Originally posted by Cervani Sub costs were originally put in place to help offset server costs for early MMOs. In a time where server costs for a MMO now barely reaches 100k, there is pretty much no excuse to have a sub fee these days. Or at least a sub fee as high as $13 a month like some MMOs charge.
That is true, running costs of MMOs are a lot lower nowadays than in 1996. Then again production costs are way up so maybe B2P with a higher boxprice would be fairer.
P2P is a service you provide and sometimes it is worth to pay for a service. Of course when they add itemshops and released plenty of expansions you must buy it seems rather greedy and that is when the model fail. But F2P games, or more precise western "Freemium" games are getting rather greedy as well.
Originally posted by Cervani Sub costs were originally put in place to help offset server costs for early MMOs. In a time where server costs for a MMO now barely reaches 100k, there is pretty much no excuse to have a sub fee these days. Or at least a sub fee as high as $13 a month like some MMOs charge.
Dunno about the numbers but today's licensing for software can be extremely expensive (e.g. having to pay according to the physical and virtual numbers of processors). You can resort to open source products, but you'll still have to pay for support. Not for one software, but quite a lot software (e.g. OS, DB, NAS, Network devices, other 3rd party software, etc.).
Pure hardware costs may indeed be low. But hardware costs come in a bundle with software licenses and support.
I played a bunch of games that are now f2p back when they were sub based .I left them as they were not worth my time OR money. They were not worth mentioning or thinking about anymore. When they went f2p, I didn't go rushing back to them even thought they were free. A free pile of steaming dog poop, is a steaming pile of dog poop.
I'll subscribe to a game for 15$ if its worth it. I still subscribe to WOW and probably will for quite awhile. The game [in my opinion] delivers 15$ a months worth. Besides people who play f2p usually end up paying more then 15$ a month on buying access to dungeons/weapons/potions...I know I did that. Sub models that you can access all content of just by playing is better.
The sub model is better for my wallet as long as the game is fun.
The Stranger: It's what people know about themselves inside that makes 'em afraid.
I played a bunch of games that are now f2p back when they were sub based .I left them as they were not worth my time OR money. They were not worth mentioning or thinking about anymore. When they went f2p, I didn't go rushing back to them even thought they were free. A free pile of steaming dog poop, is a steaming pile of dog poop.
Exactly! A bad game is a bad game. If they change it from P2P to F2P it will only help for a little while. And after that it will be much worse than it ever was...
If forty percent of people cited that they are quitting swtor because they don't want to pay a sub fee, than why wouldn't a company make the change. If 40% quit for that reason, how many didn't try it for that very same reason?
If EA is looking at the exit polls and see...
40% quit for a sub fee
19% quit for lack of mmo features
15% quit for lack of space
14% quit because of pvp
21% quit because its not SWG 2.0,
than what in all reality do you expect them to do?
1. Go free to play(check)
2. Announce and work on mmo features(check/lfg/parsers-meters/guildbanks/legacy perks, and all the stuff dribbling in late)
3. Announced they are working on a super secret space project, thats unlike anything else(of course they said that about pvp too, I guess huttball makes the comment somewhat true, but meh)
4. Announced new warzone, implemented ratings(which worked exactly like I said it would, and thats drive off anyone not in full gear), and announced the possibility of a new ilum being the focal point for the next even.
5. They probably will ignore
sub games are not dead, but I won't pay a sub fee again for any mmo out there. My first mmo had been on the market for years, so there was years of content for me to play through, so I didn't mind the sub, now, with todays gamers they burn through all content in 6 months after launch and quit. So why pay a fee for that? Until theres some breakthrough in programming that allows developers to create years of content quickly before their game is outdated, free to play will dominate supreme.
Originally posted by grimalIt's about time the big studios started admitting what many have known for some time. This declaration is a win-win for all.
