: Torment, what are you gonna do about it?" - Provis |
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Thu Jul 25, 2002 4:32 pm |
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Ammon777
Warrior for Heaven
Joined: 20 Apr 2002
Posts: 2011
Location: United States |
ATTENTION: THE FOLLOWING IS A QUOTE FROM A DEVELOPER OF A HUGE MMORPG CALLED STAR WARS GALAXIES. THIS IS NOT FOR THE SAKE OF HYPE. ITS PLACED HERE BECAUSE I WANT YOU GUYS TO KNOW WHY THE HECK WE PAY $12 TO PLAY THESE GAMES ONCE PER MONTH, [b]AND WHY WE SHOULD BE FREAKIN HAPPY ABOUT IT[/b]. STOP COMPLAINING AND READ THIS: I HOPE IT WIPES OUT SOME OF YOUR IGNORANCE REGARDING THIS.
On "Pay To Play" Or, MMORPG Business Models 101 (posted 12/18/2000 10:30 am)
Raph Koster:
I keep seeing this question recur. Here we go, guys, more than you ever wanted to know about what costs what, and why you have to pay a subscription fee for massively multiplayer online games...
Once upon a time there were muds (massively multiplayer text-based online RPGs), and they were free. And it was good. They ran on university computers like PDP-11s and early Unix workstations. They usually ran out of student, grad student, or even professor's accounts, and sometimes they were sponsored by the university's comp sci department or some such. The people who ran them did so out of the goodness of their hearts, and often put in many many hours a week. In the geek world of those days, that was good--it even looked good to other geeks when you put it on your resume. Why isn't the world still this way? Ah, the good old days...
Fast forward--muds now often run on mudhosting services, where they pay a site provider for disk space and bandwidth. Many muds are abandoning the original licenses the software originally had, because the licenses precluded making a profit in any way. Muds selling t-shirts, doing fund drives, and even charging has become common. Over in another part of the Internet, some siblings of muds have become commercial. Running on online services most of you don't remember once existed, with names like The Source and GEnie and QuantumLink, these other games charged users. By the hour. Like, over $10 an hour. Seriously. Per-minute charges, in some cases.
Then you get to the present day. What happened? Well, some execs decided to launch a major massively multiplayer game at a flat monthly fee. And now everyone does the same.
How did all of this happen? The answer is simple. The basic building blocks of the Internet, which used to be fairly freely passed around a small community of hardcore computer scientists, have become commodified. These days you'd be hard pressed to find a university that would sponsor a mud and let it run on its Unix machines with unlimited processor, hard drive, and bandwidth usage. Heck, bandwidth is scarce enough that some time ago, Australia BANNED muds. From the entire continent. I kid you not.
Here's what the big costs are in running an MMORPG:
Development. This is, literally, millions of dollars. I Figure a largish team (larger than is common for a standalone game) for longer than a standard standalone game development cycle. On top of that, some of the people on the team that you have to assemble are rare in the games industry--DBAs and fault-tolerant network designers and mission critical system administrators. (Us designers usually come a bit cheaper. )
Deploying the servers. This can also be millions of dollars, believe it or not. For one thing, the boxes needed tend to be pricier than the kind you probably have at home, because you want lots of redundancy, the ability to hot-swap parts out, all that jazz. You're writing to disk constantly, you need a hefty RAID array, tape backups, etc. Those are your initial investments. Oh--forgot, there's the standard costs involved with getting a game into your hands in the first place (packaging, the monies charged by distributors, the monies charged by stores to put your product on a shelf--did you know they charge publishers for that?)... but we can skip all that for now, since it isn't applicable to the monthly fee.
Now, if you are successful, you can make back your initial investment off of box sales and off of the first few months of monthly fees. Notice that already the monthly fee starts to matter.
Now we get into the meat of the matter--ongoing costs.
Assuming you live in the US, you are likely paying someone around $20 for the privilege of tying up some wires or phone lines and using up some bandwidth. In normal usage, you're not using it all that much--odds are that even if you have a cable modem or ISDN, that you're not doing bandwidth-intensive stuff all the time. In fact, if you DO have cable, I suggest you go check right now and see that your user agreement probably PROHIBITS you from doing bandwidth intensive things all the time. In my area, my cable provider says "you can't run a dedicated FPS server on your cable modem," for example.
That's what you get for 20 bucks.
