Am I the only one who hopes D3 WILL be pay to play? [Archive]

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Metalshredderr

30-07-2008, 19:39

sweetalmonds

30-07-2008, 19:42

I'm with you on that a little monthly fee in exchange for frequent patches to keep hackers out is fine with me. :wave:

Sein Schatten

30-07-2008, 19:47

GW has no h4x and has no montly fee.

Putz

30-07-2008, 19:49

I would be willing to pay a small fee, if of course more frequent patches and people who cheated/exploited/duped were dealt with in such ways to make the game legit and fun for everyone.

Felix

30-07-2008, 19:52

GW has no h4x and has no montly fee.

Theres also nothing sellers can make money on in Guildwars.

Lord_Jaroh

30-07-2008, 19:53

You can have your battlenet pay 2 play crap on one condition: That LAN play is still in the game. If there is no TCP/IP option and bnet costs me money, then Blizzard will be getting $0 from me. I do not want to have to rely on their servers to be able to play with friends.

Sein Schatten

30-07-2008, 19:55

Theres also nothing sellers can make money on in Guildwars.

Ooohh... I get it now. Took a while.
p2p != guarantee of hackfree
boxed != exploited, buggy like IE5
But people believe what they want to believe. ;)

freemanstretten

30-07-2008, 20:01

Patches or content updates? Patches to fix bugs should have no bearing on whether it's pay to play or not... they should keep on top of things for bug fixing.
Content updates like the 1.10 changes and synergies that basically re-boot the gameplay after a few years... those can come anyway (as they have in the past). Making people pay for them to come more frequently is a strange concept imho.
I have put in plenty of time on the bnet games... and have yet to experience a "hacker". I could see people having issues with hopping into unknown games yadda yadda... but I simply play with those I trust and/or with passworded games. *shrug*.

I understand (though don't agree with) pay to play with MMO's... as they do need to keep putting new things in the game. Is this something we expect with D3? I don't personally.

I hate the idea of paying for something and then paying for it again and again to continue to use it. I certainly don't play games that have that requirement.

My 2 cents!
Cheers!

Felix

30-07-2008, 20:06

Ooohh... I get it now. Took a while.
p2p != guarantee of hackfree
boxed != exploited, buggy like IE5
But people believe what they want to believe. ;)

And I don't get you. What is boxed? And what has IE5 to do with anything? And what is it.

Guildwars has no monthly fee and no h4x.

DII has no monthly fee and is full of h4x.

Whats the diference? The difference is that theres money to be made in DII, and none in Guildwars due to game design. I hope it's clear enough. It's what I believe and I call it logic. :thumbup:

visom

30-07-2008, 20:35

Um... p2p....it would be ok when I'm younger (18 now), now that I have to go to college, I'll have less time playing so I don't get to put that 10$ monthly fee to full use (assuming that it's 10$ monthly).

Well, I'm kinda hoping it won't be P2P, since I'll be spending 500$ total (maybe less on black friday) upgrading my computer, and not to mention anohter 60$ on buying the game disc, so my wallet won't be in the mood for P2P

One problem for p2p is that some of my friends might not p2p D3.
I have about 4 friends so far thats going to play D3 with me, but 3 of them might not p2p, which is a bummer since I rarely get to play online games with my friends due to our different taste in games.

Messiah

30-07-2008, 20:48

Monthly fees take away the casual aspect from many gamers. I shouldn't have to pay for extra content and anti-hacking measures that should be implemented regardless of a monthly fee. They can implement the fee, but they'd really be shooting themselves in the foot.

Gigashadow

30-07-2008, 20:49

If it's P2P, hurray for private servers. I don't respect P2P in non-MMORPG games...

Sein Schatten

30-07-2008, 21:14

And I don't get you. What is boxed? And what has IE5 to do with anything? And what is it.

Guildwars has no monthly fee and no h4x.

DII has no monthly fee and is full of h4x.

Whats the diference? The difference is that theres money to be made in DII, and none in Guildwars due to game design. I hope it's clear enough. It's what I believe and I call it logic. :thumbup:

There are a lot more differences. GW has a payment method which is vastly superior to MMORPGs, imo. It has an entirely different update process then D2. GW is a online only game. D2 is old and its structure is old, programmed with old technices and with a different view of MP.

edit2: How many exploits has WoW? Only a few well known. Teleport hacks, speed hacks and data mining (not really an exploit in that sense). The movement hacks are only possible because moving is done client side. Duping? Dunno if that exists in WoW.

edit: D3 is made with up-to-date technices, with safe and secure online play in mind. It shares the structure with SC2. A game which will be a big time seller and played for a ****load long time. This means the new structure must be programmed with safeguards/cheatprotection, easy to maintain, easy to update and so on.

