The Daily Grind: No beta, no thanks

I was a part of the Champions Online open beta, which I got access to due to pre-ordering the game. I have to admit I had very high hopes for the game but unfortunately it let me down. After experiencing the disappointing beta I decided to cancel my preorder. I wasn't prepared to spend £25 in these times on a game that failed to impress.

I guess I saw the beta as equivalent to a demo of a regular game. I gave it the best possible chance, ignoring comments i'd read by other people and going in which a clear mind.

No, Aleforge is absolutely right. Offering free samples is just good business. It's not a gamble, because you can't possibly lose. If your product is good, you're going to get the people who would buy it no matter what, but you're also going to lure people who are less inclined to part with their money. If your product sucks, though, it's most likely going to fail no matter what you do. That's true in every industry, not just gaming.

You yourself point out, in a roundabout way, that the real problem in the MMO industry isn't with the business models, it's with the products themselves. That's exactly why some of us won't even consider subscribing to a pay-to-play game that doesn't offer at least a free trial. Blizzard didn't come to dominate the MMO market by practicing the dark arts or hiring the mob to rub out competing developers. They did it by being better than everyone else. I'm by no means a believer in the power of the free market to solve all of humanity's problems, but when it comes to basic determinations about product quality in a single-subject marketplace, you can't really argue with results.

Actually Warhammer has addons as well. Same LUA language as WoW.

I do with more games would use it but I'm pretty sure addons aren't what killed/saved Warhammer.

I don't know which games you mean about the mail thing but I'd like to point out that for at least a year now in WoW there's the functionality to send more then one item to other players through the mail.

Just sounds lazy when people say, "I wish I could pick up more then one item to put in the mail," when all it takes is right clicking on your items with your mail frame open (at least in WoW), its simply easier then dragging and dropping. If you can simply right click X amount of items there's a problem.

As for other companies subscription models, you don't seem to know much about how competition works. These companies are scrapping for our dollars the best they can in a world dominated by WoW. Lifetime subscriptions, cheaper fee's, free trials and any thing in between are mostly the only thing people see before they really decide to try a game. Money, in most cases, dictates all when it comes to user base, these companies know that, and so do we. We don't jump head first into buying any thing without researching the hell out of it or trying it out first, or both! If you don't then your either rich or nuts. We should be so lucky that these companies let us do that for however long they give us. If they make a crap game at least they're giving us a way to find that out for ourselves, if they fail after that is none of our business.

And seriously one persons taste will be different from another, those people will buy while others wont, its how consumerism works.. Take a FPS RPG from around 2000ish called Neocron. I bought it and played it with a friend for a little while based on his recommendation that he loved it, we had similar tastes so i thought I'd like to too. Well turns out that I couldn't enjoy it with how much of a bug-fest the game was and one day when my faction changed for completely no reason to an enemy one when I was standing in, at the time before the change, a friendly place I decided to call it quits completely.. Yeah I lost about $50 or more, and it sucks to think I did, but if the business models then were how they are now I would have just taken a free trial, seen it was crap and told my friend I'd see him somewhere else.

Also, as a sidenote to some other comments I'm seeing, people need to realize that sometimes the companies themselves aren't creating the hype people see. They'll send screen shots, or send a link to their games site to places like Massively, or others, and they'll write what they think of it. That creates hype. Writers getting to play a game hands on and writing about it causes hype. Other players word of mouth causes hype. Sometimes, like the current case it seems with Champions, developers are completely unaware of how well received their games will be. If people will just read comments made by developers like "We didn't realize the community would respond so well.." you'd see it, it's all right there in front of our eyes.