Why is it a monthly fee?

djpearce

Now that no game seems to hold my attention for any significant period of time, I have come to resent paying monthly fees for games that I will rarely play for more than two weeks at a time.

Perhaps some enterprising company reading this will change their pricing method and charge an amount to purchase 100 hours of playtime? (Or whatever the monthly fee works out to be on average).

I have nine MMORPG's installed I want to be able to play them all as and when but that monthly fee stops me.

Just a thought.

MagicStar

Because it costs developers tons of money monthly to keep a large universe with hundreds of players up and running.

A charging a mandatory monthly fee to players is mostly the only way that any graphical mmo can stay alive since the developers have to cover bandwidth, electricity, and hardware costs.




Thats the way the money flows in the real world.

Knightblast

Well there's actually very few people I think who play more than one MMO at a time, because they do tend to be very time-sinkish in general.

Me, for example.  I play EVE as my "main" game.  I take breaks from it of course, but never more than a week or two, because of things happening in EVE with my corp and so forth.  When I'm on these "breaks" I may play another MMO for a week or two, or I may play an offline game, or I may take a break from gaming.  But with my commitment to EVE, I can't really play EVE and another MMO at the same time without gimping my experience in one of them, so I don't subscribe to more than one of them.

I think the pay by the hour approach sounds interesting, but what that system really does is charge the power gamers up the wahoo, so I can't see that happening.  The monthly fee, all-you-can-eat approach is pretty ingrained into the way people look at the cost of these games, and it's also neutral: you can stand by the buffet and stuff your face all day long if you want, or you can eat sensible portions, but you still pay the same price, which seems neutral enough.

djpearce

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Originally posted by Novaseeker
I think the pay by the hour approach sounds interesting, but what that system really does is charge the power gamers up the wahoo, so I can't see that happening.  The monthly fee, all-you-can-eat approach is pretty ingrained into the way people look at the cost of these games, and it's also neutral: you can stand by the buffet and stuff your face all day long if you want, or you can eat sensible portions, but you still pay the same price, which seems neutral enough.

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I hadn't thought of that.

It's not so ingrained though, Guild Wars and SOE's all access pass, for example.

Two tier system perhaps? I'm sure there is a number of hours which would not discourage the regulars from keeping up the subscription but would allow the irregulars to dip in and out as they wished from time to time, that would actually end up making more money for the companies.

Though I'm sure a lot of money is made from people who just don't cancel their subscription but never play.

Knightblast

Yeah Guild Wars isn't really an MMO, however.  As for SOE's deal, I agree that was an innovative thing.  My sense is that most people focus on one game at a time, even if they are using the access pass, but it's true that this was a different way to do MMO pricing.

I think you're right, however, in that gaming companies do have a lot of folks who just keep the $15 sub up for a few months even if they aren't playing much (perhaps because they forget to cancel before the rebilling date), or who cancel and then come back in a few months for a month or two, cancel again and so forth, bouncing between games, under the current system.