Price of MMO's in this day and age

I have been giving a lot of thought to this, and I think that an MMO coming out in this age competing with WOW as the biggest one in North America is kind of insane. Sure everyone of them will try and sell you that they are "different" from WOW, but who are they kidding? They are all trying to copy what WOW has done, and take some of the numbers. With the SWOTR going free-to-play in the fall, they could have maybe made a viable run for WOW if it was not priced at the same point. See in my opinion if SWOTR came out with an online monthly fee of $5 they might have been able to keep a lot of their base. I kept hearing about people playing the first month for free, and leaving because they "experienced" everything in the game. They did one class, and call that done. I think if they had a $5 dollar price point for the monthly users people would have not been so fast to cancel their accounts, and waited it out.

Now I understand there is argument that money made from this is not enough to keep the employees, and servers, and whatever maintenance needs be done, or to creat new content. I call "bulls**t". Teams are moved to other projects, and the teams are reduced after the game comes out. There are still a good amount of employees working on that project for new content, and what-not, but it is smaller. Also when you sell almost 2 million copies in the first week at a price point of $50, with the sign up of $5 a month you will keep a lot more people's subscription to the game. They will not jump ship after that free month. $5 is almost nothing in this day and age, and if you have the 2 million subscribers stay on for a few months after the game launches you are making money.

I understand that the company is in it for the bottom dollar only, and that if it is not raking in money hand over fist they will drop the game faster than I could have typed this little blog. Greed runs the world, and that will not change until people really start to take a stand. I would love to see these viable games comtinue to thrive in this time, and not go free-to-play. I hate this model, and we all know it is a death-sentence for the game. It's possible that the game might become viable, but the updates, and whatever will not appear as frequent, and will eventually stop sooner, than later.

For $5 dollars a month I would stay with the game happily providing my money to them, even if I only login for about 2-3 hours a week. Or even 5 hours a month. It almost becomes worth it. For the people out there that frequent these games $15 dollars is too much for them to stay with it, if they only get a couple hours a week to game, or like I said 5 hours a month.

Free-to-play is good, but money made from this model is not going to keep the game afloat, and it is already sinking hard into the waste of games that could not make it out there.

I have been giving a lot of thought to this, and I think that an MMO coming out in this age competing with WOW as the biggest one in North America is kind of insane. Sure everyone of them will try and sell you that they are "different" from WOW, but who are they kidding? They are all trying to copy what WOW has done, and take some of the numbers. With the SWOTR going free-to-play in the fall, they could have maybe made a viable run for WOW if it was not priced at the same point. See in my opinion if SWOTR came out with an online monthly fee of $5 they might have been able to keep a lot of their base. I kept hearing about people playing the first month for free, and leaving because they "experienced" everything in the game. They did one class, and call that done. I think if they had a $5 dollar price point for the monthly users people would have not been so fast to cancel their accounts, and waited it out.

Now I understand there is argument that money made from this is not enough to keep the employees, and servers, and whatever maintenance needs be done, or to creat new content. I call "bulls**t". Teams are moved to other projects, and the teams are reduced after the game comes out. There are still a good amount of employees working on that project for new content, and what-not, but it is smaller. Also when you sell almost 2 million copies in the first week at a price point of $50, with the sign up of $5 a month you will keep a lot more people's subscription to the game. They will not jump ship after that free month. $5 is almost nothing in this day and age, and if you have the 2 million subscribers stay on for a few months after the game launches you are making money.

I understand that the company is in it for the bottom dollar only, and that if it is not raking in money hand over fist they will drop the game faster than I could have typed this little blog. Greed runs the world, and that will not change until people really start to take a stand. I would love to see these viable games comtinue to thrive in this time, and not go free-to-play. I hate this model, and we all know it is a death-sentence for the game. It's possible that the game might become viable, but the updates, and whatever will not appear as frequent, and will eventually stop sooner, than later.

For $5 dollars a month I would stay with the game happily providing my money to them, even if I only login for about 2-3 hours a week. Or even 5 hours a month. It almost becomes worth it. For the people out there that frequent these games $15 dollars is too much for them to stay with it, if they only get a couple hours a week to game, or like I said 5 hours a month.

Free-to-play is good, but money made from this model is not going to keep the game afloat, and it is already sinking hard into the waste of games that could not make it out there.

I have thought about this as well, and IMO MMOs should lower the purchasing cost of the game itself and keep the 15$ a month (first month free).

However, I stopped playing ToR mainly because I lost interest. At the time I was going through a transition in computers so I had to stop playing for awhile and really just never found a reason to go back. When I reflect on ToRs gameplay I just didn't find it very interesting. Not that it does anything drastically different (beyond making story more important to the game), but now a days I'm kind of feeling like that's the real problem. The old MMO model was tolerable because the idea of playing in this world with so many other people and therefore being in a virtual environment weas appealing. ToR lacks that feel, and not just because I'm getting old and cynical. The Maps are small, there is barriers everywhere (which I understand why they did it but it's such a terrible design decision), and a lot of the quests for leveling feel really unappealing.

It also didn't help, for the hardcore players, that the end game was bugged to hell and a lot of stuff just didn't work correctly at end game (I don't know if they've fixed that or not- by now, probably).

As I get older though, my time is more important then cost sometimes, and in terms of MMOs I often just feel like I'm paying and not really having any fun anymore. The Secret World seems to do some interesting things, but I still am not entirely sure it is enough. I feel like I may even be at the point with that game as well, although I really like the puzzles and they were smart. They added story elements but there is no barriers. It feels much more like an open world. To be fair, though, they do have a problem with the cross zone loads. Seems like streaming the entire zone would have been much more modern, but the zones are so big I haven't felt that to be quite as distracting.