R3d.Gallows said: Not my view. Everyone should pay the same, and they should get no power / feature advantages apart of getting access to the game.
But you are reinforcing his point completely - you are proposing a unsustainable model where developers, or someone else, would need to keep funding the game to keep it going.
Sub model worked back in the days when there were just few titles on the market, it does not work today. With more titles to chose from, people want to hop from one game to another, playing different games depending on their mood and subscription is huge obstacle with that.
There is no point debating how players should behave and how they should treat games. You won't change them, you can't force them.
Unless you make a game good enough for them to want to play it regardless of the sub. Hell, I rarely pay for games but after playing through Witcher 3 I went and bought it and the following DLCs.
If we change the question to what players can do I wish people would do informed choices instead of getting stuck on the hype.
#1 Don't buy founder's pack for early access until the full extent of the cash shop has been revealed. You are giving them money even before you know if you will hate the cash shop or not.
#2. Stop buying games where publishers say they might add more to the cash shop, read #1.
#3. If you are paying a subscription and publishers make a change you hate make sure to cancel your subscription immediately and write that change as your reason for cancelling the subscription. Publishers listen to money and unlike your forum posts someone will read that message. You can always renew your subscription later anyway.
#4. Stop defending everything developers and publishers do just because you currently enjoy the game. You aren't doing yourself any favors by blindly supporting anything.
#5. Who am I kidding, you will do the same mistakes for next game anyway.
Iselin: And the next person who says "but it's a business, they need to make money" can just go fuck yourself.
R3d.Gallows said: Unless you make a game good enough for them to want to play it regardless of the sub.
That is not how it works.
Just look at your own reply above - a game you would pay for is sub+cosmetics only cash shop and plenty of cosmetics in the game.
Apparently even you are price sensitive and you won't pay just any price - ie. items affecting game play, because the game is "worthy", right?
For the game to be worthy it has to be fun. Lets look at the statement you singled out from my reply:
Just look at your own reply above - a game you would pay for is sub+cosmetics only cash shop and plenty of cosmetics in the game.
This is not price related. This is fun related. Its pretty damn obvious there has to be plenty of cosmetics obtainable in game and the cash shop should be a source of extra fluff only, otherwise youre starting down the road of devs designing parts of the game with the sole purpose of making people miserable, just to manipulate them into buying stuff. In this case it would be removing cosmetic items from the game so that the ones in the cash shop sell better. This kills players' joy of visual progression and visual rewards just because the publisher wants to sell shit. Its removing fun from the game. The same goes for any other feature that would sell well in the cash shop - to maximise the sales you have remove that feature from the game or make it so hard to obtain it becomes ubearably boring/annoying. Problem is most of those features are either sources of fun themselves or desirable rewards that would motivate people to play for extended periods of time. Thus youre removing fun and motivation to play from the game.
If we change the question to what players can do I wish people would do informed choices instead of getting stuck on the hype.
#1 Don't buy founder's pack for early access until the full extent of the cash shop has been revealed. You are giving them money even before you know if you will hate the cash shop or not.
#2. Stop buying games where publishers say they might add more to the cash shop, read #1.
#3. If you are paying a subscription and publishers make a change you hate make sure to cancel your subscription immediately and write that change as your reason for cancelling the subscription. Publishers listen to money and unlike your forum posts someone will read that message. You can always renew your subscription later anyway.
#4. Stop defending everything developers and publishers do just because you currently enjoy the game. You aren't doing yourself any favors by blindly supporting anything.
#5. Who am I kidding, you will do the same mistakes for next game anyway.
Very good set of rules but you need a healthy dose of jaded and disillusioned in your gaming experience to follow them. Took me a while to get there myself.
Sub for me all the way. With any payment model other than sub (w/o cash shop), you are going to divert some resources to your cash shop as well as design game play around monetization. Even games that offer several different payment models have this same limitation to make up for those who don't use the sub method.
