Gangrel_EU

Part of that is also due to the online gaming community growing at a stupidly large rate as well. Back in the early to mid 2000's there were *not* all that many people who had PC that were online *and* good enough to game with *and* had the spare money to pay a subscription fee.

Hell, I remember going over to friends houses just to check websites, because they were "rich enough" to be online. And even though I had a laptop when I lived at home, I didn't have the internet.

That has changed obviously, where if you *dont* have the internet you are viewed in a very different light.

As an idea, for the games like City of Heroes in terms of pricing structure (ie subscription and F2P setup), they are all pretty much the same, especially if you go from the US$ account side (there are differences for EU/UK account holders on occasion, even when the US$ is the same, dont expect the EU/UK people to pay the same across the games).

I think that you when you look *across* several genres of games, then yes, paying a subscription fee is a premium.

However, if you look at it from just within the MMO setup, $15 is the going rate.

Now for a *single* account, would you be prepared to spend $20/$25/$30 a month when other games are charging less?

Even if it is a niche title, there is only so far you can drive the price up before you just start pricing people out of playing the game, even if it is free to obtain.

I do feel that Buy to Play (Guild Wars model) or F2P/Hybrid is the way forward for the industry, but I also feel that lowering the "typical" subscription fee for games that choose to be subscription only is another avenue for publishers/developers to look at.

I think it is wortwhile pointing out that if those games released *now* in their current state, I don't think they would necessarily be as successful though... I know that graphics are not everything, but considering that graphical fidelity has improved exponentially over the past decade, it is one thing that can put a lot of players off, especially if you are expecting players to pay "industry" prices.

However, those older MMO's do have the current advantage of a player base that has stuck with them over several years, and are there because there are things about the game that they like and cannot find elsewhere.

Kinda like City of Heroes for a long time actually.

But releasing those games *in their current* state as a brand new title nowadays? Big risk to be honest.

Agreed.. then again I am a Jim Steinman fan anywaysB

There is a risk behind it by going for a rate that is *higher* than the "industry", unless it is something where you are operating at the *very high* end of stuff, where practically everything can be viewed as "niche".

Raise your hands if you would have been willing to play a *brand new* MMO that cost you $25/month?

Now, if you are in the niche that the MMO is designed for, you could well stump the money... especially if it is perfect for you.

However, the fact that the sub price is $10 more than the typical MMO price, can and does scare of the "passer by"... the one who is not so sure about it.

They could well take the risk and see if they like it... or they could just walk on by and see what else is out there for a price that they like.

I spoke to a friend of mine around the time of TSW launch, and I pointed out that TSW in the EU is the most expensive MMO out there for subscription fees.

It is more expensive than WoW, DDO, LORTRO, CoX, Tabula Rassa, Warhammer Online subscriptions.

Champions ONline is more expensive than those games

Eve Online is more expensive than those games

The Secret World is *even more* expensive. Sure, it might only be rougly 30% more expensive than the WoW/CoX sub rate, but that is a premium that appears to have backfired amongst my friends.

They all wanted to play it, but the fact that the sub fee (and that you had to buy the game in the 1st place) was far higher than other MMO's out there put them off from the game.

So niche does have it problems, and you cannot just charge more to make it stay afloat. Niche means that you might have to swallow your pride and charge *less* than the competition and grow from there.... which was the conclusion that me and my friend came to, especialy for MMO's, why don;t you release a game with a lower subscription fee than the others.

This does happen, and they are *typically* for the "kid MMO's" out there (Clone Wars for example i believe is $5.99/month or something like that).

Wouldn't it be interesting to see a *brand new* MMO release with a lower than $15/month subscription fee and it *was* a niche title?

From Birmingham, which granted I managed to escape from. It is the black hole of the UK... stuff goes in and rarely comes out (apart from Aliens).

Well I'm buggered then... seeing as it appears I am the resident Englishman on the forums right now.

You be suprised....

Try being disabled in the UK right now when the press (owned by Americans) are vilifying you as "benefit scrounging scum" and disabled people are getting assaulted and nothing being done. Even worse, is that a US company is behind the scenes pulling the strings to influence government policy.

And then there is the case when a UK comedian made a (in my own opinion) non humerous joke about disabled people.

