Scott McCloud On Micropayments And Gaming 57
Thanks to Game Girl Advance for its discussion of a lecture by comic creator Scott McCloud at EA's Redwood Shores campus, during which he floated "the idea of using micro-payments for online gaming, which he analogizes to feeding quarters into the arcade machines of yore." The article's author muses: "Would you pay 25 cents for 100 credits of Bejeweled? What about a dollar for six hours on EverQuest? How about a virtual penny arcade that let you play multiplayer Joust or Gauntlet II online with people from around the world? No monthly subscriptions, just pure pay-to-play." We've previously covered McCloud's hands-on interest in micropayments on Slashdot.
No, I wouldn't (Score:4, Insightful)
I suppose I need to get a change slot installed in my home so I can send my quarters down the pipe and have them pop out at pop-cap games.
Yes you would (Score:5, Insightful)
A micropayment system would require some sort of public key infrasturcture. You'd put money in your micropayment account (probably with a credit card, but only when you needed to top it off), and then every time you did something that cost you money, somebody's use your public key to verify that you were who you said you were, and a few pennies would be debited from your account. The whole transaction has to be very simple to work.
Yeah, I know what you thinking. Big opportunity for ripoffs -- steal one penny from one million people, and you've got a big haul. But that's a problem with any payment system.
The really big problem is that there's no public key infrastructure to support micropayments. Which, come to think of it, is also why spam is such a problem -- there's no way to identify people so you can say, "I don't know who this bozo is, but I don't want any more email from him." Hmm, I smell a business synergy....
Re:No, I wouldn't (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No, I wouldn't (Score:1)
Raising costs for the consumer. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Raising costs for the consumer. (Score:4, Interesting)
The only way I could see this succeeding though is if it was a alternative method of payment. By having it as a second payment option, it could potentially draw in new customers and keep some of the ones around who do not play as much as they used too. If they completely replaced their payment options with this method, it would do nothing but chase away the hardcore gamers.
Re:Raising costs for the consumer. (Score:5, Interesting)
imo (given these similar numbers across all persistent worlds) - these monthly fees of $10-15 are the primary barrier for most gamers. Anyone less than wholly-devoted to the product is extremely unlikely to find these monthly fees acceptable. Everquest's fans may well seem to all be obsessive-compulsive primarily because only obsessive fans can justify $13/mo for that one game.
Lowering the monthly fee won't work very far either. Once you drop past $8/mo or so, the cost of making monthly CC charges (and dealing with card expirations, contested charges, etc) looms large over your profit margin.
Yearly subscriptions may get around that, but you may lose your posterior at the end of that first subscription year when the bulk of players who had completely forgotten your game contest the charges.
Imagine the following scenario instead:
Blizzard creates a 'ledger' for each player of Worlds of Warcraft. After the 'free' month they switch over to their 'micropayment' scheme. With this, they charges $0.25/hr, up to a monthly maximum, against that ledger. Instead of regularly recurring billing, players are able to infuse their WoW ledger 'up-front' in transactions of $20+ as they desire. (the monthly cap is very important, as hardcore gamers are incredibly important to the 'health' of any persistent world).
Essentially you have implemented pay-as-you-go micropayments in Worlds of Warcraft, but you aren't beholden to a proprietary public key infrastructure of a third party. You also didn't need any technical expertise outside of what you already needed to handle monthly billing. You're bringing you average transaction up, and mitigating the cost risks that come with recurring billing. (Though you would likely want to retain optional monthly billing for the hardcore players' convenience.)
Publishers with larger online libraries (such as Popcap or SOE) could code the 'player ledger' outside the scope of a particular game, so players could easily switch between pumping virtual quarters into a registered version of Bookworm over to Zuma in the former; or EQ to SWG in the latter.
Many persistent worlds thrived (back in the day) with hourly charges, and Meridian 59 in particular switched back to it from a monthly fee (they had a monthly cap as well). Its worth noting that M59 did not witness a major player loss when they switched billing styles.
The key to micropayment acceptance, imo, is that the ledger is loaded with player's money 'up front'. There will be no end-of-cycle bill that shocks the socks off your clients, or run the risk of contested charges.
