Money

Surprise, surprise, playing MMORPGs costs money. Which is the source of frequent complaints about them, especially the monthly fee. Nearly all MMORPG follow the same business model: You first buy the game for the usual price of a computer game, a bit below $50. Included is one free month of game play. After that, you pay a monthly fee. The industry standard for that monthly fee used to be $10, aeh, sorry, $9.95 :). But this went up with time, so the industry standard is now more like $13, with the latest game, Star Wars Galaxies, costing $15 per month. You can usually get a slight reduction on that by subscribing for 3, 6 or even 12 months.

Now imagine you buy Star Wars Galaxies for $45. Play your free month, like it, play another 11 months at $15. Total cost for one year of game play is $210. Is that expensive? For one year of playing, I don't think so. People usually spend a lot of time in this sort of game, 1000 hours per year or more. At that rate, the price per hour of entertainment is 21 cents. Going to the cinema, or even reading a book, is more expensive. You could theoretically buy an offline computer game and play it for 1000 hours in a year for $50. But experience shows that the normal life-span of an offline game is not much more than 100 hours. Online games are often better value for money, because during 1 year there will be a lot of content added to the game.

Some people have a highly exaggerated opinion about the value of their money. MMORPG servers, like all servers that are not military or life-supporting, occasionally have down-time. For server maintenance, for patches, or rarely even unexpected server crashes. And every time that happens, somebody will post on the message board "I paid $10 (or $13, or $15) per month for this game. Now the server is down. I want my money back!". I'm still waiting for a game company to declare that the month has 720 hours, there were 2 hours of down-time, and here are your 3 cents back for the 2 hours you couldn't play. :)

While the business model for all the "big" games of the MMORPG industry is the same, the smaller games from independant companies often slightly differ from that model. While Sony / Verant has no problem of getting boxed CDs of Everquest into the shelfs of computer games stores, smaller companies don't have access to these distribution channels. There are many games from smaller companies around, which you can't pick up at your local store. In that case it is often possible to download the game. Depending on the quality of the graphics a game client can be as small as 200 MB, or as large as 1.3 GB. Not something you'd want to download with a 56k modem, but if you, like me, have 3MBit ADSL that sort of download is quite feasible.

What makes these large downloads interesting? You usually get a "free trial" bundled with them. And the client is usually for free too. So you can play the game for a week or so, decide whether you like it, and then just pay the monthly fee afterwards. But of course the old saying that "you get what you pay for" is still true. These smaller games from smaller game companies that you can download and try for free are often less pretty in the graphics department than the big games. Which is okay, as long as the game play is good. Well, up to a certain point, I'm not downloading games with 2D graphics in good old Ultima Online style.

I just wished that the big games could be downloaded too. I'd even be willing to pay for the download, slightly less than I'd pay for the boxed CD. But usually the game company has some sort of exclusive contract with the distributing company, and downloads are not possible. That only changes if the game is a market flop. Games that first sold only in boxes, but are now struggling for survival, can now often be downloaded for free. Or you get a free CD glued into your PC game magazine. I just played Anarchy Online a week for free with a free CD like that (Anarchy Online still sucks, mainly because of the weapon and equipment system that has you hunting equipment in stores for longer than you are hunting monsters). And I still have a CD with a free month of Ultima Online on my desk.

Usually the only way to play a big game for free before you buy it, is to get a place in the beta test. But of course that only works for games that are currently in beta. And that plan totally failed for Star Wars Galaxies, because you had to BUY the CD to participate in the beta. And including shipping to Europe, participation in the beta would have cost me $37, so I declined. Because you can't use the beta client to then play the release game, you have still to buy the boxed CD. :( Now I'm waiting to get my hands on a copy of SWG, but the first 125,000 copies they made are sold out. Which causes me to think that I'd happily pay $40 to download 1 GB or so of SWG client and be able to play it now. Maybe at some point in the future, when more people have broadband, game companies will offer such a service. Would probably make distribution cheaper for them. But with Star Wars Galaxies it just might be that they deliberately limited the number of clients they sold, so that their servers wouldn't be totally overloaded during release. There are enough complaints about server difficulties as it is.

Very few companies have a very different business model from the "monthly fee" one. The only online game I'm playing that works on a very different model is Magic the Gathering Online, MtGO for short. Which is not a MMORPG, but an online trading card game. In MtGO you can play for free, without a monthly fee. But to play, you need virtual cards, and these cards cost money. Which is the same business model than for the paper trading cards, so you understand where it comes from. But I've heard of plans for MMORPG games that work that way. You get an avatar with an appartment for free, but the appartment is empty, and the virtual furniture costs real money. Don't know if that will work. The business model of MtGO works rather well. The game has a lot less players than a big MMORPG, but each player is spending hundreds of dollars on virtual cards. If you are interested in MtGO, I'm running a MtGO FAQ and Guide website, where you can find a lot more information about that game.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:27 AM Permanent Link