[MUD-Dev] Will players pay for public services?

[Johan]

ceo <ceo at grexengine.com> wrote:
> Tom Hunter wrote:
>> ceo at grexengine.com wrote:

>> games fit here) then it enlarges your market by letting people
>> with very little money buy your game.  In a country like the USA
>> where the average income is over $30,000 a year your not adding
>> that many people to your potential market at $5 because just
>> about everyone can pay much more than that.  If you were selling
>> the game in China where the average income is in the hundreds of
>> dollars this strategy might make lots of sense.

>> The Same For Less is just one of the potentail offers you can
>> make.  There is also More For More.  Pay me $25 a month and you
>> get access to unique content.  Or pay me $49.99 once and you get
>> the latest

> Incidentally, I've been guesstimating for years that $25-$35/month
> was a likely long term average/target for the high dev-cost
> subs-based online (RPG) games. It shouldn't take the publishers
> too long to realise they can market these things as "a new game
> every month". There is likely to be a discount compared to a
> standard retail game simply because a new retail game is "more
> different" and so the easiest way to market these "game per month"
> subscriptions is as "almost a game per month - not so uniquely
> new, but with other benefits instead (like persistent monotonic
> character/status improvement)"

"$25-35/month?" and market as "almost a new game every month?" To me
there is not a single MMORPG that does such huge improvements every
month they could make this claim (unless it's right after launch
since most MMORPG's ship in beta stage). At best there is new
content added every few months. Most of the time there are just
normal bug fixes or balancing issues, things that "should" never
have been there to start with. If there are big changes, they are
released as expansion packs anyway. Some companies do it excessively
and just browse some forums about peoples opinions on such companies
and tactics are.

So, if an MMORPG fails to cover it's huge development costs within a
reasonable time it's not the players fault and they should not be
"punished" with such high monthly fee's. It is however the
developer’s fault for making an uninteresting product that fails to
deliver long-term entertainment.

-- Johan
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