The primary 'con' to this type of billingis: Are a large portion of persistent world profits coming from people who pay, but don't play anymore? If you switch to micropayments you would lose the steady cash from these players who can't bear to cancel and risk having their character(s) deleted.
It's entirely possible that existing publishers see too much easy money in those payers to even attempt such a change in status quo.
Of course, this would not prohibit a forward-looking developer from stepping in and 'showing them how its done'.
Re:Raising costs for the consumer. (Score:2)
An hourly fee, capped at whatever the monthly rate used to be, would definitely get me interested in trying some online games. The other thing they need to do is drop the up-front price of the disc.
Re:Raising costs for the consumer. (Score:2)
First off, think about the fee. It's less than $15/month. What's that? Half what it costs to take a date to the movies for a coupl
Re:Raising costs for the consumer. (Score:2)
$15 isn't much when you compare it to other entertainment - but gaming has its own pricing structure. $15/mo is the same as renting 3 games for a week each. Every third month, you could buy a brand new game, or every month you could pick up a used game or price-cut older game.
Now consider t
Re:Raising costs for the consumer. (Score:2)
Anyways, I think you make some very valid points. I still think the core design of MMOGs being so hostile towards casual gamers is a significantly larger problem than the monthly fees, but you're right: a micropayment system could, in theory, bring in additional ga
Re:Raising costs for the consumer. (Score:2, Insightful)
When you start charging for every second of a persons time, they start to value every second of it. Minor irritances become rather more significant, because every time they occur you're paying the guy who made it that way.
The trouble with micropayments (Score:2, Interesting)
But perhaps some clever fraudster will see an opportunity here. Wouldn't it be easy to
Re:The trouble with micropayments (Score:3, Interesting)
These companies would notice something like that and they would be the one to prosecute. If a person did this scam and made say a million dollars (not hard to do over the course of some time with your system, s
Easy Fix (Score:1, Redundant)
Everyone doesn't have to complain. As soon as a few do and the MP company investigates and finds a scam, everyone who was char
Seems familiar... (Score:1)
my beef (Score:4, Insightful)
Intrest? (Score:5, Insightful)
read:
McCloud's hands-on obsession with micropayments
Just what we need. Single player pay-per-play video games. Um, no-thanks. Asside from the lack of a cap on the total price, suddenly your favorite game would stop working when it wasn't profitable to run the billing server anymore.
While I'm thinking about it, micropayments for online games is a bad idea too. The concept seems fine, but it would turn into a way for publishers to disguise price increases.
Scott wants to find a pet industry to use as a R&D department to build his micropayment dreams for him. The trouble is, once the infrastructure is there, all sorts of advertisement supported and fixed price media will start costing fractions of a cent per use. Don't think for a second that means the ads or the up front fees will go away either. If he wants micropayments so badly, he's apealing to the wrong crowd. The users aren't going to rally to his side, because from the user's perspective micropayments are a genie best kept in the bottle.
Re:Intrest? (Score:2)
So put a cap on the total price. Sort of like rent to own, without the usury.
suddenly your favorite game would stop working when it wasn't profitable to run the billing server anymore.
Which is why there needs to be enough micropayment activity to support third-party billing as an industry unto itself.
One thing you're ignoring is the reasonably compelling argument that when produ
Re:Intrest? (Score:2)
"can" being the operative word there. What I assert is that you are correct for products that fit the description you have provided, but things we already have and take for granted will increase in price at the same time. That increase has the potential to be far greater than any savings elsewhere. That potential will be too great a temptation.
Even if you exclude monetary costs, imagine the implications of being able to cash in by getting a link t
Micropayments done before (Score:5, Insightful)
If you try to apply this to games like Quake or Unreal Tournament where it's $.25 for each match then you quickly lose your casual fan base. Even if it was a fraction of that, I'd still be out $50 on the Unreal Tournament 2K4 demo right now. It gets worse with RPG games. Pay a few extra cents for a fancy hat, a few dollars for that ring of regeneration. Twenty-five cents each time you descent into the Dungeon of Dispair! You'll end up with a situation just like at the arcades when one friend runs out of quarters and can't play.
