Often I read people critical of the MMO subscription model on blogs and forums, and inevitably someone will chime in with the counterargument “I pay for my cable every month, and I don’t complain if I don’t watch that much tv”. The similarity of course is that both are a flat monthly fee for unlimited service use. As an analogy, it just doesn’t work, and it bugs me when people use it. The fun part of it all, is that anyone who makes that argument is actually AGAINST a subscription model and is a big fan of RMT transactions.
Here’s why.
I can enjoy my TV without cable. Yes, I can enjoy my computer without an MMO subscription too, but the parallel is always drawn between cable and a specific MMO subscription – not the TV vs PC itself. I can still watch TV, and get local channels, without paying a dime. I can’t enjoy my favorite MMO’s without paying the subscription (even though I bought the box).
Cable has payment options. I can order basic cable, or cable + sports channels, or cable + movie channels, or cables + music channels, or any combination of the aforementioned. I can even buy it all, or as little as I want. I can tailor my cable experience to my own viewing style or budget. I can’t do that in an MMO, I can only pay and take what they give me (or not play at at all).
Everyone can use my Cable without extra expense. For the one time monthly fee anyone who comes to my house can use cable. Heck, I can have 40 friends over all enjoying my cable. In MMO’s, it is typically illegal to share accounts with a spouse. If MMO’s were like cable, every single person that came to my house could have their own account too, and we could have the 3 computers fired up in my house with everyone on their own account – at the same time - at my expense.
Cable has more than one channel. If I don’t like a show, I can change the channel to find a show I like. The more stronger of an argument here is that imagine if you had to pay a monthly fee for access to ONE show per month. You love House on Fox. It is a great show. Would you pay $15 a month to ONLY watch House? What if you knew you would be out of town one week and would miss it – so instead of getting full value for four House episodes, you can only watch three. Does it sound like a good deal? If MMO’s were like cable, I could play one flat fee a month and play ALL MMO’s. They aren’t. You are buying one specific show, not a channel package.
Cable is always up. No downtime or weekly maintenance that cuts into your viewing pleasure.
New Shows don’t cost extra fees. If a new program is launched, I don’t have to pay an extra one time fee to be able to watch it. IÂ just tune in. When expansions for MMO’s are launched, not only have I been paying monthly all along but I also have to pay extra to enjoy the content. Back to the House comparison on Fox – I pay $15 a month to watch House all Season 3. When Season 4 launches, I have to pay them $50 to get access to the season, then an additional $15Â a month to continue to watch.
Late Add in: A cable subscription would be more akin to an MMO subscription if your cable sub only played shows you have already seen. Grind/repetitive mechanics FTW! Twin Peaks, 24/7 for your valued dollars!
Cable subscriptions are not a MMO subscription. Please stop saying so.
MMOs aren’t equivalent to “a movie and dinner” every month, either. People make comparisons like these without really thinking them through.
…I’ve come to believe that most people just won’t do math, and refuse to think things through. If they did, conversations would be very different.
Running with the TV analogy, I don’t have cable, never will. It doesn’t offer enough value. If WoW had commercials like TV (say during loading screens), but allowed me to play for free, I’d not mind. I can’t be the only one like that out there.
Commercials during the loading screens, so we could play for free…. I LOVE IT!!!
On a side note, I have made the “movie and dinner” argument once to a friend… thankfully, she got it, and didn’t argue with me further. 🙂 However, with me, if I were to pay $15 each month to go to a movie, and I get bored with it, it’s not my ‘type’, whatever… I generally don’t walk out because I feel like I’d be wasting my money. But, if I get bored with WoW, I don’t log in for a few days, and its not such a big loss in my eyes.
Ads are probably coming in game. They did spend billions on Blizzard, and with their new forum ads it would be the next logical step.
Talk about a great selling feature too – the program will know who is playing, what age, where they live, etc. Getting that kind of targeted advertising is very difficult, and no doubt expensive.
I’ll go out on a limb here and say they don’t lower the sub fee, only tack on the ads for additional revenue.
Psh. And gravity will still be working tomorrow. 😉
I would never compare playing WoW (or another MMO) to buying/watching Cable TV.
My rationale for WoW was that I buy a new game (at $40 to $50) every couple of months, and I’ll play that game for a couple of months then go shopping for another new game. But once I started playing WoW and realized it was almost exactly what I’d been looking for in a game (at least until we have full immersion VR) it made sense to me to subscribe.
At $13/month for a 6-month sub that cost me $78, being the price of two new games. It was rare for a new game to last more than 2 months, none lasted 3, while some barely made it through the month. So I went from spending $100 or more every 6 months, to spending just $80.
Oh! What I would have paid for a lifetime subscription! Probably as much as $200 by the end of my first year. Of course in the end they got a lot more than that out of me. WoW + BC + seven 6-month subs = approx. $500 over 3 1/2 years.
But who would have thought I’d be able to keep playing the same game for that long? Certainly not me, not at first. But knowing that now, that’s why after playing W101 for barely a weekend, instead of buying a month-by-month subscription I bought two 12-month subs for my son and I.