Pay for Play and The Bling Bling

I think the "Pay for Play" concept is a necessary evil. I mean it cost money to run servers and pay bandwidth bills and to pay the salaries of the network techies that are needed to make a MMORPG work. I think it is a question of amount of cost versus the quality of service.

If the Dot Com crash has taught us anything is that you can't offer a service that costs you money to run for free and expect to make money off it. I doubt that selling banner ad space at the top of the screen is the solution to who is going to pay to run a MMORPG. So that leave selling subscriptions left. Also read Micropayments Not Popups!

If I may self-plagorize a bit.
Also worth checking out is Scott McCloud's visual essay Coin of the Realm. Part 1 and Part 2

Then A rebuttal to Mr. McCloud from Penny Arcade.

So when you subscribe to an MMORPG you are paying for the cost to run the network and some profit for the game developers. With the Xbox Live there I a $50 a year fee to subscribe to the network and service. Hopefully games like Phantasy Star Online would be cheaper to subscribe to on the Xbox than Gamecube and Dreamcast that uses Sega own Seganet Network because it uses the existing Xbox live network.

That brings up a good question. What would you pay to play a MMORPG? In addition to Xbox live I would pay 5 bucks a month if I could pay in advance and if my character would not be destroyed or penalize if I took a month off. That would be $60 a year or the cost of a new game in addition to the cost of the game disk.

EA's The Sims Online ($10 a month ) is a MMORPG that is not centered on the combat and addiction of EverQuest.

I am hoping that the online voice feature of Xbox Live will allow players to realize there is greater potential to online game play than killing monsters and taking their gold. Guys can't pretend to be girls and girls can't pretend to be guys when you have to use your real voice instead of a keyboard.

Online games like Quake and Unreal offer a player match finding service and the server software but that really doesn't apply to a MMORPG world where everyone needs to be playing from the same rule book.

I think Judy is right in pointing out that EverSmack is more about online combat than role playing but you are right about the urge to copy what ever is successful. That is why I want to see what The Sims Online evolves into as a non-combat based MMORPG.

And TJ asked how long can one play the same game? It is going on 10 years now and I still love to play Street Fighter 2.
HADOKEN!