You do understand of course EA doesn't have a clue as their recent releases like ME3, SW:tor, and DA2 have shown. EA is very much a failing company (check their stocks over the last year) So by saying you back them as knowledgable when they can't make any good economic choices themselves I'd have to wonder.
They were also voted the worst gaming company. Their console releases are become very stale too, I've been a long time player in NFL Madden and NHL series and I stopped after NHL 10 and Madden 09 as they were turned into trashy noob games with recycled textures and features from the previous (play them and you'll see what I mean).
As long as Rock-Star keeps releasing fun Grand Theft Auto and related games, I'll be playing those, but once Rock-Star attempts an MMO game, it's game over. I also think the Skyrim MMO is a bad idea.
You realize that the NHL dev team is really small and poorly funded by EA. They can't redo the entire game every single year.
The NHL dev team works realy hard to make hockey more realistic every single year for the fans of the sport.
I don't care for Electronic Arts, but they're also the only ones making ice hockey into video game form now.
So I support the EA Sports NHL dev team. They're good guys, doing their best with very little.
You do realize that the reason that there is only one company, EA, producing NHL ice hockey games is because EA bought a long term licence for exclusice rights to NHL Hockey games. After shutting everyone else out of the market, their reasoning behind underfunding their hockey dev team is bacause the license cost "so much". They are rellying on people to buy their hockey game, since it is the only one, year after year; despite the fact that the game is essentially the same every year; due to EA underfunding thier dev team in a search to "maximize profits".
I do realize all of that yeah.
EA sucks.
But NHL 13 (demo just released) is a fun game and the guys who made it are good people, even if their owners are not.
Sub games are dead not because people won't pay a subscription but because noone is willing to break the WoW 14.99 a month model. If MMO games like SWTOR or Tera or Rift had subs that started at 9.99 and were say 7.99 for a 3 or 6 month block they would have over twice as many subscripters, be making more money and have much better looking populations. People playing a game brings in other people to play the game. Tons of people still play Wow just because all their friends play. Companies like Netflix and Hulu online have figured out that people aren't willing to pay over 10 dollars a month for streaming movie service, the game industry is just greedy. Everyone is saying well Wow charges this and it works so we can charge just as much but not the way it goes. People just aren't willing to pay 15 dollars a month to try a new game and the people that are, just are not willing to continue paying that much unless it is perfect or has a huge player base.
Subscription based game are not dead, its just their games are. If they produce non innovitive games like SWTOR and WAR then they are bound not to be a hit. Two great oppertunities missed by EA in trying to make a WoW clone.
WAR could of been done with the table top PnP core rules instead they tried to make a WoW with the warhammer paint over the top of it.
SWTOR could of been really good but instead they make it into another WoW with Star Wars paint over it.
Also do you realise that WoW was commisioned by Games Workshop to be a computer game franschise based on their Warhammer world but GW pulled the plug while Blizzard kept the ball rolling and made Warcraft a house hold name?
I just resubscribed to WoW again a few days ago. I've played since Burning Crusade was a year old and, although I take some time off every year to try other games, nothing can compete with what WoW offers for the price. It's not even close. I don't mind paying a sub for WoW; many other games are worth a sub, but only until they get boring. Unfortunately that tends to happen pretty quickly even for someone who levels and plays as many alts as I do.
EA and many others are quick to announce the subscription model dead, but the real problem is that they are simply looking for obnoxious profit goals that far exceed reality. Taking everything to a so-called f2p model may give them some immediate boost, but if and when f2p is the only competitor on the block then the halcyon days are likely to end quickly. F2p makes a segment of the population pay for everyone; not out of some social goal, or any of the little factors that apply in real life, but because they happen to enjoy different things in the game. That won't last forever, and the people who came to the genre with WoW aren't going to rush somewhere else where they'll get hit for 24.99 for each pet they want when WoW offers them hundreds of pets and outfits and all the little things that WoW gives to the non-dedicated/hardcore player for a constant subscription. IE, the gravy train won't last even with a f2p model. Fortunately, I don't think the subscription model actually is as dead as EA would have us believe, and I'm hopeful it remains that way. I want some f2p games also, mind you...I don't think any single payment model is good for consumers when it's the only payment model.
