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No Monthly Fee? How?
anthrorob
Member Posts: 50
I have read that Guild Wars will charge no monthly fee and all new chapters (expansions) will be optional. How will the company maintain cash flow to maintain servers and the game and continue improving it with patches?
Games have a life cycle where they explode in popularity (hopefully) for a few months then dwindle.
Costs for creation of the new chapters have to be factored in as well.
So how are they going to pull this off? Are they going to advertise in the game?
With product manufacture, product marketing, and product and server maintenance, wages and benefits...where will their profit be? Companies that don't make a profit don't stick around too long. Those monthly fees are the lifeblood of MMORPGs, not just icing on the cake(for the game company), as some would suggest.
Also, games with monthly fees tend to discriminate against folks who cannot swing a monthly fee (Children)...even with pre-paid cards, et cetera. So more annoying kids might be playing this game.
Gee, that doesn't sound too fun.
I am age-ist, so what!?
Anthrorob
Comments
They are counting on selling more copies than rentals tend to. They have also designed a much more efficient network architecture. It uses only a fraction of the bandwidth of that of the rentals, which comes out to a lot of costs saved.
As for age, if you think the pay-to-play crowd is immune to kiddies, you'd be sorely mistaken. Is there a "noticable" difference between that an free play? Really, not that I've seen. But then, maybe it's more a matter of who you choose to associate with. That's one of the many benefits of GW, you have full control over who you play with or have to deal with. I pretty much only play with my guild, which has ages ranging 17-30+ (for the most part). But even just random folks I encounter are usually just fine. It's safe to say that GW, so far at least, has one of the better communities I've been in. Don't underestimate how many mature grown-ups play it as well. Free to play doesn't necessarily equate to an obnoxious kiddie-fest. Even the ones who are rather young often don't automatically fit the sterotype.
The Obsidian Kings
they are also expecting that people will buy these new expansions to keep up with everyone
Notice I said more, ANNOYING kids...and we have all seen them in play...
Of course there are some kids who are fantastic. And of course every age bracket has more than a few bad apples.
But that doesn't address how this will be a profitable venture. It almost smacks of "we can sell below cost because of the volume" rubbish. And as for selling expansions that are 6-9 months away...with its own costs...there is no way that can support a game.
As for the technology "break-through" hasn't virtually all new games been touting that line? That isn't going to eliminate maintenance, only reduce it. But that is a tiny wedge of the cost and profit pie.
Any other thoughts about the this topic (the money one.)
Anthrorob
I believe they're getting this from the price of the game copy, which I believe is $49.99 or $39.99, something around that, and since each player must have his or her own copy, it'll make up for it, plus more people will find it interesting since there is no monthly fee, meaning more copies will be sold.
On the note of annoying kids, I myself am 12, so I don't know if you'd consider me annoying, although I probably would be a better gamer if I had the opportunity to receive a better gaming experience, I mainly play 2 games, 1 that I have basically retired from (The Realm Online), and RuneScape (which is getting exteremely boring), but it seems I can't find any games that really fit my needs, but ah, Guild Wars comes along and saves me
!
I do agree with your bad apple part, and probably 95% of people I meet my age or within 1 - 2 years think they're cool talking like "yo wats up dood wat u doin", although I see nothing in that, it's just degrading yourself.
I certainly am interested in this game, I am just worried about how they will manage. Nearly all games require you to buy their game. So, I can't imagine how that will pay for it all.
Also, welcome to the board!
Anthrorob
Think Diablo before the hacks and cheats. Not as much will be stored on their servers (which raises a question: Are the characters themselves stored on their server or your PC?), and as mentioned above, they've managed to reduce costs there. Chapters are optional, but honestly -- who plays a game and enjoys it that much but still doesnt pay the extra $20 or $30 bucks to up his expierence? Especially when he isnt popping an extra $15 a month.