I'm aware that WoW has a cash shop for mounts/pets and charge for some services, but I have never had to use any service and don't feel at all that I need to purchase any pets/mounts, so I never have. I can't say the same about any B2P or F2P game.
I'm not an IT Specialist, Game Developer, or Clairvoyant in real life, but like others on here, I play one on the internet.
I'm personally a fan of subscription only as a monetisation model, but I recognise the problems with subscriptions.
1) Cultural - The west likes subscriptions but the east doesn't. This is often overlooked on these boards but is at the heart of why we have f2p in the west now. The Asian market has been using F2P for a very long time and prefers it over p2p. This meant that many developers had to develop 2 separate payment models for the same game to please both markets and it wasn't really worth the effort
2) Casuals - Subscriptions are fine for dedicated gamers, but casuals don't feel its worth the money. This meant that subs were a big barrier to entry for many casual gamers as well as a solid reason to quit after casuals had played the main story for a few weeks.
3) Income - Sub prices haven't really changed in 15-20 years, but development costs have. Typical subscription prices haven't been able to cover development + running costs for a long time.
My preferred monetisation model is as follows: hybrid sub + dlc.
So, primary payment method would be subscription. Drop the price to £5 a month so that it is less of a barrier to entry and is also more in line with typical content release schedule. £5 isn't much, so more affordable.
However, to cater to casuals who may not want to commit, as well as the Asian market, also have a DLC option. Players can download the game for free but can only access like the first 10 levels. After that, they have to purchase each new zone / instance cluster / whatever as they go. This removes the cost barrier to entry and also puts the players in charge of what they spend and when.
For a hardcore player, subscription would be the best option - for £60, they can play everything the game has to offer for a year, inclusive of all new content releases as well as the base game. For a casual player, they get the game for free but pay, say, £5 per DLC. If they wanted all the content, it may cost them £120 (but they would have permanent access) but if they were more selective then they might not bother purchasing instance clusters or pvp, so could work out cheaper. Also, if they are just playing slowly, they might only purchase a few DLCs, so it would work out cheaper over the year.
Not sure there will ever be a 'fair' system... even before WoW had a cosmetics shop / account services the $15 a month didn't seem fair as a non-raider (a lot of the updates were raid-only content). And the problem with anything but a pure sub is that you start to negatively affect gameplay / in-game content.
I don't know... maybe a sub model (i.e. $15 a month) but you can 'refund' certain content (like the latest raid instance you have no interest in). Also, I really think expansions (e.g. WoW style major content update expansions) should come with a month of game time.
Are you kidding me? Divide $15 by the number of hours you played WoW in an average month. That is somewhere between a low and ridiculously low cost per hour of entertainment. And you want some kind of refund system for any content you don't like?
Not saying I didn't enjoy it for the time that I played, but the main reason I finally quit was because $15 a month was simply too much for the privilege of being able to login occasionally... if the cost was lower (refund for 'dead on arrival' content was just an idea off the top of my head) then I would have hung around a bit longer, helped friends (of which I had quite a few IRL friends still playing), leveled an alt past 30, etc.
A mere one hour playtime a week is $3.75 an hour.
A mere 4 hours a week is $0.94 an hour.
If either scenario is "simply too much", you are in the wrong hobby.
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In my opinion, we should first clarify what the term "fair" actually means. Fair for the gamer? Fair for the developer? The perspective matters and in the end a solution is needed that is fair for both - developers and gamers.
An appropriate monetization model should add value to both sides. Developers should earn enough money to make a living, to maintain and further develop the game and to economically grow so that they may continuously invest in new technologies or employees which then help to improve the game further.
Gamers, on the other hand, should be presented a reasonable pricing model. Personally, I believe in the subscription model for MMOs in combination with a shop for cosmetic items. This model comes closest to what we experience in other hobbies, e.g. membership fee in a soccer club, swimming club, and so on plus the occasional purchase of new soccer shoes, swimming equip, etc. pp.