MooCQ

30-07-2008, 21:41

You people are insane.. How about we just pay the box price, and it automatically gets patched, when damage occurs.. why do we need to pay extra for them to fix what should be automatic? HUH???

Haccubus

30-07-2008, 22:44

I wouldn't mind paying maybe like $5/mo if we can get better server lag than from D2. There was nothing worse than playing hardcore and finding that your character died because of some serious lag..

Vertigo X

30-07-2008, 23:28

Are you the only one who hopes D3 will be pay to play? No, but it's close enough. So many people have played Diablo and Diablo 2 who are expecting Diablo 3 to be free online, as well. There are no absurd hacks in Diablo 2 any more (while there are exploits like duping and bots), so it won't be very hard to prevent hacks from being used in Diablo 3, no?

mince pies

31-07-2008, 00:09

What Blizzard should do is increase the monthly fee for WoW players and then use that to update/patch DIII. That would really piss them off :D

Also if I did end up having to pay for a monthly fee for WoW I'd probably end up playing it for most of my day just to get my money's worth, which I don't want to do

Telzen

31-07-2008, 03:03

I wouldn't mind a say $5 dollar fee if we got really good servers and they really worked on keeping out cheaters, gold sellers, etc. If D3 doesn't bring in continual money they may later down the line just stop caring like they did with D2.

Kaeros

31-07-2008, 04:02

I don't think DIII will be pay-to-play.

I think Battle.net v2.0 should, and will, have a small charge per month -- somewhere in the region of $4.99-6.99. This account will stretch across all Blizzard games, so you'll definitely be getting some bang for the buck.

infectedA

31-07-2008, 05:48

I have put in plenty of time on the bnet games... and have yet to experience a "hacker". I could see people having issues with hopping into unknown games yadda yadda...
Cheers!

I have also put in plenty of time and my account has never been hacked either. Thats only because I never dealt with scammers but I think they are talking about things like dupes, hacked items, and things of that nature. I would happily pay ten$ a month to get rid of that.

sbn

31-07-2008, 06:40

5zigen

31-07-2008, 06:48

:thumbup:

All I have to say, this issue is dead anyways as D3 will not be pay to play

Source plz

Halifax Donair

31-07-2008, 07:03

i've always felt that if it is P2p that it should be based on an hourly rate. i shouldn't have to subsidize someone who plays all day.

MooCQ

31-07-2008, 07:13

Why are people consistently willing to shell out needless extra dollars for something that should be updated and fixed on a regular basis as need arises (much like an anti-virus program?) We pay a one time fee (which is roughly $50+), for services that should last.. I don't want to be sold a lemon, that breaks the bank every month for costy "updates" and "repairs" that is ridiculously lame. Once people are willing to pay "extra" for services that should be automatic.. we might start seeing this lameness in the antivirus community, "oh.. that will be a $3 service charge for each daily update, (oh wait, thats already starting to occur my bad - because people are willing to put up with this garbage!!) blah blah.." Who in their right mind wants to pay to play? Ridiculous! I want to pay once, and that is IT!

and btw don't you think you're breaking sacred ground? Especially with regards to the DIABLO franchise? Diablo I and II, were never "pay to play," hence Diablo 3.. shouldn't either, EVER!

I swear this is some Vivendi Universal gimmick/conspiracy, to milk everyone.. say no to pay 2 play!

Oh and I love laggy servers, it builds the utmost character! It's about the only true skill in D2.. once you have mastered the lag, you are king!! LAGMONSTER!! Especially with regard to the beloved NECROMONSTER and his skellies of death!!

5zigen

31-07-2008, 09:03

OP: No, lots of other people would prefer pay to play.

i've always felt that if it is P2p that it should be based on an hourly rate. i shouldn't have to subsidize someone who plays all day.

Interestingly enough, an hourly rate doesn't entice US people. In fact, people in general don't like being metered, they perfer to have unlimited access to something even if they don't use a lot of it.

Back in the day, AoL charged an hourly (or was it by the minute) rate. People didn't like it though, eventually, when they changed to being a monthly charge their customer base grew very quickly. Still interesting, is that the average monthly payment increased slightly.

