Bethesda Exec Defends Elder Scrolls Online's Subscription Model

[A-D.]

You can justify subscription model only if you have a service to provide. It this case, service is the potential content that will come in the future. So here's the question: why would I want to pay for something that is not yet ready? Not even that; why would I want to pay for something that I know nothing about? Cable is a service, right? Or interner. I pay monthly for it and I know what I get every single time. What am I getting from this service? A DLC-ish type of content? Okay, what if I dont like it? Or what if I dont care for it? What then? I am certain no one will refund me. I mean there is no way that every single "content update" will appeal to everyone. And yet I have to pay for it. I dont have to pay for my neighbor's cable? Or his car insurance. Or his electric bills. Honestly, I just dont understand this model.

The service provided is the maintenance of what I assume will have to be a massive amount of servers to contend with the traffic this game will have.

Furthermore, running a good MMO, even when you aren't in the process of creating new content, requires at least some full time staff for maintenance, customer support, arbitration of reported rule violations, ect.

None of what you listed is relevant in the world of Free-to-Play market. LoL is free to play (among many others), and it has a lot of servers, and I'm sure they have permanent staff, but manage not only to survive without subscriptions, but to thrive. I doubt ESO will ever have as many players as MOBAs do, and they wont need as much staff, so subscription based model is not only obsolete, but even detrimental.

Free to play games like LoL are much simpler than ESO will be, so the cost of their upkeep is not incredibly comparable. ESO, due to it using more complex graphics, would per users playing be roughly as expensive to maintain as WoW, which uses a subscription.

Furthermore, LoL isn't an MMORPG. I wouldn't even say its game size makes it "massively". It's a different genre, so I don't care if it is free when considering whether to pay to play ESO. Are there any MMORPG's that are good, free to play, ad-free, and don't have real money item transactions? I'd go for that, but I'd much rather pay 15 a month for an MMO than either play a low quality game, one that advertises to me while I play, play genres abundant in free to plays, or compete with people who are willing to sink well more than $15 into items that unbalance the game.

Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, The Old Republic, The Secret World, Path of Exile. These are all what you could term Free to Play titles, now i will grant that with one exception of the titles named, none were developed with F2P or B2P in mind. However it is fact that these games are no less complex or require less upkeep than WoW or ESO would. Last i checked, LotRO has 21 Servers running, these are world-wide servers. They have GMs and Staff which handle support tickets and similar, both of which are very quick to respond mind you, based on two instances i actually had to use either option. TSW has very fast GMs as well. WoW on the other hand, well wait a few hours till your ticket is dealth with, this is based on experience from 2005.

Having a Sucscription does not imply quality or quantity of content, nor does it imply in any shape or form that the support team is capable or quick to deal with problems. Consider alot of MMOs had Lifetime Subs, which usually ran at about 200 bucks, you could get one of those, or you could just pay 200 via the ingame store overtime rather than a single upfront payment with no garantuee that the game wont shutdown or go F2P, where is the difference? Imagine you played WoW since release, paid 13 bucks a month every month for nearly a decade, how much have you spent, in subscription alone? Now add to this the cost of expansion packs which you pay extra for. I can get all the content in Lotro for less than that cost.

 

[AJey]

You can justify subscription model only if you have a service to provide. It this case, service is the potential content that will come in the future. So here's the question: why would I want to pay for something that is not yet ready? Not even that; why would I want to pay for something that I know nothing about? Cable is a service, right? Or interner. I pay monthly for it and I know what I get every single time. What am I getting from this service? A DLC-ish type of content? Okay, what if I dont like it? Or what if I dont care for it? What then? I am certain no one will refund me. I mean there is no way that every single "content update" will appeal to everyone. And yet I have to pay for it. I dont have to pay for my neighbor's cable? Or his car insurance. Or his electric bills. Honestly, I just dont understand this model.

The service provided is the maintenance of what I assume will have to be a massive amount of servers to contend with the traffic this game will have.

Furthermore, running a good MMO, even when you aren't in the process of creating new content, requires at least some full time staff for maintenance, customer support, arbitration of reported rule violations, ect.

None of what you listed is relevant in the world of Free-to-Play market. LoL is free to play (among many others), and it has a lot of servers, and I'm sure they have permanent staff, but manage not only to survive without subscriptions, but to thrive. I doubt ESO will ever have as many players as MOBAs do, and they wont need as much staff, so subscription based model is not only obsolete, but even detrimental.

Free to play games like LoL are much simpler than ESO will be, so the cost of their upkeep is not incredibly comparable. ESO, due to it using more complex graphics, would per users playing be roughly as expensive to maintain as WoW, which uses a subscription.

Furthermore, LoL isn't an MMORPG. I wouldn't even say its game size makes it "massively". It's a different genre, so I don't care if it is free when considering whether to pay to play ESO. Are there any MMORPG's that are good, free to play, ad-free, and don't have real money item transactions? I'd go for that, but I'd much rather pay 15 a month for an MMO than either play a low quality game, one that advertises to me while I play, play genres abundant in free to plays, or compete with people who are willing to sink well more than $15 into items that unbalance the game.

Sorry, but I dont see any complexity in ESO. At least not where it matters. Battle system is simplistic, questing is generic, world doesnt have much to offer etc etc etc. Even graphics are not up to par with something like Skyrim. So what exactly should I be paying for 15$ every month? Server maintenance? Sorry, but even the worst MMOs dont charge for that.

Lets take other MMOs then: Everquest Next and landmarks, Rift, Path of Exile, Tera, Ragnarok, Neverwinter, Star Wars The Old Republic, Dragon's Prophet, Aion and the list goes not. These are just RPGs that are all F2P. There are plenty of shooters like Mech Warrior, Planetside 2 or Hawken that are F2P as well, and all of them have much more to offer than SOE without selling power. They sell cosmetic stuff and benign trinkets and make their money this way, opening their game for a much wider audience. I dont know where your "ad-free" argument stems from. I havent played a single MMO that shoves ads in your face. Like I said: the best business model for today is F2P with an optional micro-transactions that offer cosmetic things. They dont sell power whatsoever. So if you want to waste 15$ every month, it is your choice to make. But I refuse to pay for a service that offers me nothing.

 

[Tim Chuma]

This price is nonsense
http://www.dungeoncrawl.com.au/p-5857-the-elder-scrolls-online-imperial-edition-pc.aspx

I could think of a lot of things I could do with $200 and that is the "cheap" price as the store sells import stock.

 

[Ender910_v1legacy]

This price is nonsense
http://www.dungeoncrawl.com.au/p-5857-the-elder-scrolls-online-imperial-edition-pc.aspx

I could think of a lot of things I could do with $200 and that is the "cheap" price as the store sells import stock.

That's because it's a limited edition physical copy, which means they're only going to produce so many of them. Limited editions for just about anything are usually quite excessive in price for that very reason.

The digital Imperial Edition however is 60-80 dollars (depending on what kind of sales and vouchers you can get, and where you shop).