The Subscription Psychology

[Shamus Young]

The Subscription Psychology

Shamus Young discusses subscription-based games, and whether you're getting enough bang for your buck.

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[fenrizz]

Great article.

I'm a flat rate kind of guy myself, as (like you) by-the-minute charges stresses me.
But I also feel a little obligated to play a certain amount on WoW each month, so that I don't feel like I've wasted my money.
Which is the reason I quit WoW. That endless feeling of obligation to play sucked the fun right out of it.
That and raiding.

 

[SharedProphet]

I prefer the Guild Wars subscription option. Pay for the game, then never again--the lifetime subscription option is basically the cost of the box. Now I don't feel guilty that I haven't played in years! Looking forward to GW2 using the same model.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I don't play MMOs, not because of the method by which they charge for subscriptions 'cause I hate the by-the-minute thing too, but because I hate the idea of buying the game and then having to pay to play it too.

 

[Lvl 64 Klutz]

I'm basically the deluxe version of the second mindset. Not only does the flat rate option make me feel obligated to play, but the whole idea behind an MMO makes me feel obligated to play. If I don't play for a few weeks, all of a sudden all the people who I was getting to know by grinding with them are way ahead of me.

If I take longer than that off, suddenly most of the players have finished whatever the current main or popular quest line is and finding a group for that quest line becomes a test of patience. And god forbid when a game has a limited time event which has a "grand prize" of sorts that takes hours and hours of grinding to get.

 

[Bongo Bill]

Compounding this is the classic problem of DikuMUD mechanics, raiding, and the like. Begins to feel like work. Some people end up paying for an activity that feels like something they should be getting paid for.

If an MMO existed that I was confident was a good game and which would go for years before folding, put me in the lifetime subscription column.

 

[whaleswiththumbs]

Great article.

I'm a flat rate kind of guy myself, as (like you) by-the-minute charges stresses me.
But I also feel a little obligated to play a certain amount on WoW each month, so that I don't feel like I've wasted my money.
Which is the reason I quit WoW. That endless feeling of obligation to play sucked the fun right out of it.
That and raiding.

Either way kindof bugs me, i mean i payed for this and if i don't use it it's like wasted money, but then if i payed by minute/hour I would probably not enoy it because i was feeling rushed. The flat-rate kindof makes me feel good, because if i pay for a month, then i have a month of playtime ready for me. I don't think thats what i wanted to say,but oh well, i like flat rates even if they rub me alittle weird.

 

[ben---neb]

I still haven't played an MMO yet. Tried Lord of the Rings Online free trail, it was great but I never felt the need to buy the game. Tried WoW free trail, I lasted five minutes before quitting and finding a game with a good story, good graphics and no killing grind quests.

Also I'm worried I'll get addicted and £8/month is quite a lot in my book. Then again TOR might make me change my mind.

Speaking of value for money I think Team Fortress 2 would beat any MMO. Let's see I got it in the Orange Box for £16. Which is about £5 for the game let's say. Out of that I have registered an alarming number of hours, hundreds and hundreds, I get free content updates and a hat. Best money to fun ratio ever.

And then compare to Prototype, bought for £20, played for four(ish) hours then got bored. Money wasted.

 

[Samurai Goomba]

Heh. Great point, until you realize that if you game last gen (which still has loads of great titles and few people have played all of them), you can buy 20+ hour games for fivers. That's not even taking into account the huge freeware game community you alluded to.

 

[Wakefield]

COD4 online on my PC. 40$, endless hours of entertainment.

Monthly fee = 0

 

[lluewhyn]

My wife and I have played LOTRO ever since the Beta came out, and we wrestled with the question of the lifetime purchase. Although the standard price is $15, it's very, very easy to get that down to $10 a month. I *think* at the time Lifetime was $185, so it would have been 18 months of playing before it started to break even. With Net Present Value of money, it would take even longer.

The main reason why we didn't is that we just never had $185 lying around each to go ahead and make the purchase, but I do think that if we would have purchased that lifetime membership, we would not have played the game nearly as often because we wouldn't have felt that obligation, and then we would felt that we had wasted our money. Instead, 2+ years later, we have now spent more money, so it looks like you lose either way.

 

[G-Mang]

My WoW friends (I don't play WoW) and I have talked about this. The fact that they pay monthly means two key things that compel them to keep playing:
1) Not playing means you're wasting money, as any time in a given month that you don't play is effectively paying for nothing, so any free time should be spent getting your money's worth.
2) Canceling your subscription (or simply not playing for a while) is a waste of all the time spent on character progression in previous months. If you've played WoW for 2 years, ending your payments means not getting the full benefit of all your hard work. All that grinding and raiding will suddenly be meaningless.

So it keeps looping. Your current month's payment compels you to play more in any given month, and the play time spent in that month compels you to play again next month, ensuring the same thing happens.

I think that's why I have so many friends who have tried/are trying/say they want to try to quit, but just keep playing for months on end. :S

 

[Yokai]

I prefer a pay-by-the-hour sort of thing. That way, if I lose interest and don't play as often, I don't lose as much money for it. But regardless of which is the better deal, in general I find MMOs remarkably dull. I'd much rather pay the $2 an hour for genuine fun than ten cents or whatever for repetitive monotony.

