[doulos05]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

First of all, my plan gives you a game you can play, with updates on a pre-announced schedule. You're not paying for game development, you're paying for maintenance and improvement of an already working product! Now we are paying game companies to produce the next game as the only way they can continue to produce profits. Profit is not the evil spawn of Satan, but the lifeblood of society. Without it most of us die pretty quickly and not prettily either.

My way also eliminates piracy as the game calls home, and perhaps even has online components, without which the game cannot be played. Go ahead and pirate the game! If you are not an active legitimately registered user with a valid subscription, all you have is a coaster.

Come on guys! Surely you can shoot holes in the theory better than that. To recap: A low entrance price, $30.00, for a working game, an affordable subscription price, $7.50 per month, with a minimum ten year committment by the gaming company with subscriptions used to pay a stable dev team who would evolve the product with three or six month scheduled upgrades throughout (ala Ubuntu). Online cooperative and competitive play as part of the package. Piracy not a factor. Game playable throughout: nobody prepays for vaporware.

I would buy something like this with 2 basic stipulations (which carry over from the Ubuntu model). 1) if I don't want to pay a monthly fee, but just play the base game as it is, let me do that. Sure, the version I bought in the store isn't the latest, greatest version; but I bought it and I don't have the money or the desire right now to pay monthly. 2) if I can't pay for 5 or 6 months, when I start paying again let me jump right in as though I never stopped paying. If SHIV did that, I'd have bought it even sooner. And, although I probably wouldn't be able to pay every month, you'd better believe every month I could scrap the money together, Ubi would get it.

This is probably done easiest by making online play and updates (as well as maybe advanced tools, mods, or something else) the paid portion and basic solo play unpaid (provided you had an account). Then, like you said. Let them pirate it, if they don't have an account, they can't play. Also, that means let people install it on as many computers as they want, each account can only play one at a time (possibly allow group accounts to let gamer groups buy 5 seats at a discount or something, not sure if there'd be a market for that). Offline authentication becomes a problem (I don't want my game shut off just because of some fiber-seeking backhoe outside of Atlanta), but it's fixable.