Bioware and LucasArts have finally announced the release date for the MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic. It will launch on December 20th in North America and on the 22nd in Europe. People with submitted pre-order codes will be able to play the game at an earlier date, though how much earlier is still up in the air. The game will have a monthly subscription plan with a slightly reduced fee if you pay for 3 or 6 months in advance.
Source: swtor.com
MKZY
Shmargin
MKZY
Shmargin
Alex IDV
Oh, how I hate monthly/weekly/whateverly fees for games.
Aye, but when you have to keep servers capable of letting a million to 10 million people connect, and stay connected for hours at a time, plus maintenance on those servers, plus paying the people to do the maintenance on those server, plus updating the content on a weekly basis, adding big chunks of content on a semi mothly basis, and paying people to do that, plus paying people to track and patch bugs that surface weekly on a open world, million+ player game.
Not to mention bandwidth, for the server, and for the website that has to stay running longer than any other type of games promotional website, staff to run the forums on that website, staff to run billing departments, advertising, etc, etc, etc....MMOs are one of my favorite genres, and running one is not cheap.
Its like subscribing to a magazine. Playboy isn't going to charge you $40 one time, then keep sending you new content every month for the exact same reason that an MMO needs a monthly revenue to stay running, whether that's a monthly fee or an item shop, depends on the type of MMO they want to run.
Guild Wars?
And besides if 1 million to 10 million pay you 20 bucks a month your turnover is 20 - 200 million dollars a month, that's a month not per year. I know there are costs involved but the prices WoW and others take do not motivate them at all. Especially if you’re pricing expansions at the same price as of that a new game, thus earning even more cash for those despite that people already pay you, and you include an online shop added to that to earn more.
Companies generally don't care for the consumer as much as they do for revenue, and people don't care enough to care. This is the reason why one should never defend a company you're not a part of or general consumer behaviour. No one cares enough and everyone is paying the price for it.
Guild Wars actual multiplayer portion isn't really MMO in the literal sense, they host a lot less data when it comes to players than WoW style MMOs.
And most MMOs are $15 monthly, not $20. So you could estimate, that if Blizzard has 12 million users, that's about $180,000,000 monthly. Blizzard employs 5,000+ people not counting contracted labor. I doubt many of those employees make less than $30 an hour, and contracted employees can actually cost a company more since the employees being contracted need to make comparable rates to non contract employees, and the contracting company need to take money to maintain being a contracting company. So if we low ball employee rate of pay big time, down to $30 an hour at 80 hours a month, there's over $12,000,000. But since a lot of those employees probably make over $60 an hour, and a lot are higher up management making a salary, that number doubles if not triples.
Then you can look at the internet lines supplying the data consumption for 12 million broadband users, being spread out over different servers, in different countries. One OC-48 line, costs about $50,000 a month, I guarantee you Blizzard is using a lot more than one to host clients, data, users, web pages, updates, etc.
Not to mention, we can go back to what I said before, Playboy doesnt charge you $40 then continue to send you new content every month for free for the rest of your life. But I'm also sure the ammount of subscribers to Playboy, plus the news stand purchases every month, cost more than the making and printing of a single issue, but no one argues about the fact that Playboy makes a huge profit charging an annual fee.
But youre trying to argue the fact that an MMO company is ripping you off charging a monthly fee.
Blizzard spends millions every month keeping everything going, and the game world moving smoothly, while still providing new content that people like cause they keep playing. So they aren't really making 180 million a month, most likely less than half that. And even that's not all profit, because Blizzard is also developing other titles, while maintaining WoW. So they're paying other people, and other contract workers, to help develop those titles which aren't out yet, so they're not making any money off those yet.
And whatever huge or not so huge profits a company makes after everything I detailed above, that's just good for the company, just like any other company, I'm sure WoW makes more money than it costs to run, but that is the idea....Blizzard wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't, and neither would any other company, it wouldn't make sense.
Most companies that charge $15 a month for they're MMOs aren't as big as Blizzard, and never usually get listed as huge big name companies like Blizzard, even though they probably have a few hundred thousand users, why? Because they're barely scraping by charging people $15 and trying to deliver a game that keeps them playing.
