I pay for EVE online, but CCP has many ways to get around it. One is you pay 300 milion in game dollars, which isnt alot for expirenced plays and corporations. Secondly you can give away 21 day trails for a free month. Some people have never payed a dime to play that game. IMO, more companies should do this.

Well, my view on the monthly fee is this: Say you're an xbox 360 player. Those games are $60 a piece. You're probably going to buy a new game every couple of months.

If you look at the math, assuming you buy a new xbox 360 game every 4 months...

$50 a year for xbox live + 3 * $60 per game. = $230 a year.

For WoW:

$37 for WoW Battlechest + $37 for Lich King expansion + $13.50 a month (Based on a 60-day card for $27) = $236 a year.

edit: Then after you buy the games/expansions, it's only $162 a year.

Now me personally, I play Runes of Magic. It's free, and it's good. :hehe:

Big difference. I pay $60, I have it for life. The MMO leaves once I stop paying.

Yes, and every month you get a new game, instead paying for the same game each month.

What's wrong with paying a fraction of the price of the "same game" that you enjoy? :shrug:

Because, I don't know, a monthly fee of 15$ per month amounts to 180$ per year? Isn't that, like, a lot of money for one game, especially considering how people usually play the good games for much longer than just one year?

I pay for RuneScape membership. No regrets here, I love RS membership, so much to do.

Edit: And the game is constantly being updated and improved.

I just dislike the idea of continuously paying to play a game that I've already paid for. I think they should either charge an initial fee for the game, or charge a monthly fee, but not both. I prefer buying a game once and then being able to play it as much as I like without having to pay extra.

Not if you enjoy the game enough. :shrug:

:rolleyes:

Right. :thumbsup:

But with any regular game that you buy, it's entirely run on your computer. With an MMORPG, there are hundreds of servers that are maintained by the company providing the service that you pay for. Surely you can't expect to get away with a mere one-time fee to set up an account AND get eternal access to such a service.

Hey if I can create something and my pawns (customers) will keep feeding me money constantly for this something - I'm a genius. A genius with many pawns.

Seriously though, I wouldn't pay more than $60 even for my favourite game. Games are great, but I've got loads more important and fun things to waste/use my money on.

What? It's true. If I enjoy the game enough to pay 15$ a month for it then it's completely worth it and would not be expensive in my eyes. For example, I played the WoW trial and while I enjoyed it, I didn't enjoy it enough to pay the monthly fee. So if I were to play and pay anyway and after a couple monthsI felt the same as when I played the trial I'd say, "Damn, that was expensive/a waste of money." But let's say that I love the trial, bought the game, and played it for a year. After that year if I were to look back and think about the enjoyment I got from the game I'd think, "For the experience and entertainment I had the monthly fee was worth it."

Why is it that a game like Guild Wars can get away with it then?

Because Guild Wars relies on instances and not a huge seamless world; controlled instances use up a lot less of a servers power than huge, open worlds with tons of players and creatures running around and interacting.

Who cares if it's the same game? All that matters is the hours of content you get out of it.

If you are somebody who is willing to commit time to a single game, why not enjoy it?

Do like lord of the rings online did and offer monthly or a lifetime sub for $150. That way you can try it for a while then get a lifetime if you like it enough. Easy and not all that expensive since you're basically paying that for a year by monthly fees anyway. :shrug:

Plus the devs still make money.

The problem with your view is that you're not looking at how much money you spend on a game all together, you're only looking at how much money you spend at a single given moment. You're saying "15 bucks - that's not a lot!", while in actuality 15$ per month is a lot if you're planning on playing the game in question for a while longer. For example, I bought Morrowind for... I can't recall, but it was at least a normal game price for a change, and have happily played it for the last 8 years. Of course, I haven't played it every single day, but since we're counting months, on most months I've played it for at least a week (although not 24/7), so my estimation is that the months in which I have played Morrowind amount to approx. 5 years, which is 60 months. If I were to play World of Warcraft like that, for those 60 months I would've had to pay 900 [censored]in' dollars!!! And enough with the [censored], no matter how much you "love" a game, you simply wouldn't pay that much for a single game, especially not given the amount of content and game-play in a MMO like WoW.

Except Morrowind never changes with the times. WoW has events, patches, new content, and achievements... stuff is added all the time.

Mods...

Free too.

That doesn't matter, they still charge you an outrageous amount for a game that isn't nearly worth that much annually.

Erm, http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showforum=12

Also, yeah, those events, patches, content, blahs, bullcraps, fishbones and whatnot are really worth those 900$, yeah...

Plus, it's not like there were no patches and official mods for Morrowind, I mean, what's your point?

Compared to other non-essential habits like drinking and smoking, is that really all that much? For the price of a bottle of vodka you get unlimited playtime for a month... and I myself go through considerably more than one bottle of vodka a month. :shrug:

MMOs are like virtual amusemant parks: the developers provide new "rides" to keep the customers coming back for more. You can't really compare them to traditional singleplayer games because they are so much larger (generally) and provide much more content, most of it coming out on a continual basis. And there's the fact that enormous multiplayer capabilities do not come cheap... In a typical singleplayer/multiplayer game you're lucky to play with 30 people, whereas in MMOs it can be in the hundreds. You get what you pay for - like they say, "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it."

I've put in well over 1200 hours into WoW. Looking at my payment history, I've payed $300 not including the actual games. Compare that to paying $60 for GTAIV and only playing for 2 hours. Sure, I can go play GTAIV whenever I want to, but I'm not going to ever again.

Very few games have given me as many hours of enjoyment per dollar than WoW.

So MMOs are just another addiction and a bad habit? Fair enough.