City of Villains and Heroes Combine Monthly Fee

JamesO writes "Massive game players will have lots of options. NCSoft has announced that City of Heroes and City of Villains will only require one fee to play both games." From the article: "We know that many City of Villains players will be existing City of Heroes players who are essentially playing in order to access another aspect of the universe they have grown to love ... We wanted to find a solution that would look after existing players, offer tremendous value for money and also encourage new players to investigate the world of City of Heroes. This is that solution."

This is only...

[Shads]

... sane, as COV may be a different game, but in reality it's a significant expansion to COH. They interact.

Kudos.

[kinglink]

If they are completely seperate games (where you interact on the servers) kudos.

When everquest did this they started charging 150% (I think) rather than the same price. It was kinda crap but also understandable, but here there's two things to realize,

A. The only change is storage space.

b. If the world is always the same for both games and you only log on one game at a time, there's no extra load by doing this.

Overall I'm happy they did this, but it's not going to change anything for me. (The plague in WoW got me into that though so we'll see)

Wave of the future

[sdhankin]

As MMORPGs become more mainstream, and there are more and more games competing for the same players, I think you're going to see the big guys doing more of this. After all, it's kind of a no-brainer if one company charges $20/month for their game, and another charges $20/month for their stable of 10 games.

I'm kind of surprised SOE hasn't gone this route. If they undercut all the competition (I believe right now they charge more than the average monthly fee for a group of games), they could likely force smaller operators out of business. If their business model just counted subscribers (rather than subscribers to a particular game) they could just figure out what they needed to support an individual (server load, lines, etc.) and just skip the rest of the equation. The same servers can support a variety of games. It's just a matter of balancing out the load.

Who wouldn't see this as a better deal?

Re:Wave of the future

[j-joshers]

It's a matter of game quality, though. SOE's games aren't that good IMO and the subscriber numbers kinda reflect that (probably the best data is here [mmogchart.com]. I'd rather pay $20 a month for one really good game than $20 a month for 4 bad games, 5 mediocre ones, and 1 sorta-good one. If the small operator has a better game than it already has SOE (or whoever) beat. And even if there were 10 really good games on one bill, who would find time to play any more than one of them in this world of 800-hour MMORPGs? Seems more like a bullet point to get quick sales than an actual legitimate good deal - and as I said the smaller operator will be fine as long as the game is good.

Re:Would people really pay double?

[PhoenixOne]

I agree with you that this is the "right thing to do" but, as anybody who's dealt with SOE can tell you, game companies don't always do the "right thing".

I think giving them credit for thinking in the long term and not squeezing every cent they can from their loyal users is worthy of praise. To me, praising companies that respect their clients is a no-brainer.