We can go on about this for a long time, but the fact is, if you actually take the time to understand how these things work, its very easy to see that it is required to have some kind of constant income to keep the game going.
Even your Guild Wars example, that game released 4 expansions, each priced the same as the original game when they came out, plus bonus pack missions that costed less. So even with requiring a lot less server hardware, they still needed to bring in extra income to continue to support and develop what they have.
MMOs cost lots of money to run. Which is why virtually none of them are free except ones that are text based and require no data usage, and a fraction of the staff, or the MMO has less than a few hundred users and is barely updated running privately out of a home.
Thanks for adjusting my figures, I admit that I did not bother to check the prices or subscribers up, but it does little to change my point.
The point I'm trying to make is that large video game developers do not care for there customers since most costumers do not care enough to demand thorough standards for their games. I'm sure that WoW and the like (is Counter Strike still popular?) are some of the most popular games out there, but perhaps not the most well produced, well thought trough, and in the end most satisfying games out there (though admittedly these views are subjective). And I'm afraid that my gut instinct about TOR is that LEC hasn't chosen to try and raise the standard of gaming much the consumers enjoyment as much as making a WoW clone/competitor in space with laser swords and make, inshallah, a quadrillion million money.
This bring us back to what you discussed, that whatever profit a company makes is good for the company and that they wouldn’t be running WoW if it didn't make a good profit. To oppose this "wouldn't make sense".
This is indisputably true, if we automatically assume that what's good for a company is a profit for the company. I profoundly wish this wasn't the case and that we could roll back time to when Blizzard where barely making it trough and only had a few employees and where clobbering together Blackthorne or WarCraft or Diablo and when LEC had a bunch of youths hanging around the office, randomly making pirate games. This makes little sense in today’s efficient and well functioning global market since it's all measured in turnover, cost and profit and little to no consideration or slightest care is left to the fact that almost all cultural and referenced achievements where driven by any of these factors (although they of course always play a part).
I did not buy the MI Special Edition combo pack because I calculated it to be the best money-per-minute investment I could make and I wish to imagine that this was not the reason why LEC made it. This might be crazy dreaming on my part, but I'd like to fantasize that they made that game because a part of the company still loved it, and that someone managed to pitch as at least somewhat profitable and that they didn't put their resources on some quick cash for once.
Yeah.
Shmargin
MKZY
Shmargin
Alex IDV
Oh, how I hate monthly/weekly/whateverly fees for games.
Aye, but when you have to keep servers capable of letting a million to 10 million people connect, and stay connected for hours at a time, plus maintenance on those servers, plus paying the people to do the maintenance on those server, plus updating the content on a weekly basis, adding big chunks of content on a semi mothly basis, and paying people to do that, plus paying people to track and patch bugs that surface weekly on a open world, million+ player game.
Not to mention bandwidth, for the server, and for the website that has to stay running longer than any other type of games promotional website, staff to run the forums on that website, staff to run billing departments, advertising, etc, etc, etc....MMOs are one of my favorite genres, and running one is not cheap.
Its like subscribing to a magazine. Playboy isn't going to charge you $40 one time, then keep sending you new content every month for the exact same reason that an MMO needs a monthly revenue to stay running, whether that's a monthly fee or an item shop, depends on the type of MMO they want to run.
Guild Wars?
And besides if 1 million to 10 million pay you 20 bucks a month your turnover is 20 - 200 million dollars a month, that's a month not per year. I know there are costs involved but the prices WoW and others take do not motivate them at all. Especially if you’re pricing expansions at the same price as of that a new game, thus earning even more cash for those despite that people already pay you, and you include an online shop added to that to earn more.
Companies generally don't care for the consumer as much as they do for revenue, and people don't care enough to care. This is the reason why one should never defend a company you're not a part of or general consumer behaviour. No one cares enough and everyone is paying the price for it.
Guild Wars actual multiplayer portion isn't really MMO in the literal sense, they host a lot less data when it comes to players than WoW style MMOs.