Playing an MMO is probably one of the most bandwidth intensive things you do on a regular basis. It's like downloading a large file, the entire time that you are playing. The key here is that the bandwidth is *sustained* bandwidth, not "bursty" the way that most things you do on the Net are, like web browsing. ISPs don't like sustained bandwidth, because it means they can support fewer people. They rely on the burstiness to squeeze more people onto the limited capacity of the wires.
Why does this matter to us? Well, simple logic. Let's say that you at your end are using 1k of bandwidth every second while playing our game. That means that we at our end are also using 1k a second receiving what you are doing and sending back what you see. But for you, that's $20 and you're worried about one guy. For us, it's a lot less than $20 a head, but we have to pay for the bandwidth usage of EVERYONE playing the game.
That right there wipes out a significant fraction of your monthly fee.
Then there are hardware issues. You have to pay someone--actually, many someones--(and these guys don't come cheap) to make sure that the network stays running. Do backups, monitor things, fix whatever goes wrong. These poor guys wear pagers and are on call 24/7. Plus, depending on your setup, these boxes may not be at your office. They may be at co-location facilities. And that means you're paying monthly fees for rack space and for guys THERE who sit at that facility and make sure all the blinky lights stay on.
That's only a small drop in the bucket of the people costs though. There's an expectation of customer service too. I'll be up front and say that as an industry, we're still figuring that part out. But we already know that it's really really expensive! After all, you can't just go hire a bunch of kids fresh from flipping burgers, train 'em in the game and the customer service tools, and pay them minimum wage. They'll be lousy customer service reps. REAL customer service people have a multitude of skills, and cost a lot more than minimum wage. You can train people to be real customer service people, of course, but then you have to pay them real money, too. So support eats up another huge portion of the monthly fee...
What else? Ongoing development. There's a development team that stays on the game after it finishes. They fix bugs that crop up, and they also add new content. This is an ongoing thing, and it can be quite a large amount of people--not as many as it took to make the game in the first place, but a significant fraction.
[[By the way, just to address the issue--some companies have promised to never charge for an add-on or expansion. We are not making that promise, and I'll tell you why. Making large content additions can require extra team members, which incurs extra cost, of course. But also, having a new box on the shelf means that new people join the game. It's very hard to keep a year-old game on the shelf in this industry (in fact, it only happens for fairly rare hits) but it's an absolute necessity for an online game, whose lifespan is measured in multiple years. It's hard to afford ongoing marketing out of the monthly fee, and it's almost impossible to get press (which drives awareness for drawing in new people) or media attention without a new box. So you make a new box because it comes with these things--which cost money, of course, but then the new box sales help pay for it.]]
There are other miscellaneous costs going in there. Consider the fact that if you call a support guy in-game ONCE and keep him tied up for an hour, you just burned up ALL the monthly profit we make off of your subscription fee. Actually, you probably burned up quite a bit more than that. We have a direct incentive to reduce the amount of bugs and make the game as easy and trouble-free as possible, because the more you need to call, the more it costs us, and the less money we make...
When all is said and done, if there's no ongoing costs, there's no massively multiplayer game. If you decided not to have a monthly fee, you would lose money before you even launched the game, and never make it back.
Yes, there are online games that have tried other revenue streams. Some matchmaker services have used ad revenue to support the cost. Of course, being matchmakers means that they don't actually run the game--they just pair you and your opponents up, so they don't have servers, customer support people, or bandwidth cost (except for the lobby). But notice that even most of the matchmaker services are gone now...
When all is said and done, the subscription fee is a necessity for this type of game. However, it didn't have to be a flat monthly fee. It could have been hourly, the way that it was for a decade and a half of online gaming. But fortunately, that all changed a few years back. It used to be that online gamers regularly paid hundreds of dollars a month to play their favorite MMOs.
Personally, I think we're lucky to pay what we do these days.
I don't know when we'll announce the subscription fee for SWG (probably not for a very long time) but I'm sure it'll be reasonable. Look at it this way--last movie I went to see in the theater, with the popcorn & soft drink, cost me lots more than the typical monthly fee. And it only lasted two hours. And it sucked.
Last edited by Ammon777 on Fri Jul 26, 2002 7:42 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Fri Jul 26, 2002 5:17 pm |
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sauron38
Rara Avis
Joined: 14 Jan 2002
Posts: 4396
Location: Winnipeg's Sanctum Sanctorum |
So, you expect a company that is a beneficiary of these monthly fees to produce a fair and un-biassed document concerning their primary source of income? 
