People don’t typically want to think about spending money the entire time of playing a game and trying to relax and escape reality. For some people it might be their entire entertainment budget for the month. It makes the whole process much less enjoyable when you have a ticking clock in your head running up fees. I suspect the same thing will ultimately happen as people feel like they are forced to pay more money to “have fun”.

When you have a subscription you pay it and forget about it. The whole time you are playing the game you are not worried about how much it is costing or how it is impacting your real life. You are allowed to escape into the game and leave that behind. In a MT system, every time something comes up where it costs money you will be hit in the face with having to deal with these realities.

What if your husband just lost their job and you have a subscription to a game. You might debate keeping it and then decide, it is only $15 a month, I can play more and cut out other things and it will be fine. You are essentially faced with that decision once.

Take the same person and put them in a micro transaction game. New items come out and there are some things they want but it will cost $3.00. They go through the same thought process and figure it is just three dollars. Then the next day they come across something else they want and they have to confront these feelings and emotions all over again. This next time it is not so easy. Then it happens again and now they are actually depressed because the game keeps asking them for money and their husband just lost their job and they quit the game for the time being.

Lots of people use these games for escapism and only a time fraction of players have a truly unlimited entertainment budget. Making these financial choices in your face and over and over again is going to create all kinds of issus. issues that the industry managed to succesful leave behind 10-15 years ago.

People think this is a step forward, but to me it looks like a step backward to where things already have been, and I can assure people, it was not better.

I hear people talk about micro transaction like it is the savior from horrible subscription pricing. In the case of MMORPGs, subscription pricing is the holy grail for the consumer. You get access to a massive amount of entertainment for a small amount of money. Does this mean some people who want to play 2 hours a month might not see the value in it and not play at all? Certainly. But trying to make your game accessible to those people at the cost of charging those who play it to the fullest now having to spend $50 a month, I think you end up losing.

I do think some game designs lend themselves to this model and many do not. It seems like everyone wants to apply this model to all future games and it is not a good idea.

Clearly most people in the industry don’t know the origin of multi-player pay games where people paid steep hourly fees to play games. I remember paying $12 an hour to play Islands of Kesmai on Compuserve. You also had hourly charges to play Neverwinter Nights on AOL. Coming from that, being able to pay a low flat fee was a godsend. I had some $300 plus bills in a single month to play some of those games.

I also think it is naive for most customers to think this will end up being cheaper for them. Why would MMORPG companies want to do something that they hoped earned them less money per customer. So if the plan is to get more money per customer than we are screwed, If the plan is we are going to have more players so the lower pay players will subsidize me and make my cost lower, I am skeptical. More players means more support from a technical and human standpoint. Adding more customers to a business like this is not free. If the average customer is paying less per month and some new customers are paying zero per month, the revenue to make up for that, as well as to increase profitability from somewhere.

I think for most it is a blatant attempt to nickle and dime their customer base and hope they can get $25.00 a month out of a customer instead of $15.00.

The whole micro-transaction off-shoot seems especially weird given the ridiuclous amount of revenue a subscription based game like Wow can generate. However, even moderate or slight success games to generate a decent amount of money. Do the math, it is pretty easy. A 100k subscribers paying $15 a month is gross revenue of 18 million dollars a year. 200k means over 35 million dollars a year in subscription revenue. Not counting box sales, addons or anything else. Certainly there is a cost structure involved, but In most cases if you can run a business that can generate 35 million dollars in revenue like you can in this, you have to be able to figure out how to do it profitably. If you can’t, you probably should not be running a business. it is not like MMORPGs are some kind of high margin item with a huge fixed cost for resources.

I would also believe in a MT environment developers would need to provide content even faster and more often as it is the only way they get money. I suspect the rate that new content gets purchased in these games versus year old content is way out of balance. In a subscription game you can get ongoing monthly income stream for current content. Once people already have that old belt, or decided not to buy it, they are not going to spend any money until there is a new belt.

As for your plan for an MMORPG. I like it. With so many betas essentially being the same thing, a soft launch would create a real sense of participation and ownership by the early adopters of the game. Sure it might give them an unreasonable sense of entitlement but they would also be strong allies in providing feedback and growing the game. Let me know if you ever get it going. I have an interesting marketing plan that I think would work very well for MMORPGs. Even moreso for one that is more grassroots.

The people who did that paid $15 a month for a chat room, basically. I can see the business reasons NOT to do that, but I guess to me, gaming isn’t just about the business end of it, even if I were making a game.”

Nowadays, you can install the Station Launcher and talk to any of your friends in any of thier (SOE)MMO’s. All you need to know is their game name and what server they are on and have a station account. Don’t even need to be currently subscribed to a game. It will auto fill with your friends list’s from any games you have added friends in game and allow you to optionally add them from the launcher. I have friends in EQ, EQ2 and Vanguard on my list.

I am a whole-hearted advocate of the micro-sub and RMT models. It’s the future for many more things than just games.

EQIM, eh, Wiqd? Saylah has argued before for wanting game functions in a browser or even on the fly for portable devices. I can see great potential for mobile access to the WoW AH, for example. That’s one thing to hang a MT off of even in a sub model, or even a separate minisub (granular subbing, which is still offering options, which is good.) Say, a WoW nut who mostly plays the AH could pay their normal sub, and then something like $2/month for remote AH access on their iPod or what have you.

That’s not quite the same thing as a true “microtransaction”, so I’ll call it a “microsub”. Honestly, it’s still not really something that I would do if it’s on top of the flat $15, but I can say without reservation that if I were able to play WoW and customize my sub price so that if I never raid (I just wander around and quest/grind) and want the AH remote rider option, where I could pay something like $7/month for custom access rather than blanket access, I would be orders of magnitude more likely to buy in. Give me the ability to reduce that sub fee to $5 by limiting me to a single class or race, and I’m suddenly a subscriber, despite my very strong reservations with the model.