Punkonjunk

31-07-2008, 09:08

GW has no h4x and has no montly fee.
/thread
10char

5zigen

31-07-2008, 10:34

/thread

I disagree, Mostly because guildwars isn't fun and the engine isn't very robust.

Plus I think declaring a thread "over" because you like one of the arguments is immature.

Mad Mantis

31-07-2008, 10:52

Mcwhopper

31-07-2008, 11:11

What I dont get is why people seem to think they are *entitled* to getting things like bug fixes and updates for free.

Grow up: Nothings for free. Nobody is going to work their *** of if there isn't a reward at the end of the road.

If you buy something the seller will try to please you as much as he can. Until you bought it, after that he's done with you. Now if the seller knows you might be coming back to buy something else in the future and will continue to do so, he will keep working hard to keep you as a client. If you continue to pay for the service, you still have the power to deny someone future income. Once you stop paying, they stop caring.

Yeah : Ill pay up to 20 euro a month if it gets me servers that are at least 10 times more stable then the current d2 ones, unlimited games per hour, minimum downtime, added content, quick bug fixes and speedy solutions to the newest hacks and bot. If they are just going to charge me and the service provided is not up to par? Then I'll settle for SC2.

5zigen

31-07-2008, 11:34

Call me old fashioned, but there used to be a time in history when you didn’t have to pay for everything. There was a time when people would give you service when you bought a product.

Never was there such a time! TINSTAFL

There was a time when people would give you service when you bought a product.
For some reason the software industry, and the gaming industry in particular, first decided that we didn’t buy their product. We rented a license from them. After that they decided that they could restrict how often and where we could use the license they rented us. Then they made us pay in order to be able to use the license they rented us on the times and machines they allowed.
Why are we even putting up with this? Why are people actively seeking to receive this kind of treatment? Do people have an aversion to saving money?

Well, in reality there's a lot of reasons. I did a little research on this recently at an internship at a game co. One thing you're leaving out is that games haven't increased with inflation, yet their production costs have gone up significantly.

Just as comparison for entertainment, when I was a kid, a game cost around $50-60, depending on platform. I remember buying Chrono Trigger for 75 when it was new also. On the other hand a movie cost something like $7 at the big theater near my home and 3.50 for a matinee. Now it's $10.50 and matinee prices are almost gone. That's something like a %40 increase in movies versus the relatively small to no increase in games.

Certainly the gaming industry is getting bigger, which should mean more money, but it's also gotten SIGNIFICANTLY more demanding. When D1 came out I don't think people really considered stopping hacking part of blizzards job. Patches were few and far between so writing them was kind of pointless as distribution was difficult. Another expectation is hosted servers, which also cost developers quite a bit, particularly for these types of games, but that has to do with cheating also I guess. People expect well planned bug free games much more often now, particularly because it's also intensely competitive (with significantly more companies producing games), which has worked to offset the increased number of gaming consumers.

To make matters worse, the cost of game production has risen exponentially. I mean, GTA 4 has an estimated production cost of $100 million. Sure it made it all back as it was probably the biggest game ever. For some comparison again between my other staple entertainment media, Batman Begins had a $135 million budget. Games are costing the same amount to produce as movies are these days.

So really the question we should be asking is, Why don't games cost significantly more than they did 10 years ago? We're demanding more, games are costing upwards of 10 to 100 times more to produce, yet we still wont buy a game for more than 60 bucks.

What this does is puts the developers in a really tight spot. Unless your game is both great and has extremely broad appeal (see: WoW, GTA 4) it is destined to fail. Not fail in a quality sense, but an economic sense. An example of this would be HG:L and FSS.

We're really in a transition phase right now, for games, as we have all sorts of developers trying to figure out ways to recoup the money from the production budget without charging more than $60 per game box. Fortunately for us consumers, there's so many good old games that a mediocre new game couldn't compete at the $100 price point. This is rough for the game industry though, as it basically means we will see fewer new IP's, fewer successful new IP's as they simply cant compete with the established franchises.

Just as an example, Capcom has this wonderful game, Okami, which they re-released on the wii. It sold 280,000 copies. On the other hand, their re-release of Resident Evil 4 sold over a million. And Okami is probably one of the best games on the wii. I mean, obviously the nintendo guys liked it so much they practically copied it for the Zelda Twilight Princess.

