"Paying a monthly Fee is stupid" - No..no it's not.

[Starke]

So before you complain about other people paying a monthly fee for a game. Do the math.

The wierd thing that wanders through for me is, I'd actually rather plunk down the $200 for a lifetime sub than pay monthly in most cases, though you're sorta right about the math.

So, here's what I don't get, why do I dislike the idea of paying monthly on a game, but not paying a ridiculously large amount for the lifetime sub?

That said, STO did eventually warm me to the concept of paying monthly, it's just not something I have to do seeing as I'm on the lifetime mode.

 

[Nanaki316]

I've never understood this argument either.

I've played a few different MMO's, WoW, AoC, FFXI, FFXIV and I've tried rift but I honestly believe WoW is the only one I've played that's worth the £8.99 to me.

If AoC had been a bit cheaper, I might have considered keeping that on as well and I'm impressed with Rift's beta but I wouldn't pay for more than one every month.
I run a guild on WoW so it kinda has to be that one that being said I do like change!

 

[Wicky_42]

Now if you take an MMO, you have hundreds and hundreds of hours of gameplay. PvP, crafting, leveling, raiding, etc. Even if you only play a couple days a week, the dollar per gameplay hour ratio is way way way higher than a normal game.
...
So before you complain about other people paying a monthly fee for a game. Do the math.

Yeah, hundreds of hours of game play designed purely to string the game out longer, rather than delivering it in a simple 6-10 hour complete package with free multiplayer. Take Eve, where to fly the bigger ships you literally have to sink over a year in. That's not 'value for money', that's 'milking your customers'. WoW's grind is just the same thing.

You make a big thing about 'value for money', but you should realise that any paid for mmo has the worst value for money possible; you're paying full whack even if you only play occasionally. Any other game you pay once you're done. You can go back and play as much or as little as you want.

My 100 hours on BF2 cost me £25. My hours in HL2, TF2, Portal et al £30. I spent £100 (!) on Eve, and just began to play in a battleship. It wasn't especially fun, but it was compulsive - but the same can be said of web browser games, and those don't cost bloody £200 a year!

So yeah, before you start blindly defending MMOs, do the maths

 

[instantbenz]

I just always figured that those were complaints from kids who didn't have jobs, but really wanted to play the game. Once you are working, $15 a month isn't that big a deal.

Unless you're working in the creative industry, then it's two days of food.

pixel pushers unite! ... yeah honestly i don't have the cash to drop 15 extra a month for that ... plus when you don't have that cash weighing on you and you have a lack-luster product, you should know why ... i'm not complaining, i'm saying i don't have it and i enjoy the mmo's i play without new content all of the time

plus the communities tend to be better on such games as the only ones who can pay for it are children whose parents don't know how to raise them except for with money

pretty sad

 

[solidstatemind]

I'm really shocked at how myopic most people are; they talk about "I pay $60 for a game, and I expect to get all the content."

Well, with World of Warcraft which seems to be the piñata here, you are: any updates to the 'version' you're in come free. It's when they add substantial new content, like Outlands or Northrend, that you have to buy another disk. With Cataclysm being kind of an exception (since it's a reshaping of the original continets and only 5 new zones), you are getting substantially new areas to explore and new critters and bosses to fight.

But that $15 dollars a month... laying aside the fact that if you only played WoW for 2 hours a week, you'd be running about a $2/hr entertainment rate... still better than most of your options out there...

Has anyone really given any thought to what is going on behind the scenes? Each month, Blizzard has to pay hosting costs, maintenance and hardware replacement costs, bandwidth costs, as well as continued support and development, customer service, etc.

That is not to say that Blizzard is operating at a zero-sum, but the point is that I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard saw less than $5 of the monthly subscription rate as profit, and tbh, that is probably as thin a buffer as I'd be willing to go if I were in charge of WoW, given that things can happen that make that buffer rapidly dry up.

 

[bloodychimp]

Two words: Guild Wars

I wish Guild Wars had a monthly fee. That game was great, then they ran out of cash and stopped making new content so they could get GW2 out.

I honestly don't understand the complaints. Going to the movies where I live costs about $20, and that's for a two hour movie. Lunch usually costs something like $10 if you go out with friends. $15 is actually really cheap compared to the other things we do for entertainment, especially with the amount of time people play mmo's every month.

 

[Brandon237]

I just always figured that those were complaints from kids who didn't have jobs, but really wanted to play the game. Once you are working, $15 a month isn't that big a deal.

Unless you're an adult working in a third-world country where $15 is... *does the math* 1/60th your paycheck.

Hmm...

Ok, you got me.

Also third world country here, but with parents in slight financial trouble. I cannot play subscription MMOs because they would not allow it, and 3rd world country + students pay will not let me play them later on either.

But I don't really play MMOs so I'm okay I guess.

And for $15 I could buy a new decent quality game with a different experience. So no, I will not play subscription games because HERE the money does not exist for middle class people who are already a bit tight on money (which is almost all small business owner's in SA) to play them ontop of everything else and I do not want to really play them

 

[Palademon]

I understand your point, but I still see it as just one game. Even if it is big.
If I do everything can I stop paying? If I get to the max level of my charatcer in WoW can I get it for free afterwards? No, I'd have to keep paying for the privaledge.

