Ulysses Posted October 16, 2007 Share Posted October 16, 2007 I dont know if anyone has noticed but more & more games for online playing seem to be requiring monthly, quarterly fees on top of the actual cost of buying the game (good examples are world of warcraft & Lord of the rings online). Is this actually fair or just a total rip off of the customers?? In my own view is another way of software firms of ripping the customer off! If they are going to charge for a online game it should be in my view incorparated in the price of buying the game i.e instead of paying £30-£35 for the game and then all the additional charges, we should pay £40-£50 for life. By doing this they will surely get alot more people playing theses games online. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gamer1978 Posted October 16, 2007 Share Posted October 16, 2007 I voted no. There must be another way for them to cover the cost of servers and whatever else they need. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TetsuoShima Posted October 16, 2007 Share Posted October 16, 2007 It depends on the kind of game and support imo. For a shooter it would be unacceptable imo, sinc they typically require less 'supervision' (and support dies after a couple of years, plus it's usually perfectly possible to set up your own server, thus eliminating even more work from the game distributor), as for mmo's however, a small fee is acceptable, but they shouldn't exaggerate and if they charge a monthly fee, then the game itself should be free or at the very least cheaper than it normally would have been. Some initial fees could include: physical disc ($1), decent proper (big) manual ($5) and distribution ($10) plus initial subscription fee for the first 2 months ($14), totalling to $30. There should be an option for people who do not require a physical disc and manual, as such an acceptable amount could be $15 for the initial 2 month subsciption only. It is not logical to pay a single fee of say $75 for a lifetime subscription to a longlasting (5+ years) mmo, the company would surely either go bankrupt or would not provide good support, which in the end would also ruin the game. If they need to do continual monitoring and upgrading of an environment where thousands of players are roaming, then it's going to cost a bit. The alternative would be an environment filled with ads... I don't think it would be very good for the gameplay and rpg elements to see coca-cola ads in a warcraft environment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GorunNova Posted October 17, 2007 Share Posted October 17, 2007 I also agree... an online game with a continually changing world needs a monthly fee to function... and I'd argue that some single or small group games could need periodic fees as well to support the development costs. To be honest, however, those Korean MMOs with 'cash shops' may be an even better idea for sustaining an online game without actually charging a per-month fee. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TFMF Posted October 17, 2007 Share Posted October 17, 2007 Paying a montly fee really turns me off buying a game. Way too much in the long run, and the game itself can be expensive enough to buy. I do accept that they need continuous funding to keep them going, but some games just charge too much. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ulysses Posted October 17, 2007 Author Share Posted October 17, 2007 Like ive said in the past, I am with TFMF on this, as soon as I pick up the game in the shop and it states monthly fees I just put it straight back as I am totally unwilling to pay for a £35 ($70) game then additional charges. I have in the past been interested in games like world of warcraft and Lord Of The Rings Online but due to the fees its put me off them. While its unstandable about mantaining the servers and updating them, alot of people either cant afford to outlay the sums of money involved or are unwilling to pay extra. The snag is that software firms by doing this and charging more are cutting down its own customer base which surely does not do there games any good even though they could be really good. I for one wont buy any game that requires additional fees on top of the purchase price of the game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chiggy Posted October 17, 2007 Share Posted October 17, 2007 I am lead to believe that costs are justified through game development, server upkeep and employees who monitor whats going on in the game. What a great job! Watching people play a PC game! I really would like to know how much those people earn. Ive never paid for a subscription to a PC game. The cost has encouraged many people to start running emulated servers like the various Star Wars Galaxies servers that have yet to be released. All of which are totally legal since they are coded from the ground up by the enthusiasts themselves, of course there is the issue of intelllectual property. What I would like to see are more games that allow you to play online with out fees THAT allow a player to take the game so far THEN if they wish put their money in the slot to take the game further. Lets say its possible to play a character to level 40.........with out a subscription you can take that character to level 15, with a subscription to level 40. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tenebrae Posted November 22, 2007 Share Posted November 22, 2007 WoW is what... £7-8 a month? For which you can play as much as you like... So even if you only play 2-3 hours a week, that's fairly good value for money. It's fairly obvious people that think this is an inequitable arrangement are in the minority, given the millions of people that happily throw money at Blizzard et al. And while there are some games that are trying to strike out in new directions to the classic subscription model, it's clear that it's been established as the norm and as such, it seem unlikely that it is going to be overthrown any time soon. Especially given the fact that these games are essentially in a perpetual state of development... so, not only do you have a development team working constantly on content, you've got to have people working on balance, monitoring the game (games without proper monitoring are not great), people to keep the servers running and of course, the massive costs of bandwidth for accommodating tens of thousands of users, at a good speed 24/7... Not exactly going to pay for itself. Before people say "Second Life"... that's less a game and more an online brothel/3d chatroom. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GorunNova Posted November 22, 2007 Share Posted November 22, 2007 Ive never paid for a subscription to a PC game. The cost has encouraged many people to start running emulated servers like the various Star Wars Galaxies servers that have yet to be released. All of which are totally legal since they are coded from the ground up by the enthusiasts themselves, of course there is the issue of intelllectual property. Well... there IS the point that reverse engineering is a violation of pretty much any EULA out there, and all server emulators are effectively reverse engineering the network code and data formats, if nothing else (well, unless the server emulator has it's own custom data made from scratch, that is.) Edit: Then again... as long as the reverse engineering was done without actually using a bought copy of the game to do that reverse engineering, I think it's legal. If the server emulator was made purely with a packet sniffer on other peoples' data and user-made data without any use of a game disc / installed copy of the game, I believe that's legal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tenebrae Posted November 22, 2007 Share Posted November 22, 2007 I'd have thought that in the case of something like Star Wars, the biggest risk would be that Lucas Films etc. are infamous for stamping out unauthorised usage of Star Wars material... and in the case of a piece of software that would ostensibly be used to deny them paying customers... you'd best hope they don't find out about said servers, is all I can say because I'm sure that you could get ninja lawyer'd to the moon and back for all the kinds of copyright violations and EULA violations it entails... not to mention the intellectual property. Which is to say, I agree with Gorun. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GorunNova Posted November 22, 2007 Share Posted November 22, 2007 *continues* (not that I didn't read what you said, Tenebrae. ^^) ... then again, you can't let OTHER people sniff your packets with the intent of making an emulator because then YOU'RE allowing reverse engineering of your copy, breaking the EULA, making it illegal... Geez, what a nest of complications. No, I'm pretty much certain that server emulators are illegal. It's not like making, say, console emulators. Those have a special loophole... they are developed by reverse engineering what the software thinks is the hardware. It's not reverse engineering the hardware directly (hence avoiding any hardware manufacturer reverse engineering issues), and it's not reverse engineering the software's data or code... so it's pretty much safe, legally... and it drives game companies nuts. ^^ Edit: And with that, I is a little off topic, as I already added my opinion on the matter up there. Why don't more MMOs use the 'game shop' method of revenue gathering, as it has obviously proved to be a working model in more than one MMO? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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