The point is, at the current pricepoint, there's not much incentive for a company to maintain a game if there's no subscription type payment in it for them. In D2 for example the game was basically generating sales for it's first 6 years. That's something not a lot of games do. But how many people do you think bought HG:L last month?

The desire to pay for the service generally comes from people who have played a MMORPG or other pay to play game, and enjoyed the service they got. I abandoned GW for WoW thinking I would hate WoW with a passion. I was so wrong, everything about WoW was better in my eyes (well except the split servers and no transfers). But really I think a lot of people, like me, have internalized that paying a monthly fee gives the company incentive to maintain their game: Do regular bannings of hackers, have people to moderate the community (particularly in scams that violate an in game "verbal contract"), keep the game relatively bug free with frequent patches (remember the 4 years between 1.09 and 1.10 d2?), add content to keep the game fresh, make sure there's some semblance of balance and anything else I'm forgetting.

A willingness to pay for such things isn't irrational, I think it's very rational (though admittedly un-american). If I stop liking the game I can stop paying the company, thus giving them incentive to provide good ongoing support. If I buy a game (like HG:L, which I foolishly did) there's no way for me to tell the company they did a crap job and I'm unhappy with it other than not play and post on forums about what terrible executive decisions were made in the game. Open an economics book, one of the fundamental rules is that people respond to incentives. I have much more power over the company if they have a monthly fee than if they don't. Sure, it costs me more, but the point is that not only do I retain that slight economic power, but I also get a service in return for my monthly fee.

I wouldn't call things like frequent patches, balancing passes, additional content, central server hosting and anti-cheat measures "basic services" because, well they simply aren't. A basic service is for them to provide a working game that does not have any game breaking or progression stopping bugs. Everything beyond that is something that is costing them money, and that is generally a maintenance cost, not a one time fee.

This willingness to pay for even the most basic service is something I just do not understand.

I think it's interesting that if you change the context of this statement, it has just as potent a meaning for my point as it does for yours.

Grats to anyone who finished reading this.

p.s. don't try to compare it to cd prices because cd's had a pricesetting collusion thing going through the 90's.

Funkopotamus

31-07-2008, 11:40

What I dont get is why people seem to think they are *entitled* to getting things like bug fixes and updates for free.

Nobody's going to buy stuff from a company that releases buggy software and doesn't fix it unless you pay.

Kyo

31-07-2008, 11:42

Call me old fashioned, but there used to be a time in history when you didn’t have to pay for everything. There was a time when people would give you service when you bought a product.
For some reason the software industry, and the gaming industry in particular, first decided that we didn’t buy their product. We rented a license from them. After that they decided that they could restrict how often and where we could use the license they rented us. Then they made us pay in order to be able to use the license they rented us on the times and machines they allowed.
Why are we even putting up with this? Why are people actively seeking to receive this kind of treatment? Do people have an aversion to saving money? This willingness to pay for even the most basic service is something I just do not understand.

Could not have put it better MM. You would have thought that most pay for a product/service that should basically work as it was sold, if the product/service is changed or is not working as expected than normally it would be for the retailer to sort. Game manufacturers recognise in the modern gaming industry that their products/services are exempt from this because people are willing to pay for what some would consider a basic expectation. :ponder:

5zigen

31-07-2008, 11:51

Nobody's going to buy stuff from a company that releases buggy software and doesn't fix it unless you pay.

Most bugs don't prevent a game from working. In fact, I cant think of ever playing a bug free game.

And as counterpoints to your argument I present HG:L and Ninja Gaiden 2. Both games had bugs that would prevent you from progressing beyond a certain point in the game. IIRC these bugs existed upon release in some cases (And probably still exist) yet they still sold fairly well (and HG:L still went under!)

Saint Anger

31-07-2008, 12:05

Most bugs don't prevent a game from working. In fact, I cant think of ever playing a bug free game.

And as counterpoints to your argument I present HG:L and Ninja Gaiden 2. Both games had bugs that would prevent you from progressing beyond a certain point in the game. IIRC these bugs existed upon release in some cases (And probably still exist) yet they still sold fairly well (and HG:L still went under!)

While your point certainly hold merit, I believe the original quote should be understood more along the lines of 'games being rushed out incomplete, being buggy/glitched because of it and then expecting people to pay for something that should have been taken care of before the game was released in the first place'.

