The Price to Play

Massive online games have really come into their own as a genre. We are in the middle of a boom in new game production, though we have yet to see how many of the boom time games are able to support themselves over the long term. Much of what I wrote in the State of the Game series of articles is being overturned. While innovations in play style, theme and content create new and interesting experiences, innovations in business model and payment structure cause us to question how we relate to the genre as a whole. Today we take a look at the payment structures for three different online games, two of which are online now and one of which will be entering Beta soon. Their unique payment plans present interesting alternatives to the traditional buy the game and then pay $12.95 a month plan popularized by Everquest et. al.

Disclaimer: Properly reviewing a MMORPG takes a sizeable time investment. While I have played two of the three games discussed herein for the double-digit hours required for basic familiarity, by no means do I have the double-digit days required for extensive knowledge of either. (I have, of course, no time with The Chronicle, given its' pre-release status.) As this game is primarily concerned with the economic implications of business structures, limited experience should not be an obstacle. However, readers are advised to take comments regarding interface, playability, etc. with a grain of salt.

Guild Wars is the flagship game for alternate payment plans. Having been on retail shelves since April,, Guild Wars remains free to play after the initial purchase. While their stated intent is to maintain revenue through continually releasing "Chapters," the first nine months have shown no retail level expansions, only content drops through patching. (Guild Wars claims not to have patching. It does. The patching, here called updating, is done in the background during play rather than up front through a different application. Time will tell which version delivers superior interface quality.) To match the revenue stream of a traditionally structured MMORPG, Arena Net would have to produce one chapter approximately ever four months. As they have shown no sign of doing so, we must conclude that they are working with less revenue/user and thus have fewer resources to throw into development/support, etc. Guild Wars focus on pvp content in the endgame will help to abate this somewhat. First, PVP content requires less investment. Because of the evolving nature of competition in a complex environment, players will in some sense create new challenges from one another with only a baseline level of tuning required on the part of the game's creators. Secondly, competitive players are extremely motivated to buy expansions. Despite the ridiculous claims of the Guild Wars FAQ that you can still compete with players who own more chapters than you, if a new chapter has any options that are better than, or even as good as, existent options, every player wishing to remain competitive has to rush out and buy it immediately, lest they fall behind. Hopefully, this competitive player base will be enough to provide Guild Wars with the income potential it needs on the long term, as its' success will be a big step toward validating the possibility of payment structures beyond simple subscription.
Flyff is another game without a monthly fee. Flyff takes the free plan a step further by providing its client software for download. (Try it. You can download the game, patch it and be playing in a couple hours without investment.) The only revenue generated by Flyff's owner/maintainers comes in the form of sales of items from a "premium store" stocked with in game merchandise (and, to a lesser degree, sales of residual real world merchandise.) This premium store model, while an interesting way to allow the hardcore to support the game for the general player base, is not going to support the level of income necessitated by corporate underwriters. This is fine, of course, because Flyff is clearly a labor of love and not intended as a massive moneymaker. The game shows much more coding genius than it does commercial polish and is exceedingly light in the showing new players around department and while it will never be the next big thing it will very likely last until progressing technology erodes the influx of new players.

The Chronicle is a monthly subscription game by MMOCenter.com. While you do pay a monthly fee to play, you pay for an account that expands across all current and future MMOCenter games. They are presenting the transaction as buying a service rather than a product. While this has interesting implications for ownership of your characters and their items, they are no larger than those presented by online games in general. Interested readers are encouraged to take a look around MMOCenter's site. Their plans are ambitious and if they manage to pull together even some of what they suggest, their games will be well worth the larger than normal ($20) monthly fee, particularly given the rather generous preorder offer. It seems that the monthly fee being spread across games will cause lessened development on a per game basis, but we must wait and see whether this results in an increase or decrease in overall play quality.

These three are far from the only games proposing to roll over the basic one game one month one free structure. When making your mmorpg decision, stop and think about what you pay, what you get, and what they claim. All three have to line up to make the experience worth your while.