MMORPG Cost? Rip Off?

Aye UpAye Up Posts: 7,053
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How can they justify it?

Right now one is looking at the cost of Elder Scrolls Online for between £30-£50 depending on the platform people go for, however a subscription costs $14.99 a month on a continuing basis. What I find remarkable is that you pay through the nose for what is in effect a rented title, they charge a shit load for the base game and you only get 30 days play.

How on earth do they get away with it?

Guild Wars for example charges a standard game price for the franchise with no monthly subs.

Even WOW gives you the base game free! What happened to the days when Games were feature complete and didn't need any costly subscriptions or DLC upgrades lengthen the shelf life of the game.

ESO would work as a proposition if they dropped the upfront cost of the game as that is ridiculous! The subscription should more than cover the cost.

Its why I have never gotten into MMORPGs due to their general exorbitant costs.

Thoughts?
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Comments

  • brbbrb Posts: 27,405
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    You pay monthly for the servers, the constant customer service support needed on MMOs that aren't needed on other games, plus content. For example, in ESO they plan on upgrading the game monthly with new content.

    What I don't like about ESO is that they offer things for a cost which should be included int he base game (such as exclusive races - the imperial ediiton).

    Personally, as a WoW player (or semi atm), I don't mind paying... although Blizzard's content release is pretty slow, it's always of high quality and as a whole, they have bucked their ideas up with MoP (albeit slacking towards the end going into Draenor).
  • InspirationInspiration Posts: 62,694
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    Aye Up:

    Look at it in terms of game play hours. Pick up a new single player console title like “Last Of Us” for example and how many hours of gameplay do most average people get out of it? You’re looking at something around 10 hours perhaps. Maybe less for people who are good at games and blast through them. And that’s it.. game over, other than perhaps trying for achievements. So for £49.99 or whatever.. you’ve got 10 hours entertainment. Some people finish AAA console titles in 1 sitting on launch day and they gather dust after.

    Now take an MMO. You have to pay the initial cost, that’s the same for any game.. and you get 30 days free. That’s 30 days of entertainment. Some players might hit max level in those 30 days but others won’t. If you like the game, then you subscribe and continue to play. But you’ve already had a lot more hours of gameplay and entertainment than any normal gaming title.

    Compare it to going to the movies.. roughly £14 or so if you buy some food. For what? 2 hours of movie? That buys you a month of MMO. Which is sitting down and playing the game most nights.

    So I actually think in terms of “bang for buck” it’s actually amazing value for money. Split the cost by hours of gameplay you can get out of it to get the real value. MMO's by their nature are designed to always give players something new to do.. so you never really run out of content.. and so you don't mind handing over £15 a month because you know you're getting another month of content.

    That's my 2p worth anyway.
  • fluffedfluffed Posts: 1,791
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    I doubt they will be subscription based for long, it's very hard to keep people paying monthly unless you have a large and/or loyal subscriber base in existence already (wow, EQ, Eve), or you offer amazing and regular new content. I can't think a recent MMOG that launched as subscriber and not gone to some sort of free to play format within a year.
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 3,813
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    MMOs never seem like value for money, take FIFA for example its £40 has a never ending supply on new content as no two games you play will ever be 100% the same but they don't ask you for money each month

    Why couldn't elder scrolls online be a one off fee and then if they have enough compelling new content every month then people will buy the DLC so they can carry on playing it and experiencing more

    My thoughts it will be free to play by Christmas, loyal fans will of course be willing to play but the casuals will drop off within a month or two
  • YuffieYuffie Posts: 9,864
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    I used to think MMOs were rip offs. But then I tried Final Fantasy XIV. And the only reason I tried that was because I'm a massive fan of the series and wanted to give MMOs a go.

    So I paid €25 for the base game at launch (late August 2013) and that came with a month's sub. Then I paid €11 for 5 subsequent months. So 6 months of gaming cost me €80. Now I pumped a lot of time into this game. I would say more than 50 hours per week. It was the only game I played and loved it. It cost me about €3 per week. Not bad value at all.

    But just over a month ago I gave it up. I was getting too into it and because I was there from launch I was kinda running out of things to do. They release amazing content patches every 3 month's (only 2 so far), so it's not like I was paying for nothing. I loved most of the community and it was a very different style of game to what I usually played. I missed out on The Last of us and GTAV as this was the only game I played.

    To wrap this up I guess MMOs aren't suited to everyone. They are time sinks and if I didn't have the time to pump into this game it wouldn't have been worth it. ESO is considerably more expensive for the base game, requires a monthly sub and has microtransactions. This is a bit too greedy in my eyes. If it's a sub based game then there shouldn't be microtransactions. If it's free to play then fine.

