What, if anything, would make you pay?

[BloodSquirrel]

For $15 dollars a month I should get the following EVERY month:
- a new class
- several new areas
- a compelling story (not just a short DLC one off)
- several new monsters
- several new items

Adding a new class and new areas every month is a quick way to make the game into an unfocused clusterfuck. There's only so many classes a game needs, and MMOs have enough problems balancing 10-15 classes as it is, let alone the hundred that WoW would have right now if they added a new one every month. Developing content that fits gracefully into a long-running existing system is a lot more difficult than developing a single chunk of content for a one-off single-player RPG.

Then, of course, you have to consider that your $15 is paying for:

The initial development and expansion pack development (MMOs launch with much more content than a singleplayer RPG), server costs, support personnel costs, and all of the other overhead that comes from running the game on a day-to-day basis.

 

[Story]

Nothing. It's not that I have anything against the model it's that I can't afford it without a regular job. If I'm working, I simply don't have the time for an MMO; especially since I like too much other stuff. On the other hand, if I'm NOT working, I don't have the money. I get some money from doing freelance compositions, but not enough for yet another monthly bill to come out.

I got to agree with this. If I had my own money and my own free time that isn't dedicated to making that money then I would pay for something I'm highly interested in.

I enjoyed paying WoW for a few months, I think I would enjoy playing MMOs a lot. Then again, that's part of the problem too. I think I have an addictive personality, not good for MMOs.
...
Man I really want to play Elder Scrolls Online.

 

[Mike Fang]

I'm likely going to be in conflict with the majority of people and what they'd be willing to pay a subscription fee for. I too played WoW for quite some time before finally becoming tired of its model. As I've said in previous threads, my biggest problem was the pacing. I'm an avid roleplayer; I like to get into the story, explore the content, read the flavor dialogue with quests, watch the cutscenes...in general, everything the grind-happy power gamers DON'T do. And yet its those gamers that MMO developers base their business models on. They churn out new content like Dominoes cranks out pizza, and the power gamers chew through it with about as much appreciation and savoring of the taste as you'd give such pizza. I can only speak for myself, but it pisses on my fun and spoils my immersion when I'm conscious of the fact that the content I'm working my way through is something that, in the game's official canon, no longer exists.

This kind of pacing can even kill a buy-to-play game for me. I really enjoyed Guild Wars 2 for a long time; I was in it since beta. But I've become largely burned out on it. Why? Because there's a new content release every TWO WEEKS. I can't get into a story if the pace keeps leaving me behind. I can't take a break from the game because the plot progression is breakneck.

So, what would it take me to get into another subscription game? For starters, a more gradual pace to the plot, or better yet, be a sandbox MMO that has a background, but not an overarching plot. At the very least, if there -is- an overarching plot, don't let the pace of new content release be dictated by the griping of people who got to the end by the day after the latest content release; base it on the number of players out of the wholewho have played through that content. Perhaps developers could let players come up with their own plots through roleplay, or maybe have some hidden storylines that can be discovered through exploration and investigation. Second, more roleplaying mechanics. I like being able to customize the look of a character and keep that look until I find something better. I like interactive environments; chairs that characters can sit on, beds they can lay on, eating and drinking animations, emotes, and so on. Player and guild housing would be a definite plus, especially if it's customizable.

I saw someone mention Wildstar in this thread, and I'm also cautiously optimistic about that game as well. I'm considering buying the game and playing the 30 days that seem to come with every new MMO's release and seeing how it does. However, if I start feeling the pulling sensation of the game community dragging me as fast as it can go to get through the content, I'm probably not going to pick up a subscription.

 

[babinro]

Content added regularly that actually matches or exceeds the price tag of the subscription fee.

If I'm paying $15.00 a month I want approximately 10 hours of content added to the game a month. $15 is one fourth that of a full game. A full rpg game tends to offer 40hrs of solid gameplay if not quite a bit more.

For $15 dollars a month I should get the following EVERY month:
- a new class
- several new areas
- a compelling story (not just a short DLC one off)
- several new monsters
- several new items

Oh. Sweet. Jesus.

I know you want to get your moneys worth but you want that? Every month? I'm sorry, but this is a time when I genuinely get to use the expression "lol". I normally would explain why you're wrong politely. But just no... those demands are not worth my time explaining.

I would however like some of what you're smoking so we can give it to the devs in the vein hope they can keep up with your demands.

