Are we renting our MMOs?

If they're going to strip away more of our rights to ownership, then honestly I don't believe they should be selling these games for $50 at retail. Lower the price if all we're doing is renting it monthly to begin with.

My thoughts? You spelled Duel wrong.

Also, I agree with Tony.

Dropping the price on the retail sale would be OK for WoW, LotRO or WAR, where they're doing financially pretty well thanks to subscriptions. But other games which offered the client for free and relied ONLY on subs probably need that initial cash influx to make the jump from development to live.

Even so, there is SOMETHING evil in charging retail prices for something that, should the parent company get hit by a bus and take the servers down (Shdowrun comes to mind), we're TOTALLY unable to use the product we've paid for. At least in the case of Hellgate:London, there's still a single player game, and even though publishers don't like it, the whole community server community is something that should be provisioned for as a gesture of "good will" should anything happen to the hosting company at some point. I don't expect that to happen, though...ever.

More like a lease. A bigger down payment and then a monthly payment.

It is a bit like renting. If they ever abandon their servers, you can't play anything. You will still own a shiny coaster for your Jolt cola.

MMOGs subscriptions are usually $15 / month with an initial box MSRP for around $50 but that comes with 1 free month. What if the retail game remained the same price but came with 3 free months or $30 with 2 free months?

What about the MMOs you don't have to pay anything for? Say Maple Story. Not a huge MMO, but they have boasted about 5k people a server before and they have about half as many servers as WoW does. Just throwing in something to ponder about. ;)

And yes, you have to pay if you want special items, but it's all Eye Candy items, the rest can be bought with in-game-cash.

The 'Cable TV' comparison strikes me as the most accurate.

Personally, I like the "peristence" of online games. With single player games, once you play through the story, the game is over. If you decide you want to play it again, you'll be playing the same game all over again. Not to mention, there is no sense of "community" that you get with MMOs

The majority of single player games, have very low replayability. MMOs have persistent worlds, which constantly evolve and change, even without your involvement.

However, I think that game companies should provide either one of these two models.

1). (Guild Wars Model) Release the initial game in retail stores at a certain price, at release expansions at least once per year (perhaps 2 depending on their size and development in time and cost) at the same price each.

2). (Eve-Online Model) Release the game digitally and make it available for download, but charge a monthly fee for each account. Expansions are free, and included at no extra charge. (Eve usually release 2 per year.)

Releasing the box at $50, and then charging a monthly fee is just being greedy in my opinion, Both Eve and Guild Wars do wonderfully with their models, and with much less subscriber base than WOW. Based upon that, I feel that game companies can implement this, and consumers would applaud them for it.