    The value you get out of an MMO is entirely based on what you put into it. It's not for everyone but there are people who have punched a decade into the like of WoW. To each their own.
  • Aye UpAye Up Posts: 7,053
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    Now see I don't have a problem with subscription gaming, honestly the proposition from ESO looking brilliant were it not for the ridiculous cost of the base game. The ongoing monthly sub should be more than enough to justify both the base game and content updates in the future and it is a fixed revenue stream. I do believe however similar to what thomas said in that it will be free by christmas, at least the base game will be. I think their is reasonable value in a monthly sub with frequent content updates.

    My fear however is will this be another DC Universe which went f2p due to subscriber numbers falling off a cliff several months after.

    This has always been my gripe about MMO games if I am honest, I wouldn't have a problem with monthly subs if there was value in it. I just believe that monthly cost should include all future expansion packs and content updates, it rather annoys me how WOW can justify extorting another 20 quid from people for new DLC when it should be part of the subscription.

    Maybe Guild Wars sets the bar I don't know.....everyone seems to hold the game in high regard. I havent played it before so that could be something on my to do list.
  • SpeedloaferSpeedloafer Posts: 2,407
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    Aye Up wrote: »
    How can they justify it?

    How on earth do they get away with it?

    Guild Wars for example charges a standard game price for the franchise with no monthly subs.

    Even WOW gives you the base game free! What happened to the days when Games were feature complete and didn't need any costly subscriptions or DLC upgrades lengthen the shelf life of the game.

    ESO would work as a proposition if they dropped the upfront cost of the game as that is ridiculous! The subscription should more than cover the cost.

    Its why I have never gotten into MMORPGs due to their general exorbitant costs.

    Thoughts?

    When I first played WOW nothing was free if I remember correctly, they just started to give free stuff when subs died off. Now you get lots of free stuff, but the sub is still there.

    Also OP you say game will cost £30-50 with $14.99 a month sub. $14.99 is £8.95.

    When I played WOW I played no other games. I didn't need too, there was more than enough content in WOW to keep me going, it was always updated, always balanced, they always listened to their feedback and **** me they had a lot. But I guess that is why the game was/is as popular as it was. I never once thought this is not value for money. Never even entered my head. Patches and hotfixes were constant, if a move or weapon was under or overpowered or a boss was too easy or too hard it was fixed in days sometimes hours.

    If you ever read any of my posts in the past you would know I am very pro consumer and anti shit game/DLC/money grab, but done right the subscription is the only model for an MMO. It has to be balanced constantly and it has to have content regularly. You can never ever say I have nothing more to do.

    So at £2.20 a week for a game that will fulfil all my gaming needs is a steal to me.

    I should just add aswell that I don't have a PC powerful enough to play the Elder Scrolls online and Im a massive MMO fan, I would love nothing more than an MMO on PS4 but I'm not touching this, not until the dust has settled. Using a control pad seriously limits your output and im my opinion a good MMO cannot be played with a controller. You have 8 buttons and a touchpad. Hold down R2 and press X or square is not as fluid as pressing one button on a keyboard, I don't see how it can work without a mouse and keyboard. When I played WOW I had about 70 buttons Id need access to in a raid. No way could I play it with a joypad. He is an old screencap so many buttons
    https://imageshack.com/i/03wowscrnshot022109174852j :o
  • Philip WalesPhilip Wales Posts: 6,373
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    The problem I have with a console based MMO is the fact it's in my living room, hooked up to my TV, there's no way in hell I'm going to be able to give the sort of hours needed on an MMO while hogging the main TV. When I played EQ I played for maybe 2-3 hours a day (not every day) and then 3 times a week raided and that was maybe 4-5 hrs each raid. With WOW I did less raiding and more single player stuff but still could easily sink 3+ hours a day into. I just don't see me getting my monies worth.
  • LyricalisLyricalis Posts: 57,958
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    It costs about the same as the NOW TV film package per month. I'd say that an MMO sub is far better value than a subscription for a film package, especially when you consider that these games take a lot more effort to maintain the infrastructure for than a streaming site would.
  • The_OneThe_One Posts: 2,402
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    Its actually a bargain. Over 4-5 years I played Everquest 2 for 12k hours which cost approx £700.
    Whats the average hours played per game? 200 hours?
    12,000 / 200 hours = 60 games
    60 games each cost £40?

    £40 x 60 games = £2,400...

    I got 12,000 hours for £700 with just one MMO game.

    MMO games are the best if you dont have much of a life, if I won the lottery jackpot I'd get back into hardcore gaming but as it is I have to work to be able to live now..
  • whoever,heywhoever,hey Posts: 30,992
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    OP, i dont get it either. I will never pay a sub to play a game.
  • YuffieYuffie Posts: 9,864
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    The_One wrote: »
    Its actually a bargain. Over 4-5 years I played Everquest 2 for 12k hours which cost approx £700.
    Whats the average hours played per game? 200 hours?
    12,000 / 200 hours = 60 games
    60 games each cost £40?