SWTOR couldn't have possibly failed because it wasn't a very good game...it HAD to be the business model, that's the ticket!
If the sub model were dead, WoW would not still have like 8 million active players.
^^THIS^^ if the sub-type games are dead then how come the biggest sub-type game in the world is still using it huh??
If i am not wrong on this one.....so is the good old EQ2 and Rift still sub based IF you want the FULL game that is and not the watered down version of the game......hell, even the good old UO still has a sub and that game goes WAY back.
The sub based model works great for MMOs. Look at Darkfall and Eve and all the MMOs of the past.
The sub based model SUCKS for solo instanced quest grinding games that pretend to be MMOs.
I do not care at all for which kind of game I'm willing to pay money. If Skyrim would be fun to play, I would gladly pay monthly fee if the keep bugs away, add fresh content, .... etc.
And I do not play any mmo because dieing of wish of socializing with complete strangers. I play because I like style of mmo games.
For socialising I leave keyboard and go out with people I care for. It really SUCKS if somebody have real need to "socialize" via keyboard.
I just resubscribed to WoW again a few days ago. I've played since Burning Crusade was a year old and, although I take some time off every year to try other games, nothing can compete with what WoW offers for the price. It's not even close. I don't mind paying a sub for WoW; many other games are worth a sub, but only until they get boring. Unfortunately that tends to happen pretty quickly even for someone who levels and plays as many alts as I do.
EA and many others are quick to announce the subscription model dead, but the real problem is that they are simply looking for obnoxious profit goals that far exceed reality. Taking everything to a so-called f2p model may give them some immediate boost, but if and when f2p is the only competitor on the block then the halcyon days are likely to end quickly. F2p makes a segment of the population pay for everyone; not out of some social goal, or any of the little factors that apply in real life, but because they happen to enjoy different things in the game. That won't last forever, and the people who came to the genre with WoW aren't going to rush somewhere else where they'll get hit for 24.99 for each pet they want when WoW offers them hundreds of pets and outfits and all the little things that WoW gives to the non-dedicated/hardcore player for a constant subscription. IE, the gravy train won't last even with a f2p model. Fortunately, I don't think the subscription model actually is as dead as EA would have us believe, and I'm hopeful it remains that way. I want some f2p games also, mind you...I don't think any single payment model is good for consumers when it's the only payment model.
Nice post there. Although I am not a WoW fan Lissyl has a good point. 99% of F2P MMO's charge you exhuberant amounts to have certain dungeons opened or classes to even play the game. Forsaken World charges you to real money to buy identification scrolls to ID each and every item you find. Or you grind boring endless hours for tokens to buy just 1 or 2 ID scrolls. Which by the time you have the one or two scrolls you need 10 times the amount for all the items you have found doing the repeatable quests.
F2P is not the be all and end all answer for the genre. They have their place but so do well made and well written subscription based MMO's.
Anyone in this thread arguing for a F2P model isn't looking at the future in any way shape or form.
F2P is going to hurt the serious gamers in the wallet much more than a sub. If you don't think EA's F2P model will include things such as paying for each dungeon separately and paying for high level gear, then you're crazy. EA doesn't give a shit about gamers; they bown down to the almighty dollar. If their research determines that people will pay a lot to win, then that's what will be implemented. End of story.
F2P is the worst thing that ever happened to the MMO genre. Games that can't keep subs should instead lower their sub fee. A lot of games out there have a sweet spot that people will still sub to play, but the corporate suits have it in their dense skulls that if they can't charge 15 bucks a month, then it's a loss. They can't seem to figure out that if the game they've created is a $9.99 a month game, then people will simply leave. SWTOR, for all it's years in development, is barely a $4.99 a month game, but guess what. If the fee was $4.99 a month, I'd still be subbed. But screw F2P. If it ever goes there then they have zero chance of bringing me back. Pay to win cash shops can go suck an egg.