It certainly wouldn't be the first time a game would be 'rushed' out incomplete, only to require half a dozen of subsequent patches to fix it - but with Blizzard that's usually not the case. They have a record of delivering quality games, but, as you say, bugs and glitches can never be completely eradicated.

This being said, I do not hope d3 will be p2p only. Call me old-fashioned, but as someone above me said I still believe that we purchase the games and then own them, and not merely 'license' them and have to pay to use them. Both sides of the argument hold merit, but I believe that when you purchase a game, the company has the moral obligation to ensure that the game you've purchased is working as optimally as possible - i.e. with as few bugs and glitches as possible. I fail to see why these 'bugfixes' should be considered an option that comes with a monthly fee.

To give a stupid example: when I buy a car, I expect it to be in working order. If it isn't, the manufacturer has the moral obligation to supply me with a working product under the terms of the guarantee clauses. I wouldn't pay additional cash to get something I should've gotten in the first place. Anything beyond this is fee-able, of course (to keep up with the example: buying chrome rims for your car: comparable to additional content for d3).

So, in my opinion: for additional content, paying is ok. For content that should have been in the game from the start (bugfixes and whatnot): paying is not ok.

PlasmaTorture

31-07-2008, 12:16

I wouldn't call things like frequent patches, balancing passes, additional content, central server hosting and anti-cheat measures "basic services" because, well they simply aren't. A basic service is for them to provide a working game that does not have any game breaking or progression stopping bugs. Everything beyond that is something that is costing them money, and that is generally a maintenance cost, not a one time fee.

I think you're forgetting that Blizzard has established that, over the years, they've had exceptional online service, with patches, balance moves, additional content, and some anti-cheat services and maintenance and such, for free. That is a huge incentive for people to buy and always has been. How do you think the company has been so enormously successful? While Warcraft and Warcraft II and their early game efforts were all good in their own way, it was Diablo's unparalleled easy access to online play that put Blizzard on the map. Battle.net is just as much part of the Blizzard quality as the games themselves, I feel. What other companies have offered similar things as battle.net?

I can only think of one, and it's far more recent.

Valve and Steam. Steam is completley free. You buy the game (say, TF2), and you get to play online completley for free. Hosting isn't central servers (but neither is b.net), but Valve continually releases updates and lets you play their games online for free. They release, for TF2, major MAJOR content updates in the achievement packs, and often tweak balance and fix bugs.
All
for
free.

Why?
Because that's what game companies do. Especially the good companies.

Valve and Blizzard are probably the only two developers in the industry who can accurately claim they've never made a bad game (or, for WoW, they can say it was successful). Valve is running a successful, free, quality online service, just like Blizzard has done for the past 10+ years.

Making Diablo 3, or even worse, Battle.net 2.0 itself p2p would be a huge mistake on blizzard's part. It would destroy what integrity the company has left after selling out the Warcraft franchise for profits, and make it plain and clear that they aren't the fun-loving company that makes great games for the love of games instead of profit, which was always the image they had tried to present before I feel.

There are incentives for Blizzard to keep offering their services for free, too. Diablo 2 still sells copies to this day because it is a solid game, and the free (and easy to jump into) online service is at least almost adequate. Huge success with their game - is that not an incentive? Additionally, there is an inevitable expansion planned for Diablo 3. That's the big incentive right there. If they give us a great game and a great service to go along with it, how many people are going to stick around and buy the expansion? Most of them, I'd imagine.

But hey, Blizzard has shown with WoW that they care far less about their integrity than they do about profit nowadays, so I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being P2P... just really, really dissapointed.

Edit:
It certainly wouldn't be the first time a game would be 'rushed' out incomplete, only to require half a dozen of subsequent patches to fix it - but with Blizzard that's usually not the case. They have a record of delivering quality games, but, as you say, bugs and glitches can never be completely eradicated.

Interestingly enough, the only game Blizzard has ever launched incomplete, full of missing details and promises, and buggy and laggy as hell was WoW. Sure, I hear the game is much better now, but to deliver a shoddy product at first and upgrade as time goes on used to not be Blizzard's style, so I hope they don't take WoW as a precedent and run with that model again.

Onehouse

31-07-2008, 12:32

With diablo 3 being pay-to-play, imagine the updates the game would get. It would be like WoW, where when one hack is introduced, it gets patched practically instantly. Plus no laggy cheap servers or any of that. From what I've seen, it looks like it will most likely be P2P anyway, so I'm happy:wave:

I think they should leave the singleplayer campaign alone and lan and open bnet that way also.

