Quote:
Originally Posted by Webster
actually making and maintaining the arcade machines was the problem because the arcade owners made the money not the game makers.
pay to play online without having to make machines or print cds would be a gold mine for them and very attractive to gamers.
if you can have every game ever made if you want, and all for free and you only pay for playing time.
are you trying to say gamers wouldnt like to choose from hundreds of games on demand any time they want them just for a small fee like the cost of prepaid minutes on their telephones (just to use as a cost reference)
and yes i think they could charge as little as 50 cents or $1 a day for server access and be making more money then they make now by selling the game. if the average player plays the game for 2 months then thats $50-60 right there and the game lives as long as they keep it working good and interesting so profits could be 10 fold with zero piracy.
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People are resistant to the pay-per-use model, as evidenced by the recent Hulu backlash, and music industry suggestions and backlash.
That said I don't think pay-to-play is an absolute impossibility for gaming -- in some ways, it might be convenient, as I wouldn't have wasted $60 on games like Crysis or Spore that I only played for a few hours and ended up disliking. That said, it is difficult, if not impossible, to take back the idea of "owning" a product once the user has had that experience; pay to play has to be carefully framed, and the option to own must still exist. It has to be an alternative, not the only option; it must also be carefully designed to ensure that the public does not perceive it is paying more.
An approach that might be a bit more successful is to meld the two: perhaps allow the user to either pay to play
or purchase the game outright (perhaps at something like $45). Later, if the user wishes to own the game for unlimited play, they could pay some sort of larger fee, $60 or $70, less whatever they've already spent on the content. Users could then "work up" to owning a copy of a game they really like for unlimited play.
I think that most people feel that pay to play (or even rental -- See how Blockbuster has been doing lately?) services are essentially throwing money away. Netflix has succeeded because it presents the product in a way to suggest that the user is getting a benefit: you could watch 8 movies a month for the price of two Blockbuster rentals! However, I feel that many Netflixers, like me, will rent a movie and leave it sitting on the TV for weeks; I am under no pressure to watch it, because there's no late fees or hard cost to see, just a subscription that gets taken off the card.
Pay-to play is a dead end, unless it's similar to a lease-to-own model. Subscription based services, or one-time-fee is what the American population likes (I speak not for other nations, as I don't know them), and deviation from that irks them.