Originally posted by Cervani Sub costs were originally put in place to help offset server costs for early MMOs. In a time where server costs for a MMO now barely reaches 100k, there is pretty much no excuse to have a sub fee these days. Or at least a sub fee as high as $13 a month like some MMOs charge.
Hosting costs have come down, but not as much as you might think. Something like a Dell 710 will still cost you 1K-2K a month at a decent Hosting Provider. It's not so much the cost of the hardware itself as it is the cost of running the Data Center. These services don't get hosted out of someones server closet in an office building somewhere. I don't work in the entertainment vertical but I have first hand knowledge of Operations costs for SaaS type companies (which is what MMO's are essentialy)
To give you some idea of the type of costs involved..... Hardware... You'll need at least 1 physical server for each level of application (front end, business logic, middle-ware, data layer, etc ) you present as a single logical server. Likely you'll have multiple ones in a cluster so you can do fail-over/load-balancing. You'll also need servers/software to provide subsidiary services, sales & marketing, CRM, help desk, billing, etc. You'll also likely need high quality SANs, IDS, Multiple FW's, Logical Directors, backup devices. If you want to be PCI compliant then you've likely got to mirror (data/backup at least) offsite to another Data Center for Disaster Recover Purposes. You may even have a full environment mirrored in another Data Center on warm standby. If you are serving a geographicly diverse audience you may need to establish multiple points of presence.
Software.....If you haven't built your own engines then you've got licensing costs. Don't forget you've also got to pay for all the auxillary stuff you haven't built in house too...CRM, Help Desk, Etc.
Now you need to pay for Engineers to setup and maintain all of the above, as well as Help Desk/Tech Support Staff, at least some Developers and QA for bug fixing and more (along with Artists) if you want to do ongoing Development. That's ontop of all the regular corporate staff (HR, Finance, Administration, Marketing, etc) that normal companies have.
Then you've got the Data Center Costs. Either your hosting out of a 3rd party or your running your own. If you run your own you've got to deal with costs like multiple wide pipe ISP connectivity, onsite security, power, the cost of the physical facility itself, fire supression systems, contracts for diesel supply for backup generators, shredding/secure waste disposal, etc.
All this stuff adds up to alot more then most people think.... and that's before a dime goes to paying off IP Holders or Investors.
Now you can reduce costs in some areas....if you can offload some stuff to cloud services for example, you can cut some of your infrastructure costs...but that comes at a hit in both performance (if your app is particulary latency sensitive) and potentialy security.
SWTOR couldn't have possibly failed because it wasn't a very good game...it HAD to be the business model, that's the ticket!
If the sub model were dead, WoW would not still have like 8 million active players.
^^THIS^^ if the sub-type games are dead then how come the biggest sub-type game in the world is still using it huh??
If i am not wrong on this one.....so is the good old EQ2 and Rift still sub based IF you want the FULL game that is and not the watered down version of the game......hell, even the good old UO still has a sub and that game goes WAY back.
EA is dead, not the sub-model....imho
How many MMOS have reached numbers of WOW anyways? if i go by these comments i guess WOW is the only good game in whole genre because it has 10 million players paying subs for it? regardless of the fact that majority of subs come from China and they don't have monthly payment system. But no one mentions that.
Also, EQ is F2P and SWTOR is following the same model and not getting rid of monthly sub. You can still play full game in same manner as you are playing it right now and no it won't be watered down either. I don't know from where you are pulling this BS from that SWTOR will be watered down if you stick to monthly subs. Why spread mis information?
Honestly, I think the fairest model, which no Developer seems to be interested in offering, is a Pay per Hour upto a maximum amount each month at which point the game becomes Unlimited Play (essentialy a sub).
