StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I was sort of thinking. About two weeks ago, I bought Guild Wars (Sorenson Galatae, if you're interested) and that got me in something of a ponderous mood as I contemplated the idea of not having to pay for your subscription. Now, I know that bandwidth fees and such can get pretty damn expensive, depending on the popularity of the game and such, as well as the system that you use for creating the game environment and such - but could it ever fly with the game companies and the players to set up a system by which players don't have to pay monthly fees?

Figure this: when the next bit MMORPG comes out, the designers and such staff decide that they're not going to charge people for playing the game, but rather that they're going to increase the price about half again or so of the standard. So your standard game, which would be about fifty to sixty bucks, would instead debut at 75 to 90 dollars instead. But once the player makes that initial investment, that's it - there's no monthly fees, there's no premium upgrade package (though expansions and the like would come along, as per the norm) there're no extra items, environments, or adventures that can only be obtained by making a monthly "donation". The player gets the entire deal, and they are free to do as they please within the game. But, again, they must make that larger innitial investment - the normal price would go to covering the costs of development and such, and then the extra would go to covering the charges of servers and such.

Would the MMO gaming community, developer and customer-size alike, ever try and accept such a system, or do the economics of massive online games simply make such a concept impossible?

A system like what you proposed would be very unlikely to succeed. Very.

You are using one generation of players to pay for the previous generation. However, as you add more players, your costs for bandwidth, infrastructure, new content and the like increases. Without month to month billing, you have to estimate the cost per month per player, and then multiply that by the number of months that they will play the game. Most MMOs charge ~$10 per month. Assuming that the average player plays for 6 months, that means that you would have to charge $60 more to cover the costs of the game. Do you know many people who will pay $110 for a computer game that may or may not be sucessful? Since rate of new players is going to decrease, you have sucessively fewer and fewer new payments into the system.

Selling all addon content would only make things worse. Each new expansion is an extra expense for new players, and at the margin is going to reduce the number of new signups, since there will be some people for whom the cost isn't worth it, while at the same time adding more costs in the form of a development team.