The main issue is that the drift towards the free-2-play monetization model leaves only a few options to implement a "fair" system, and as far as I can see, there are only a few companies that managed to come up with a good solution that feels like a win-win for both. Example: Riots League of Legends, Bethesdas Elder Scrolls Online.
I want to play the game and be rewarded for it, not by spending money in the cash shop, even cosmetics are part of the reward for playing the game. I'll take a game designed to be fun with a regular charge over one designed to manipulate you with roadblocks and addiction mechanics that break immersion and shove the cash shop in your face.
I just saw an article in Forbes about Overwatch loot boxes from a writer, Paul Tassi, I don't usually like but this time I think he got it right:
"The main counter-argument to all this is that all of these unlocks are cosmetic, that they don’t affect the game at all. This is true, and if it wasn’t, if you could “buy power,” we would be having a very different conversation. It wouldn’t even be a debate, as that would be a thousand percent wrong and Overwatch may have bombed outright if that system was in place.
And yet I don’t really buy the argument that cosmetics are “meaningless” either. Jim Sterling did a good video on this recently where he talks about when they only “goal” in Overwatch other than just winning is to level up and get loot crates, that is a hugely important part of the game. And we have to stop pretending that cosmetics aren’t “important,” at least psychologically, as players love dressing up their characters in every kind of title from shooters to RPGs. Cosmetics do matter, and unlocking them is an important part of the player experience."
I agree cosmetics matter, but Overwatch gives you quite a few loot boxes for free. I get like 2-3 a day since I play quite a bit. And there's a currency system so you can buy your favorite ones if you don't luck into them.
I'm willing to compromise a little and allow an extra avenue for income for online games since they require content updates and server upkeep.
I think Overwatch is about as good a monetized game as we're going to get nowadays, and it also proves that you don't need to make an insidious cash shop to make a metric-shit-ton of money. You just need to make a good game.
It also shows that an insidious cash shop is probably a hindrance for wild success. Clearly you can make some quick bucks and have some parties at the Trion dev office if you go with insidious p2w pricing models, but you'll never come even remotely close to the success Blizzard has had with their fair and player-friendly monetization models.
It reminds me of an article I read on this site awhile back from some financial analyst (who mimicked many of the p2w champions on this site) who looked at the billion RIOT was making with LOL and said they should make the game p2w because that would mean more money.
That analyst like some on this forum, completely ignored the fact that LOL would not have the playerbase it has nor would it retain it if the game was p2w. The wild success the game was having was in-part because it has a fair monetization model, and if that were to change, overall profits would very likely dramatically decrease.
"Also need I mention that Blizzard as a 5000+ employee billion+ dollar company is about 20 times the size and 100x the cash flow that pretty much none can match?"
How did Blizzard get that big?
I can tell you one thing- it wasn't from selling earing slots in the cash shop for WoW (cough Trion cough).
Of course it is price related, we are talking about what and how much would you pay for - subscription and cash shops.
You are the one claiming people will pay "anything" for "good enough game", yet once there is something people should pay for - it is manipulation and company selling "shit".
I think fairness is completely subjective - so IMO you find a game that is "fair for you" and you play that.
Adapt to reality of now, don't expect the world to change for you.
If you can't find anything to suit you - move on.
There is fairness and there is equality. Someone can say "Hey! That's not fair!" to anything they want. But equality can be measured. I want to play a game where I pay to gain entry. What I pay is equal to what everyone else pays to gain entry. From there, the only thing everybody gets for the fee, is the same amount of time.
Traditionally, we'd all pay $15.00 in exchange for 30 days access. That's what EVERYONE pays, that's what EVERYONE gets. 30 day. How people choose to use that time is on them.
Subjective: "It's not fair! That person spends 12hrs a day in the game, and I can only spend 4!"
Equality: You both paid for 30 days access, you both recieved 30 days access.
The arrangements one makes in their own life in order to use what they were given is entirely on them and should not be foisted on the rest of the player base in the form of "Convenience Items". Otherwise known as "Fairness", which it seems can be bought.