Something like 1$ per hour upto 20 hours each month and anything over that is free for the rest of the month. It divorces the game-play from real world financial considerations....which is what most of us object to about the F2P model. No chance of Pay-2-Win or Pay-2-Achieve, no need to bork your game design by designing your game mechanics around the consumption of consumables in order to drive sales of them in the store. No need to clutter up the game world with ugly in-game adds for the Store or break immersion or game-play buy taking people out of the game to make a RMT purchase. No need to seperate the player base into different communities based on what they've purchased.
At the same time, it removes the one legitimate objection to the subscription based model. Namely, if you aren't getting much use out of a game, or only play it sporadicaly, it doesn't make much sense to pay a recurring $15 fee every month regardless of whether you actualy played. Under this model, you'd be charged only based upon the degree you ACTUALY used it during a month. You'd also have a threshold....so if you used it a heckuva alot (20+ hours) you wouldn't get dinged an exhorbinant amount for that usage. That would also remove the temptation for the Dev's to make it overly grindy....as they aren't making any more revenue from a person that plays more then 20 hours. You could also offer discounts for people that paid up front for the month...just like most sub games do for people that are on multi-month plans.
Under the model, Dev's would still have a motivation to release new content.....as that would be something that would get players to come back into the game and spend some hours exploring once they had finnished all the existing content and weren't playing as much.
Somehow I doubt Dev's will offer it though....certainly not the likes of EA. As their real goal with F2P is NOT to offer a product at a fair value.... it's to capitalize on the compulsive spending side of human behavior...and play cheap psychology tricks to get people to keep purchasing XP boosting potions, and super healing potions to "get ahead" and to spend minimal effort on reskinning some object with a flashy new look...so they can sell 100K copies of it in the store to people who "just have to have it."
Comments
That is true, running costs of MMOs are a lot lower nowadays than in 1996. Then again production costs are way up so maybe B2P with a higher boxprice would be fairer.
P2P is a service you provide and sometimes it is worth to pay for a service. Of course when they add itemshops and released plenty of expansions you must buy it seems rather greedy and that is when the model fail. But F2P games, or more precise western "Freemium" games are getting rather greedy as well.
Dunno about the numbers but today's licensing for software can be extremely expensive (e.g. having to pay according to the physical and virtual numbers of processors). You can resort to open source products, but you'll still have to pay for support. Not for one software, but quite a lot software (e.g. OS, DB, NAS, Network devices, other 3rd party software, etc.).
Pure hardware costs may indeed be low. But hardware costs come in a bundle with software licenses and support.
I played a bunch of games that are now f2p back when they were sub based .I left them as they were not worth my time OR money. They were not worth mentioning or thinking about anymore. When they went f2p, I didn't go rushing back to them even thought they were free. A free pile of steaming dog poop, is a steaming pile of dog poop.
I'll subscribe to a game for 15$ if its worth it. I still subscribe to WOW and probably will for quite awhile. The game [in my opinion] delivers 15$ a months worth. Besides people who play f2p usually end up paying more then 15$ a month on buying access to dungeons/weapons/potions...I know I did that. Sub models that you can access all content of just by playing is better.
The sub model is better for my wallet as long as the game is fun.
The Stranger: It's what people know about themselves inside that makes 'em afraid.
Exactly! A bad game is a bad game. If they change it from P2P to F2P it will only help for a little while. And after that it will be much worse than it ever was...
If forty percent of people cited that they are quitting swtor because they don't want to pay a sub fee, than why wouldn't a company make the change. If 40% quit for that reason, how many didn't try it for that very same reason?
If EA is looking at the exit polls and see...
40% quit for a sub fee
19% quit for lack of mmo features
15% quit for lack of space
14% quit because of pvp
21% quit because its not SWG 2.0,
than what in all reality do you expect them to do?