 

[John Funk]

I prefer a pay-by-the-hour sort of thing. That way, if I lose interest and don't play as often, I don't lose as much money for it. But regardless of which is the better deal, in general I find MMOs remarkably dull. I'd much rather pay the $2 an hour for genuine fun than ten cents or whatever for repetitive monotony.

Putting aside the question of fun vs monotony (I happen to love MMOs) I think this is actually where Shamus was spot on.

Last night, we tried and wiped repeatedly on the final boss of the 25-man Crusaders' Coliseum for an hour, an hour and a half? When we were broken / had to repair and a design flaw in the raid meant that we had to portal out / manually fly back, all that we wasted was time. And we had plenty of that. Had we been PAYING for every hours we didn't kill the boss, I think it would have been so much more frustrating.

Great article as usual, Shamus. I think you nailed the whole mechanics of why people prefer/will never ever buy subscriptions perfectly.

 

[theSovietConnection]

I think the biggest hole in the "best bang for your buck" theory is a figure that can never be judged in dollar figures.

Entertainment.

Funk, Shamus, and many others have great fun playing WoW, and I can appreciate that. But they get something from it I've never been able to. They have fun. I tried WoW, and I never had all that much fun with it. Sure, maybe I could get 4 cents an hour from it, but if I'm not having fun, is it really money well spent? Sure, maybe when it works out I might only end up getting about $2.50 an hour from a game like inFamous, but if I'm having fun, it will always be money well spent in my eyes.

Sorry, I got a bit rambly. If my post isn't clear let me know and I can clean it up tomorrow, feeling a little dead tonight.

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

I play F2P mmos because I play sporadically and my PC isn't high end. I mostly play Perfect World.

I would really like to play Runes of Magic too, but my PC doesn't have a good enough graphics card apparently. So it lags and the draw distance is 4 feet if I want to play it now.

Tried DDO, and quit before finishing the first quest. You can't move with the mouse, you need to manually turn to face mobs that you are attacking. Translates to targeting with one hand on the mouse, moving with the wsad keys, and having to take your hand of of one or the other to hit a spell etc.. By that time the mob has moved and you can't hit it anymore, but they are killing you.

Also unless I'm just slow, there isn't a way to see the front of your character. The camera just doesn't swing that way, so I couldn't even see the weapon in my hand let alone the face I spent some time crafting.

I know a lot of people that play Warcraft (I think calling it wow is asinine). I'd like to try it, but since I'm lamentably unemployeed I have better things to waste my money on.

 

[toapat]

Great article.

I'm a flat rate kind of guy myself, as (like you) by-the-minute charges stresses me.
But I also feel a little obligated to play a certain amount on WoW each month, so that I don't feel like I've wasted my money.
Which is the reason I quit WoW. That endless feeling of obligation to play sucked the fun right out of it.
That and raiding.

the thing that people dont get is that WoW isnt this omnipotent soul devouring game. its just a game with about 16 billion times the content of Halo and CoD combined. you can approach the game from less serious methods. i stopped having fun when i actually set some longterm objective in WoW that didnt count as get to the level cap and try to hit every dungeon along the way. if you like multiplayer, fine, just dont talk to me about it in any RPG, as one of the short/long term objectives i set for myself and regret is that i attempted to pick up PvP gear for better singleplayer and group questing. i had no fun when i was PvPing because its not natural, its not fun, and its not fair in an RPG.

 

[Chipperz]

My wife and I have played LOTRO ever since the Beta came out, and we wrestled with the question of the lifetime purchase. Although the standard price is $15, it's very, very easy to get that down to $10 a month. I *think* at the time Lifetime was $185, so it would have been 18 months of playing before it started to break even. With Net Present Value of money, it would take even longer.

The main reason why we didn't is that we just never had $185 lying around each to go ahead and make the purchase, but I do think that if we would have purchased that lifetime membership, we would not have played the game nearly as often because we wouldn't have felt that obligation, and then we would felt that we had wasted our money. Instead, 2+ years later, we have now spent more money, so it looks like you lose either way.

Huh. Interesting.

See, I would have said that you paid slightly more for over two years of gaming with your wife, stories that will last you for many more years (unless you both stood around in Minas Tirith, dancing with Hobbits...). The idea that you "lost" because you payed more than you could have if you'd had more money years ago doesn't really enter into it.

On Topic - I love that, once again, the concept that Warcraft is nothing but grinding comes up. If you're just grinding in WoW, you're playing it wrong. That is all.

 

[Fearzone]

MMO devs want th money up front. I doubt Blizzard wants to mess with collection agencies. This pay-for-an-MMO-by-the-minute has a sinister quality where people innocently sign up for, say WoW, just to check it out--I mean that's how we all stumbled on our first one right?--and then a month later get a $900 bill on their credit card.

 

[wilsonscrazybed]

Flat rate MMOs appeal to people who have faith in the MMO they're playing. But a lifetime membership is hardly a free pass to the game for eternity. There are always hidden costs in MMOs. What happens when they release an expansion? And prices for MMOs rarely change, but if they do they tend to go down, not up.

In DDO's case, monthly fees disappeared completely. How would you feel about a lifetime subscription in that case?