"Dude, a bunch of us are going down to attack the Red Dragon in the Dark Dungeon. C'mon!"
"Sorry, after spending $4.32 in the expansion area to get my Crystal Sword, I can't afford it."
Those that can afford their gaming habits now have an unfair advantage. Arcade games used to offset this with skill allowing you to continue on one quarter, today's games often have killzones designed to make the player shove in more quarters. Online games would surely go down the same route.
I also can't think off the top of my head of an instance where a product went from a flat rate back to a hourly/micropayment rate. Even long-distance and cell phones are edging towards a flat-rate with unlimited calling time.
Re:Micropayments done before, Yea, in SuperMan III (Score:1)
With the proliferation of cracks/hacks to online gaming cheats, imagine a clan that developed a way to skim $0.01 from each member of the [fill-in-game] community.
OR, what if you could combine "on-line gambling" with pay-per-play on-line games. Imagine a scenario where your PayPal account is credited $0.05 foe each head shot kill, or deducted $0.10 for each death you experience attributed to being killed by a head shot. Not really gambling, but you get the lightbulb.
Can you suggest other cool pay-per-pl
Re:Micropayments done before (Score:2)
Entirely true. Back in the day, when I was an AOL luser, I used to play Air Warrior, a MMO WWII flight sim. The lag was terrible, the graphics were shitty, but the game was very addictive. The best part was that it was free, ev
Re:Micropayments done before (Score:1)
Re:Micropayments done before (Score:1)
Many already have. The typical MMORPG stretches the experience curve out over many many months, thus ensuring players spend many many months (and many many dollars in monthly subscriptions) playing the game. Well, those that don't get bored after the first free month, anyway, and if they paid just for the box the company still profits.
UT model (Score:2)
Sure, at first there's a gazillion servers to choose from, with ping times all over the spectrum, but eventually things settle down and you can weed out the good from the bad, or even form closed servers (eg clan servers).
Re:UT model (Score:4, Informative)
That method doesn't make for a consistent revenue stream. Sure, you get a bunch of sales up front, and then a few sales here and there from people picking up the game, but that's it.
What the author of the article wants, is to get you to pay him every time you fire up your copy of UT. You log onto a server, you pay him a quarter. You finish up a round, and start a new one, you pay him another quarter. Any idiot can see that this is going to add up to a lot of money fast, that's why he wants it, he's just putting a consumer friendly spin on it, to try and sell it.
Re:Mmmm.... Joust..... (Score:1)
Raising money for Evercrack (Score:2, Funny)
Don't cast that spell yet! I'm in the middle of auctioning off my kid's liver.
Re:Raising money for Evercrack (Score:2)
Micropayments = Not Gonna Happen (Score:2)
Why? Nobody wants it but webmasters and tech types looking for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
Face it, if anyone on the web comes up with a high-volume, pay per use application -- why would they want to join a micropayment consortium and share the revenue? Being a member of a "micropayment network" would actually expose customers to competing services as well!
They would rather license a
Insert $0.25 into your USB Slot to Read This Post (Score:5, Interesting)
Why? Because if I drop a quarter in an arcade cabinet, the quarter serves as physical proof that I dropped a quarter in there. Now, if I were actually in a real arcade (which is darn near impossible anyway), I can go to the arcade employee and tell him that the machine "ate my quarter," (another modern impossibility since the game would have cost no less than four quarters) but the fact remains that I've dropped a physical quarter in the machine. The machine just can't take a quarter out of my pocket without me looking.
But online payments reverse this. The power of the transaction is now firmly in the grip of the payee, not the payer. With micropayments, Scott McCloud's dream machine can take quarters from my pocket whenever it feels like making an error. I understand that there are checks and balances with the credit card companies, but what if some 10 year old kid uses his mom's debit card? How do I know that the game didn't charge me for 11 games when I only played 10? Who's going to go over their credit card statement to compare how many times they've played a certain game? Moreover, with a physical arcade, when I place the quarter into the machine it is physically me placing it a machine. Using a credit card for gaming micropayments across the internet is like giving someone all your quarters, telling him to pass to the next guy and so forth until someone is close the machine, have him to put one quarter in and then kindly hand back all the other quarters you didn't use. Repeat 5 times an hour, more if you suck at the game, each time, of course, becoming yet another opportunity for someone you don't trust to interupt that line and snag a quarter.
