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WoW- Something interesting I never knew about until today.
LeegOfChldrn
Member Posts: 364
Very strange that I have never heard of this before on this forum, in game, or in conversation. I assume it's because most people just don't know.
WoW in China has no subscription fee. It's free, and people pay by the hour. I am unsure of the article's legitimacy, but I even read that you can buy gold (Although I'm sure you can from players, the article made it sound like you could buy it from Blizzard).
Other countries have different subscriber rates, such as $8/month instead of $15/month.
WoW in China charges at a rage of $0.06 per hour played, and you are only charged with how much you play. (Game time is bought through game cards in 15/30 currency intervals).
I'm not sure of the accuracy of the above information, but the article I read was very interesting indeed, as I have never even heard of this. I was actually incredibly surprised I didn't know this.
It really makes you rethink the whole "WoW has 10+ million subscribers" as most of those are from China, and they aren't paying $15/month like I always assumed.
Comments
its a rather well known fact that China doesn't have box costs on most games, and only an hourly sub fee.
Korea is much the same.
That is the argument everyone uses to "prove" Blizzard lies about the numbers, or that the game is dying.
Reagrdless of that, there are still several million subscribers, so I don't get it, but people will bitch so whatever.
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
I think it's somewhere around 60% or so of wow's 'subscribers' that use that model.
It is I would think common knowledge on these forums at least if not to the man in the streetNah, that is old stuff. It was 9 cents an hour last time I heard.
But it have been discussed a lot here, just not the last while. When Wow still was growing and boasting new records every 3 months people were discussing if those players should be counted as subscribers or not.
What is unclear is if the accusations that Blizzard count all people with a single cent left on their account are counted as active subscribers or not, no one have really proven that so it is probably noy true... Then again, who knows?
Yeah considering how often this argument is used by people on the forums to "shock" us into the state of "oh my god WoW is dying"
Even though its been this way in China since WoW launched in China.
OK, I admit it, I'm confused.
I would say yes, I mean BW wants to count people that haven't even gone into a payment cycle yet, and Rift even tried to use number of forum accounts or something of the sort (think they hit 1 million unique accounts shortly after launch on the forum, been a while, could be wrong on the exact specifics)....It is marketing, if you give the appearance for some of the newer games that all is well, then it will help a select few that may not buy a shrinking sub product. It makes sense for any of these companies to pull any trick or slight they can. I would say this is why BW has not started to merge servers, the second you do that, you give the nay-sayers fuel, and they have not really admitted to many sub loses, but if you go by some different methods of counting, it could be up to 50-70%, and people saying their servers are dead (some say they are fine, but their seems to be a good number in need of merge).
The king always dies, but the propaganda/PR machine will try to make it take as long as possible, unless it is a offering from the same company, then that is a plus, so if Triton (no idea what it is, just next mmo) surpasses WoW, they will be out with it quick...
I think, from what people have said, is they mean the 'box' is free, then it is p2p/hour.
Thanks. That would make sense.
But it's not really free, it's just a different form of P2P.
I must have not been around when this was all the buzz around these forums.
Must be quite the coincidence/circumstance for me to be around so many MMORPg gamers, discuss so much, and even play WoW and discuss it-- and never have had anyone ever tell me this!
LOL, I feel like a man walking around the world for 80 years and just now discovering that Coca Cola exists, because anytime I've ever encountered it someone stood infront of the advertisement or talked during the audio announcement or blocked my access to the Soda isle or people offered me Dr.Pepper instead.
Apparently oblivious to common knowledge due to sheer bad luck :P
The thing is, if there isn't a subscription fee, then who counts as players? This is how you get things like Habbo Hotel announcing that they have 50 million players, as they did a while back. They didn't mean that they have 50 million people log in on an average day. They meant 50 million accounts created all time, many of which were only briefly used and haven't logged on in years.
WoW does have a lot of subscribers. But when you're trying to mix subscription numbers with people who pay hourly, any number you could come up with for the total number of players is going to be dubious.
Why? WoW still has at least three times the amount of Western subscribers of any other MMO. And many of those other MMOs also have Eastern audiences as well, and don't come close to WoW numbers.
I've been saying this for a long, long time.
WoW's subscription numbers are vastly over-inflated by the chinese "subscriber base" , which actually generates only a small fraction of their actual profit.
The 'big fish' subscriber numbers for NA and EU have been shrinking pretty steadily over the last year, but the WoW China numbers are making the population drop seem a lot smaller than it really is.
I don't have a source, but I'd heard that an account had to have time used in a given month for it to be considered active.
If some one was on a budget they could play WoW from a China VPN, but it would require trying to find a dirt cheap VPN. Well that and crossing the hurdle of actually being able to pay for it plus being able to comprehend their language.
I don't have a source, but I'd heard that an account had to have time used in a given month for it to be considered active.
I thought that too but no idea where I heard it.Why do you think they give away all those "7 days free" every quarter?
They all multi-task like 5 games at a time so that system would work for them.
Sure, if we paid 6 cents an hour here, most would benefit from that here, but trust me, if they did an hourly plan here, it would NOT be 6 cents. Probably be like 99 cents. Waiting for a raid while the "meter is running"; wouldn't THAT be great fun!
Reminds me of the AOL $2.95/hr. 90's... oh what fun that was!!!
I know. I can't believe we have a thread on this topic again.
Yep... it was the reality for me for a while, actually, since the Dragonrealms MUD was an AOL exclusive early on. When they announced they were leaving AOL and were going to charge their own fee, there was just a TON of End of Days rants on the BB's about what the cost per hour would be. DR ended up going to a flat rate, which was slowly but surely becoming the market standard around that time.
At long last, the "10 FREE HOURS!!!" snail mail floppies were finally going away. And the convoluted $10 a month for 10 hours, with 40 free "non-prime time hours***" deals from Mom and Pop places...
***1 to 9AM weekdays except holidays, during the waning moon cycle only. We reserve the right to change these rules mid-month without notice and when most financially lucrative.
Gaming is huge in many Asian countries. Like ROK (and China). The population plays at Internet Cafes, and they play games like WoW for about 15 cents an hour. I have heard for years that WoW includes these as subscribers, but idk if it is true. In Korea gaming is a national sport almost, with closley followed celebrity gamers and television shows with huge followings. Those peculiar stories that you hear now and then about some poor Gamer dropping dead after 30 straight hours of gaming with no calorie or fluid inttake or bio are usually from one of those ROK Internet Cafes. Those are some extreme Gamers.
Ballerinas are always on their toes. Why don't they just get taller ballerinas?
a blogger wrote about the asian fees a few years ago
http://mmodata.blogspot.com/2009/10/chinese-wow-players-pay-less-so.html
that said, back in 2008, when Blizzard gave regional breakdowns
Blizzard claimed 4.5 million subs for US & EU alone, no asia
http://eu.blizzard.com/en-gb/company/press/pressreleases.html?id=2443799
EQ2 fan sites
Remember the old Neverwinter Nights game on AOL had an hourly fee. I don't think it's doable in the US now, however.