    £40 x 60 games = £2,400...

    I got 12,000 hours for £700 with just one MMO game.

    MMO games are the best if you dont have much of a life, if I won the lottery jackpot I'd get back into hardcore gaming but as it is I have to work to be able to live now..

    You must not play many recent games if you think the average time per game is 200 hours. I would think it's more like 20. But that just makes your point even stronger.
  • whoever,heywhoever,hey Posts: 30,992
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    Yeah this is the argument i hear at work from a few. But they dont have any time to play any other game. So i suppose its great if its the only game you want to play for a year, but variety is key.

    I've packed 100's hours into BF but i wouldn't pay to play it.
  • AnachronyAnachrony Posts: 2,757
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    Play a game that is priced more to your liking then. If out of all the tens of thousands of games in the world that don't have a subscription model, this is the one game you want to play anyway, then that's why it costs what it does.

    Originally it was about how expensive the server side was, which is an ongoing expense that they keep having to pay for years after you've paid for the box. Although as bandwidth and hardware get cheaper, hosting an MMO becomes easier and easier. Still the games also become more sophisticated and people expect more demanding features out of them, which ramps the difficulty back up again somewhat.

    Another factor is ongoing content development which periodically adds new zones to the game, paid for by subscriptions. And game moderators resolving disputes or running special events. How much of this goes on varies quite a bit from game to game.

    For some of the massive premium MMO titles, part of the subscription model is just about recouping the huge investment in creating their MMO. Making a fully featured MMO world can be an investment of tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Easily 10x what some of the single player games cost to develop to make a game competitive with the kind of content that a first rate MMO can have. But there's no way they can get away with charging you 10x for the box. So they charge you what they can get away with on the box, which doesn't pay for the huge development bill, and then they make their investment back (if they're lucky) over time with the subscriptions. Overall, a lot of MMOs fail and they're not always a great investment, so there are a lot of risks and costs that you're paying for with a game of that type.

    Guild Wars uses a lot of instancing tricks to keep people separated, so the "massive" part of "massively multiplayer online game" is not all that massive. You get too many people in one place and they'll lock you out. When you get lots of people together in the same place, the server resources and network bandwidth get polynomially more expensive. A higher end MMO is going to be better equipped to handle that sort of thing than a budget title that is free to play.

    If you're going to play the MMO for several hours per week, it strikes me that a $1 or less per hour subscription is still a very cost effective form of entertainment compared to many other things. I value my time a lot more highly than that, so if playing that game is what I'd like to be doing with that time, then that price isn't a problem at all. And if it's not what I want to be doing, then it's not worth it at any price. I haven't personally been that interested in any MMOs for many years, but making them cheaper wouldn't help there. If anything, the kind of MMO that might capture my interest would be very expensive to develop, and the trend toward generic, cookie cutter free-to-play worlds that cost less to develop are a step in the wrong direction for me.
  • SpeedloaferSpeedloafer Posts: 2,407
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    Yeah this is the argument i hear at work from a few. But they dont have any time to play any other game. So i suppose its great if its the only game you want to play for a year, but variety is key.

    I've packed 100's hours into BF but i wouldn't pay to play it.

    Who would though? An sub based MMO is nothing like an FPS. Think of it like Skyrim or Fallout, except you cant finish the story as the next chapter is always coming. Along with new weapons, armour, moves, your character evolving, all bugs and patches fixed in days if not hours, any problems solved by a moderator who will talk to you in game. Special events at Xmas, Easter etc. The ability to join your friends and try the harder content only beatable by teamwork, with rewards that far outweigh anything you can do by yourself. An MMO should be ever evolving.

    Game like Battlefield 4 barely get patched, that game is a joke, a disaster, still broken. If it was an MMO it would have died the first month.
  • YuffieYuffie Posts: 9,864
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    The thing about cocomparing MMOs pricing to the likes of BF or CoD is that it isn't really all that different. FPS players pay the highest price for the base game and then buy 3? "expansions throughout the year. And the next year they'll do the same again.

    Whereas MMO players buy the base game, usually costs much less than a normal New game (ESO is an exception), then the monthly subs pays for more and much better quality patches throughout each year without the need to rebut the same base game each year.
  • Aye UpAye Up Posts: 7,053
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    Who would though? An sub based MMO is nothing like an FPS. Think of it like Skyrim or Fallout, except you cant finish the story as the next chapter is always coming. Along with new weapons, armour, moves, your character evolving, all bugs and patches fixed in days if not hours, any problems solved by a moderator who will talk to you in game. Special events at Xmas, Easter etc. The ability to join your friends and try the harder content only beatable by teamwork, with rewards that far outweigh anything you can do by yourself. An MMO should be ever evolving.

