FPS Developers Support Call of Duty Subscriptions

[The Rockerfly]

Yeah the minutes fps's get any form of subscriptions I am out, I pay £300 for a console and £40 for the game and I am perfectly entitled to play online with it.

Why are all gamers treated like criminals these days? I miss the days where we were treated like nerds and not money filled pirates

If you make people pay subscription fees, people will just crack the game and then play it online anyway. It will also take people like me who only play single player games away from the company because I am not going to support any companies that treats me like I owe them constant payment

To all fps developers in that article, you are all greedy bastards. Find some other way of making money rather then getting your customers to pay more

 

[Delusibeta]

Second, the $60-$100 is going to pay off the initial development, licensing fees, server infrastructure for multiplayer, support, and more. Most of the rest of the money goes into seed money for future game development.

It just stupid business to pump that money into developing and updating more free multiplayer, that is basically throwing away money at a game people already paid for. When they use it to invest develop a new game they could sell.

Here's the problem with that arguement: they *aren't* paying for the multiplayer infrastructure: Microsoft, Sony and Valve (assuming they use Steamworks) are. (And if Treyarch follow through with their promise to allow dedicated servers for the PC version, then the ultimate responcability for the multiplayer infrastructure lies with the users who run thouse servers, and they can be relied upon: try accessing a server for, say, Quake 3. There's still servers up to this day. Or, say, Call of Duty 2[footnote]Still the fifth most popular PC game according to Xfire, after League of Legends, Modern Warfare 1, Starcraft 2 and World of You-Know-What[/footnote]) Sure, they might be told to contribute to the pot, but what did you think the £5/month fee for Live Gold is for? Second part of your arguement can be defeated in two letters and a number: TF2. A fine example in how to turn free updates into money. And even if you don't have your own digital distributor, you can always ask them to give away your game for a weekend, like Unreal Tournament 3.

 

[Traun]

*sign*

They were able to make people pay for Xbox accounts.
They were able to push payed DLC through somehow.
They made profits from Map Pack release.

They WILL make subscription based FPS games the norm.

With every day I get more and more interested in the indi market.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

Honestly? I really don't see the problem - provided that they don't just start charging for what's already there. If you can play online for free, and they just add a "premium" subscription on top for extra skins/automatic and constantly updated DLC, is that really a problem? Are you all really so cheap as to think that a team of developers spending their time creating new content should give it all away for free? No, because they need to pay those salaries so the people who make the stuff can actually feed their families.

The whole "DLC should be free!!!!1" argument has always sounded so juvenile and immature to me. If a team of twenty people works for a month to create something new, in what world should they NOT get paid for their efforts? Similarly, if Treyarch starts working after the launch of Black Ops to release a steady stream of new content for their game, should they not get paid for it? Is their time literally worth nothing?

And I have to say, if you think Valve constantly updates TF2 out of the pure goodness of Gabe Newell's heart, I have a few bridges to sell you out in San Francisco. That's as much a business decision as anything Activision does. It keeps you on Steam, it keeps you seeing their ads and buying new games on Steam... and Valve gets a cut of every game you buy. It's a loss-leader.

I know you're a huge Blizzard fan, so let me remind you that Battlenet has always been free, and they added new heroes and maps to Warcraft III in content patches, and new items and a rare event to Diablo II. For free. So don't go insulting the collective intelligence of gamers who have been around more than a few years by implying that we're all greedy because we won't pay for stuff that used to be free after paying the up-front cost of the game (which by the way still exists and has gone up).

I don't understand how anyone with the slightest grasp of reading comprehension could think after reading just one of Bobby Kotick's statements that this is about anything other than the desire to charge more for what's already there. This is a man who uses the word 'exploit' when talking about franchises. This is a man who uses the word 'subscription' before and often without even using the words 'extra content'.

 

[Riobux]

Oh dear...

Best thing people can do is simply not buy the game, or at least don't pay the subscription fees. However, knowing people, they will do it. Thus begins the end of games you actually own and can play without paying for them continuously.

 

[ultimateownage]

I still think it's a stupid idea, only for money grabbing pricks. Also, the idea for an open world COD is strange. Hmm, a MMO shooter with RPG elements? Where have I heard that before? *cough*APB*cough*

 

[CINN4M0N]

Escapist Readers - One the biggest collection of freeloaders on the net. Bring it on CoD!! Subscriptions leads to more quality and more development in most games.

Oh yes, because spending upwards of 600 dollars for a console or PC and then 60-100 dollars on a game totally says we're cheapskates.

I would report you for trolling, but you're not even doing it right.

$600 console is directly paid to the console manufacturer(in which most times the manufacturer is loosing money on because they make their money from licensing fees of games.)
Second, the $60-$100 is going to pay off the initial development, licensing fees, server infrastructure for multiplayer, support, and more. Most of the rest of the money goes into seed money for future game development.

