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World War II Online FAQ: Pricing
This is an UNOFFICIAL set
of Frequently Asked Questions about the price and costs associated with
WW2Online. It is by NO MEANS connected with Playnet Inc. or Cornered Rat
Software.
I've
heard there's going to be a monthly charge for this game, is that true?
The only official announcement
from Playnet, Inc. or Cornered Rat Software
regarding price has been this:
There has been no pricing
figure announced or otherwise released by
Playnet, Inc. or Cornered Rat Software.All
threads relating to the subject are pure speculation on behalf of the
posters concerned.
With that said, WW2Online
will be a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG)
and SPECULATION has
been that the price of the game will include store bought
software in the range of $25-$50 and a monthly fee of around $10-$30 (all
figures in U.S. Dollars).
How sure are you there's going to be a monthly
charge?
Pretty sure. Make that,
damn sure with a bullet. (Disclaimer, bullets don't necessarily make
an argument more sure, they simply end them.)
How much will the monthly charge be?
As stated before, there
has NEVER been an official statement about pricing but all the big MMOG
games are monthly fee pay-to-play, most being $10. Asherons Call, EverQuest,
Fighter Ace, Air Warrior are all $10, WarBirds is $25, and the most expensive
is Aces High at $30. So we can speculate that it will be somewhere in
the neighborhood of $10-$30.
There have been hints that it will be on the low side of that figure,
between $10 and $20, but again, there's never been anything official.
At $10 a month, it works out to $60 every six months. On average, a hard
core gamer buys 1 game every 2 months, at an average of $50 per game,
that's $300 a year. It is estimated it will cost you $50 to buy the WW2Online
Software and if we estimate on the high side of the predicted subscription
price ($20 month), it will cost roughly $230 to play WW2Online for a year.
Also of note, MMOG's tend
to have a much longer replay period than the average online game. Everquest
recently celebrated its 2nd year anniversary in operation and there ARE
players who've been playing from the beginning.
Will
there be a charge for the Open Beta?
More than likely, there
will NOT be a charge for the Open Beta. There has been no indication from
Playnet, Inc. or Cornered Rat Software that there will be any sort of
a charge for the Open Beta. It is not customary for companies to charge
for Beta testing software, though it has been known to happen in rare
cases.
I don't understand, I play Half Life, Tribes,
Quake and Star Craft online, and I'm not charged a monthly fee. What's
the difference?
There is a substantial
difference between the costs of maintaining multiplayer games like Half
Life, Quake, Star Craft, Unreal, Myth, Diablo, Delta Force etc. Essentially
what those games do is provide you with limited dedicated server space
with built in matchmaking software to help you find other players who
are playing at the same time. The servers and bandwidth required to host
matchmaking multiplayer games like those mentioned above are miniscule
compared to the pipes and machines required to host MMOG's like Everquest,
Asheron's Call and WW2Online..
Can't they ditch the monthly fee and just have
pop up ads or something?
From the Star Wars Galaxies
forum:
In a nutshell, ads
don't make money for hardly anyone anywhere on the Internet. Countless
businesses have crashed and burned over the last few years discovering
that. Pretty much all those matchmaking services I mentioned relied
on ads, and well, they're not here anymore.
It takes a very large,
very high traffic site to make serious money on ads.
And the costs I described are serious money.
-Raph Koster
Creative Director, Star Wars: Galaxies
Star
Wars: Galaxies - Forum Post on Pay to Play
He's correct, as this latest
Internet crash has shown, even internet companies that charge for services
are having revenue problems (Amazon, eBay, eToys, etc.) If an online business
relies solely on advertising revenue, they'd better have a user base of
around 10 million people and up to make it profitable and survive.
Lending additional weight
to this argument was the recent decision by Combatsim.com to start charging
a monthly subscription fee. According to the site's founder:
We have a whoppingly-huge,
monstrous, bandwidth bill each and every month. I'm not talking a few
hundred dollars here, I'm talking high 4 figures and the current state
of affairs in Internet advertising combined with the dot com business
carnage of late, I suspect that in order to survive, many other popular
content sites are going to have to go to a subscription model or close
their doors.
