Cerebrawl said:
Therumancer said:
2. Elder Scrolls Online is pretty much charging standard rates. The cost is box plus subscription. You cannot consider that truly "double dipping" as that has been the way MMOs were being sold since pretty much the very beginning. I say pretty much because the first MMOs actually charged you by the hour or minute. But Everquest, WoW, Ultima Online, and others all used this basic business model.
Plenty of MMOs have been free-to-download, monthly sub. Heck those outnumber the ones with a box price. But tell me about these mythical MMOs that came before Everquest and Ultima Online? There were MUDs, but not MMOs(aside from Meridian59 which released a few months before UO), there's a difference. MUDs were also typically truly free to play, as in totally free, no transactions at all unless you wanted to donate some money to them, though there were some exceptions, and of course internet back then was usually dialup so you could be saddled with some hefty phonebills.
Or are you talking about games that came before the internet, through proprietary networks, back when bandwidth was super expensive? Like the original(1991) Neverwinter Nights?
I say this as someone who was into MUDs back then and considered the new-fangled graphical MUDs(MMOs) to be gimmicky.
I sported over 4000 hours on my main character alone in Discworld MUD, and I had several characters, and played several MUDs, and none of them cost money to play except for what it cost to actually have internet access(internet cafes at first, phone bills later).
Actually I'm quite familiar with MUDs, I was pretty big into Moments In Tyme (Wheel Of Time MUD), Warriors Of Gor (invitational MUD with a large population based around ultraviolence and heavy ERP... I was in a different place personaly at the time), Wings of Melnibone (similar to WoG) and others.
Prior to Ultima Online and even Meridian 59 you had things like "Dark Sun Online: Crimson Sands" which was run through TEN (Total Entertainment Network) which was a service largely based around Quake death matches but also had that MMO running on it which itself based on code/levels/etc... heavily lifted from the Dark Sun single player games. TEN was largely based around an hourly fee (which applied to any game you played) but you could also pay like a $50 a month flat fee to have unlimited hours each month (they kept raising the price). AoL (I think it was) ran the original "Neverwinter Nights" which was an MMO largely based around the old SSI gold box games (never played that one, but I believe it was by the minute), you also had Kesmai, and of course Sierra Online's various games such as "Shadows Of Ysebrius/Fates Of Twinon" and "The Realm" which were also I believe pay by the minute games.
If you were involved in Ultima Online, you might remember guilds like "The Mercs", which were a multi-game guild from the time that had cut their teeth terrorizing things like "Dark Sun Online", and of course "Ysebrius". That's in part why they were so famous and got griped at in so many places since simply mentioning their name (along with a few others like Inner Circle, Pirates Of Dark Water, or Covetus Crew) could derail entire forums. On Atlantic shard the final show down between The Mercs and Covetus Crew to see who was the baddest of the bad PVP/terror crew was pretty much the duel watched by the MMO world of the time (The Mercs won). At any rate though, the point of this is that part of why it was news is that The Mercs at least were involved to some extent in pretty much every online game up until that point. I have no idea if they are still around in any form though.
On top of this you had things like "Club Cairbe" on Q-link which might actually be able to make the claim of being the first MMO, being a graphical game where people could run around and interact with avatars in real time. Albeit it was based more around scavenger hunts, social interaction, and assorted things like that, probably being spiritually more like "Second Life", as much as groups like the early "Adventurers Guild" tried to do more with it. It was however like most games of the time horrendously expensive (again, pay by the minute if I remember) so didn't exactly take off in people's minds.
The generation of MMOs that began with Meridian 59/Ultima Online and then moved on to Everquest and AOC was the first time you started to see these kinds of games given exposure and being made affordable to the average person through their monthly fees. Prior to them the whole idea was being strangled by the fact that the big services tried to maintain a hold on anything telecommunications related so they could charge premium, by the minute rates for services we take for granted right now or even find obsolete like oh... text chat. AoL, Prodigy, PC Link (and Qlink), and others all being driven out of business (or at least their initial business models) was in part done by MMOs (though not exclusively). While there were always work arounds, like MUDs, one of the things that helped sell things like UO, Everquest, and others was how cheap it was, and you had people thinking it was worth tolerating UO's infamous lag just for the ability to say hang out on the roof of a bank and chat with whomever happened by... like a chat room that doesn't cost $1 a minute. To a lot of people that in of itself was a big deal.
Truthfully the big thing that kind of annoys me right now is that it seems like the industry is starting to gradually swing back towards the old school levels of greed. What's more it seems like we haven't been seeing the continued level of advancement of technology and innovation we'd expect. To be honest one of the reasons why despite limited funds I try and find a way to at least try almost every MMO out there is because I see a lot of potential in the medium, and for a while it was exploding for a bit, but then it just kind of fizzled and pooped out, with the focus being on finding ridiculous ways to monetize things. It's sort of like the leap from BBS systems and Echos to the Internet and WWW, for a while it got stymied when a few big companies tried to monopolize technology by tying it into professional services that they could force people to pay minute to minute, or hour to hour for. We needed to see that collapse before things
moved on to the current level.... I'm rambling, but basically, there are not only MMOs (as in real ones, not MUDs, I did those too) that came before the well known ones that got strangled, but there was a whole era where you'd be charged literally minute to minute for a service which was actually inferior to what The Escapist provides for free today (although I personally support the Publisher's club).
