Developers Corner

I have a billing idea: instead of paying 15 a month, and not even playing the entire time, why not maybe... 75 cents a day you log in? Log in once on a day, pay 75 cents, play the rest of the day knowing it's paid for. Next day: pay 75 cents, ect. ect. You can pay $75.00 and have 100 days paid for, but only when you use them so you dont have to keep typing in all that billing junk. You play for 5 days straight, you get billed for $3.75. You decide to take a break (after all, MMOs are kinda exhausting and boring after burning out on it) for say... a week or two. You come back, and you still have 95 days paid for and I'd still get some money to maintain the servers and update the game. The monthly fee always gave me the feeling of "I gotta get this done.. NOW!!" so I'd rush through the game in a month and end up hating it, because it was just a huge grind, being pushed up hill by the daunting memory of that $15.00 chunk in your banking account... and what might happen if you dont "win" the game in that month... .

Of course that was a HUGE exaggeration . If you like, hate, or couldn't care less about this idea, any input is good.

I think this could be an interesting idea to be dug. I mean, obviously not everyone plays the same game 365 days a year, so you can't expect them to PAY this game for the same amount of time. Let's make it like, pay for the time you spend in? make it on a hourly basis, and you'll find that possibly, you'll make some added benefit.

Let me get this straight. Making it 0.75$ a day of game is amounting to 22.5$ a month on 30 days months. If you asked your average gamer if he would pay that amount for a month of game, he would probably answer no. But if you let him do it on his own, he may even think its a bargain price. Same thing for a hourly rate. Let's say your average gamer plays 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, so that makes it 20 hours a week, and approximately 80 hours a month. Decide that you want your average gamer to pay, say, 12$ a month, in order to cut in. That gives you a hourly rate of 15 cents!! 15 cents to play a MMORPG Wow! this is a revolution blablabla, consumerist advertisment argumentary...

But what you should consider doing this is your lower gamer, who will play, say, 8 hours a week on your game, and will have to pay about 4 bucks a month, and that will make a good publicity. Plus the fact that your HARDCORE gamer, which playes approximately 8 hours a day, 30 days a month, will pay 36$ per month!! He will KNOW he can stop anytime he wants, because in his logging page, he will se the extent of his bill. he will KNOW he should not log in, and still won't care, because it's so cheap. until it becomes more than twice the price of other games. At that point, either he says he is stupid for overdoing it, and keeps coming back, hoping against hope that he can beat himself to it, and keep his money in his pocket, which he won't, or he can come to these forums and say how crappy and damn expansive this game is, and will be told off by less addicted gamers, who will be so happy to be able to pay 4 bucks a month for a MMORPG. Until they become addicted and start spending more.

So you should think a little bit about it. Maybe your maximum billing should be limited to 20$. Or maybe your hourly rate should be higher, in order to maintain the maintenance costs. Or maybe your playerbase is just not sufficent to apply this payment system to. It all amounts to calculation. Wishful thinking is NOT a solution. You should KNOW who are your players adn apply this system when you'll know for sure that they'll keep coming, no matter what, and that they will support both maintenance cost, development costs, and profit margins.

Good idea, say a person plays 8 hours a day 30 days a month... that would be a bit of money. So instead of $36-$40, say, have it cap at $25. So it's not too much over the top, while getting some profit on the side for the good customer service reps and to help along the updates.

Also, the game our dev team is working on (or will be soon, we're about 1/200th done with it and we stopped because we need to go back to college or taking additional courses on programming and Open GL (not Direct X, because we need the adaptability that only GL offers) ) will be a massive monster of a game, around 8 gigs of space required on a player's PC and some 20 gigs on server side. The updates are going to be revolutional (bug fixes are not updates, according to SWG they are ), with ACTUAL new content every month, not some pathetic excuse to take up 100 megs on your hard drive, just to find that it only fixed some issues with a class or feature you never bothered to check out. We're not going to hold out on new content either, like saying "We have the expansion completed, but we're waiting for people to level up". In other words "We're lazy bums who want to wrap you around our fingertips, to be truly honest, there IS not expansion!!! *maniacal laughter*". Complete over-exaggeration. ANYway...

The idea of an hourly charge is much better, I'd say, than my original idea of a daily rate. I read somewhere ont he forums about a guy who's implementing his payment in the game... like: If you die, you pay 10 bucks to come back to life, if you want an uber item, pay 20 bucks and you have it. That idea just really gets me... I dunno why, I just dont think people should PAY because they play badly or they want to have good items.

Whoa, that's alotta scatterbrained junk i just typed... sort it out (if you can) and give me an opinion .

A good idea, but lots of people will just stop playing for the casual hour or two on week days and spend all their time playing it on the weekend, so you end up with about $6/month from most people. Most people probably play a max of 2 hours per week day and could easily tack a few more hours onto their weekend play to decrease their payments significantly.

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Originally posted by Overload
I have a billing idea: instead of paying 15 a month, and not even playing the entire time, why not maybe... 75 cents a day you log in? Log in once on a day, pay 75 cents, play the rest of the day knowing it's paid for. Next day: pay 75 cents, ect. ect. You can pay $75.00 and have 100 days paid for, but only when you use them so you dont have to keep typing in all that billing junk. You play for 5 days straight, you get billed for $3.75. You decide to take a break (after all, MMOs are kinda exhausting and boring after burning out on it) for say... a week or two. You come back, and you still have 95 days paid for and I'd still get some money to maintain the servers and update the game. The monthly fee always gave me the feeling of "I gotta get this done.. NOW!!" so I'd rush through the game in a month and end up hating it, because it was just a huge grind, being pushed up hill by the daunting memory of that $15.00 chunk in your banking account... and what might happen if you dont "win" the game in that month... .
Of course that was a HUGE exaggeration . If you like, hate, or couldn't care less about this idea, any input is good.

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companys who really charging you account taking from game devs cash for that...
ant 15$ monthly can be about 1%-5% but if amount of cash is small that can be even 50%

thats why is monthly charge - look at this - if you paying for half year once - amount of casc is a bit smaller ...