Also, games aren't really based on money per hour anymore, otherwise games would be much cheaper.

Even if people pay for updates and stuff, why would they still have to pay extra for expansions?

I don't mind paying for Gold Xbox Live because it's way cheaper than an MMO, sometimes has bonuses, and allows me to play ANY game I have online, not just one.

 

[Sun Flash]

So to get my money's worth out of a MMO, I'd have to play 15 hours a month on top of an initial 50 hours to get the same game/$ ratio you get from Dragon Age. I don't have the time or the money, quite frankly. and playing 15 hours of a game every month sounds like an awful lot of grinding to me.

But I don't even like MMOs, so I'm just came into this thread to moan a bit.

 

[Layzor]

Two words: Guild Wars

I wish Guild Wars had a monthly fee. That game was great, then they ran out of cash and stopped making new content so they could get GW2 out.

[/e quote]

Guild Wars cranks out new content all the time, there may be no more expansions coming out but they're bridging the first and second games by fleshing out the backstory for the sequel with questlines and missions, new weapons, heroes etc. They're also dillegently patching, updating and balencing all the time (Dervishes just had a total overhaul). They fund all this business not with monthly fees but by providing optional, purely aesthetic purchases that don't give one player the advantage over another such as costumes and side mission packs as well as character slots. All this while working on a gigantic sequel.

 

[HellspawnCandy]

My parents always paid and thought nothing of it. So I never was that ignorant kid who complained. What is shocking to me is how awesome some companies are. Plexes from Eve(30 day card basically but ingame and can be bought with isk) and how Guild Wars is free. I feel so bad for new MMO companies that don't make it. The shit they gotta deal with.

 

[googleback]

i've never had enough for a monthly subscription. but I've also never like mmo's or seen them as worth it.

 

[dtocs]

My objection to paying comes from a personal choice, I enjoy buying things and thats the end of it. Id prefer if subscription based games charged more for the disk/download but then I didnt need to pay any subscription afterwards. Only occasionally adding new content that becomes mandatory but covers a subscription fee.

Subscriptions are part of a business model and at the moment there the best way for a company to make money, however I think that there are potentially better ways to gain these funds that a player can recognize and its only a short time before a new strategy is implemented that hurts WOW much more then just a competing game.

 

[inFAMOUSCowZ]

I do complain because I dont have ajob yet, but when I do, I may change my mind

 

[TheMadTypist]

I'm afraid playing a game with monthly fees would require me to play that game, and only that game, all the time, lest I feel like I was paying for time that I subsequently didn't use. Put another way, unless I am willing to commit exclusively to a game with monthly fees, I will always feel that I am loosing money on the deal during those times that I play other games.

Free to Play therefore would be a much more appealing model for MMO's to me, because I have no obligation to get my money's worth each month, but can play at my own rate. Note that in good free-to-play MMO kind of games, the sort I might actually pay attention to, choosing to play without the micro-transactions doesn't cripple you. Similarly, if I can resist the siren calls of DC universe, I think I can resist the 30 dollar "CLOAKE OF DE UBARS!" in some online shop somewhere.

Regular games that have a one time price might appear more expensive per hour, but I'd rather play a variety of games that don't give me cause to resent them if I choose to play something else. Besides, thanks to steam most of my "to buy" list will either be bought when on sale, or is an indie title that sells for a cheaper value anyway.

 

[Sabiancym]

That is some fanboyism and inaccurate assumptions.

I just don't want to pay a monthly fee for a game. Even that is enough for me to not to play an MMO.

And where the monthly fee gives the developers a steady flow of resources to spare in improving and changing the game, it does not mean you can't get endless amount of gameplay out of a game that you only need to buy once:

I've played Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source combined for about ten years and since that Steam's counter for the game started rolling, I've played CS:S for nearly 1000 hours. Well worth the 50 ? I bought Half-Life 2 and the CS:S included.

I bet, or know in fact, that there are plenty of users here who've got well over their money's worth of gaming out of titles like Mass Effect 2, Fallout 3, The Elder Scrolls III and IV: Morrowind and Oblivion, and so on, without paying a monthly fee...

$15 or similar for a month isn't necessarily much. It's not a reason to whine if it's used to improve the game and you have time to play it. But at the same time it does not make a game all that much better and grander and it definitely does not automatically add hours to gameplay.

The trend for free-to-play games with optionally purchasable stuff is good, as long as you don't have to buy things that are quite necessary in the game. If they want all of the perks of a monthly subscriber, they better do just that; after all they've got the chance to play the game free. If the free-to-play-but-pay-for-stuff is done correctly, I can't see this bothering anyone, but elitists. These games actually suit OP's preferences most accurately as you're getting exactly what you pay for.

When I said gameplay hours, I didn't mean how long people will play the game. I meant how many hours of content there is. You can play the same 30 minute level of the same game 100 times. That doesn't mean there are 200 hours worth of gameplay, there is 30 minutes.

So mmos offer substantially more gameplay hours.

That logic fails so hard I can sense the Earth trembling.

No...that's what gameplay hours means in the industry. When you ask a developer how long his game is, he'll say x amount of hours. That means how much time it takes to get through the game at a normal speed, not how long someone could play the game.

 

[ssgt splatter]

Good argument OP. I'm not into MMOs in the first place but I did share their "outrage" because I thought the same way they did, but you are right.