And most MMOs are $15 monthly, not $20. So you could estimate, that if Blizzard has 12 million users, that's about $180,000,000 monthly. Blizzard employs 5,000+ people not counting contracted labor. I doubt many of those employees make less than $30 an hour, and contracted employees can actually cost a company more since the employees being contracted need to make comparable rates to non contract employees, and the contracting company need to take money to maintain being a contracting company. So if we low ball employee rate of pay big time, down to $30 an hour at 80 hours a month, there's over $12,000,000. But since a lot of those employees probably make over $60 an hour, and a lot are higher up management making a salary, that number doubles if not triples.
Then you can look at the internet lines supplying the data consumption for 12 million broadband users, being spread out over different servers, in different countries. One OC-48 line, costs about $50,000 a month, I guarantee you Blizzard is using a lot more than one to host clients, data, users, web pages, updates, etc.
Not to mention, we can go back to what I said before, Playboy doesnt charge you $40 then continue to send you new content every month for free for the rest of your life. But I'm also sure the ammount of subscribers to Playboy, plus the news stand purchases every month, cost more than the making and printing of a single issue, but no one argues about the fact that Playboy makes a huge profit charging an annual fee.
But youre trying to argue the fact that an MMO company is ripping you off charging a monthly fee.
Blizzard spends millions every month keeping everything going, and the game world moving smoothly, while still providing new content that people like cause they keep playing. So they aren't really making 180 million a month, most likely less than half that. And even that's not all profit, because Blizzard is also developing other titles, while maintaining WoW. So they're paying other people, and other contract workers, to help develop those titles which aren't out yet, so they're not making any money off those yet.
And whatever huge or not so huge profits a company makes after everything I detailed above, that's just good for the company, just like any other company, I'm sure WoW makes more money than it costs to run, but that is the idea....Blizzard wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't, and neither would any other company, it wouldn't make sense.
Most companies that charge $15 a month for they're MMOs aren't as big as Blizzard, and never usually get listed as huge big name companies like Blizzard, even though they probably have a few hundred thousand users, why? Because they're barely scraping by charging people $15 and trying to deliver a game that keeps them playing.
We can go on about this for a long time, but the fact is, if you actually take the time to understand how these things work, its very easy to see that it is required to have some kind of constant income to keep the game going.
Even your Guild Wars example, that game released 4 expansions, each priced the same as the original game when they came out, plus bonus pack missions that costed less. So even with requiring a lot less server hardware, they still needed to bring in extra income to continue to support and develop what they have.
MMOs cost lots of money to run. Which is why virtually none of them are free except ones that are text based and require no data usage, and a fraction of the staff, or the MMO has less than a few hundred users and is barely updated running privately out of a home.
Thanks for adjusting my figures, I admit that I did not bother to check the prices or subscribers up, but it does little to change my point.
The point I'm trying to make is that large video game developers do not care for there customers since most costumers do not care enough to demand thorough standards for their games. I'm sure that WoW and the like (is Counter Strike still popular?) are some of the most popular games out there, but perhaps not the most well produced, well thought trough, and in the end most satisfying games out there (though admittedly these views are subjective). And I'm afraid that my gut instinct about TOR is that LEC hasn't chosen to try and raise the standard of gaming much the consumers enjoyment as much as making a WoW clone/competitor in space with laser swords and make, inshallah, a quadrillion million money.
This bring us back to what you discussed, that whatever profit a company makes is good for the company and that they wouldn’t be running WoW if it didn't make a good profit. To oppose this "wouldn't make sense".
This is indisputably true, if we automatically assume that what's good for a company is a profit for the company. I profoundly wish this wasn't the case and that we could roll back time to when Blizzard where barely making it trough and only had a few employees and where clobbering together Blackthorne or WarCraft or Diablo and when LEC had a bunch of youths hanging around the office, randomly making pirate games. This makes little sense in today’s efficient and well functioning global market since it's all measured in turnover, cost and profit and little to no consideration or slightest care is left to the fact that almost all cultural and referenced achievements where driven by any of these factors (although they of course always play a part).