"Also need I mention that Blizzard as a 5000+ employee billion+ dollar company is about 20 times the size and 100x the cash flow that pretty much none can match?"
How did Blizzard get that big?
I can tell you one thing- it wasn't from selling earing slots in the cash shop for WoW (cough Trion cough).
The market was also different, but yea, its possible but i guess a different way to look at it is another mmo makes their mmo different enough that its not part of the same market so to speak. kind of like WoW at the time.
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
The subscription model was always the best and fairest IMO. It works fine. WoW started with a box price AND a sub but that didn't stop it from becoming the biggest MMO success to date. It's only later, when the market was flooded with new MMOs that people became 'creative' with their monetization to lure people into their mediocre games. I think most people agree that if a game is great it'll do just fine with a sub and no P2W cash shop. However I do agree that 15 dollars or euros a month seems too much. I'd keep it under 10.
"Also need I mention that Blizzard as a 5000+ employee billion+ dollar company is about 20 times the size and 100x the cash flow that pretty much none can match?"
How did Blizzard get that big?
I can tell you one thing- it wasn't from selling earing slots in the cash shop for WoW (cough Trion cough).
It was through a decade+ of selling excellent single/multiplayer games before MMOs even existed.
Blizzard made money fron Diablo, Star craft and Warcraft before 2004.
After 2004 WoW made them huge.
Again you are comparing a 5000 billion dollar established company to Lulz Trion who has less than 300 employees and a tiny fraction of revenue.
Trion didn't even exist when WoW came out..... hello?
Trion launched Rift in 2011, Blizzard at that point was already a billion dollar company.
Do you not recognize the absurdity of your comparison?
Hey lets compare a local hardware store to Home Depot..... yeah!
How did WoW make them huge? Was it from having an insidious cash shop?
How did Blizzard establish themselves before WoW? Did Diablo, Starcraft or Warcraft have insidious cash shops?
How did League of Legends go from being funded for 7 million to making over a billion a year? Was it from an insidious p2w cash shop?
This argument you're making is beyond absurd because you're acting like Blizzard was just born into their success.
Your implying that a company needs to do insidious cash-grabby things to get established. But Blizzard never did that. And one could very reasonably argue that the entire reason they became established is because they never did that.
"Also need I mention that Blizzard as a 5000+ employee billion+ dollar company is about 20 times the size and 100x the cash flow that pretty much none can match?"
How did Blizzard get that big?
I can tell you one thing- it wasn't from selling earing slots in the cash shop for WoW (cough Trion cough).
If there is one thing that games like WoW, Eve Online, FFXIV:ARR have proven, is that good games thrive with a P2P subscription financial model, if there is one thing that has been repeatedly proven is that games that indulge too heavily in the F2P/Cash shop method, don't tend to last, although a lot of that is probably that in the case of most F2P MMO's at least, is that they aren't designed to last, they are just there to grab as much money as they can for however long they can.
Phry said: If there is one thing that games like WoW, Eve Online, FFXIV:ARR have proven, is that good games thrive with a P2P subscription financial model
On the contrary, they proved how non-viable the model is - exceptions that confirm the rule.
"Also need I mention that Blizzard as a 5000+ employee billion+ dollar company is about 20 times the size and 100x the cash flow that pretty much none can match?"
How did Blizzard get that big?
I can tell you one thing- it wasn't from selling earing slots in the cash shop for WoW (cough Trion cough).
It was through a decade+ of selling excellent single/multiplayer games before MMOs even existed.
Blizzard made money fron Diablo, Star craft and Warcraft before 2004.
After 2004 WoW made them huge.
Again you are comparing a 5000 billion dollar established company to Lulz Trion who has less than 300 employees and a tiny fraction of revenue.
Trion didn't even exist when WoW came out..... hello?
Trion launched Rift in 2011, Blizzard at that point was already a billion dollar company.
Do you not recognize the absurdity of your comparison?
Hey lets compare a local hardware store to Home Depot..... yeah!
How did WoW make them huge? Was it from having an insidious cash shop?
