Why I think the subscription model will be good. : Othor Games

» Sun Aug 25, 2013 2:10 pm

At quakecon Eso announced their payment model, a subscription fee of $15 a month and a free month when you first buy the game I Thought this was a terrible idea and then I started to do research and Think on it for a little so here is my opinion.

I have noticed of lot of people have been comparing Eso to Star Wars And I think it is not a fair comparison, I had two Points to verify that.

Point 1: The companies
Star Wars the Old Republic was made by barware right And Elder scrolls online is made by
ZeniMax ( Sorry if I did not spell that right ) If you look at the two companies barware has no experience with mmo Or I never seen them make one, Zenimax Is a new company But all of their Employees mmo experience in their background And most of them know what they are doing.

Point 2: I do not mean to be mean to Star Wars but it is a wow clone with voice acting But ESO is not A wow Clone with voice acting, It is a new idea for MMO, From the questing system to the combat it screams new, And I am not going by what they told us I actually have play experience and it is new for a mmo.
Okay I wanted to get that out of the way. Back to my opinion, I was against the idea in the first place But like I said before I did some research and thought on it a bit and I think it's best for the game. Elder scrolls is all about freedom and what you doing how you do it It's F2P or B2P They will have to monetize you for Pacific content so they can make money and make More content, So you Will end up the same amount of money to play the game anyways, And to be honest I would rather pay $15 a month for the whole game and then Every Zone dungeon etc, having to Pull out money from a credit card to get The content.

Okay now let's talk about consuls.

Okay you buy the game For $60 and a new PlayStation or Xbox for $400,I do not see you zenimax, Sony, or Microsoft make it where you have to have PlayStation plus or Xbox live to play Eso It will be asserted if they did, And since the memos are coming to consoles now I think Sony and Microsoft kind of want that So they can make more money for Consul sales, so why in the world will they make you pay extra to play these games. It will make the player just buy it on PC if they have to pay extra on Consol. So I'm not worried about it.

Well this is my opinion so like to hear Your opinion
And sorry if my spelling is not completely correct.

» Sun Aug 25, 2013 5:08 pm

good insight, I agree with you http://www.gamesas.com/user/918442-j2d210/

» Mon Aug 26, 2013 1:03 am

Only thing I really disagree with is I don't think SWTOR was a WoW clone. SWTOR was a linear on the rails MMO masquerading as a WoW clone, but in truth it had about 1/5th the freedom of WoW.

But yes, P2P was a great decision by ZOS.

» Sun Aug 25, 2013 8:37 pm

-Bioware Hired experienced MMO developers to work on SWTOR as well, plus Mythic worked on it as well.

-only a few B2P games, and none of them charge you for content like zones, dungeons, quests, ect, just bag/bank space, character slots. The only real difference I see between P2P and B2P, is whether you want to do a one time fee for Bag/Banks space and character slots, or pay $15 every month to have access to the bank/bank space and have access to your characters.

» Sun Aug 25, 2013 10:16 pm

Bioware also went cheap for the gameplay and licensed the game engine (and not a very good licensed engine at that). Mythic was rolled in to Bioware Austin in 2009, so where SW:TOR is concerned, they were the same company. By nearly every account I've seen, they blatantly ignored beta feedback. Veteran team, rookie mistakes.

I'm an alt junky, and a bit of a pack rat. My upfront cost to play how I enjoy in a B2P game is pretty hefty. To use http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gem_Store as an example, it's $10 for each additional character slot (I prefer to have at least 8--GW2 gives 5 base, so there's 3 I need to buy), $5 for each bag slot (it says characters can have 8 bags, and they start with 5), and $7.50 for each bank slot (they give one, and you can purchase up to 7 more). So, I'm looking at $60 retail, $30 for character slots, $45-90 to get my desired bag space (some character slots are for trying out different things, and won't get bags, as I'll delete and remake in those slots), and $52.50 for full bank space (I'm assuming the bank upgrade is account wide and that all characters on a server share the same bank, as with GW1). So...just over $180 (minimum) for me to play GW2. Sure, I can come back any time, but my personal experience with the original GW1 (bought it at launch, did everything in the game that I cared to do within a month) says that I'm paying 3 times the box cost for a game I'll only enjoy once in a while.

» Sun Aug 25, 2013 4:00 pm

I'm like you being an Alt junky, and spent some big money in the first couple of months, though I didn't buy any extra bag space because the game makes it so easy to clear up space no matter where you are since you can instantly send all crafting materials to your bank, and instantly sell items on the auction house no matter where you were at, and with people being every where to sell stuff to, I hardly ever filled up my bags which had a total of 100 slots. So i spent $60 for game, $30 on character slots, and $52.50 on bank space, so $142.50 total since the game released, that comes to an equivalent of $11.88 per month.

IMO, ESO would more then likely do better as a B2P model (ala Guild Wars 2) then as a P2P model. My fear is that eventually they will go to F2P and will end up making it annoying, where as B2P (GW2 style) isn't annoying at all.

» Mon Aug 26, 2013 12:45 am

So in the first year, you've saved about $4 over a subscription (and so long as you don't buy more, it averages out to less and less each month). My primary concern with B2P for an MMORPG is that GW2 hasn't been around long enough to prove that the model has longevity after the retail sales are gone (the big spenders that the industry coins "whales" aside). Year one is the big year. How will the game be doing in year 3? Year 5? Since they've http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/07/03/guild-wars-2-might-never-have-an-expansion/, how long can they keep up with updates every two weeks?

ESO as B2P would almost certainly do better in box sales, but more users also means higher costs to keep the game up and running (the two biggest non-development expenses are bandwidth and paying your customer service employees, and more people playing pretty much automatically means paying for more of both). It's a crazy balancing act.