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Pay-As-You-Play
Uzleb
Member Posts: 162
I don't understand why gamers have put up with all other pay shcemes and never push harder for this kind.
I mean the math is pretty simple.
Let's just say the norm is 15$ per month for a sub.
What that tells me is that I could have my game running 24/7 for about 30 days and it would only cost me 15$
(theory of course)
Now breaking it down into units that the publisher has agreed upon, this would make your cost about 0.02$ per hour.
A friend of mine many years ago (b4 U8) said he would never play an online game until it was pay as you play, for just a couple basic reasons.
1. What about when i'm at work.....i'm paying about 0.02$ an hour.....for what?
wage goes from 21.55$ per hour 21.53$ per hour.
doesn't seem like much but your paying for something that you CAN'T use.
2. What about when I do have time for game play and I log into a servers are down screen.
the 0.20$ downtime does not show up as a credit on my next months sub.
3. The enviroments are tied up with time sink quest that need 2b completed b4 you can move 4ward.
I don't like developers digging around my pockets for loose change.
4. Since I would only play for about 40 hours per month my usage cost should be less than a 1.00$
why should I pay the same price as somebody who play 400 hours per month.
Not being a penny pincher like my friend I often would sub into games, for years even, but there was always this little hint of ....see above, 1,2, 3 & 4 in the background reminding me that time is money. And during my game sloath years I was subbing two sometimes three different mmo's per month.
In the finacial climate of 2011, unless you have money to burn, multiple MMO's are just not an option, not for me anyway.
Furthermore; with all the options in the mmo market..... Buy to Play / Free to Play / Cash Shop / Social Media etc....
it makes you wonder why there is not more Pay-as-you-play....I know that connection time to server is easily captured and recorded.....and you already pay for your interenet connection.......so what's the deal?
Would you accept a Pay-as-you-play transactions for your newest MMO?
Thoughts?
Comments
No, the original MMOs were pay as you play. At about $6.00/hour of game time. Minimum wage was under $4.00/hour.
1. What if your work docked your pay for any time you weren't being productive? (going on the internet, using the bathroom, talking about non-work things) You could argue that your employers are paying you to work, not do those things
2. If they never did maintenence then every game would be the exact same as it was at launch, ie: not good. Most companies try to do this at awkward times on purpose. Sorry you couldn't login at 4 am on a Tuesday morning.
3. If there were no time sinks then everyone would blow through the game and complain about how there's nothing to do at end-game (WoW). Also when you spend more time doing something, the sense of accomplishment is even greater.
4. That's like saying I only ride the bus once a week why should I have to pay the same amount as someone who rides it everyday?
Honestly I get what you're saying but companies often rely on people who sub long-term, or sub for a month and forget to cancel. It allows them to see what their financial situation is going to be in the next month, year, etc. If everyone could just stop whenever they wanted to on a whim there would be massive fluctuations in sub numbers. Like it or hate it games (especially high-profile companies) are made for monetary gain, not to look out for your wallet and save you every penny.
There is profit consider. if you played for 50 hours it'd only be about one dollar. If a thousand people played for fifty hours it'd be a thousand dollars, I'm not sure if that is enough to cover overhead on a game. Personally I think different amounts of time could be offeref. One hour could be 2 dollars but if you only play fi hours a month than it would be cheaper than a monthly 15 dollar deal but it you played for 9 hours than the monthly would be cheaper [all numbers are a bit rough].
while the idea of only paying $0.02 per hour looks great
its a very bad idea
your basing this on a few errors 400 hours a month is 12 hours a day
yeh you get people playing for 12 hours in a day but not many people play for 30 days at 12 hours a day
normal is 2-6hours a day
these companies are in it for the money do you think they will charge $0.02 per hour or more like $1 or $2 a hour
and if so your 40 hours would cost you at least $40 which is a lot more than the $15 you currently pay
most mmos like to fill the games with grinding would you be happy paying per hour to grind
personaly if im paying per hour i wouldn't want the kill 10 rats quests
and what happens if you queing for a instance and you waiting for 40 mins to get in would you be still happy waiting
knowing your paying per hour
subs were ment to be for upgrading and improving the game to provide support and servers ectra but in recent times its
been used to make greater profits for the companies
dont give them ideas for getting more money
MMOs are pay to play. They are called cash shop MMOs. It's free to watch but try and do anything and you spend upwards of $2/ hr.