Strangely enough there was more of an uproar over the comedians non joke, then the actual harm that is being done to disabled people.

How do I know this? Because I care for a disabled person and have experienced it 1st hand.

It is in the "Current position/Update thread" IIRC (although that is on page 2 of the Titan Boards)

Agreed, they are both similar and different at the same time.... mainly because the PLEX has the added bonus of being able to be used for subscriptions (or account activations!)

Not so sure... when I unlocked mine it was after completing Act 1, which is *around* level 30ish. I think I was actually level 32 or something when i got round to completing Act 1.

Actually it was "Garriott took them to court, Garriott Won. NCsoft appealed, lost the appeal".

They never counter sued from what I can tell on the interwebz.

I also forgot to mention the "Legacy powers" that you can get and those will take up room on your bars as well (if you choose to have them there).

Depends on how you define it...

NC NorCal was set up at the time of CoX purchase from Cryptic (so late 2007). This was later renamed to Paragon Studios in April 2009.

So between 3 and 5 years, depends on which side you want to take.

<edit>
The pets window/vehicle window are seperate to the "tool bars" that you can pay to unlock. Some people like having htem on the trays, others like having them just in the powers window.
</edit>

Returning player here, and yes, I have quite a few pets... 10 or so. And then there are the 6 speeders that I have (although I can and will buy more).

Abilities wise, I actually have no problem with, it is just that with clickables, "dueling" powers (kick/punch etc), relic clickables and consumables, you can quite easily start running out of space.

It is just bar management in the end, one that I have no problems with overall, especially as I have clicked med packs/stims etc from my inventory before. I do the same in WoW... keep one sort on the bar, and the rest in the inventory before I can use it.

Which is slightly different to CoX though, in that you cannot activate powers from your "powers window" and it has to be from the tray (or at least I have never managed to activate it via a click in the powers window)

I personally prefer the Muta scale...

Looking at the market (I just loaded the game up now), it is just to unlock the "legacy perk", so that you can use them *earlier* on, but there is no actual mount ability to unlock (nor sprint ability either).

Just wondering, but i am assuming that for the skill bar unlock, you still have your default 2 to begin with?

Side note: Looking at the prices overall, they are *not* all that bad... especially as 450 Cartel points is £2.99 and most stuff comes in under that price. And as you can use stuff directly from your power window/inventory window anyways, the quick bar is a "bonus" in a fashion (I have often used consumables from my inventory window directly). I do feel a bit gipped over it, as I actually dont have enough room for all my mini pets and vehicles...

Personally I would give that edge to LOTRO or DDO, where you can also earn the market currency ingame....

There is more than likely a method to do it, and if that were the case, then it could quite possibly mean that all NCsoft games were actually making a profit when they were closed down. However, i feel that this isn't necessarily the case.

The way in which it *could* happen, is that Paragon Studios actually pay nothing out themselves, and that it is NCsoft who end up footing all of the bills directly (although all expenses get marked against the store). It happened to me enough in retail (it wasn't my store that paid my wages, it was the wages department).

However, and this is where my retail point of view kicks in, each store *still* had those wages "marked against" them as an expense, for working out how profitable a store is. Even though each store effectively had a "blank check" to run with for wages, and everything else... it made it interesting to see which stores were the most profitable.... and they were not the stores with the most number of employees or the largest sales (it was normally the mid sized store with 5-8 employees).

I still hate that method though of accounting, because in my mind it is deceptive, and it can make stores overspend without realizing it, as their "outgoings" are zero on the shop store level, which the general punter is not aware of... (especially when they have their shop floor rent increased, and due to a lack of "increase of sales" it got closed down, and this was one of the most profitable stores in our area before the rent increase).

It all depends on what point of view you take. Internally you show a profit (money coming in because you do not actually have any direct expenses), but from the outside, you show a different figure (people not knowing that you don't pay the bills yourself, work out a different figure, which could well be a loss).

However, it does give the impression that Paragon Studios had to beg and scrape for every single penny though to justify their existence.

Anyways, yes, there is a way to do it, but the problem is that it requires the support of another financial side to do it. Without that financial side, who knows how profitable it actually would be...

And I will admit that I was closed off to this side of thinking, because it goes counter to how a lot of people would think, unless you are an accountant (boring people that they are, I have met enough in my lifetime already).