1. Go free to play(check)
2. Announce and work on mmo features(check/lfg/parsers-meters/guildbanks/legacy perks, and all the stuff dribbling in late)
3. Announced they are working on a super secret space project, thats unlike anything else(of course they said that about pvp too, I guess huttball makes the comment somewhat true, but meh)
4. Announced new warzone, implemented ratings(which worked exactly like I said it would, and thats drive off anyone not in full gear), and announced the possibility of a new ilum being the focal point for the next even.
5. They probably will ignore
sub games are not dead, but I won't pay a sub fee again for any mmo out there. My first mmo had been on the market for years, so there was years of content for me to play through, so I didn't mind the sub, now, with todays gamers they burn through all content in 6 months after launch and quit. So why pay a fee for that? Until theres some breakthrough in programming that allows developers to create years of content quickly before their game is outdated, free to play will dominate supreme.
I do realize all of that yeah.
EA sucks.
But NHL 13 (demo just released) is a fun game and the guys who made it are good people, even if their owners are not.
Sub games are dead not because people won't pay a subscription but because noone is willing to break the WoW 14.99 a month model. If MMO games like SWTOR or Tera or Rift had subs that started at 9.99 and were say 7.99 for a 3 or 6 month block they would have over twice as many subscripters, be making more money and have much better looking populations. People playing a game brings in other people to play the game. Tons of people still play Wow just because all their friends play. Companies like Netflix and Hulu online have figured out that people aren't willing to pay over 10 dollars a month for streaming movie service, the game industry is just greedy. Everyone is saying well Wow charges this and it works so we can charge just as much but not the way it goes. People just aren't willing to pay 15 dollars a month to try a new game and the people that are, just are not willing to continue paying that much unless it is perfect or has a huge player base.
Subscription based game are not dead, its just their games are. If they produce non innovitive games like SWTOR and WAR then they are bound not to be a hit. Two great oppertunities missed by EA in trying to make a WoW clone.
WAR could of been done with the table top PnP core rules instead they tried to make a WoW with the warhammer paint over the top of it.
SWTOR could of been really good but instead they make it into another WoW with Star Wars paint over it.
Also do you realise that WoW was commisioned by Games Workshop to be a computer game franschise based on their Warhammer world but GW pulled the plug while Blizzard kept the ball rolling and made Warcraft a house hold name?
I just resubscribed to WoW again a few days ago. I've played since Burning Crusade was a year old and, although I take some time off every year to try other games, nothing can compete with what WoW offers for the price. It's not even close. I don't mind paying a sub for WoW; many other games are worth a sub, but only until they get boring. Unfortunately that tends to happen pretty quickly even for someone who levels and plays as many alts as I do.
EA and many others are quick to announce the subscription model dead, but the real problem is that they are simply looking for obnoxious profit goals that far exceed reality. Taking everything to a so-called f2p model may give them some immediate boost, but if and when f2p is the only competitor on the block then the halcyon days are likely to end quickly. F2p makes a segment of the population pay for everyone; not out of some social goal, or any of the little factors that apply in real life, but because they happen to enjoy different things in the game. That won't last forever, and the people who came to the genre with WoW aren't going to rush somewhere else where they'll get hit for 24.99 for each pet they want when WoW offers them hundreds of pets and outfits and all the little things that WoW gives to the non-dedicated/hardcore player for a constant subscription. IE, the gravy train won't last even with a f2p model. Fortunately, I don't think the subscription model actually is as dead as EA would have us believe, and I'm hopeful it remains that way. I want some f2p games also, mind you...I don't think any single payment model is good for consumers when it's the only payment model.
nah not sub- based games ..just EA's in general LOL!
NHL games get funding based on their sales. Not because EA is evil, because it's not a top grosser.
I love how people can say EA is cheap/evil yadda yadda yadda, when they threw handfuls of cash at Bioware to make an MMO, how did that turn out?
