The Elder Scrolls Online Isn’t Too Expensive, But The Subscription Only Model Is Creaking

I’m going to break this down into a couple of posts, this post is more about The Elder Scrolls Online and their pricing model, I’ll follow up with a related post that is more about Second Life later. There has been a bit of a hoo ha about the pricing model of The Elder Scrolls Online. The standard digital edition is £49.99 and the Digital Imperial edition is £69.99, the prices vary depending upon your local currency. These prices include 30 days of game play, but if you want to play after that it’s £8.99 a month. If people shop around they can get the game cheaper.

The pricing model has led to Paul Tassi of Forbes Predicting The Biggest Video Game Disaster Of 2014: The Elder Scrolls Online and also suggesting that The Elder Scrolls Online Should Choose Between $60 Up Front Or $15 A Month. Those prices are in US Dollars of course, my prices earlier are in GBP, but you should get the gist. I have to say that I disagree with Paul, 2014 is likely to be a very good year for Elder Scrolls Online, especially as it isn’t released until April. Their problems are far more likely to come in 2015.

Let’s get one thing straight, this pricing model is not outrageously expensive. The upfront price for the game is a little on the high side but the monthly subscription is not that bad. As many people point out, it works out to about 30 pence a day in the UK or 50 cents a day if you’re in the USA. People argue that a night out at the cinema can be more expensive, a visit to a bar more expensive, buying pizza far more expensive. The problem is, the people making these points are actually exemplifying why the pay when you want model is better than the subscription model.

If it really was 30 pence a day and you only played for 10 days that month, that would be a cost of £3.00, not £8.99. In the US it would USD$5.00 not USD$14.99. If you didn’t play at all that month, for whatever reason, you’d pay nothing. This model may actually work, it’s along the lines of something I’ve suggested Second Life do with tier in so much as a sim that’s only open weekends only pays for that weekend usage, rather than the flat monthly tier.

However they are using a flat subscription fee model, although as I said, the model itself isn’t expensive in general. The problem for this sort of pricing model is that there are loads of competitors offering a less expensive experience these days and that’s one of the deciding factors people use in whether to engage, although it’s far from the only factor.

A lot of people defending this pricing model point to World Of Warcraft and Eve-Online as examples of how this model can be a success. However World Of Warcraft and Eve-Online were in the right place at the right time, that time was quite a few years ago. On top of that, Eve-Online is rather niche, there aren’t many epic space MMO’s around and certainly not one with the economic dynamics of Eve-Online, they have a different formula.

World Of Warcraft is where the people are, people go back to World Of Warcraft because despite its dwindling numbers, there are still more than enough participants to engage with and people have invested a lot of time in their characters, but I’ll discuss that more in my next post.

The Elder Scrolls Online is competing in the dungeons and dragons style MMO market and there’s a lot of choice there. This is a very tough nut to crack, even if you’re a so called free to play venture. Let’s not forget that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, someone is paying for it.

Another problem The Elder Scrolls Online faces with this pricing model is that plenty of people have been there, seen it and got the T-Shirt. I’ve got three of the T-Shirts having been in early and subscribed to Age Of Conan, Star Trek Online and Star Wars The Old Republic. They all moved to a free to play model. I also paid and subscribed to City Of Heroes, which I loved. However I’d left a long time before they changed their pricing model, but change it they did.

In reality this means that plenty of people are a tad wary of moving too fast when it comes to ventures such as The Elder Scrolls Online, some of us are way beyond once bitten, twice shy.

However this doesn’t mean that The Elder Scrolls Online will fail, they could buck the trend, but they really are swimming against the tide and if they do end up changing their pricing model they will have to deal with annoyed subscribers, they would also be nailing another nail in the subscription only coffin.

I’m convinced that The Elder Scrolls Online will be a cracking game, with excellent customer service and experiences, but I really can’t see it having a long and prosperous future with this pricing model in today’s market.

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