Ask a Dork: MMO Payment Models
âWhat is your stance on MMO-entry. Should the base game be free to download/acquire with a monthly fee or does it still need an entry price? How should people pay, monthly or per hour?â
Wow. Came off my hiatus to a doozy of a question. I guess I canât just say âdifferent strokes for different folks,â can I? Hereâs the thing: most people posed with this question will instantly say that they want a free-to-play game with no initial game purpose. After all, no commitment is the best commitment. However, this mob mentality is exactly why subscription models, providing theyâre accompanied with decent content, work.
To pose an example, when Star Trek Online was first released for the PC it required initial purchase and a monthly subscription. At the time, in-game purchases were few and servers werenât too bogged down by players. Unfortunately, the game also didnât have a ton of content and wasnât exceptionally profitable. Thatâs when something magical happened: Star Trek Online went free-to-play. When I was talking to Cryptic Studios CEO Jack Emmert at Pax East this year, he told me that Star Trek Onlineâs player population increased exponentially almost overnight. An MMO that had begun to stagnate suddenly was booming again, and with added digital content it had generated a solid revenue stream.
Thatâs all well and good if you want to play with clustered servers and somewhat noncommittal gamers, but it doesnât work if youâre like me. Personally, I donât mind paying a monthly fee if the people I get to play with are super into the game and the content itself feels worth it. To provide another example, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn costs $39.99 up front and roughly $15 each month thereafter. I donât mind paying because thatâs what a lot of my MMO friends will be playing in the near future and I dig Final Fantasy anyway. Also, it really helps that the people playing now are all very much into Final Fantasy XIV and servers wonât be so sluggish in the long run.
So yeah, as much as I appreciate the Guild Wars model of âbuy once upfront and never again,â I canât say Iâm against buying once and paying a fee. If the experience justifies the cost, I say you take it unless money is a huge issue or you arenât really into the game.