The sub based model works great for MMOs. Look at Darkfall and Eve and all the MMOs of the past.
The sub based model SUCKS for solo instanced quest grinding games that pretend to be MMOs.
^^THIS^^ if the sub-type games are dead then how come the biggest sub-type game in the world is still using it huh??
If i am not wrong on this one.....so is the good old EQ2 and Rift still sub based IF you want the FULL game that is and not the watered down version of the game......hell, even the good old UO still has a sub and that game goes WAY back.
EA is dead, not the sub-model....imho
Meaning we can forget quality gaming ... F2P succeeded to kill it. Quality ... RIP.
THIS.
I do not care at all for which kind of game I'm willing to pay money. If Skyrim would be fun to play, I would gladly pay monthly fee if the keep bugs away, add fresh content, .... etc.
And I do not play any mmo because dieing of wish of socializing with complete strangers. I play because I like style of mmo games.
For socialising I leave keyboard and go out with people I care for. It really SUCKS if somebody have real need to "socialize" via keyboard.
Nice post there. Although I am not a WoW fan Lissyl has a good point. 99% of F2P MMO's charge you exhuberant amounts to have certain dungeons opened or classes to even play the game. Forsaken World charges you to real money to buy identification scrolls to ID each and every item you find. Or you grind boring endless hours for tokens to buy just 1 or 2 ID scrolls. Which by the time you have the one or two scrolls you need 10 times the amount for all the items you have found doing the repeatable quests.
F2P is not the be all and end all answer for the genre. They have their place but so do well made and well written subscription based MMO's.
Anyone in this thread arguing for a F2P model isn't looking at the future in any way shape or form.
F2P is going to hurt the serious gamers in the wallet much more than a sub. If you don't think EA's F2P model will include things such as paying for each dungeon separately and paying for high level gear, then you're crazy. EA doesn't give a shit about gamers; they bown down to the almighty dollar. If their research determines that people will pay a lot to win, then that's what will be implemented. End of story.
F2P is the worst thing that ever happened to the MMO genre. Games that can't keep subs should instead lower their sub fee. A lot of games out there have a sweet spot that people will still sub to play, but the corporate suits have it in their dense skulls that if they can't charge 15 bucks a month, then it's a loss. They can't seem to figure out that if the game they've created is a $9.99 a month game, then people will simply leave. SWTOR, for all it's years in development, is barely a $4.99 a month game, but guess what. If the fee was $4.99 a month, I'd still be subbed. But screw F2P. If it ever goes there then they have zero chance of bringing me back. Pay to win cash shops can go suck an egg.
Hosting costs have come down, but not as much as you might think. Something like a Dell 710 will still cost you 1K-2K a month at a decent Hosting Provider. It's not so much the cost of the hardware itself as it is the cost of running the Data Center. These services don't get hosted out of someones server closet in an office building somewhere. I don't work in the entertainment vertical but I have first hand knowledge of Operations costs for SaaS type companies (which is what MMO's are essentialy)
To give you some idea of the type of costs involved..... Hardware... You'll need at least 1 physical server for each level of application (front end, business logic, middle-ware, data layer, etc ) you present as a single logical server. Likely you'll have multiple ones in a cluster so you can do fail-over/load-balancing. You'll also need servers/software to provide subsidiary services, sales & marketing, CRM, help desk, billing, etc. You'll also likely need high quality SANs, IDS, Multiple FW's, Logical Directors, backup devices. If you want to be PCI compliant then you've likely got to mirror (data/backup at least) offsite to another Data Center for Disaster Recover Purposes. You may even have a full environment mirrored in another Data Center on warm standby. If you are serving a geographicly diverse audience you may need to establish multiple points of presence.
Software.....If you haven't built your own engines then you've got licensing costs. Don't forget you've also got to pay for all the auxillary stuff you haven't built in house too...CRM, Help Desk, Etc.