Future
of Combatsim.com
Now, he's just talking
about CONTENT sites, the bandwidth that his site consumes is miniscule
compared to the bandwidth a MMOG uses.
For a detailed explanation
of how advertising works for websites, check out this article on How
Things Work by SimHQ President Dan "Crash" Crenshaw.
I refuse to pay $10-$35 a month to play an online
game. What do you say to that?
Well, if you refuse to
pay, you won't play. Simple as that. MMOG's like Everquest, Ultima, and
WW2Online are SERVICES. Just like Cable, Digital Satellite, or Cellular
systems. You buy the product (Cable Box, Satellite Dish, Cell Phone, Software)
then you pay a monthly fee for the content and services that they provide
THRU that product. The CONTENT of WW2Online is the persistant world of
the proposed theaters (Blitzkrieg, China-Burma-India, North Africa, Pacific,
etc.) and the MASSIVE number of players who will populate those theaters
(1000 players max is a far more than the 32 max in one arena I've seen
for games like Diablo, Half Life and Quake, etc.)
The price that they ultimately
decide to charge is going to be whatever it
needs to be in order for Playnet to:
- Recoup developement
costs
- Cover operating expenses
(including continuing developement)
- Make enough of a profit
to build a "war chest" to cover the costs of developing
future products
- Pay back their investors.
IF, they charge more than
the "market" is willing to pay, they will have to charge less,
if they have to charge less than they need to cover Costs 1 & 2, they
will go out of business and we can all go back to buying PRODUCTS like
UT and Quake or watching reruns of "Suicide Missions" on the
History Channel.
What are these "developement costs"
you speak of?
Developement. This
is, literally, millions of dollars. Figure
a largish team (larger than is common for a standalone game) for longer
than a standard standalone game development cycle. On top of that, some
of the people on the team that you have to assemble are rare in the
games industry--DBAs and fault-tolerant network designers and mission
critical system administrators. (Us designers usually come a bit cheaper.)
Deploying the servers.
This can also be millions of dollars, believe it or not. For one thing,
the boxes needed tend to be pricier than the kind you probably have
at home, because you want lots of redundancy, the ability to hot-swap
parts out, all that jazz. You're writing to disk constantly, you need
a hefty RAID array, tape backups, etc.
-Raph Koster
Creative Director, Star Wars: Galaxies
Star
Wars: Galaxies - Forum Post on Pay to Play
How
much could it cost to set up a few servers and a decent internet connection?
Assuming you live
in the US, you are likely paying someone around $20 for the privilege
of tying up some wires or phone lines and using up some bandwidth. In
normal usage, you're not using it all that much--odds are that even
if you have a cable modem or ISDN, that you're not doing bandwidth-intensive
stuff all the time. In fact, if you DO have cable, I suggest you go
check right now and see that your user agreement probably PROHIBITS
you from doing bandwidth intensive things all the time. In my rea, my
cable provider says "you can't run a dedicated FPS server on your
cable modem," for example.
That's what you get
for 20 bucks.
Playing an MMO is probably
one of the most bandwidth intensive things you do on a regular basis.
It's like downloading a large file, the entire time that you are playing.
The key here is that the bandwidth is *sustained* bandwidth, not "bursty"
the way that most things you do on he Net are, like web browsing. ISPs
don't like sustained bandwidth, because it means they can support fewer
people. They rely on the burstiness to squeeze more people onto the
limited capacity of the wires.
Why does this matter
to us? Well, simple logic. Let's say that you at your end are using
1k of bandwidth every second while playing our game. That means that
we at our end are lso using 1k a second receiving what you are doing
and sending back what you see. But for you, that's $20 nd you're worried
about one guy. For us, it's a lot less than $20 a head, but we have
to pay for the bandwidth usage of EVERYONE playing the game.
-Raph Koster
Creative Director, Star Wars: Galaxies
Star
Wars: Galaxies - Forum Post on Pay to Play
For any other questions
about WW2Online, refer to the WW2Online
HQ FAQ or the WW2Online
Official FAQ.
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Thanks to Der Tuefel
for putting this information together!
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