The annoying kid thing seems like it should take care of itself. Nearly all the zones are instanced, so you'll only be seeing the rest of the populace at the meeting grounds. In other words, no more anoying kids (or adults) /shouting in general chat in the middle of nowhere! Hurray!
Actually, MORE is stored on the server than most MMORPGs. GW's server calculates all damage, plots all movement and paths...essentially, the GAME is on the server, and your client is merely a visual representation...
As to how they keep it with no monthly fee...
First off, Anet has done a great job of minimizing bandwidth necessary without effecting performance. Limiting the amount of connections per zone further reduces that bandwidth cost. That, and, traditional MMORPGs charge WAAAYYYY too much for "server maintenance"...it's basically a rip-off.
It's a great question that seems to generate a lot of discussion. In my opinion, it is a fallacy that MMOs can only be supported with monthly fees. Or, rather it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The truth is those games are designed from the ground up with monthly fees in mind. Their profit structures are based on a content per amount of time calculation, and the game mechanics are designed to find the sweet spot between keeping people entertained and making the process of content discovery take as much time as possible.
If you design a game that is cheaper to maintain and more easily incorporates content updates (look at the patch process for any other MMO compared to GW and it's not hard to see how the latter will require orders of magnitude less infrastructure), providing an online service for less than the price of a box becomes much more feasible. Besides, the people designing it are experts at doing just that, and it's what they set out to do from the start.
As far as behavior goes, game communities are influenced by game mechanics. All time-based MMOs are driven by individual player greed, as one of the primary incentives to keep paying and playing is the pursuit of wealth and power for your character. It has nothing to do with age and everything to do with the basic motivation beneath character interactions. The basic motivation in Guild Wars is teamwork. This doesn't eliminate shitheads, but the overall difference is very real. People are encouraged to behave like shitheads in many time-based MMOs. It's part of the built-in fun. The exact opposite is true of GW.
The same company that is making this game has created the game, World of Warcraft.
How are they able to do the things they do I will never know but, the profit they're hoarding from that game will be able to fund the guild wars game until they can actually make profit on it.
At least, if they dont break even or ahead with game sales, they have other profit to fall back on.
KillerTwinkie - That one guy who used to mod mmorpg.com's forums.
Actually -- as far as I know, at least -- the folks that are doing Guild Wars were working for Blizzard, but prior to World of Warcraft. They left the studio before that. They're the Diablo guys, not the WoW 'uns.
With the server situation -- that sounds alot like Eve: Online. One server with 11-13k on at a time, but in clusters. They're all conected, but not exactly localized. Good idea, actually
Actually a large chunk of overhead for these MMO companies is bandwidth. Guild Wars will get around this by limiting the number of people in the "action" areas - or where 90% of your time will be spent.
Some might think that 80players in a zone use 10 times the bandwidth as 8 players - but the real answer is more like 100 times. This is due to the exponential nature of the data transmission levels.
Most bandwidth in these games is player movement and positioning data. So in other words the x,y,z,direction and velocity need to be continuosly transmitted for each play to every player in the zone. Suppose this happens once per second. This would give you the following chart:
2 players: 2 transmissions per second
4 players: 16 transmissions per second
8 players: 64 transmissions per second
16 players: 256 transmissions per second
32 players: 1024 transmissions per second
64 players: 4096 transmissions per second
128 players: 16,384 transmissions per second
You can see where this is going
So suppose that a game that averages 100 people in a zone spends $200,000 per month on bandwidth. Another game that averages 8 players to a zone would only spend about $1200.00 per month (or about 1/156 the cost).
Just some food for thought!
- MMORPG.COM Staff -
The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive.
I think this is actually quite critical. Take WoW for example. Now, on the surface, it is an annoyance to paying customers that they must wait 3 months for a significant bug patch. But for Blizz it's a huge expense. It's hard to estimate what percentage of developer time goes to overcoming the inherent difficulty with updating the world, but 75% is probably not far off and it may be conservative. They test internally (for weeks and weeks to iron out the many bugs that inevitably appear), setup a testbed server where users can kick it around, then finally bundle a large patch to be delivered all in one large download. They will no doubt streamline this process as they go forward, but for now it is large pipe sucking money out of the business.
