I have yet to try a subscription model MMORPG. Imho, if they charge monthly, the game should be free…if they charge for the game, online play should be free.
Besides WoW, has any game manufacturer created a game worth the subscription fee?
Well, you can play Guild Wars on the model you seem to want. You pay for the game (and you pay for each expansion), and then the game is free of subscription from then on (until the next expansion comes out).
I’d say whether it’s worth it or not is going to be up to whether you THINK it’s worth it…i.e. whether you enjoy the game and the game environment enough to pay the subscription fee. Personally, I don’t think MMORPGs are worth the fee, but then, I don’t think that Guild Wars is worth the non-fee either. Of course, I’m pretty much done with MMORPGs, and wouldn’t play WoW if it were free to play, despite having several high level characters in my now defunct account. I just don’t enjoy them any more.
Someone who does enjoy that type of game is going to have a completely different take on whether it’s worth it or not, however.
-XT
I’ve played several different subscription-fee MMOs (EQ1, CoH, WAR, AoC, WoW) and it’s always been worth it to me. A lot cheaper than buying new computer games every time you finish the old one, at least if you have as much free time as I do. When you are playing 20-30 hours a week, the cost per hour is minimal. And in the other hand if you don’t have much time to play MMOs aren’t that great a choice to begin with.
I actually have known quite a few really poor people who didn’t have much money to use for a hobby but who subscribed to MMOs because as far as entertainment goes, it’s very cheap per hour.
If you wait a few months, most MMORPGs will eventually offer a free trial. The trials usually let you start subscribing without buying the retail box.
A growing number of MMOs are also going free-to-play and make money buy selling you optional things for real cash. The optional things make play easier/less tedious, but they are still optional.
Only you can say whether you’ll like a particular title, so download the trials and decide for yourself. I’ve probably played some 30 MMOs, but of those, only 2-3 lasted longer than a month. The great majority of them follow the same model; kill, quest, gain exp, rinse, repeat. If you don’t enjoy the grind, most MMORPGs will bore you.
Some do offer unique spins on the formula:
*Eve Online is mostly about political intrigue and giant corporations run by real players.
*Second Life has a world built by its players and ties its in-game currency with real-world money.
*Warhammer Online and Dark Age of Camelot emphasize realm-vs-realm, player-vs-player combat over fighting NPCs.
*Planetside is a first-person shooter first and RPG second.
*Guild Wars and Dungeons & Dragons Online emphasize small-party instanced play, mostly ignoring the “massively multiplayer” part of MMORPG
*EverQuest 2 has a crafting system that’s a game unto itself
*ProgressQuest is the only one that won’t kill your social life and suck away your soul. It’s also free to play.
APB is requires you to both pay for the game and subscribe. If it survives, I’m sure it will become a free to play game. It’s frustrating because the game is crazy fun, but RTW does its best to screw it up. I’m hoping someone buys it from RTW and fixes it.
Oh don’t even go there. APB had a flawed launch, but the recent patches have made long strides in making the game more viable, with more on the way. It’s only the people who think MMO development cycles should run in hours rather than the weeks they really do who think RTW’s screwing the pooch.
Anyway, APB offers a subscription payment model, but it’s not the only option. They also offer a per-hour model where $7 gets you 20 hours of game time. Very nice if you’re a casual player.
Personally I think subscription is very much worth it if the game is good. I agree that it seems like double dipping to make you buy the game up front before charging you per month, but they do have to recoup initial development costs as quickly as they can, with subscription revenue going toward continued development and support. As the game matures, the initial cost of the game usually drops substantially, often costing only $20 after a while. Given that typical practice is to include a free month of gameplay with the purchase, a $10-15 value for most games, that’s not a bad deal.
EVE is essentially free to play, free updates, monthly fee–you get a 14-day free trial, then you pay $15 for the game and get your first month free.
If you like political intrigue and vaguely RTS-style combat mechanics, it’s a pretty good game. I mean, I enjoy it, and there are a lot of dopers who can get you into anything in the game you find interesting (I’m the mercenary PvP-for-pay one :D).
It’s not really RTW’s fault that people seem singularly unwilling to give the game a chance to stretch.
Last I knew, EVE also let you pay the subscription fee with in-game currency. So once you are up and running you can play-to-pay.
If you want to get away from the Sword and sorcery genre, City of Heroes/Villians is a very good and thriving game universe based on superheros. Start Trek Online was pretty good, but suffers from repetative mission-itis.
I think if you design and launch a game that results in your company going bankrupt, it’s safe to say there was a problem with your business model. Blaming the consumers doesn’t put money in anyone’s bank account.
APB is a fun game, but it only sold about 10,000 copies. It cost about $50 and you had to pay a subscription or hourly fee (you did get 50 hours free). I think it is smarter for a publisher to get a game in as many hands as possible (maybe free to DL, or very cheap to buy) and then hook them once you got them playing.
Luckily it doesn’t work the other way around. A player recently lost $1295 real-world dollars worth of EVE game time in a pirate attack, the equivalent of 6+ years.
Then again, if you play MMOs the way most people do, you pretty much ARE paying to throw your life away…
I more meant the reviewers, who set unreasonable expectations that everyone seemed to fall in lockstep with. But I’ve been reading the accounts, and it does look like RTW badly mishandled things before the game ever got out the door.
That was just someone being a colossal idiot, since the in-game items representing game time can be bought from almost anywhere and used from literally anywhere.
Never put more into a ship that you can’t afford to lose.
True, but Guild Wars is pretty much dead at this point. There has been no new campaigns or expansions released since August of 2007. There has been some content added but it nothing that brings in new players. The game is getting little support as Guild Wars 2 (which will also be free on-line) is in development.
Now, Guild Wars is just long time players maxing titles getting ready for GW2. I wouldn’t recommend it for a new player.
And that’s the thing… if publishers only make money from the initial sale, what incentive do they have for improving the game afterward? Every additional month they even keep the servers alive is just a drain on their resources.
Also, the way the game is designed (you can only go on missions with a small group of up to 6 people, and your group exists in its own “instanced” world during that time) means that the “MMO” part is sorely missing. It’s more like Diablo with a 3D chat lobby. This in turn means that it’s harder to socialize, or feel attached to the game world, or craft, or any of dozen other things that keep players involved in a MMO to build community.
For-pay games like EverQuest, on the other hand, have been alive for more than a decade and are still releasing expansions and features, despite the simultaneous existence of EverQuest 2 and a hundred other competitors.
I didn’t know that Guild Wars was basically dead…I haven’t played it since I bought the game on release and played here and there until the first expansion, which is when I dropped it.
-XT
Well, I like City of Heroes and it’s subscription based. Besides the obvious stuff like bugfixing and keeping the servers running, the subscription fee pays for the regular infusions of new content we get every few months. I recall a discussion like this on the CoH boards a while back, and one point that was made that stuck in my head was that subscriptions give the playerbase leverage. It puts them in a position of being able to implicitly or out loud demand constant improvement to the game, or they’ll leave. If you just pay up front though they’ve got your money already and you have no leverage.
There are still maybe somewhere between 1-2 million players still. However, that is a long way down from the 6-7 million players at its peak. The problem is no new content means no new players and loss of older players.
Like I said, the majority of players still around are waiting for GW2, because there will be benefits from titles earned in GW in GW2. I still don’t know how it will work since GW2 is supposed to be set a couple hundred years after GW.