Adding a new class and new areas every month is a quick way to make the game into an unfocused clusterfuck. There's only so many classes a game needs, and MMOs have enough problems balancing 10-15 classes as it is, let alone the hundred that WoW would have right now if they added a new one every month. Developing content that fits gracefully into a long-running existing system is a lot more difficult than developing a single chunk of content for a one-off single-player RPG.

Then, of course, you have to consider that your $15 is paying for:

The initial development and expansion pack development (MMOs launch with much more content than a singleplayer RPG), server costs, support personnel costs, and all of the other overhead that comes from running the game on a day-to-day basis.

The summary of my response is that I want my 1/4th of a cost of a full game to give me 1/4th the content of a new game. I don't feel that giving players the equivalent of costly DLC is a reasonable reward.

I understand that these companies have servers to run and upkeep costs. This has been true for nearly all games with an online component. Look at Diablo 2 or Warcraft which get years of patch support long after the games stopped generating the company any significant income.

As a customer I'm not responsible for considering the costs to upkeep a game. I look at my $15.00 dollars and think to myself...I could buy another month subscription in WoW and get 'insert small amount of new content if anything'. Or I can look on Steam/Origin/GoG/PSN/etc and see what that $15.00 will buy me. I don't feel that's an unfair comparison for a consumer to make even though the behind the scene factors aren't as simple as I'm making them out to be.

I'd just like to point out that the nature of this thread was 'What, if anything, would make you pay?'
Clearly subscription models aren't trying to gain me as a customer given my expectations.

 

[snekadid]

I refuse to pay subscriptions, like xbox live, I already bought your game brick, I bought a controller, I bought the game, I pay for the Internet and the electricity it needs, I refuse to pay for a subscription to a shitty network that after paying will still spam me with ads! .....What were we taking about?

O yea, so no, I used to pay a sub for FFXI and WOW and then I realized that I already bought the game, why should I pay a quarter of its cost additionally every month? It makes no logical sense when they add fuck all until the next expansion that I'm expected to pay for in addition to the monthly mugging. I like TSW and I like GW2, B2P... that actually makes sense and if they want you to pay them further... then just need to make something worth buying that doesn't make me feel like I'm being punished if I don't buy it.

TSW does this better then most in my opinion, because pretty much all they sell are clothes.... lots and lots of clothes, and since stat gear doesn't show on your character, I actually want to buy some of those clothes because they look bad ass. Want new content? They sell that too, so instead of paying a sub and waiting and hoping the Wow devs will add something this year, you can pick and choose what mission packs(and they are very good quality stories) you want to actually pay for and which you don't.

 

[ultrabiome]

i think a sliding scale of gametime to cost where a minimum fee of $1/month or something would keep everything unlocked, you'd get a few hours of game time and then maybe $0.5-$1/hour extra until you cap out at $10-15/month (although i'd personally prefer <$10/month) after which you wouldn't have to pay until the next month.

i'm really tempted to try FFIV, but i spent hundreds of dollars on City of Heroes over 7 years, and i really just want to solo most of the time anyway, on my off hours before work and days off. so unless i luck out and get disease that keeps me home for a month... i probably won't invest for the game + sub, even for a few months.

see the big issue is similar to what another poster mentioned. if i have the money, i don't have the time and vice versa. especially with a FT job and a wife who strong dislikes binge gaming.

 

[suitepee7]

i pay because

1) i like blizzard and their games
2) i enjoy playing WoW
3) they do continued work on the game post release (a lot of it)
4) the game takes up enough time to be worth the price in my eyes

 

[Adeptus Aspartem]

subscription makes me feel like i HAVE to play. In f2p games i sometimes spend some money because i like the game.

It's just a diffrent kind of incentive. One has a negative and the other a positive connotation.

 

[Brian Tams]

Nope. I will never again do WoW, nor will I ever again do subscription fees.
15 bucks a month, for twelve months, is $170 total. That's a shit load of money for a single grindy grind video game that takes over your life (in order to even get close to your money's worth, you kinda have to let it). For that price, I could acquire a bunch of games on Steam, GOG, etc.

Not worth it. Nothing will ever make me do subscriptions ever again.

 

[EHKOS]

$5. I really don't care much about new content as I do about keeping the servers running.

 

[TehCookie]

If it was a great game that held my attention and I had ample free-time I'd pay. However being a busy college student and part time worker who has plenty of other games that won't happen. If I only had to pay for how much I played I would do that.

 

[Tsukuyomi]

subscription makes me feel like i HAVE to play. In f2p games i sometimes spend some money because i like the game.

It's just a diffrent kind of incentive. One has a negative and the other a positive connotation.