How did Blizzard establish themselves before WoW? Did Diablo, Starcraft or Warcraft have insidious cash shops?
How did League of Legends go from being funded for 7 million to making over a billion a year? Was it from an insidious p2w cash shop?
This argument you're making is beyond absurd because you're acting like Blizzard was just born into their success.
Your implying that a company needs to do insidious cash-grabby things to get established. But Blizzard never did that. And one could very reasonably argue that the entire reason they became established is because they never did that.
The video game market in 1990s and early 2000s was vastly different than 2010+
Cash shops didn't exist in vast majority of time Blizzard made games.
Blizzard got established during an entirely different era.
Any company that is trying to establish themselves today can't do it like Blizzard did, unless they have time travel tech and can go back to 1980s.
Need I pont out that Blizzard has cash shops in most of their games?
Also "insidious cash shop" lol is that a new term you're trying to coin here?
Insidious McDonald's , insidious Exxon, insidious government? Insidious Blizzard with their own cash shops?
Is this a thing now?
How did Riot games get established with 7 million dollars, with a game that now makes 1.6 billion dollars a year?
League of Legends was made in "this era".
Bottom line, you're just wrong. You think that common business practices of keeping customers happy, making quality products, and looking long-term no longer apply. They apply as much as they always have.
It's evident when you replied in a BDO thread that players should have zero say in how a Dev conducts business because they are "just consumers".
You forget that the consumers pay the bills. If you piss them off with shady cash-grabby tactics, you're not going to make as much money as you could have.
And you'll still be a Lulz 300-man company like Trion, blaming the unfairness of the world or the era for its plight.
p.s. look up the definition of "insidious" if you're having trouble with the word.
$15.00 for 30 days $36.00 for 90 days $60.00 for 180 days
Those would be some great options, I think. No?
There are only 2 options:
1) You truly do not understand the flaw of your argument. 2) You understand it but you are incapable of any constructive discussion.
I understand all too well, your argument. I only need to look as far as the state and decline of the genre over the last 10 years to know what your side of the argument brings. Shitty games where too many players leave after 3 or 4 months due to being shit upon by overly monetized gaming that serves nobody. These same games that could have held on to a much greater number of players had they not monetized as they did.
The system you prefer is designed to serve the wealthiest minority which would be fine if it wasn't on the backs of the rest of the player base. Even so, the whales aren't really getting any favors here. Their in-game victories are hollow and meaningless. They might like the easy route, but what odes it really get them in the game? Why do we play MMOs instead of Single Player games? There's no recognition in the games for them. So they trounced the weaker players in PVP. Nobody says, WoW, I want to be that good, or how did you learn to fight so well, when we all know the answer these days.
I remember games where people who accomplished things were known in their realms for what they put into the game. Now, who cares who bought their way to the top? Nobody.
GeezerGamer said: I understand all too well, your argument. I only need to look as far as the state and decline of the genre over the last 10 years to know what your side of the argument brings. Shitty games where too many players leave after 3 or 4 months due to being shit upon by overly monetized gaming that serves nobody. These same games that could have held on to a much greater number of players had they not monetized as they did.
The system you prefer is designed to serve the wealthiest minority which would be fine if it wasn't on the backs of the rest of the player base. Even so, the whales aren't really getting any favors here. Their in-game victories are hollow and meaningless. They might like the easy route, but what odes it really get them in the game? Why do we play MMOs instead of Single Player games? There's no recognition in the games for them. So they trounced the weaker players in PVP. Nobody says, WoW, I want to be that good, or how did you learn to fight so well, when we all know the answer these days.
I remember games where people who accomplished things were known in their realms for what they put into the game. Now, who cares who bought their way to the top? Nobody.
Sorry, I can't hear you from down below the high horse you are sitting on...
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Comments
Just look at your own reply above - a game you would pay for is sub+cosmetics only cash shop and plenty of cosmetics in the game.
Apparently even you are price sensitive and you won't pay just any price - ie. items affecting game play, because the game is "good enough", right?
