Pay to Play

nihilist_1137 writes: "Zdnet has a story on how companies are looking at making gamers pay to play online games. It goes over the problem of how to make a game great but yet at the same time appealing to people who pick it up."

non-US players

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess one of my main problems is the cost for us foreigners...

Example: Australia

Our dollar has "softened" steadily on the US$ over the years and is worth about 50 US cents. If we play a $10 per month game we are paying $20.

This is a real pain when you consider Aussie wages are a similar to US wages. But in AU $. Example most permanent employees working in IT are on about 50-70K AU$. High end IT jobs can be up around 100K. From what I can work out US wages seem to be very similar but in US$.

This means it is really costing aussies twice as much to play these things. That's all well and good when you aren't married etc but when you have to justify these costs to a wife $120 for one computer game in a year sounds a lot better than $240.

Play a couple? Forget about it.

Heaven forbid if you lived in New Zealand.

Comments....

[MrBandersnatch]

In the UK BarrysWorld [barrysworld.co.uk] has had a semi-successful p2p system for years - hosting servers for the most popular games and charging for league games, dial up access to lower pings etc. Sadly they went bankrupt last year but were happily bought up by (I think) EB.

As many have pointed out a p2p FPS just isnt going to work because of latency issues - a ping over 50 is considered bad by many FPS players. MMORPGS over come this problem by having high latency tolerant game systems - however that really limits the type of play. Even now that market is starting to stagnate due to the number of poor clone type games being foist onto the market in order to cash in.

project entropia [project-entropia.com] has an interesting slant on all of this - players get the game and play for free but to get the most from the game they have to put real money into a virtual economy - check it out, very nice concept.

Of course the REAL p2p market doesnt exist in the states - people are paying to play games via SMS now ( mobile phone text messages ) and download the games to their phones. Once 3G ( NOT 2.5 ) appears with high powered mobile devices and good quality displays the p2p gaming market is going to EXPLODE!! In fact I've been developing a 3G p2p game for the last 2 years - anyone wnat to through me a few million? ;)

Re:they are gonna try this again.

[Mahrin Skel]

Here's what you are missing: EverQuest, Ultima Online, and Lineage: The Bloodpledge (state religion in South Korea) are the highest grossing PC games *ever*. Bigger than Starcraft, bigger than Quake 3, bigger than Myst. That $10/month adds up when the typical player sticks around for more than a year. And you don't have to share the subscription revnue with the retailers and distributors (who typically take 3/4 of the purchase price).

That's why the industry is suddenly waking up. This is a genuinely stronger business model that *works*. Online games are almost certainly going to be a $1,000,000,000 (that's one *billion*) dollar industry in 2003, after the release of Star Wars Galaxies and The Sims Online. It's already worth hundreds of millions in actual revnues companies are collecting *now*.

--Dave Rickey
Designer, Mythic Entertainment

Re:Free games!

[Mahrin Skel]

It's been tried, it doesn't seem to work. You need to have a full-price unit on the shelves for people to actually buy. Hell, our piece of the retail sale barely pays for the "free" month, we'd *gladly* just let you download it. People just don't do it in enough numbers to make a viable business model.

--Dave Rickey
Designer, Mythic Entertainment

Multiple games, one price

[herderofcats]

Rather then charging for each game, Skotos [skotos.net] is offering multiple games for a single monthly fee.

Current they offer The Eternal City [skotos.net] -- a romanesque RPG game, Castle Marrach [skotos.net] -- a high-fantasy social game popular with women, and Galactice Emperor [skotos.net] -- a weekly political game to become the Galactic Emperor.

They also have a number of other games announced to come out later in the year, including "Lovecraft Country" and "Paranoia".

The also have an active articles section [skotos.net] with columns by MMPORPG pundit Jessica Mulligan, MUD pioneer Richard Bartle, and many others. If you are an online game designer there are many great articles here!

-- Herder of Cats

Concerning server-side games like EQ...

[D'Arque Bishop]

When Ultima Online and EverQuest first came out, I too was very leery about paying $10 a month to play a game. In fact, I had sworn never to do so. A few friends of mine finally convinced me to do so, and I now have a high lvl cleric on EQ with intentions to create alt characters. After thinking about it for a while, I can see why $10 a month is reasonable for this kind of game.

Unlike games like Quake 3 Arena, Counterstrike, Unreal Tournament, and even Starcraft or Diablo II (which despite the use of battle.net, play games peer-to-peer), all of the servers are hosted by Sony themselves, along with all character information. This article [everlore.com] should give an idea of how many servers this requires. (For those who don't want to read the article, it says that it takes close to 1400 computers to run the 41 different game "servers".) Also take into account each server has anywhere from ten to thirty thousand people at any given time, and you're looking at a hell of a lot of needed bandwidth. Add into that paying gamemasters, guides, tech support staff, and maintaining those 1400 machines, and you've got one heck of a cash drain.

Would I pay per month for a peer-to-peer game like Quake? No. However, for a server-side-run game like EQ, $10 a month doesn't seem like a heck of a lot of money, especially considering the resources needed for such an endeavour.

Just my $.02...