Comments on: What do you expect to get for your monthly subscription?

By: Tesh

Tesh — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:59:57 +0000

When I can buy a game every month for $15 that I can play for far longer than just the month that I bought it, an MMO just can’t compete.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:24:11 +0000

It doesn’t even matter what we expect. What matters is how to keep us buying the product.
WoW is a total package. You get a solid single-player game – all the way from 1 to 80 it’s a great single player game if that’s what you’re looking for.
You get a solid multi-player game, from the time you can queue for dungeons until 80 you can play that way.
You get a solid strategy game, you can play AH from level 1 until … well level 1 that has more money than everyone else.
You get a solid social atmosphere, just join a social guild if you want.

WoW is a very very very solid game. Or more of a platform, with solid games built on top of it.

To compare it to a non-blizzard game is like comparing microsoft to mom & pop software development company. I seriously can’t think of any other game shop that produces solid games. Yes, some games are more fun, but they won’t last for as many years and won’t cater to so many different styles (rpg, pvp, strategy, probably all genres).

So what should a game offer? Should content patches be free? Well it should offer what makes sense. Both business sense and what makes sense to the customer. It’s very possible it isn’t good business for a tiny company to make free content patches. WoW has a huge player base, and if they only get 10 cents per month from each subscriber toward development, that’s still considerable money. if you only have 100k player base, than 10 cents per subscriber is 10k dollars … which pays for maybe … at most … 1 developer (this is per month). So no new free patches.

By: scrusi

scrusi — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:46:30 +0000

Thanks for reminding me about Psychonauts again, almost forgot to buy it

As for the main topic: I see nothing wrong with paid expansions (and they call it one). WoW has those too. Now I don’t know much about CO, so I have no idea whether they have free content patches as well. In general I think that a subscription of the standard size does entitle you to a certain amount of free new content over time – especially if you have to pay up front for the game itself as well – but selling expansions on top of that is hardly a new concept.

By: Uzi

Uzi — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:43:15 +0000

I do think games like WoW offer fantastic value with their regular content patches. You could argue that if you bundle the entire thing into the price of the expansion it doesnt look so good on paper….but compared with Solo Play games I find it good value.

Champions:- Well I suspect that life time subs owners are going to be very peeved indeed. Whats more if I were considering a punt at STO I’d be even more wary of doing so. So far STO has limited PvE content for the Klingons and I’d expect PvP action to end up mostly happening in the latest ‘pay to play’ content. I know a few people have already sprung for lifetime subs to STO and I expect them to be ..less than enthused by this model. I mean how much is a life time sub worth if it extends only to the ‘vanilla’ game? I shall be avoiding this developers products for sure now….