Then for closed bnet I would be willing to pay a one time fee of 10 dollars or so (I would infact be willing to pay much more if the higher cost was explained) in order to be able to use:

1. Auction house
2. Mail items and gold
3. Guild house
4. Permanent characters (biggest flaw of D2 was to delete players characters)
5. Friends list and clan management

People who dont want to pay for that, they can still play closed bnet but without those features.
Simply in regards to 4. How many here can raise their hand and say omg, how cool would it be if that character I had years ago could be played again.

For regular updates, hmm, I'm not sure. I think I rather prefer to buy an expansion pack once a year. I hope that D3 can provide some dynamic content that lasts. For me, the Diablo games are soo much better than wow in the aspect of balance. Wow is too damn balanced in the way that you can't really get insanely powerful. If they can keep the powerlevels without having to balance it with tons of content updates I am game, but I doubt it's possible.

PlasmaTorture

31-07-2008, 12:41

I think they should leave the singleplayer campaign alone and lan and open bnet that way also.

Then for closed bnet I would be willing to pay a one time fee of 10 dollars or so (I would infact be willing to pay much more if the higher cost was explained) in order to be able to use:

1. Auction house
2. Mail items and gold
3. Guild house
4. Permanent characters (biggest flaw of D2 was to delete players characters)
5. Friends list and clan management

People who dont want to pay for that, they can still play closed bnet but without those features.
Simply in regards to 4. How many here can raise their hand and say omg, how could would it be if that character I had years ago could be played again.

For regular updates, hmm, I'm not sure. I think I rather prefer to buy and expansion pack once a year. I hope that D3 can provide some dynamic content that lasts. For me, the Diablo games are soo much better than wow in the aspect of balanse. Wow is too damn balanced in the way that you can't really get insanely powerful. If they can keep the powerlevels without having to balance it with tons of content updates I am game, but I doubt it's possible.

See, I agree that I'd probably be willing to pay a one time additional fee of around $10 for it. Even $10 a year I guess. Actually... given how insanely much time I've spent playing Diablo 2 since it came out and Warcraft III, if I were guaranteed a game of similar quality (remains to be seen), I'd probably gladly drop $100-150 for it. Heck, I already have a habbit of buying all the collector's editions since D2 came out anyways.. :whistling:

However, while I can't think of any specific games off the top of my head, I feel like in the past a similar thing would be handled with the version with less features costing $10 LESS. :scratchchin:

5zigen

31-07-2008, 13:31

To give a stupid example: when I buy a car, I expect it to be in working order. If it isn't, the manufacturer has the moral obligation to supply me with a working product under the terms of the guarantee clauses. I wouldn't pay additional cash to get something I should've gotten in the first place. Anything beyond this is fee-able, of course (to keep up with the example: buying chrome rims for your car: comparable to additional content for d3).

So, in my opinion: for additional content, paying is ok. For content that should have been in the game from the start (bugfixes and whatnot): paying is not ok.

What you should've and shouldn't have gotten in the first place is debatable. I'm not arguing that patches should be paid for only, but ongoing patches must be. If you buy anti virus software they will keep you updated for a year and end your license after that. You cant expect a patch every 3 months for more than a year, yet that is the kind of thing I would expect with a monthly fee (and subsequently what was delivered in WoW).

Also, the whole "content that should have been in the game from the start" is a really slippery slope. While a working game is important, trying to argue that X feature need be free, or that Y content is part of the game and should have come in the box is very difficult. While I think what EA has done, charging for Guns or Tutorials as DLC is morally reprehensible, I believe that if you want a service it should be paid for.

That said, I expect more than free patches for the first month if I am paying a monthly fee. For more details feel free to read my essay on the previous page. However, I think keeping a game up to date in the long term (longer than 3-6 months) is something that warrants part of a monthly fee.

And with a car you pay for the guarantee. It's called the warranty (I know you know this) and it's internalized in the cost of the car.

P.S. Plasma. Bnet vanilla and Steam aren't actually robust online services. They're more server finding tools that help players find games. They have very little work to do. In B.net's case the game is hosted on the players computer and on Steam it's hosted on a private server. Just because you aren't paying for something doesn't mean it's free.