Read some of the interviews with ArenaNet developers where they describe their method of content update/delivery. The modular nature of the world allows them to work in an essentially live environment, and simply enable the updates when they are ready for delivery. Because the delivery system logs and flags every single asset in the game, they are able to work on and test very large and very small updates while people are online. When the updates are ready, they change a flag and every client in the world is ready to retrieve it when needed.
Just like Admin said, they seperated alot of people into different areas and instances so the bandwidth lowers. That's one of the main reasons why I don't like this game, they whored Guild Wars with zones so it doesn't feel much like an MMO, more like just a multiplayer game. Also, in theory you are still paying a monthly fee with the expansion packs. They are optional, but i'm sure it's going to be those kinds of expansion packs where it's almost necessary to have them.
Yes, and if you combine that with an intelligent algorithm that 'predicts' in-game actions rather than setting up a constant stream of updates, the bandwidth savings are even greater.
I rather have 20 annoying kids in the same room then me then 1 politician.
Kids are there to make fun, they are usually very direct about it. Adults have more arguable tastes. Kids always accept pure random. Adults create DKP and lootwhorish systems, and you wonder which I prefer?
Even the most annoying kid is usually bargainable.
GW is a nice gift to offer anyone. Any monthly fee is a poisonned gift that many persons will never do to anyone!
Kids want to please peoples in general, this is why some are so annoying. Some adults should be thrown down the toilet next time you flush please.
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren
its only 0 transmissions if you are playing an offline game...besides, updating position only 2 times a second would be uber-lag, i think it was more for illustrative puropses...
---sig---
PvE in general is pretty lame, if you think long and hard about it. You are spending your time beating a severely gimped AI that would lose to a well trained monkey. Best not to think too long and hard why you are wasting time playing games in general actually...
Yes, solo you would be getting 0 (zero) transmissions relating to other players' vector information.
If there's a lot of instancing and they limit the number of players in each one, I don't see why this game would take anymore bandwith than current battle.net games. I haven't played the game though just speculating.
Well, it would take more than a b.net game I'm guessing. For one, all the content, especially before any CDs are released, is downloaded on demand. And even after it ships any changes will be served up by the host. That's a pretty good chunk right there since I downloaded something like 550mb in just a couple of days during the last weekend event. People who got farther than I did downloaded even more. There's probably a couple of gigs worth of stuff all totaled.
And all the action is hosted on the ArenaNet servers. They've apparently come up with some system that allows the client to do some guesswork on its own, and just receive corrections to its guesses, rather than a constant stream of data during combat. That probably saves them some bw, but it's still more than a bnet server needs to do.
lol little kids are fun there so dam stupid i ripped some kid off my first beta weekend event i traded him some gay sword i found that was like 5-7 dmg for 8 hide ya hide is common but i dident no that cuz it was my first day on gw...and the guy was a ele/mes lol 5 i think lol..
Shump, you're making zero sense. Speak English?
Well, here's my theory about the main income. (just an example, not the real facts)
100 People = $50 x 100 = $5,000 (no monthly)
10 People = $50 x 10 x $5 ($5 a month, just a guess) = $2,500
Basically, they're probably expecting more people to buy it rather then rely on a few people to pay the monthly fee, although I wouldn't mind paying $5 a month for it, although I do believe this is an easy game to maintain and I'm sure they'd make the monthly fee higher for their own profit.
Toughest rater in the world
Try to impress me, please, i dare u
Believe me that, 6 out of t10 ppl that buy GW will buy at least, 1 or more expansions of the game, thats where the profit, wich P2P games have M. fee, is made out of in GW.
Grtz,
Xardasteo
Leader of the MindRebels Alliance
Our Guild & Forum
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