It should come as no surprise that McCloud pushes micropayments, and it should come as no surprise that someone at EA Redmond probably has several whiteboards full of micropayment ideas by now. They're content producers so, as I've illustrated, micropayments place power firmly in the grip of the producer.
Is it just me, or are McCloud's micropayments remeniscient of the old Office Space-a-roo, only legal?
Re:Insert $0.25 into your USB Slot to Read This Po (Score:2)
1) Of course most people wont pore over their credit card statement to verify that they're not being scammed... but some people will. And they will complain to their credit card company. And the credit card company will, if enough people complain, investigate the game company to see if their customers are being screwed. And if they find something, the game company is going up the river.
2) Your quarter analogy is not a great one, because how does the arcade manager know that you actually p
Re:Insert $0.25 into your USB Slot to Read This Po (Score:2)
Well sure it does. You yourself said that he's going to probably give me a free game, and while the physicality of the quarter may not necessarily help in that situation, my own physical presence does. He knows, because I stand in front of him, that this is not the 1037th time I've tried to steal a game. But with physical presence removed and replaced with equal amounts of anonymity, the content producer has to assume that every per
Micropayments could be nifty (Score:3, Interesting)
I am not however, interested in playing them fo 10 hours per day in order to be at a very high level and keep having fun. I'm not a instant high level kind of guy.
However, whats stopped me from playing both of them recently are two factors:
#1: Both charge a flat, montly fee, which I do not get the good end out of.
#2: Both delete your character off of the server after a month of a cancelled account. There is nothing you can do to keep the character from being deleted.
If I could pay, say, 5$ a month, and and only expect to get 10 hours of play time, and anything over that gets be the premium 12:50$ a month, I'd probably never cancell my account.
This is why I've given up on PC online RPG's by the way. The developers use the helpfullness of server side characters to completely screw players into paying money. If I could drop a dollar or so whenever I started playing until I logged out, then hey.
Re:Micropayments could be nifty (Score:1)
Re:Micropayments could be nifty (Score:1)
Legally Required Penny Arcade Link (Score:5, Funny)
Check the news post for that strip for more commentary.
For Gauntlet II (Score:1)
If I play Gauntlet II online, how will I push my teammate away from his controls so I can steal the food before him? (Believe it or not, my friends and I actually do that when we play only to have someone "accidently" shoot it)
How To Make MicroPayments Work For Me (Score:2, Funny)
Every time Scott McCloud comes up with a 'uniquely inventive' way of using micropayments on the internet, he has to pay me a quarter
Every time Scott McCloud tries to convince us that micropayments are the wave of the future and can work, he has to pay me a quarter
Then, once I have few hundred thousand dollars, maybe I'll buy him a 'clue'.
Micropayments are not feasible, micropayments will never work, micropayments are a buzz
If I had a nickel for everytime... (Score:1)
Nope, I won't (Score:2)
If the web ever becomes micropayment based, we won't see a great surge in income for website owners. We'll just see a decrease in the use of the web.
And personally, I find the i
Charge through the ISP (Score:1)
Had it have been controlled by the telcos it would have been rolled out slowly and in a considered fashion - of course, we would still be on 9600 baud modems paying $60 per month, but we would also have a micropayment solution built into the infrastructure.
It would be something like the telephone billing system, where I can call a pay-per-minute telephone service and the charges get billed via my phone account.
Now, back to reality, I like the int
The 80's called.. (Score:2)
Micropayments are dumb. (Score:2)
Either, the cost is *very* low, so that I can ignore it, *or* it forces me to make a consient decision for every 5-minute game or every newspaper-article or whatever if this item is really worth the price. People don't like to be
micropayments are stupid, GGA is pretentious (Score:1)
We don't put quarters into arcade games anymore (Score:2, Insightful)
But now the games on a console or a PC are better than most arcade games, so there's no incentive to pay that quarter anymore.
Maybe if there was no alternative, micropayments would work. But I can't foresee the day when every single game developer decides