The Daily Grind: Is $15 a good fee for your MMO subscription?

This is a great topic, there are so many different players and I don't think there is any one right answer. I like the Anarchy Online model (the game is somewhat dated, but bare with me).

It's free to play the basic version, if you like it (but not love it) there is a $5.00 month upgrade-and that gets you the first expansion; and if you like that you can get ALL the expansions for $20.

To top off the deal, you can pay for a whole (12 months) year for under $100.

To me, this is smartest subscription model I've seen. I'm surprised there aren't more companies experimenting away from the standard $15/month deal. Competitive pricing is a win for everyone, frankly.

I don't mind paying $15 a month but I would like to see monthly reports from the company stating what the fee's we pay are going towards since they seem to vary between companies/games. Eve charges $15 a month, yet you get free expansions, where as EQ2, WOW, and others charge the same fee yet we have to pay for expansions. Some others, Planetside comes to mind, where folks have paid $15 for a long while and haven't seen a expansion for years.

I think that $15 a month (US dollars) is a very reasonable price for what you get. I think it's a good deal. However, for me a monthly fee is a problematic investment inl leisure time fun - I play so intermittently that I end up paying not to play!

Guild Wars works better for me, no monthly subscription, and I love the game. I also paid for a lifetime subscription to LOTRO, so I don't pay a monthly fee - the opportunity came up, and I decided to risk it. Now, if you calculate how many months I could have gotten if I just paid the LOTRO monthly fee - maybe it's not such a great deal - but it feels good not to pay a monthly fee, and it's better for my monthy budget.

I don't play MMOs that much (don't play any game that much), but I'm still curious. I'm trying out a couple of other MMOs, slowly, but I'm doing the gamecard thing - not committing to a monthly fee.

If the Dev keep improving the game, and adding free content I don't mind the 15$ a month. I know it also helps pay for the expansions. Yes I know WoW charges like 50$ for their expansions, but most companies dont.

It's far too expensive, especially in today's economy. I know publishes are fond of comparing it to the price of movies, but that comparison doesn't really work. They're two completely different experiences.

I think $5 - $10 would be much more reasonable and would attract enough extra business to where they'd end up making more money that way. But, as I said, especially in today's economy, $15 is just too much and is unreasonable.

I wonder how a scheme such as (using WoW as an example) ...

$5/month -- Unlimited play for original WoW
$10/month -- Unlimited play for original WoW/Burning Crusade
$15/month -- Unlimited play for original WoW/Burning Crusade/WotLK

... might work?

A graded scheme like this might address a couple of issues:

(1) casual players (who are generally lower level anyway) would be more likely to subscribe at $5 or $10/month and

(2) this kind of scheme might help to "repopulate" the lower areas of the game world.

I refuse to add another monthly bill to my current stack.

I've been a Guild Wars player from the very beginning for this exact reason (among others). As busy as I am, it's not unusual for me to not log in to GW for a month (or two). If I was playing WoW, I'd be out $15 for every month I didn't get a chance to play. And then, I'd feel like I had to play X hours per month to get my money's worth. I hate feeling like I'm forced to play a game.

So far the roughly $15 (less with multi-month pre-payments) seems to be about right. I've been playing using the yearly cost with City of Heroes since launch. (Hey, I DO like it THAT much.)

But the other games I have paid $14.99 (or whatever) for on a monthly basis has felt right for the price. It's less than the cost of going to a pair of movies. It's about the same as a monthly subscription to Netflix on the 2 film unlimited plan.

I've been trying the Transaction-Based games such as Mabinogi (by Nexon) and Perfect World International. They are not bad games. But they ARE rather deceptive it the way they are presented. I especially felt that way with Mabinogi where the quality content required that you be a subscriber (though that initial content is going free at the same time as the current 'paid' content is being added, and they will continue to do that as time goes by) and you were strongly limited in several ways by being a FREE player. To properly play the game, you really needed to pay.

Perfect World International is slightly less annoying with that. As many of the additions CAN be gotten without doing the Microtransactions. Just it takes a LOT of grinding to do them without it. The Microtransactions make it easier. But even those require that you get far enough in playing the game to make some of those purchasable things useable.

What it comes down to is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. ALL of these people and companies are NOT going to provide all this FREE. They want you to pay for it somehow. And paying something like $15 a month to play a game that can sort of become an additional life in and of itself that keeps you entertained... it's CHEAP at the price.

Of course, there's the third model... that used by NCSoft's Guild Wars... make a retail box at regular times with quality content, make it a MMO, and then DON'T charge a monthly fee.

I'm just wondering how long it will be before some MMO maker decides to make a REALLY REALLY fantastic game with LIVE content that changes almost daily with LIVE GM-Driven events remotely along the lines of the book Dream Park but online... and charges a premium price for said content and then DELIVERS. How much would people pay to have a World of Warcraft where you and your group of 20-50 friends can go do an adventure that others are NOT going to play, with unique gear and stuff that can't be gotten on the regular servers...

Oh, wait... Sony tried that with Everquest with that premium server... is that server still going? Is it still charging 2x or 3x the standard monthly price?

And when will someone take the next step in paid content....

I'm on the fence on this one. Considering I played WoW since it first came out (and now WAR), I never got interested in any other game during those 2-3 years. That's saying something about the company and updated content.

However, if you do the math, the gross income is staggering.... $15/month X 11 Million Subscribers X 12 months = $980,000,000 / year for Blizzard for WOW only. Good for them, bad for us.

Responding to something a few of you said...

I've heard the "it's cheaper than a movie" argument before, but I think it's more complicated than that. It might cost $11-12 for just one movie now, but you also get the COMPLETE value of the movie in 2 hours. If you ever get around to doing and seeing everything in an MMO it would have cost you much more.

I'd like them to experiment with competitive pricing. I talked myself into maintaining two $15 a month MMOs, even though I can only play one at a time.

I'm perfectly capable of being conned into paying slightly less for an equivalent MMO (all hail LOTRO's experimentation) and completing an episodic collection over time (hail Guild Wars...) though.

See, it's all about relative worth.

The absolute worth is no big deal if you earn a decent amount of money and aren't in critical debt or a starving college student or something. It's a movie or two a month. *shrugs*

But the relative worth. Ah. There's the crunch. World of Warcraft and Everquest and its ilk have established that a full-fledged game world of a particular size and that much content is 'worth' $15 a month. Niche competitors like CoX and Eve and ATiTD work by being different from the norm, and yet offering enough potential 'look-forward-to-ness' to be equivalent.

I liked Auto Assault. I found Tabula Rasa passable if not spectacular. But you can't tell me with a straight face that both had as much content and potential play experience than any of the above $15 a month contenders. Heck, even Age of Conan probably offers a teensy amount more. Just a bit, even if it's just by number of classes alone.

So by comparison, they aren't worth $15 a month. $5? $10? No problem. A game with a fraction of the world size should be a fraction of the standard price. But a refusal to price the game at what it's worth = eventual death. Big surprise. Not.

If you want to compete, and aren't up to $15 a month quality, then creative pricing is the way to go.

Customers can rationalize and justify a full $15 game and maybe a couple fractional games. But to ask for the near-complete loyalty of $15 a month (from earlier surveys, seemed most pay for one, some two, a few three subscriptions, is it.) is very ambitious.

I think 15$ a month is fine. the thing the pisses me off, is the fact that you pay the money every month for a year and instead of offering constant patches, updates and new content, they charge you for a expansion pack. Which they should have gave you in updates.