That's all entirely irrelevant. We don't care where the money goes, or whether or not a manufacturer is turning a profit. Because whether they do or they don't, we still pay $600 for the console and $60-100 for the game- which is the point he was making. At that point, we are not cheapskates.

 

[Fallen-Angel Risen-Demon]

...
I can't sum up my thoughts in any way other then just
...
I can't.

 

[zombie711]

Didn't tabula rasa try to do this? And didn't that game get the world record for shortest lasting mmo (it did)

 

[A Pious Cultist]

QFT. I don't agree with the "less content" bit though, because of how short most games used to be. Of course, that's answering a generalization with a generalization.

Really? Most games used to have far longer single player campaigns and far more multiplayer maps then they do now.

Compare unreal 2004's selection with cod4 or 5's.

I understand the quality difference but "because they are shorter"... no. Hell no, games are at an all time low in terms of length.

Bring back modding support, custom maps, dedicated servers with actual admins instead of just VAC, wack in the occasional extra map or temporary gamemode (ala L4D2/TF2) and I think it'd probably be worth an extra tenner or two a year.

 

[UnravThreads]

I do and don't support a subscription FPS. If you look at, as an example, the MMORPG market, you find that at the top you have a bunch of paid-for, then you slump down into the lower-quality F2P games, and then you've got this huge swathe of paid-for and F2P games with small numbers that just trundle along.

I've played a few MMOs and I've been happy to pay for them to an extent. I think what should happen is something more along the lines of BioShock 2 but enhanced. Give a good percentage of the experience for free - So let's say ranks 1-30. If you don't pay, you're stuck at rank 30 and can't go past it. For a small monthly fee (because a shooter doesn't necessarily need the huge amount of infrastructure that an MMO does) you can progress past that and into, say, rank 50. It takes longer to get from 30-50 than it does 1-30, and as a bonus there's weapons you get in 30-50 that don't exist between 1-30.

In my mind, that would work. The BioShock 2 bit came in because for a small fee, you can download a DLC pack which increases the level you can attain and so forth, but for a monthly fee you'd have to "give" more to the player to make it attractive.

 

[CINN4M0N]

And I have to say, if you think Valve constantly updates TF2 out of the pure goodness of Gabe Newell's heart, I have a few bridges to sell you out in San Francisco. That's as much a business decision as anything Activision does. It keeps you on Steam, it keeps you seeing their ads and buying new games on Steam... and Valve gets a cut of every game you buy. It's a loss-leader.

I don't think many gamers care if Gabe updates TF2 out of the goodness of his heart or his money-hungry greed. At the end of the day, they can choose not to buy their other new games. They can have their ads flashed at them, and move on. Everybody's just worried that they're going to be charged for the same multiplayer service that they're getting now.

It's perfectly understandable too. In the old days you'd buy a game, and it'd be yours. It was a pretty good system. Then "premium DLC" started appearing pretty much right from the release of a game, and all of a sudden we weren't even getting a full game when we forked over our $60. Now they want to charge us to be able to play it? The same way we've been playing for years (i.e. against other players)

Just so you know John, I don't live in America. And as such I have to pay $120 for a new release game. Then I have to pay for a Live gold subscription. At this point, I don't think wanting to then be able to play is cheap.

 

[Lawyer105]

Hah, MMO shooters already happened. And they were mediocre. Planetside, Global Agenda, Tabula Rasa, APB. I don't see people ever remembering those games, less playing them.

I don't think you can reasonably compare those four games. I'm not going to comment on APB, because I disliked the premise so I never played it.

Planetside was an excellent, open-world, persistent world game with RPG elements that simply controlled which weapons, vehicles and armour you had access to. It had three factions, and allowed up to 133 players PER FACTION onto a continent (map). Post around 2007, the devs started doing a lot of stuff the players didn't want, while making little to no effect to stave off the hackers. It was also becoming extremely dated.

Global Agenda was simply a thin RPG wrapper around gameplay that's not significantly different from a standard online FPS. You still had small maps (10v10), no REAL persistence (even the P2P mode was poor) and the 'open world' gameplay was effectively a 3D chat-room.

Tabula Rasa had potential, but was plagued by poor support and even poorer design decisions. If you can only buy new equipment in town, and you can only access the town if you've spent the last two hours defending it from the enemy zerg, then it's a poor game. TB died because the designers were idiots. Not because it tried to be an MMOFPS.

Global Agenda, I played the F2P bits but refused to subscribe to and regretted the purchase I made. Tabula Rasa, I purchased and subscribed to, but it only lasted about 2 months before I gave up. Planetside, as it was before SOE management really got involved (i.e. screwed it up) I played for 4 years - paying a subscription the whole time, and I was happy to do so.