Now you need to pay for Engineers to setup and maintain all of the above, as well as Help Desk/Tech Support Staff, at least some Developers and QA for bug fixing and more (along with Artists) if you want to do ongoing Development. That's ontop of all the regular corporate staff (HR, Finance, Administration, Marketing, etc) that normal companies have.
Then you've got the Data Center Costs. Either your hosting out of a 3rd party or your running your own. If you run your own you've got to deal with costs like multiple wide pipe ISP connectivity, onsite security, power, the cost of the physical facility itself, fire supression systems, contracts for diesel supply for backup generators, shredding/secure waste disposal, etc.
All this stuff adds up to alot more then most people think.... and that's before a dime goes to paying off IP Holders or Investors.
Now you can reduce costs in some areas....if you can offload some stuff to cloud services for example, you can cut some of your infrastructure costs...but that comes at a hit in both performance (if your app is particulary latency sensitive) and potentialy security.
How many MMOS have reached numbers of WOW anyways? if i go by these comments i guess WOW is the only good game in whole genre because it has 10 million players paying subs for it? regardless of the fact that majority of subs come from China and they don't have monthly payment system. But no one mentions that.
Also, EQ is F2P and SWTOR is following the same model and not getting rid of monthly sub. You can still play full game in same manner as you are playing it right now and no it won't be watered down either. I don't know from where you are pulling this BS from that SWTOR will be watered down if you stick to monthly subs. Why spread mis information?
Just something to think about.
******************* Check your friendlist v1.37 simularot *********************
check your friendlist in free to play games and compare it to friendlists on your p2p games,which one holds more friends?
i remember when AO was only sub based i had hundreds of friends,when it went cash shop ,i had 2.
in my books no matter dollars , sub based have bigger heart and lives longer,no matter what.
Let's internet
Honestly, I think the fairest model, which no Developer seems to be interested in offering, is a Pay per Hour upto a maximum amount each month at which point the game becomes Unlimited Play (essentialy a sub).
Something like 1$ per hour upto 20 hours each month and anything over that is free for the rest of the month. It divorces the game-play from real world financial considerations....which is what most of us object to about the F2P model. No chance of Pay-2-Win or Pay-2-Achieve, no need to bork your game design by designing your game mechanics around the consumption of consumables in order to drive sales of them in the store. No need to clutter up the game world with ugly in-game adds for the Store or break immersion or game-play buy taking people out of the game to make a RMT purchase. No need to seperate the player base into different communities based on what they've purchased.
At the same time, it removes the one legitimate objection to the subscription based model. Namely, if you aren't getting much use out of a game, or only play it sporadicaly, it doesn't make much sense to pay a recurring $15 fee every month regardless of whether you actualy played. Under this model, you'd be charged only based upon the degree you ACTUALY used it during a month. You'd also have a threshold....so if you used it a heckuva alot (20+ hours) you wouldn't get dinged an exhorbinant amount for that usage. That would also remove the temptation for the Dev's to make it overly grindy....as they aren't making any more revenue from a person that plays more then 20 hours. You could also offer discounts for people that paid up front for the month...just like most sub games do for people that are on multi-month plans.
Under the model, Dev's would still have a motivation to release new content.....as that would be something that would get players to come back into the game and spend some hours exploring once they had finnished all the existing content and weren't playing as much.
Somehow I doubt Dev's will offer it though....certainly not the likes of EA. As their real goal with F2P is NOT to offer a product at a fair value.... it's to capitalize on the compulsive spending side of human behavior...and play cheap psychology tricks to get people to keep purchasing XP boosting potions, and super healing potions to "get ahead" and to spend minimal effort on reskinning some object with a flashy new look...so they can sell 100K copies of it in the store to people who "just have to have it."
...... 2013 .......
Following a further loss of SWTOR population and another round of server mergers EA announced today that the F2P model is dead ...
LMAO. This is hilarious. After that: EA declares Multi-player non-sports games are dead.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011