No.

I can play ESO whenever I want as well.

Sounds more like you have a problem with the payment plan.

Yes. That is exactly why.

Yes it being an MMO means its not just another game. Its a Premium Service you have to pay to access. Not sure whats not to understand about different types of games having different sets of rules.

Perhaps. But there's no need for it to be, and it's not quite to the point where every multi-platform game is the same price for the PC and console versions. It also may be a question of retailer or distributor markup to prevent different versions of the game from "undercutting" one another.

Yes. Because an MMO is NOT a single player game. You're comparing dogs and cats--Sure, they share plenty of similarities, but no one familiar with both is going to confuse one for the other.

You're projecting your own feelings onto the rest of us. I've played many an MMO, including many sub based ones, and i've never seen people complain that they felt "ripped off". All people ever complain about is whether the game is good or not. If the game is good, people are happy to pay whatever they need to in order to play the game. If the game is bad, they quit. It's really quite simple.

Also if you want to be taken seriously, maybe tone down the rhetoric. Saying "this is greed in it's purest form" immediately makes me dismiss what you are saying because it's an absurd statement.

Have you ever actually played an MMO? Trying to compare them financially to single player games is ridiculous. Completely different concepts and economic models.

As the poster you quouted said. MMO's are an ever changing world. Skyrim is not. The servers have to be paid for, we are going to have customer support to pay for and you are going to want new content updates which also need to be paid for. New content from Skyrim, which is either player made and often but not always svcks or is released as an expansion pack that you have to pay for, is easier to make due to being a single player game. If you look at Call of Duty, they develop the single player game, which people play through in a weekend or so, then their online multiplayer stuff. Their online stuff is nothing more than a battleground, or warzone, that is loaded and played in for 10-15 minutes. After that it is back to the main menu. In an MMO, you never go back to the main menu unless you are initially logging in or changing characters.

It may be, but there's also the fact that you can go back to those other games whenever you want without any extra charge. Once I've left a game, a monthly sub is often a minor barrier of re-entry for me personally - not because I can't afford it, but because I often find I can get just as enjoyable an experience with an "old" title for free. I could re-sub, or I could go back to, say, "Mount & Blade" or one of the KOTOR games and still have a blast.

And clearly there's no shortage of F2P and B2P MMOs out there. Quality varies, naturally, and many partake in dirty little tricks to make money, but there are titles that can still keep me entertained for a while.

It's interesting to see this whole thing seemingly come first-circle. Back in the day, I wondered why a friend of mine would pay the cost of a magazine subscription to keep playing a game he'd already paid for (EQ), as did most of my buddies. Most of us had since gotten bit by the MMO bug and happily paid subs for years, but with F2P, B2P, and the generally poor quality of MMOs compared to single-player titles, I find the question I asked 13 years ago is once again relevant.

Good post OP, you explained it a little bit better then I could have. I don't know if I necessarily agree that monthly subscription is better. Personally I would love for this to be at $5 a month and possibly a lower price of $30-40 if they choose the subscription route and having the installer. I don't think they'll make the installer free, that's a dream that won't happen. Personally I would like this game to be a combination of B2P/F2P with a trial period up to level 5 like the OP said and then you pay the installer and get the rest of the game.

The adoption rates for this will be low because it's not a F2P/B2P game and the public perception is not good. If you don't have good adoption rates well it kinda falls apart. TESO right now has a huge mountain to climb and I'm seeing it left and right that people won't try this if it isn't F2P/B2P. Now I'm not a fan of F2P because it leads to nickel and diming. B2P is a little bit better and as long as it isn't P2W, it works. Time will tell if ESO will be successful, if we base it off of recent history, it's going to be a trainwreak.

Then I don't see a problem.

Sounds like a plan.

And the answer is pretty clear. You pay for what you want to play. If you want to go play a F2P game, you are free to do so. If you want to play ESO, you pay what they ask.

Options are wonderful.

You realize buying the game comes with a free month, effectively meaning the "box" price is $45. That's not far from your range, what's so terrible about it?

And thankfully ZOS is smart enough to not rely solely on "recent history". People that do that are usually the ones that fail at business. It's much more complicated than all you people seem to think.

The recent history being SWTOR? I do agree that SWTOR was a huge letdown but they did prove one thing... that people are willing to pay $15 a month for a game that they hope is awesome. SWTOR sold how many copies, like 1.7 million? That is a pretty big success for launch day. To bad the game was not good enough to hold them as subs though. If people are going to pay they are going to vote with their wallets by walking away or continue paying if they like it. In the case of SWTOR... people walked away... or ran, depending on how you want to look at it.

Would love a link to this "cash shop" information the op mentioned. Please?

It's nothing set in stone, just a rumor, but seeing how many MMOs use these features now, it's probably not too unreasonable to think that at least eventually this may be implemented. No official word from the devs though. "Seek and ye shall find" I suppose; I've seen a cash shop being mentioned and discussed on quite a few forums and I remember seeing an anolysis on Gamespot that said the game will most likely contain microtransactions & a cash shop system, although this anolysis also stated that this would be a part of the game being made f2p. I edited my original post to specify that it's only a rumor for now.

Scratch that, someone just posted this. Cash shop confirmed. http://esohub.de/news/154-eso-interview-abomodell-itemshop-entwicklung

I am 99.9% sure there would only be vanity shops, not cash shops.

It is set in stone, there is going to be a cash shop with "services and fun items" http://esohub.de/news/154-eso-interview-abomodell-itemshop-entwicklung about 30 seconds in is where he talks about it.

Yep, just saw your thread. Thanks for posting this info.

haha, it wasn't my thread, and I didn't even know it was there till now

You're paying for the box, the disc(s), and anything else they include in the box (for standard versions this usually means a game manual, for collectors editions quite a bit more).

Of course, I'm not saying that the disc, box, and game manual arent terribly overpriced - they're only charging 60$ for it because that's the standard going price for 'new' games. I think the real issue is that the 60$ average game price came about from single player games where no online fees are used, and the industry mistakingly went by the same pricing guidelines for subscription fee MMO's.

Cash shop... So, they decided to double-dip their players. Bad, bad business. I don't care if it's a sparkly party hat that no one would ever want to wear. It should be in the game, not a separate shop for even more money.

My comment below is:

Who cares?

Can't be everything everyone wants it to be, it's time to deal with it. It's the way it is

Yeah, but that kind of nonsense is there in every game, sub or not. So long as they keep it to goofy bits that don't affect the actual gameplay, it's no big deal.

It's in a lot of games because the players allow it to be. If players would take a stand and not endorse the double-dipping, the company wouldn't do it. No profit, no point in wasting resources on it.

I know this might meet some criticism, but take the words with a grain of salt.

ESO is a service, and yes you pay monthly to utilize said service. Why do you have to pay for the game assets and installers? ZOS has put in thousands of hours and millions of dollars into the development into this product. It is still a product that ZOS needs to see an immediate return on in order for this project to see fruition. That's why you pay initially.

Besides, do you also argue installation costs for cable as well? It's the same thing, it's a service you pay monthly for, but it still requires an immediate investment to offset the cost of production, materials, and employee wages.

Man, typing all this on a little iPhone svcks

I would argue it's all exploitation, or cable at least, but that's only my opinion.

Well, I'm going to just respond to that with this. I don't have cable. I use Netflix. No upfront costs. It even has a free trial. In a way, Netflix is like that ideal system I mentioned in my original post.