They get to send spam to our junkmail, say they have millions of subscribers but most people only play them for a few days at most.
The assumption behind your post is that the sub is needed to fund the game. Back in the day it might have been, but not anymore. We know from NCSoft's quarterly reports that the residual revenue from Guild Wars, a game which hasn't put out paid content since 2007, would be enough to pay for the bandwidth for all of NCSoft's games combined (Aion, Lineage 1&2, GW, CoH).
Or look at F2P games. They have a vastly larger customer base, but the majority of people pay nothing. It might only end up working out to $3 per month per user. How could F2P games stay in business if it was even that expensive to keep a game running?
The real cost is payroll and keeping those hundreds of designers, developers and artists employed, not ongoing expenses and maintenance.
$15 a month (yes I know it's cheaper than the movies or whatever) is a ridiculous amount of money in aggregate. Blizzard brings in more than a billion dollars per year in subscriptions. Do you think that WoW is getting a billion dollars worth of care being put towards it every year?
The subscription fee is $15 a month because people are willing to pay it, and the companies who are charging it have no reason to educate people.
I'm excited about Guild Wars 2 for a lot of reasons, but most of all because of their Buy to Play business model. Buy the game, no subscription, play it forever. They're going to have paid expansions, but that's how they're going to keep their developers employed. If the expansions look good, buy them, if not, don't. No being locked in, voluntary purchases, and best of all it'll probably be about half the price of a subscription over the course of a year, or maybe less (maybe two $50 expansions instead of $180 in fees).
I say don't push for lower fees or fees for how much you play the game, push for no fee at all.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Guess this is where I step-in to bring up ArenaNet and a buy-to-play model of rich content without the pay-to-win cash-shop.
Wrong is wrong, though most mmo consumers don't know that.
i agree for sure, my only question is why don't you see more want for this pay-style, you see want for every other type.
i'm with you 100% , subscriptions started out as a joke, publishers and developers never thought people would pay for thier internet connection plus that of the game servers (+)
i did the math and compared the two p2p vs b2p (with great insite)
my cousin is a big WoW fan and he buys all the extras/expansions etc... just like me and my obsession with GW.
we keep in touch and we keep each other well informed about our game of choices content and upgrades.
the short of it.........So.... for a total and quick comparison
If I played a b2p model vs a p2p model for 5 years
Prophecies 54$ Client 50$
Factions 49$ Monthly 900$ ((12 months x 15$ fee/month) x 5 years)
Nightfall 54$ Expansion 1 50$
EyeNorth 44$ Expansion 2 50$
----------------------- Expansion 3 50$
Total 201$ --------------------
+extras 61$ Total 1100$
----------------
Grand Total
262$
......this is just a snip from a year old post of mine, i still play GW and my cousin still plays WoW
so add one more year sub.....myself, i've made one additional GW purchase from the cash shop ($5.99 or $9.99 can't remember)
The only argument that P2P models had was "WE HAVE A PERSISTENT ENVIROMENT TO MAINTAIN" .....now that you know it's a LIE not an argument seeing as GW2 will have a PERSISTENT SERVER ENVIROMENT TO MAINTAIN.
with NO MONTHLY FEE!
!! HAPPY HOLIDAYS !!
We can now start expecting more from our subscription based games or players will no longer stand for sub-par quality entertainment.
Perhaps Pay-As-You-Play will become saving graces for some struggling to adapt, who knows.
You not thinking about the consequences of this system. The cause and effect. This model you want is what Asian models use, which lead to the game to be made with "Deep Long Grinding" in mind(yeah that sound sexy).developers would exploit the system, by increasing the amount of grind needed to do things, since they want you to play longer periods to do anything. If you like tht kind of thing, than ok. But if you don't like grinding, than look at what you are asking for.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
I wouldn't want pay as you play just because that means I'll always have to be playing when I purchase it. Sometimes when I'm playing online such as CoD, I'll have to go do other things like get the door, help my parents with something, get food, PEE, etc. when you have pay to play you are less likely to do all these things, especially pee, and i think it will make the gaming experience overall not as enjoyable. haha. i'm just trying to say is that for that couple hours you'll have to just sit there playing cause you wanna get all your money's worth, just like if you went to watch a movie.