I did not buy the MI Special Edition combo pack because I calculated it to be the best money-per-minute investment I could make and I wish to imagine that this was not the reason why LEC made it. This might be crazy dreaming on my part, but I'd like to fantasize that they made that game because a part of the company still loved it, and that someone managed to pitch as at least somewhat profitable and that they didn't put their resources on some quick cash for once.
But in reality, I doubt I'll ever find the time to make those monthly $15 worthy. Hell, nowdays I hardly find the time to finish the games I already own.
MKZY
Shmargin
Alex IDV
Oh, how I hate monthly/weekly/whateverly fees for games.
Aye, but when you have to keep servers capable of letting a million to 10 million people connect, and stay connected for hours at a time, plus maintenance on those servers, plus paying the people to do the maintenance on those server, plus updating the content on a weekly basis, adding big chunks of content on a semi mothly basis, and paying people to do that, plus paying people to track and patch bugs that surface weekly on a open world, million+ player game.
Not to mention bandwidth, for the server, and for the website that has to stay running longer than any other type of games promotional website, staff to run the forums on that website, staff to run billing departments, advertising, etc, etc, etc....MMOs are one of my favorite genres, and running one is not cheap.
Its like subscribing to a magazine. Playboy isn't going to charge you $40 one time, then keep sending you new content every month for the exact same reason that an MMO needs a monthly revenue to stay running, whether that's a monthly fee or an item shop, depends on the type of MMO they want to run.
Guild Wars?
And besides if 1 million to 10 million pay you 20 bucks a month your turnover is 20 - 200 million dollars a month, that's a month not per year. I know there are costs involved but the prices WoW and others take do not motivate them at all. Especially if you’re pricing expansions at the same price as of that a new game, thus earning even more cash for those despite that people already pay you, and you include an online shop added to that to earn more.
Companies generally don't care for the consumer as much as they do for revenue, and people don't care enough to care. This is the reason why one should never defend a company you're not a part of or general consumer behaviour. No one cares enough and everyone is paying the price for it.
Guild Wars actual multiplayer portion isn't really MMO in the literal sense, they host a lot less data when it comes to players than WoW style MMOs.
And most MMOs are $15 monthly, not $20. So you could estimate, that if Blizzard has 12 million users, that's about $180,000,000 monthly. Blizzard employs 5,000+ people not counting contracted labor. I doubt many of those employees make less than $30 an hour, and contracted employees can actually cost a company more since the employees being contracted need to make comparable rates to non contract employees, and the contracting company need to take money to maintain being a contracting company. So if we low ball employee rate of pay big time, down to $30 an hour at 80 hours a month, there's over $12,000,000. But since a lot of those employees probably make over $60 an hour, and a lot are higher up management making a salary, that number doubles if not triples.
Then you can look at the internet lines supplying the data consumption for 12 million broadband users, being spread out over different servers, in different countries. One OC-48 line, costs about $50,000 a month, I guarantee you Blizzard is using a lot more than one to host clients, data, users, web pages, updates, etc.
Not to mention, we can go back to what I said before, Playboy doesnt charge you $40 then continue to send you new content every month for free for the rest of your life. But I'm also sure the ammount of subscribers to Playboy, plus the news stand purchases every month, cost more than the making and printing of a single issue, but no one argues about the fact that Playboy makes a huge profit charging an annual fee.
But youre trying to argue the fact that an MMO company is ripping you off charging a monthly fee.
Blizzard spends millions every month keeping everything going, and the game world moving smoothly, while still providing new content that people like cause they keep playing. So they aren't really making 180 million a month, most likely less than half that. And even that's not all profit, because Blizzard is also developing other titles, while maintaining WoW. So they're paying other people, and other contract workers, to help develop those titles which aren't out yet, so they're not making any money off those yet.
And whatever huge or not so huge profits a company makes after everything I detailed above, that's just good for the company, just like any other company, I'm sure WoW makes more money than it costs to run, but that is the idea....Blizzard wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't, and neither would any other company, it wouldn't make sense.
Most companies that charge $15 a month for they're MMOs aren't as big as Blizzard, and never usually get listed as huge big name companies like Blizzard, even though they probably have a few hundred thousand users, why? Because they're barely scraping by charging people $15 and trying to deliver a game that keeps them playing.