People are always considering the price and it only goes back full circle to point being made there.
#1 Don't buy founder's pack for early access until the full extent of the cash shop has been revealed. You are giving them money even before you know if you will hate the cash shop or not.
#2. Stop buying games where publishers say they might add more to the cash shop, read #1.
#3. If you are paying a subscription and publishers make a change you hate make sure to cancel your subscription immediately and write that change as your reason for cancelling the subscription. Publishers listen to money and unlike your forum posts someone will read that message. You can always renew your subscription later anyway.
#4. Stop defending everything developers and publishers do just because you currently enjoy the game. You aren't doing yourself any favors by blindly supporting anything.
#5. Who am I kidding, you will do the same mistakes for next game anyway.
Just look at your own reply above - a game you would pay for is sub+cosmetics only cash shop and plenty of cosmetics in the game.
This is not price related. This is fun related. Its pretty damn obvious there has to be plenty of cosmetics obtainable in game and the cash shop should be a source of extra fluff only, otherwise youre starting down the road of devs designing parts of the game with the sole purpose of making people miserable, just to manipulate them into buying stuff. In this case it would be removing cosmetic items from the game so that the ones in the cash shop sell better. This kills players' joy of visual progression and visual rewards just because the publisher wants to sell shit. Its removing fun from the game. The same goes for any other feature that would sell well in the cash shop - to maximise the sales you have remove that feature from the game or make it so hard to obtain it becomes ubearably boring/annoying. Problem is most of those features are either sources of fun themselves or desirable rewards that would motivate people to play for extended periods of time. Thus youre removing fun and motivation to play from the game.
I'm aware that WoW has a cash shop for mounts/pets and charge for some services, but I have never had to use any service and don't feel at all that I need to purchase any pets/mounts, so I never have. I can't say the same about any B2P or F2P game.
I'm not an IT Specialist, Game Developer, or Clairvoyant in real life, but like others on here, I play one on the internet.
1) Cultural - The west likes subscriptions but the east doesn't. This is often overlooked on these boards but is at the heart of why we have f2p in the west now. The Asian market has been using F2P for a very long time and prefers it over p2p. This meant that many developers had to develop 2 separate payment models for the same game to please both markets and it wasn't really worth the effort
2) Casuals - Subscriptions are fine for dedicated gamers, but casuals don't feel its worth the money. This meant that subs were a big barrier to entry for many casual gamers as well as a solid reason to quit after casuals had played the main story for a few weeks.
3) Income - Sub prices haven't really changed in 15-20 years, but development costs have. Typical subscription prices haven't been able to cover development + running costs for a long time.
My preferred monetisation model is as follows: hybrid sub + dlc.
So, primary payment method would be subscription. Drop the price to £5 a month so that it is less of a barrier to entry and is also more in line with typical content release schedule. £5 isn't much, so more affordable.
However, to cater to casuals who may not want to commit, as well as the Asian market, also have a DLC option. Players can download the game for free but can only access like the first 10 levels. After that, they have to purchase each new zone / instance cluster / whatever as they go. This removes the cost barrier to entry and also puts the players in charge of what they spend and when.
For a hardcore player, subscription would be the best option - for £60, they can play everything the game has to offer for a year, inclusive of all new content releases as well as the base game. For a casual player, they get the game for free but pay, say, £5 per DLC. If they wanted all the content, it may cost them £120 (but they would have permanent access) but if they were more selective then they might not bother purchasing instance clusters or pvp, so could work out cheaper. Also, if they are just playing slowly, they might only purchase a few DLCs, so it would work out cheaper over the year.
A mere 4 hours a week is $0.94 an hour.
If either scenario is "simply too much", you are in the wrong hobby.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
I'm willing to compromise a little and allow an extra avenue for income for online games since they require content updates and server upkeep.
I think Overwatch is about as good a monetized game as we're going to get nowadays, and it also proves that you don't need to make an insidious cash shop to make a metric-shit-ton of money. You just need to make a good game.