I've honestly got no inherent problem with paying a subscription for an FPS. I LOVED Planetside, and would kill (it IS an FPS after all...) for the opportunity to play another game like that. But it's gotta offer the right kind of experience.

CoD is not that game. Unless they drastically change the CoD formula (which is unlikely) it'll be a dismal failure - just a thin transparent wrapper around the small scale rotating maps we already have in CoD. They effectively did that with Global Agenda, and we all saw how well that worked.

So... Up Planetside, down CoD!

 

[Callex]

Hah, MMO shooters already happened. And they were mediocre. Planetside, Global Agenda, Tabula Rasa, APB. I don't see people ever remembering those games, less playing them.

Whaaat? Planetside was a tonne of fun. I actually enjoyed it more than any recent MMO to date. The graphics/physics are pretty dated now though, hence why I stopped playing in the end (that and the hackers). I remain optimistic for Planetside 2, though - but we'll see.

So... Up Planetside, down CoD!

Couldn't agree more!

 

[Jared]

I still dont agree with the idea...its terrible "Oh look, pay x amount here and received x character skin"

...I mean, this is no better than Zyanga! ...They just want pretty, pretty coffers...

 

[Hiphophippo]

Bungie has already started this trend by locking out 80% of the online multiplayer content by forcing you to buy the DLC before it will let you play the content you rightfully own and now COD is doing the same thing but more blatantly.

Let me stop you right there. Buying a game at gamestop does not mean you legally own it. It mean's you've licensed what they've unlocked on the disc for you. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. As a matter of fact, By just licensing it, they could come, at any time, and simply take the CD back from you. This has never happened, of course, but it's food for thought and I wanted you to be clear on this.

You don't "own" shit. Nothing is rightfully yours at all. In a perfect world policies like this would be abolished of course because I can't get behind it. But it's the reality of the situation, like it or not.

 

[Cabisco]

I personally find that while it sounds like a good idea, I'd never buy a pay per month game. I haven't ever found one worth it. Especially if I could find a different FPS which was significantly cheaper and just as good.

 

[Albino Boo]

Running servers for multiplayer costs money and that money is going to come from the consumer one way or other. The idea that TF2 servers are free is false, someone pays for them and maintains them. I happen to know that No Heroes is only breaking even with 32 odd TF2/L4D servers and lot of time being invested by the admins to keep them running. Valve essentially gets the the players of the game to pay for servers, which is fair enough but in the end it isn't free. If the company runs the servers your going to have to pay those costs one way or another either through a subscription or an increased purchase price.

 

[Hiphophippo]

Hah, MMO shooters already happened. And they were mediocre. Planetside, Global Agenda, Tabula Rasa, APB. I don't see people ever remembering those games, less playing them.

Hey, hey, hey buddy. Planetside was fucking amazing. Shit, I'd still be playing it today if my friends were into it.

I love how the argument against CoD subscriptions is based entirely on rumors and speculation. Fact is, they know they can't get away with just charging for multiplayer so I'm positive they're working on something neat and persistent.

That's OPTIONAL.

Optional seems to be a difficult concept for detractors of this stuff.

 

[Omnific One]

How I read the article:

It seems that it isn't just Bobby Kotick who wants to see Call of Duty charge clueless gamers $15 a month for a watered down FPS experience.

"We fully support Activision's continued desire to shoot itself in the foot." said a spokesperson for an anonymous developer known for producing games that are so much better then Call of Duty 6.

"First they managed to kill off a good chunk of the brain trust at Infinity Ward, and now they're going to charge $15 a month for what other, better, FPSs give out for free!" was the response from another anonymous developer. "We could not ask for anything better!"

Gamers, however, proved to be the most excited. "For the past two and a half years, I've had to suffer from free, regular content updates for TF2. I simply cannot wait to pay Bobby Kotick $15 a month for the same thing!" said XxXSpehiiroth420XxX.

Spot on, I could not have said it better myself. Isn't it obviously a tactic to jack up Activision's ego into thinking that they could pull the wool over all our eyes and pull something like subscription based CoD. Hell, I don't even like CoDMW2's multiplayer; it's unbalanced and easily exploitable.

Let me stop you right there. Buying a game at gamestop does not mean you legally own it. It mean's you've licensed what they've unlocked on the disc for you. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. As a matter of fact, By just licensing it, they could come, at any time, and simply take the CD back from you.

No, from what I've heard, you own the physical copy (the disc and whatever else is there) you just don't technically own the rights to the game so they could just prevent you from playing somehow. Yes, you are in a way licensing the data, but you own the physical copy, even if that copy is useless.