We can go on about this for a long time, but the fact is, if you actually take the time to understand how these things work, its very easy to see that it is required to have some kind of constant income to keep the game going.
Even your Guild Wars example, that game released 4 expansions, each priced the same as the original game when they came out, plus bonus pack missions that costed less. So even with requiring a lot less server hardware, they still needed to bring in extra income to continue to support and develop what they have.
MMOs cost lots of money to run. Which is why virtually none of them are free except ones that are text based and require no data usage, and a fraction of the staff, or the MMO has less than a few hundred users and is barely updated running privately out of a home.
Shmargin
Alex IDV
Oh, how I hate monthly/weekly/whateverly fees for games.
Aye, but when you have to keep servers capable of letting a million to 10 million people connect, and stay connected for hours at a time, plus maintenance on those servers, plus paying the people to do the maintenance on those server, plus updating the content on a weekly basis, adding big chunks of content on a semi mothly basis, and paying people to do that, plus paying people to track and patch bugs that surface weekly on a open world, million+ player game.
Not to mention bandwidth, for the server, and for the website that has to stay running longer than any other type of games promotional website, staff to run the forums on that website, staff to run billing departments, advertising, etc, etc, etc....MMOs are one of my favorite genres, and running one is not cheap.
Its like subscribing to a magazine. Playboy isn't going to charge you $40 one time, then keep sending you new content every month for the exact same reason that an MMO needs a monthly revenue to stay running, whether that's a monthly fee or an item shop, depends on the type of MMO they want to run.
Guild Wars?
And besides if 1 million to 10 million pay you 20 bucks a month your turnover is 20 - 200 million dollars a month, that's a month not per year. I know there are costs involved but the prices WoW and others take do not motivate them at all. Especially if you’re pricing expansions at the same price as of that a new game, thus earning even more cash for those despite that people already pay you, and you include an online shop added to that to earn more.
Companies generally don't care for the consumer as much as they do for revenue, and people don't care enough to care. This is the reason why one should never defend a company you're not a part of or general consumer behaviour. No one cares enough and everyone is paying the price for it.
Shmargin
Alex IDV
Oh, how I hate monthly/weekly/whateverly fees for games.
Aye, but when you have to keep servers capable of letting a million to 10 million people connect, and stay connected for hours at a time, plus maintenance on those servers, plus paying the people to do the maintenance on those server, plus updating the content on a weekly basis, adding big chunks of content on a semi mothly basis, and paying people to do that, plus paying people to track and patch bugs that surface weekly on a open world, million+ player game.
Not to mention bandwidth, for the server, and for the website that has to stay running longer than any other type of games promotional website, staff to run the forums on that website, staff to run billing departments, advertising, etc, etc, etc....MMOs are one of my favorite genres, and running one is not cheap.
Its like subscribing to a magazine. Playboy isn't going to charge you $40 one time, then keep sending you new content every month for the exact same reason that an MMO needs a monthly revenue to stay running, whether that's a monthly fee or an item shop, depends on the type of MMO they want to run.
I understand why, but I don't like it.
Alex IDV
Oh, how I hate monthly/weekly/whateverly fees for games.
Aye, but when you have to keep servers capable of letting a million to 10 million people connect, and stay connected for hours at a time, plus maintenance on those servers, plus paying the people to do the maintenance on those server, plus updating the content on a weekly basis, adding big chunks of content on a semi mothly basis, and paying people to do that, plus paying people to track and patch bugs that surface weekly on a open world, million+ player game.
Not to mention bandwidth, for the server, and for the website that has to stay running longer than any other type of games promotional website, staff to run the forums on that website, staff to run billing departments, advertising, etc, etc, etc....MMOs are one of my favorite genres, and running one is not cheap.
Its like subscribing to a magazine. Playboy isn't going to charge you $40 one time, then keep sending you new content every month for the exact same reason that an MMO needs a monthly revenue to stay running, whether that's a monthly fee or an item shop, depends on the type of MMO they want to run.