An Ongoing Tribute to my own lameness.....
General random thoughts about gaming, both within and outside of the MMO genre.

After reading an in depth article about the state of the video gaming industry over at Firing Squad, I've come to a realization. I'm contributing to the death of the industry. All this time I thought I was just being a wise consumer of media..... Alas, I was (and still am) killing the thing I love.

You see, there are certain rules that I follow so as to get the most out of the gaming dollars that I spend. Every one of these rules is damaging to the industry in one way or another.

1. I never purchase at launch - This mostly applies to consoles and MMORPGs. In the case of consoles, the price will probably go down in a year or two and by then I'll be able to browse the game library to see if it's worth my time. The Wii and the DS were exceptions to this rule since they were both cheap enough that it didn't really matter. With MMORPGs, I want a trial. I don't want to pay for the trial. I require seven to fourteen days to decide if I want to invest any more money in the game. Most MMORPGs don't offer trials until after the first year.
2. I buy used or off the bargain rack - In the rare event that I actually BUY a game, I go out of my way to not pay more than $20 or $30. This is actually pretty easy with console games since used games can go for as low as $5. PC games can't be resold due to CD-keys, so I generally wait until a game drops to around $30 or lower. I would be really pissed if I spent $50 on Battlefield 2 at it's release plus $30 for the Special Forces expansion ($80 total), only to then walk into Best Buy and see the BF2 Deluxe Edition for $28. If a game is really any good, there will still be people playing it once the price drops.
3. I rent console games - I have an account with Gamefly that costs $23 a month. If I rent a new RPG that takes between 40 and 80 hours to complete and play an average of two and a half hours a night, I can beat it before the month is up and spend less than half what it would cost to buy the game off the shelf. I can also pay $6 at the local BlokHussle Video to keep any game for seven days which is more than enough time to beat most action games in single player mode.
4. I usually don't play any MMORPG for longer than three months - The last MMORPG that I actually laid down money for was City of Heroes, just before the release of City of Villains. I played the two week trial, bought the box ($20 at the time) and bought a two month card ($30). I got one month with the box so I played for about three and a half months total. This was long enough for me to level a character to the cap and get bored with the game. Of the other MMORPGs that I subscribed to (Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, and Anarchy Online), none lasted more than three months or cost me more than $60 total.

I thought about throwing in the fact that a play a lot of freeware games like Neverball, Vega Strike and Cave Story, but I'm not sure if that can technically considered directly damaging to the game industry.

If you're scratching your head at this point, let me explain. The gaming industry has only one means of income: retail sales. Used games don't send a dime to the publishers or the developers. As far as my research has been able to find, game rental outfits only pay for the games themselves and don't dish out royalties to the original publishers or developers. Read the above Firing Squad article to find out why paying less than $50 dollars can cause even a good game to lose money. That also goes for console sales since the PS3 is losing about $300 per unit sold and the Xbox 360 is losing around $125 on every unit sold. On the up side, the Wii is making Nintendo $50 on every unit sold ;-P

Swinging this back around to MMORPGs, the overhead of keeping them running requires not only a set number of subscribers, but a set amount of cash per subscriber. The added strain of those free trials doesn't come cheap. Korean MMOs go by a different model that requires an average of about $60 per player across a population of millions. Western MMOs couldn't survive with the kind of turnover that would bring with the subscription model.

In the end, the system is way broken. The "solution" to this problem seems to be digital distribution, but that will simply push people like me to the fringes of gaming if not to piracy or simply quiting the hobby altogether. Personally, I think it's time that the publishers and developers got back to basics with smaller development teams, more tightly focused game design, shorter games, basically just scale everything back to an almost arcade level. Games that are cheaper to develop and distribute may actually lead to an industry where the profit margins don't sink five or six development houses a year. Imagine that! A world with decent profit margins <cue the relaxing music and cloud montage>