Would you pay a subscription?

[TheDoctor]

The elder scrolls online is a huge gamble for the investors, apparently it has a eyewatering budget of $300 million!

They are going to need to shift an awful lot of subscriptions with that price tag.

The Old Republic was meant to have cost $100 million and it went free to play before the end of the first year, although I must say BW and EA just didn't get new content out quick enough and so there was a pretty huge tail off in logins six months after launch.

Darkfall is probably not the best game to quote how to make MMOs. It was more entertaining reading about how awful the company was and all the exploits etc than it ever was playing it.

Also it came with EU funding to help the emerging greek computer industry, now greece is in the toliet and I would suspect they would have difficulty getting sufficent funding. But who knows they might find enough cash to get it done.

 

[Davidtq]

The elder scrolls online is a huge gamble for the investors, apparently it has a eyewatering budget of $300 million!

They are going to need to shift an awful lot of subscriptions with that price tag.

The Old Republic was meant to have cost $100 million and it went free to play before the end of the first year, although I must say BW and EA just didn't get new content out quick enough and so there was a pretty huge tail off in logins six months after launch.

Darkfall is probably not the best game to quote how to make MMOs. It was more entertaining reading about how awful the company was and all the exploits etc than it ever was playing it.

Also it came with EU funding to help the emerging greek computer industry, now greece is in the toliet and I would suspect they would have difficulty getting sufficent funding. But who knows they might find enough cash to get it done.

I preordered TOR, But I actually ended up cancelling my preorder after trying out the later beta. I didnt get along with the graphics style, the linearity or the railed feeling to the whole game. There was some interesting cut scenes but overall it did next to nothing for me. Ive tried it again a few times with various free reactivations etc but I can really see that game design rather than funding method was the major issue. Im a sand box player though...

 

[Dusty]

I have in the past but ED business model does not support monthly subscriptions

 

[Memnoch]

I definitely wouldn't pay a subscription. I have paid more for this game than any other, with the possible exception of VBS/VBS2. If there was some kind of premium content down the road that required a subscription I would probably just avoid it I think. It would be the state of future expansions that I would be eyeing and seeing what direction FD was taking the game that would concern me in that instance.

 

[Count Iblis]

I just shelled out $800 as a backer I would rather not pay a subscription.

I remember paying a one time big lump sum fee for Star Trek Online only to watch it become free to play a short time later...

 

[Comandante]

Yes and no...

I'd rather pay nothing.

I'd refuse to pay a massive premium - £8 to £10 per month is what seems a (un)popular subscription; however, I would not be averse to paying a small amount per year that would amount to something like a pound per month - for server costs, spread across thousands of players, seems 'fair' - although life is not necessarily about being fair.

However, ED is for many of us the game of the decade, century and millenium. The merchandise, novels, RPG and many other aspects are really going to help fund ED above and beyond what most other games normally achieve. So hopfeully there will be no server funding/monthly subscriptions.

In the least, in the spirit of democracy and fairness I'd like to think that all funders would NEVER have to pay, and wouldn't mind if the non-funders (that buy the game next March) had to pay a monthly subscription...

 

[Robert Maynard]

No. That is all.