Good point. Though I think with pre-paid game-cards, that feeling is lessened a bit. Unless I play like...twice out of a two-month period, I don't really consider my money wasted. Had a few times where I was gone for a few weeks towards the end of my time and I just didn't care all that much. I'd gotten my use out of the time, so I wasn't all that fussed about it when I had more pressing matters to attend to.

One question to add on to this entire discussion:

Some people don't wanna pay for anything at all. They'd rather go F2P. Which is fine, and I understand many of the reasons for their choice. But when an F2P game releases content or otherwise does a patch and things go a bit wonky (unintended errors, bugs, etc.), is it really fair to harangue the developer for it?

I mean it's not like you've paid for the game. If you're playing it 100% free, never done microtransactions or anything, do you still have a right to demand, say, Losses Forgiven, or loot from a dungeon that you got disconnected from, or anything else when you're not paying them?

Sure, you're a customer in the sense that you're using their service, but are you really? Typically a customer pays money in exchange for a product or service. Since you paid, it's only fair and right that you get a quality product, especially if the person selling said product has openly stated a commitment to quality.

But if you're not paying...if they're getting no kind of income from you whatsoever....what right do you have to whine at them? I mean at least in a subscription-based model I have a rock to stand on by saying "what does my money each month go to if it's not going to make sure we don't have problems like this?!"

But to pay absolutely nothing, and then demand new content, bug-fixes, server stability, all that good stuff while you put NOTHING into the arrangement but doing what you like to do...well...it...doesn't add up. I normally hate cold-hearted statements but: they're running a business, not a charity. Well, normally they're not running a charity anyway.

Still though, I'm not sure. Is it right to expect good quality and whine and complain about it when you don't get what you want despite the fact that you're not contributing anything to the arrangement in question? Playing for free and never paying a dime is great, but if I do that, do I have a right to complain and throw a fit when something happens that I don't like? I'm not sure...

 

[dfphetteplace]

I don't have to time to dedicate to an MMO. I don't like the idea of paying every month for a game.

 

[BloodSquirrel]

The summary of my response is that I want my 1/4th of a cost of a full game to give me 1/4th the content of a new game. I don't feel that giving players the equivalent of costly DLC is a reasonable reward.

...and why that is absurd was pointed out to you.

I understand that these companies have servers to run and upkeep costs. This has been true for nearly all games with an online component. Look at Diablo 2 or Warcraft which get years of patch support long after the games stopped generating the company any significant income.

Diablo 2 and Warcraft didn't have massive, persistent worlds. They were far simpler games with simple online matchmaking functionality.

As a customer I'm not responsible for considering the costs to upkeep a game. I look at my $15.00 dollars and think to myself...I could buy another month subscription in WoW and get 'insert small amount of new content if anything'. Or I can look on Steam/Origin/GoG/PSN/etc and see what that $15.00 will buy me. I don't feel that's an unfair comparison for a consumer to make even though the behind the scene factors aren't as simple as I'm making them out to be.

I'd just like to point out that the nature of this thread was 'What, if anything, would make you pay?'
Clearly subscription models aren't trying to gain me as a customer given my expectations.

Two things-
1) Like most people who see paying an online subscription as some kind of affront, your thinking is based in fallacy. It shouldn't matter whether a game is actually putting out new content every month- MMOs already have more content than you can experience in one month of play, so unless you've been playing long enough to be able to say that you've actually experienced everything the game has to offered the fact that you aren't getting 10 new hours a content a month is irrelevant.

A rational consideration would be "How much total content am I getting versus how much total money spent?" If you spend $60 on the box, and another $60 in subscription fees over four months, then you should expect to get twice as much content as a $60 single-player game. Even at lauch WoW easily had more content than any four single-player RPGs I could name. By that metric, even without a single bit of content being added after launch, the game is worth the box price plus twelve months of subscription fees.

Of course, how fast you play games factors into this- if it would take you four months to get through an RPG, then an MMO is a bad deal since in four months of playing you'd be paying $60 in subscriptions plus part of the box fee. If you would eat through an RPG a month, then with an MMO you'd only be paying $15 while being able to go through $60 worth of content.

2) If you aren't considering how much it costs to provide you with what you're demanding, while simultaneously making decisions based on ideas of how much something "should" cost instead of whether what you are actually getting for that cost it worth it, you are going to be making suboptimal purchasing decisions.

It's fair to have priorities that make MMOs a bad deal, but "They don't put out 1/4 of a games worth of content every month" is external to those.