It also shows that an insidious cash shop is probably a hindrance for wild success. Clearly you can make some quick bucks and have some parties at the Trion dev office if you go with insidious p2w pricing models, but you'll never come even remotely close to the success Blizzard has had with their fair and player-friendly monetization models.
It reminds me of an article I read on this site awhile back from some financial analyst (who mimicked many of the p2w champions on this site) who looked at the billion RIOT was making with LOL and said they should make the game p2w because that would mean more money.
That analyst like some on this forum, completely ignored the fact that LOL would not have the playerbase it has nor would it retain it if the game was p2w. The wild success the game was having was in-part because it has a fair monetization model, and if that were to change, overall profits would very likely dramatically decrease.
How did Blizzard get that big?
I can tell you one thing- it wasn't from selling earing slots in the cash shop for WoW (cough Trion cough).
You are the one claiming people will pay "anything" for "good enough game", yet once there is something people should pay for - it is manipulation and company selling "shit".
You just again reinforced the point.
Someone can say "Hey! That's not fair!" to anything they want. But equality can be measured. I want to play a game where I pay to gain entry. What I pay is equal to what everyone else pays to gain entry. From there, the only thing everybody gets for the fee, is the same amount of time.
Traditionally, we'd all pay $15.00 in exchange for 30 days access. That's what EVERYONE pays, that's what EVERYONE gets. 30 day. How people choose to use that time is on them.
Subjective:
"It's not fair! That person spends 12hrs a day in the game, and I can only spend 4!"
Equality:
You both paid for 30 days access, you both recieved 30 days access.
The arrangements one makes in their own life in order to use what they were given is entirely on them and should not be foisted on the rest of the player base in the form of "Convenience Items". Otherwise known as "Fairness", which it seems can be bought.
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
It works fine. WoW started with a box price AND a sub but that
didn't stop it from becoming the biggest MMO success to date.
It's only later, when the market was flooded with new MMOs that people
became 'creative' with their monetization to lure people into their mediocre games.
I think most people agree that if a game is great it'll do just fine with a sub and no P2W cash shop.
However I do agree that 15 dollars or euros a month seems too much. I'd keep it under 10.
How did Blizzard establish themselves before WoW? Did Diablo, Starcraft or Warcraft have insidious cash shops?
How did League of Legends go from being funded for 7 million to making over a billion a year? Was it from an insidious p2w cash shop?
This argument you're making is beyond absurd because you're acting like Blizzard was just born into their success.
Your implying that a company needs to do insidious cash-grabby things to get established. But Blizzard never did that. And one could very reasonably argue that the entire reason they became established is because they never did that.
$15.00 for 30 days
$36.00 for 90 days
$60.00 for 180 days
Those would be some great options, I think. No?
League of Legends was made in "this era".
Bottom line, you're just wrong. You think that common business practices of keeping customers happy, making quality products, and looking long-term no longer apply. They apply as much as they always have.
It's evident when you replied in a BDO thread that players should have zero say in how a Dev conducts business because they are "just consumers".
You forget that the consumers pay the bills. If you piss them off with shady cash-grabby tactics, you're not going to make as much money as you could have.
And you'll still be a Lulz 300-man company like Trion, blaming the unfairness of the world or the era for its plight.
p.s. look up the definition of "insidious" if you're having trouble with the word.
The system you prefer is designed to serve the wealthiest minority which would be fine if it wasn't on the backs of the rest of the player base. Even so, the whales aren't really getting any favors here. Their in-game victories are hollow and meaningless. They might like the easy route, but what odes it really get them in the game? Why do we play MMOs instead of Single Player games? There's no recognition in the games for them. So they trounced the weaker players in PVP. Nobody says, WoW, I want to be that good, or how did you learn to fight so well, when we all know the answer these days.
I remember games where people who accomplished things were known in their realms for what they put into the game. Now, who cares who bought their way to the top? Nobody.
I think I'm paying about $11.00 a month as I pay annually.
Now if I could just get a multi account discount on top of that.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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