Mad Mantis

31-07-2008, 13:37

I apologise for cutting up your post in quotes. I generally find that if you quote enough you can make somenone say almost anything. Arguments should be made against an entire posts and things should be taken into context. However I tried to put it all in a neat story and it was a bit of a mess. This made it easier for me to keep things constructive.

TINSTAFL

Soup kitchens.

One thing you're leaving out is that games haven't increased with inflation, yet their production costs have gone up significantly.

While I'd have to do some calculations to be certain, games over here still costs about as much as they did when I was a kid. I mean kids today could buy the same amount of games in a year as I could when I was a kid. I don't think they got cheaper. I can't back this up with facts, so I'm willing to concede this.

But why are games more expensive? Recently it came to my attention on a Fallout board that Fallout had as many people working on it as Oblivion did. Only Fallout was made almost 10 years earlier. Sure the programming might be more difficult nowadays, but there are better tools for the job as well. So all in all the amount of work should be roughly equal. So why are games nowadays so much more expensive? Does all the money go to shiny graphics? I’m genuinely curious about this. It is not something I was able to find a lot of information on.

Just as an example, Capcom has this wonderful game, Okami, which they re-released on the wii. It sold 280,000 copies. On the other hand, their re-release of Resident Evil 4 sold over a million.

Did Okami make a profit? How much more profit did RE4 make? Could the company flourish if all it did was make games like Okami? Games are no longer about fun or doing what you love. All they are today is a way to increase profits for the suits. I think that did not do the industry good.

The point is, at the current pricepoint, there's not much incentive for a company to maintain a game if there's no subscription type payment in it for them. In D2 for example the game was basically generating sales for it's first 6 years. That's something not a lot of games do. But how many people do you think bought HG:L last month?

The incentive for the companies is there. At least it used to be. A pleasurable experience with a well maintained game would lead to goodwill towards a company and an increased willingness of gamers to purchase future products from that company. It is what made Blizz great. It helped Valve to become one of the greats. Nowadays people think they have to pay for this. Most companies gladly go along with that.

Why is it that HG:L bombed while DII flourished? I’d say it is because HG:L is not as good a game as DII. Having never played HG:L I can’t comment on the mechanics of the game, but the reviews and experiences I read did not entice me to play the game.

The desire to pay for the service generally comes from people who have played a MMORPG or other pay to play game, and enjoyed the service they got.

Could it be that the service was great and people assume that this is because of the fact that it is paid for? That they link p2p with better service while the fee is not necessarily the cause of the better experience?

If I stop liking the game I can stop paying the company, thus giving them incentive to provide good ongoing support. If I buy a game (like HG:L, which I foolishly did) there's no way for me to tell the company they did a crap job and I'm unhappy with it other than not play and post on forums about what terrible executive decisions were made in the game.

I don’t believe in voting with your wallet. This really only works if you are able to garner enough support. The way consumers and how products are set up today means that your vote is even less effective than when you are voting for the government.

That being said you can still punish the company by not buying their upcoming product. The same monetary signal would be sent out. There would be a loss of income for the company and they would have to find out what caused it.

I wouldn't call things like frequent patches, balancing passes, additional content, central server hosting and anti-cheat measures "basic services" because, well they simply aren't.

If you are providing an online experience for a game I'd go so far as to say that central server hosting, anti-cheat measures and balancing passes are basic services. Without them the online environment does not function and will reflect badly on your product. Patches need only occur with game breaking bugs. Additional content is something that should be paid for, but that can come in the form of expansion packs.

factotum

31-07-2008, 13:56

Did Okami make a profit? How much more profit did RE4 make? Could the company flourish if all it did was make games like Okami?

I know of at least one game company that produces a highly niche game that probably sold no more than 200,000 units (and probably a lot less), yet they're still going. Whether the people working for the company are driving the Porsches they possibly dreamed about when starting out in the gaming business is another matter. :thumbup:

5zigen

31-07-2008, 14:42

I apologise for cutting up your post in quotes.

I don't mind, hope you don;t mind so much either.

But why are games more expensive? Recently it came to my attention on a Fallout board that Fallout had as many people working on it as Oblivion did. Only Fallout was made almost 10 years earlier... So why are games nowadays so much more expensive? Does all the money go to shiny graphics? I’m genuinely curious about this. It is not something I was able to find a lot of information on.

Did Okami make a profit? How much more profit did RE4 make? Could the company flourish if all it did was make games like Okami? Games are no longer about fun or doing what you love. All they are today is a way to increase profits for the suits. I think that did not do the industry good.