 

[kasperbbs]

I don't like that kind of payment model simply because i would feel like i'm wasting my money if i'm not playing it as much as i can and i have other things that i want to do, not to mention work which sometimes consumes even my weekends. If i was paying for ig hours, 15$ for a months worth, even half would be fine, then i would find it more reasonable. Or maybe it's just because i'm poor and i don't feel like paying more than i pay for my internet and phone bills combined every month.

 

[Roxor]

I won't pay a subscription for any game. If I'm going to pay for a game, I want to pay once and get the whole thing in one download.

Yeah, I know updates are largely a given these days, but I prefer to be able to at least theoretically get the whole game up front.

 

[Bellvedere]

No matter what was added, I would probably never pay a monthly subscription fee, because I have the tendency to lose interest and drift away from things easily, for weeks or months at a time. I manage finances badly, so if I started a subscription, I would likely forget about it for a long time and find out after a year away from the game that I've been losing a fair amount of money.

Pretty much the same boat. I never feel like I'm getting good value out of a monthly sub because I want to play/do other stuff for long periods of time but I don't necessarily want no access at all to a sub game. I can also never anticipate when I should unsub. Sometimes stuff is unexpectedly distracting, sometimes I know I'm going to be busy but it occurs over an awkward time in billing periods. It's also hard to call whether it would be better value for money to pick up a longer sub when I have no idea for how long a game will hold my interest.

The prices aren't really all that unreasonable and I appreciate that they have upkeep costs. I just feel guilty about potentially wasting money.

Maybe a more flexible subscription model would help?

 

[scapefly]

well I would pay to get more worlds or features unlocked - thats what a premium account often does so I pretty much have a premium account in every game i play that offers one...
my question is how do you guys pay for these updates / upgrades / online items / whatever? I am trying to figure out what the most diverse payment method is in the gaming world - meaning what method of payment is accepted on most platforms...?

 

[Anthony Corrigan]

it shouldn't be needed. A game should be priced so it makes money and maintains its servers up front. If that means I pay $200 for a game well then that's ok, you price it at $200 and I will make a determination as to whether the game is worth it or not OR you charge only a subscription. If you expect me to buy the game and then pay then get stuffed

 

[Tsukuyomi]

well I would pay to get more worlds or features unlocked - thats what a premium account often does so I pretty much have a premium account in every game i play that offers one...
my question is how do you guys pay for these updates / upgrades / online items / whatever? I am trying to figure out what the most diverse payment method is in the gaming world - meaning what method of payment is accepted on most platforms...?

I suspect the credit card is probably the most accepted over every platform, if I had to guess. Second is probably pre-payment options such as WoW Game-cards, Riot Point cards, Microsoft Point cards, etc. I see tons of them every time I hit a gas-station or Walmart. At Walmart I also see times where the area has been rather ransacked and most of the cards are gone, so at least someone is buying them. Paypal is probably up there too, though I don't know how it works so I can't say.

it shouldn't be needed. A game should be priced so it makes money and maintains its servers up front. If that means I pay $200 for a game well then that's ok, you price it at $200 and I will make a determination as to whether the game is worth it or not OR you charge only a subscription. If you expect me to buy the game and then pay then get stuffed

I understand where you're coming from but I also have a few counter-points...

1: $200 is a pretty hefty price-tag in the world today, and especially in the gaming community. Just look at how many people in this thread alone point out that with their $15 they could buy a ton of things instead of a month of an MMO. The gaming community at large tends to be a frugal lot, and while there's nothing wrong with that, any game developer who isn't totally oblivious likely knows this. Unless they have a 100% top-notch never-going-to-make-anyone-unhappy-ever product I don't think many would market such a price. Collector's Editions go for that much on occasion, yes. But I suspect game developers know that the people who drop that kind of money are the exception over the rule.

2: Granted that is a lot of money up front, and odds are the company would more than break even on the game, but if we're talking about an MMO, one has to consider the lifespan of the game. If content patches and expansions are going to be built and the lifespan of the game is expected to be a decade...well...that money may not be enough. It may certainly last a long time, but bills and employees still need to be paid and typically neither one has a tendency to become cheaper. They may even go a decade or two without charging a dime or needing additional funding, but it seems unlikely that that money would last forever. Most businesses would use the excess to expand their business, not just to keep that game running. Odds are chunks of that money would pay for other games to be launched and maintained. If you end up like Blizzard and have three flagship titles pulling at that money, dunno how long that wad of cash would last.

Like I said, I understand where you're coming from, but I also see some flaws there too.