    Game like Battlefield 4 barely get patched, that game is a joke, a disaster, still broken. If it was an MMO it would have died the first month.

    I know FPS and MMO are by and large not comparable as they offer a completely different gaming dynamic. That said I completely accept the points previously made in support of sub based gaming relative to MMOs. Obviously there are large amounts of infrastructure and overheads to pay for to ensure a brisk experience, naturally this can only be funded properly through longterm investment and monthly cost to the gamer. That as I say is justified, my gripe is the upfront cost for games and dlc whilst they expect you to pay an ongoing monthly cost. I would actually invest time in an MMO is I know what I was paying each month included the base game and all future DLC/Expansions, I just think it derisory the way developers like Blizzard treat their customers in this way.

    As for BF4 I think its been widely discussed what a piss take of a game launch that has been, it still doesn't stay stable during online play. I whinged at Tesco about the faults and got my money back because of it. Maybe there is a market for a subscription based approach to FPS rather than the current approach adopted by COD and BF franchises with their season pass. To be fair I am not a massive online gaming player, I generally stick to the campaign modes as that suits me best. I don't think I am skilled enough to tackle any online game be it FPS or MMO at length.

    I have played WOW, however I uninstalled it within a few hours as I couldn't get to grips with it, this is purely down to me I have to say and nothing against the developer. I wish MMO games were easy to just pickup and play or be part of a group that can guide you through the initial training stages at least so you can find your feet. The nature of the beat with online gaming is there are people who will always be better than me and a lot of the time "noobs" can often be greeted with hostility.

    Maybe one day a game will be made when I can just sit and drink beer with other people *wishful thinking** ha
  • Philip WalesPhilip Wales Posts: 6,373
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    Thats one of the main problems of a mainstream MMO like WOW, it attracted alot of idiots and kids who just wanted to run around, level the fastest, kill people and generally be a pain in the ass. It's better nowadays (not played for over a year) most of those kids have either grown up and improved or moved on to things like COD etc.

    EQ was better as it was one of the first, generally there was no PVP unless on a PVP server, it wasn't really geared to PVP like WOW is. The worst that would happen is someone would "train" a named mob right through the zone (oh the fun), Wall of Slaughter being a favourite for "training" but even then the player would usually call train and its general direction.
  • orzieorzie Posts: 312
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    I dont really have a problem with the monthly subs my problem is having to pay full price for a game that you cant play after 30days. Why doesnt the game just cost the same as the monthly sub??
  • SegaGamerSegaGamer Posts: 29,068
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    orzie wrote: »
    I dont really have a problem with the monthly subs my problem is having to pay full price for a game that you cant play after 30days. Why doesnt the game just cost the same as the monthly sub??

    Yeah, that is the only problem i have with it.

    If people want the content on these MMO's to be upgraded on a regular basis and for the games servers to be any good then subscriptions are needed.

    I would rather pay a subscription then have stupid microtransactions.
  • Aye UpAye Up Posts: 7,053
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    orzie wrote: »
    I dont really have a problem with the monthly subs my problem is having to pay full price for a game that you cant play after 30days. Why doesnt the game just cost the same as the monthly sub??

    I think you have put my arguement much more succinctly thad I ever could.
  • Philip WalesPhilip Wales Posts: 6,373
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    Yes it's a shame you can't just play the game, without the MMO part, unfortunately with ESO a major part is the PVP witch obviously you need the online element. With WOW you could level to max without ever the need for the online element.
  • MoggioMoggio Posts: 4,289
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    ESO definitely can't justify it. It's a terrible game with horribly dated mechanics.

    It'll be F2P in a few months.
  • BowdonBowdon Posts: 705
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    I doubt ESO will keep going as a subscription base model. It'll be like LOTR mmo, it'll have to go F2P at some point.

    It's an elder scrolls game trying to be an mmo. NOT an mmo elder scrolls game.

    Everything mentioned as a good point for ESO as been done with Guild Wars 2.

    ESO hasn't brought anything new to the table. The only part that seems to be of interest is the PVP elements of the game. Though it'll take you a long time to reach that stage as level progression is very slow.

    People in to ESO's brand will love the game though. Question is, is the subscription the price of love!?
  • Philip WalesPhilip Wales Posts: 6,373
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    I don't personally find the characters in ESO very good, they're all similar, the Orcs just aren't Orcy enough preferred the Warhammer ones, and there's no small race I love playing Gnomes/Goblins etc.
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