SWTOR – Ciaran Laval

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.

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

There’s a discussion on The Elder Scrolls Online forum regarding the forthcoming game’s pricing model. Before we go further, I should point out that the game is known as TESO, which is way too close to Tesco for my liking, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll call it TESO. Anyway, the discussion is largely supportive of the pricing model and on the face of it, the pricing model looks historically like other MMO’s, with an upfront price for the digital edition of USD$59.99 or GBP£49.99 and after the first 30 days a recurring monthly cost of USD$14.99 or GBP£8.99.

However here’s the thing, that pricing model is largely out of date. Games launch this way and then within a year or two, they go to free play. That’s often how it works these days. I went through this with Star Wars : The Old Republic, it was a very similar model and it didn’t end well in terms of being a subscription model, however going free to play saved the galaxy, as reported in Massively at the end of March last year : GDC 2013: James Ohlen on how F2P saved SWTOR:

According to Ohlen, SWTOR was designed to be a subscription-based game, so any F2P option needed to still effectively support the service the way a sub game would. The most successful compensation came in the form of Cartel Packs. In the style of trading card games, these packs would give players random items that they could use in game. And just as in any good TCG, the items in the Cartel Packs could be traded with other players — this time on in-game auction house, the galactic trade network.

There’s part of the key to changing your model and it’s one Linden Lab should pay heed to but I’m not going to talk much about Second Life or Linden Lab in this post, I’ll save that for another post. There will be a little bit more about SL and LL but this post is mostly about TESO.

So with all the evidence staring TESO in the face about the lack of longevity of subscription based MMO’s, why are they going ahead with it? Well if anything, SWTOR leads the way. Initially there will be a big buzz and a lot of people engaging with the game, the cash will flow in and that’s a business model that is hard to ignore.

Continue reading “Why Subscription Models Aren’t Dead Yet”