Pay-As-You-Play MMORPGs? 158
grubber33 wonders: "With exciting MMO games like World of Warcraft and others existing, the current monthly fee plans that all MMO games that I'm aware of aren't necessarily worth it for people that don't have as much time to play games as others. For instance, I have about 3-5 hours to play games per week, if I'm lucky. On top of that, I like more than one game but I'm still interested in MMO games. I was wondering what Slashdot thinks about newer MMO games implementing some sort of pay-as-you-play system or at least having that option alongside the current monthly fees."
Free is the only way to go. (Score:3, Interesting)
If it wasn't for their BitTorrent download, and a free year of playing I wouldn't even consider it.
But now, I might not hesitate to pay the full price for an expansion pack, if that need comes up a few months from now, a few months after playing it for free.
ibgames's Federation... (Score:4, Interesting)
All very well... (Score:1, Interesting)
Developing a MMORPG (I'm only talking about full-fledged, full-scale, commercial MMORPGs here, such as WoW, EQ2, FFXI and Galaxies) is an expensive business. The amount of game-content you need to put into one of these games is vast and completely dwarfs the work you need to do for a single-player game. As well as providing content, you have to do extensive testing and balancing, which probably entails running a large private, or even a public beta, for several months. This all costs a vast amount of money; at the end of the process, you're going to have pretty huge cash-flow issues. This is exactly why you need to charge customers to take the box off the shelf.
So, your game launches, your customers buy a copy each and you get a cash infusion which (hopefully) covers your development costs and maybe even gives you a profit (remember, this is the whole reason why you're doing this). What next?
By launch day, you need to have servers in place, both game servers and registration servers. You can try saving money on the latter if you want, and using somebody's old 386 on a 28.8k modem, as your registration servers won't be too loaded after the first few days, but this will cause major headaches for all your new customers and will give you a bad reputation from day 1. Sorting out your servers costs money, as does keeping them up.
Next, you'll probably find that despite all the testing you did and despite that expensive public beta you ran, the hordes of new players who have taken up your game have managed to find ways of breaking it that you've never even considered. You're going to spend the next few months, at the very least, chasing down bugs and fixing glaring balance issues. You're paying your staff to do this, when, in the case of most other types of games, they'd have been working on the sequel for months.
So, you've launched the game, you've got your people fixing bugs and the game is running smoothly enough. That's all you need to do, right? Wrong. Some of your customers are paying 16 hours per day. They've finished all that content they put in already. Your less dedicated players are working through the content at a solid rate and are getting bored with the levelling treadmill. Your competitor is launching their own MMORPG next month and people are saying they might switch over to that. Now you need to start adding entirely new content to the game. You might get away with one or two expansions, every few months. But remember, expect your customers to pay for too many expansions and most of them, apart from a few of the truly hardcore, will leave. Most of the new content you release needs to be made available through patches that are included with the normal servives. And you need to pay people to develop this. This is why you need monthly fees. Moreover, you need to keep the influx of cash as predictable as possible, so you don't find yourself spending money you're not going to have.
Letting people pay at an hourly rate for a MMORPG sounds nice to a certain type of gamer, at least on the surface. However, if you allow this, then the quality of the experience for *all* players will suffer. Bugs won't get fixed, content won't get added and the trend will move further towards paid-for expansions as opposed to "free" content.
Come on, it's not as if MMORPGs are expensive. I play FFXI, which is $15 per month. Hardly going to break the bank, is it? Especially when you consider how many other "regular" games I'd have bought without a MMORPG.
Consideration: Time cards (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just how little do you value your leisure time? (Score:4, Interesting)
Tack on at least $13/month for a subscription if one of those games is an MMORPG. That brings the min total up to $314/year. And again, that is a bit low compared to reality from what I see.
Now let's assume a power gamer
Don't forget around 25% of the cost of your PC/year to keep up with games (meaning that at a minimum games require a new PC every 4 years, again, conservative) and easily 100% for the power gamer. Assume a base cost of $400 for a PC capable of playing a modern game and $2000 for a gaming rig.
That doesn't count feeling the burning need to optimize your bandwidth/throughput so that you enjoy those games more which will likely increase network costs by 25-50% (in some cases easily 100% more for that fine sDSL connection) so we're somewhere between $414 for the minimal gamer to over $3000 for a power gamer.
Now if you want to make the power gamer into a social power gamer (either by going out with the "gents" once in awhile or by helping host LAN parties
* Makes consoles alot more attractive
* Means that the Power Gamer likely never leave the house
* Definitely shows the attraction of something like Anarchy Online
Now
I personally do believe that having to pay for the MMORPG box is a bit nuts
1) the people who have the bandwidth to play an MMORPG often will have bandwidth to download a DVD of material and get an online key to play.
2) any MMORPG worth buying will make FAR more back on subscriptions. Charge me a minimal download fee and then let me play for a couple of hours free to see if I like it. No cost to you if I stop playing and I don't feel ripped off (in other words, more likely to try a future product from you).
3) any MMORPG that is GREAT enough to suck me in for hours and hours can make a lot more money off the power gamers by charging by the hour.
Make the subscription fee tiny, perhaps $2.50/month
No, those hourly figures aren't low
1) basic player is between 4 and 20 hours/month (and the parent to your post fits this nicely at between 9 and 20 hours/month). He pays $2.50 for his monthly upkeep and 1 hour fee. He pays between $3 ($1/hour for hours 2-4) and $15 ($9 for hours 2-10 and $6.00 for hours 11-20). That's a total of $5.50 to $17.50 for the average player.
Face it
Ain't no such thing as a free lunch (Score:1, Interesting)