[MUD-Dev] Star Wars Galaxies: 1 character per server

[Scott A. Farley]

On Saturday, December 14, 2002 3:27 PM  Marc Fielding
<fielding at computer.org> wrote:

> The regular monthly fee covers servers, storage, bandwidth,
> customer service (CS), further development, advertising, etc.  My
> proposed monthly fee per additional character would cover the
> resulting increased storage and CS costs indicated by Raph. I'm
> doubtful that the cost of a *single* additional character per
> server equates to a full monthly fee.  To the uninformed, that
> looks like a cash grab. There are more elegant ways of covering
> your expenses and maintaining your margins than requiring
> customers to get completely new accounts.

What about the *advantages* of two or more accounts? Players with
multiple accounts and multiple boxes has reached epidemic
proportions based on my own experience and anecdotal evidence. With
two concurrent accounts, players can (i) trade between accounts,
(ii) play both simultaneously (iii) have a ready account for family
or friends to play. The current Star Wars Galaxies design is going
to push many players into buying multiple accounts, just to overcome
the limitation of a single character per server. Why not try to
bring players using two or more accounts back into the game design?
The cost for multiple accounts is both the retail box and the
monthly subscription. Instead of playing for additional characters
on a server, allow the retail account key be used to play for
additional accounts on the same credit card. Players have an
incentive to 'join' multiple accounts together, since they don't
have to play for more then one retail box. The developers can design
around joined accounts and prevent the worst abuses.

Players who would have purchased multiple retail boxes and played
multiple accounts are encouraged to instead purchase a joined
account. Players who wish to have more then one character can
purchase additional accounts. From a revenue standpoint, the number
of players who agree to pay additional monthly fees (move up from a
single character to a joined account) has to exceed the loss of
revenue from retail box sales and full price monthly subscriptions.

I expect the analysis would show it to be an equivalent revenue
stream, although it may be true that only *huge* titles could afford
the hit to their retail box sales.

SAF




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