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Make good choices. |
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Fri Jul 26, 2002 5:59 pm |
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Ammon777
Warrior for Heaven
Joined: 20 Apr 2002
Posts: 2011
Location: United States |
Not everyone is as evil as you are, Sauron. |
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Fri Jul 26, 2002 6:02 pm |
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sauron38
Rara Avis
Joined: 14 Jan 2002
Posts: 4396
Location: Winnipeg's Sanctum Sanctorum |
How many users pay X amout of dollars a month to play Everquest? . . . I would like to do some math.
_________________
Make good choices. |
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Fri Jul 26, 2002 6:07 pm |
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Ammon777
Warrior for Heaven
Joined: 20 Apr 2002
Posts: 2011
Location: United States |
sorry
Last edited by Ammon777 on Fri Jul 26, 2002 7:43 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Fri Jul 26, 2002 6:11 pm |
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Val
Risen From Ashes
Joined: 18 Feb 2002
Posts: 14724
Location: Utah, USA |
Ammon777, stop flamming other users.
_________________
Freeeeeeedom! Thank heavens it's summer!
What do I have to show for my hard work? A piece of paper! Wee!
=Guardian, Moderator, UltimaDot Newshound=  |
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Fri Jul 26, 2002 6:21 pm |
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sauron38
Rara Avis
Joined: 14 Jan 2002
Posts: 4396
Location: Winnipeg's Sanctum Sanctorum |
I've heard that EQ has upwards 400,000 users 13 dollars a month. Most of those users haven't played in the past week, and when they do, it is rarely for longer than 4 consecutive hours.
5.2 million dollars a month. US. That's all I'm going to say. Well, that and 62.4 million dollars per annum. That's:
288,982,847 Egyptian Pounds
63,093,521 Euros
98,970,860 Canadian Dollars
205,865 Ounces of Gold
39,879,552 Pounds
If any web-based company can find a way to loose money while they are raking in upwards of 60 million American dollars a year, while providing hosting services for only 400,000 users, I salute them. Oh, and after that EDIT of yours, I must say that all of the profit is going straight to the owner of the company, who quite frankly, didn't have to do anything.
P.S.: I am not an accountant. I love being ignorant.
P.P.S.: Wait a second... am I really arguing about numbers with someone who doesn't know the difference between 5000 and 2400?
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Make good choices. |
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Fri Jul 26, 2002 6:48 pm |
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Ammon777
Warrior for Heaven
Joined: 20 Apr 2002
Posts: 2011
Location: United States |
okeys
i must apologize to both MoonDragon and Sauron. I am not admitting i am wrong, i am just apologizing for being a jerk. Why? Because i am trying to be a christian. so sorry for my flames. And i am Not apologizing because some moderator told me to. anyway, have a nice life |
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Fri Jul 26, 2002 7:37 pm |
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Roach
SBR Belfry Bat
Joined: 20 Jan 2002
Posts: 3233
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I'm ware of all the expenses that the companies have, my brother in law is one of the people who maintains a massive database for most of the major US Airlines, I think it's the second largest database in the entire south-west and that includes San Jose, California. I actually got to go in, it looked like something out of Star wars. Some of their processors cost from three to five million dollars(US) each, and they had nine of them. Plus a hundred grand each for the databases, and they had about thirty of those. Whoa, I went way off-topic there, sorry I got a little carried away there.
OK, my point is, I know that these MMOGs cost ridiculous amounts of money to make and maintain, I'm not going to be content paying full price for the box then $10-$15 a month until I see some hard numbers. If they can show me that they aren't ripping-off the consumer, then, and only then will I believe a word they say. I have only once played an MMOG, though I like the idea and are looking for one that interests me (none that are out now do, though there is one called Charr that looks good). But one of the reasons I haven't tried any expect UO (which I bought for twenty bucks from the cheap bin) is because most make you buy the box for the same price as a single player game. So if I try an MMORPG for the first month I have to pay $50-$70, and if I don't like the game and don't continue service, then all that money is spent for something I can't even play anymore. So don't give me assurances that I'm not being screwed give me cold hard numbers! |
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Fri Jul 26, 2002 7:41 pm |
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