*shrugs*

Color me annoyed, confused and hating accountants/taxes and everything else to do with them because a loss might not always be a loss, it is just how you show it (and a profit might not always be a profit either, it all depends as to how you show the working out, and what you choose to miss out on)

Indeed. If anything it is a *logical* extension of their stall thing. Am I correct in thinking that they didn't have a "Auction house" style of selling stuff, and that this was the closest to it?

Think of this like in Aion or Lineage 2, or any game where you could set up a *stall* for players to look at and buy, and not "sending stuff to an offline person".

It just allows you to set it up so that when you are offline, you can still trade/peddle your wares.

Yep, I had to google it up, but this isnt just "throw stuff up on the market and leave it be". You can choose for your character to stay in game and do it...

Just to point out that as far as I am aware, the GM's for City of Heroes are paid for by NCsoft because they don't just cover CoX, but also the rest of NCsoft stable of games.

I think that this where the stigma kicks in about F2P.

Swapping from subscription only over to F2P/Hybrid can be seen as a sign that the ship is sinking. And for most people they treat it as such.

It happened to City of Heroes, it has happened to SWTOR. As to how accurate they are, that is open to debate.

There are other companies who have indeed succesfully managed to make the conversion over. Granted, they are from Turbine (DDO and LORTO). DDO infact was very successful in conversion apparently increasing by over 1000%. But unfortunately, without knowing as to how much money that title was bringing in, 1000% increase could just be from $10K/month to $110K/month.

That is not to say that games that *release* as B2P (Guild Wars/Guild Wars 2 for example), or F2P cannot be succesful.

It is that they chose their bed from the outset and work for that alone.

Now, you say about the number of subscribers...

Using the financial reports that NCsoft provide us, for Q3 2011 (Just as the game hit Freedom mode) City of Heroes made (using a rough 1000KWon to the $ conversion ratio), the game made about $2.8millon, about the same as it made in Q2 2011 incase you are wondering.

Actually, we can use Q2 2011 to better show the figures here, because in this case there was *no* Freedom option. It was "subscribe or not play".

$2.8million/3 = $933,333 (ish) per month.

$933,333/$15 = 62,222 players roughly.

But this is where the game had no other subscription options. You could subscribe for a longer period of time and get a discount, so that means that the shooting range for the number of players *at that point in time* was roughly 60-70K players.

However, since then, and indeed after the introduction of the Hybrid model, the money didn't increase, and infact decreased (with the notable exception of Q4 2011, which I would have expected anways, as people load up on points).

Now comes the interesting part.

The figures for CoX in Q1 and Q2 2012 are around the same as before introduction of Freedom.

What does this mean?

Well, we know that people have been buying stuff off the Paragon Market. How much, who knows. But for every single person who buys Paragon Points, it decreases the number of potential susbcribers. Now remember, we have never really contested using the "subscribers Via NCsoft financial" calculation in the past, especially once NCsoft stopped reporting them directly.

So by using the same argument, the fact that people *could* play the game without spending any money, and that subscribers could and did buy points for their accounts, the total number of susbcribers has *had* to have decreased.

If you say "The number of subscribers is the same pre Freedom as post Freedom" the only thing that we (as a player base) can say then is "well that means that freedom was a failure and no one bought points".

But we know that not to be true though. There are several people on the boards who have spent *hundreds* of dollars above and beyond their normal sub free since freedom launched. And in this case, it doesn't take all that many people to increase their spending to actually decrease the number of "paying customers".

Using my calculation above, and just increasing the spend from $15/month to $20/month means that the number of players paying *on average* that amount goes from roughly 62,000 players to just 46700 (ish) players. A drop of almost 16,000.

Now, there are figures that NCsoft have never released to us.

The total number of active accounts nor the average spend of an active account (although the 2nd could be derived from knowing the 1st).

So whilst overall Freedom *worked* it didn't actually improve their average spend per customer. It decreased it (assuming that the player base increased).

Or the average spend *did* increase (in which case, the player base shrank).

Which side is more likely?

*edit* I would like to point out that I view a subscriber as someone who has a VIP account (so $15/month spend). When I mention player base, I am lumping together VIP and free players into the same group.