Why is it that HG:L bombed while DII flourished? I’d say it is because HG:L is not as good a game as DII. Having never played HG:L I can’t comment on the mechanics of the game, but the reviews and experiences I read did not entice me to play the game.

The incentive for the companies is there. At least it used to be. A pleasurable experience with a well maintained game would lead to goodwill towards a company and an increased willingness of gamers to purchase future products from that company. It is what made Blizz great. It helped Valve to become one of the greats.

The reason the Oblivion dev team was the same size as Fallout (my guess) is because Betheseda licensed the Gamebryo engine(It's not just consumers that deal with licenses) That probably cost them a few hundred thousand dollars (probably a conservative estimate), and they can't even use it for more than 1 game! That being said, if you don't have to design your own engine, you can have a much much smaller dev team as all of the libraries are already there for you to access and all of the tools are there to make your life easier.

As to why it's more expensive now, well you have inflation which has increased the cost of living. Game developers are a pretty high skill job so the pay has to increase with inflation. Aside from that, the production cycles are much longer because all of the content takes so much longer because it's so much more detailed. So in part it is due to fancy graphics, but also that gamedevs are more expensive and generally a team has to be bigger, if the team doesn't have to be bigger, you're talking about using a licensed engine which can run from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars (unreal 3 engine, iirc).

Whether or not it's good or bad it's a reality of our market emulating economy. Okami wii made a profit (it was a port after all), but not a big enough one to garner a sequel according to Capcom. Another reality though, is that making a game "for the love of gaming" isn't really possible. I mean you've got a engine licensing company like emergent who needs to review and consult with you, train you how to use their engine, then charge you for the training, the tools, and the engine. Plus you need developer salaries for several years. Plus you need to get someone to publish your game (though this is increasingly easy with things like steam, which is good) which cuts into your profits, and that all adds up to huge huge loans. If your idea doesn't look good enough, the publisher could decline, the capital investment lender could decline or the game engine company could decline. Not to mention it's incredibly risky to make a game that cost several millions of dollars to make. It's not just because of the suits, it's a simple market reality.

HG:L didn't "bomb" in sales(it did bomb in ratings). It was number 6 on the november sales chart (of pc games). It's anyone's guess as to why they crashed like they did. And unfortunately goodwill doesnt make money. It can make you sales, but when sales are 90% sunk costs, that doesn't leave much for paying teams of people to work on released products after they're released. That's why D2 only got 1 patch in the 5 years between 1.09 and 1.10. It's also why the realms got dirty very quickly and still do after ladder wipes. No offense intended here but I think you're romanticising your D2 online memory, yeah the online service was free, but the anti cheat measure were just short of non existent, there was no game support staff, the patches were infrequent etc. That's all because they only had 1 person working on the game post 2001. You cant pay salaries on good will alone, and in that way, there is simply no incentive for the kind of costly online support that modern p2play games provide.

Could it be that the service was great and people assume that this is because of the fact that it is paid for? That they link p2p with better service while the fee is not necessarily the cause of the better experience?

It could be, but it's an honest assumption. If I go rent a limo I get good service, but I don't expect that from the bus. But that being said, the things associated with better service are (in my opinion): Robust online only features - matchmaking, economy devices, mail and messaging-, cheat monitoring and prevention -watching for bots, exploitave scripts, dupe cleaning / prevention- , continual attention to balancing, tech support / other help -wow GM's-, robust and secure central servers -a server that not only hosts the character files but also all of the game information-. Of those, only 1 is a one time cost, the others all involve a ongoing cost in terms of salaries and rental space. I think it's safe to assume that in the case where I experienced those things, that's where my monthly fee was going. I admit GW did a great job and has seen minimal exploitation, but that's not so much from the constant service as it is from the clever engine and netcode design.

If you are providing an online experience for a game I'd go so far as to say that central server hosting, anti-cheat measures and balancing passes are basic services. Without them the online environment does not function and will reflect badly on your product. Patches need only occur with game breaking bugs. Additional content is something that should be paid for, but that can come in the form of expansion packs.

I'm not sure why you're of the opinion that things like anti cheat measures and balancing / patching passes are things that should be "standard issue" while you think additional content warrants pay. Both of them cost the company money. Perhaps our idea of anti-cheat measures are different, but my idea is working against people who cheat and develop cheats in real time, it's not like they can simply write a code to make their game exploit free.

I'm not talking about paying a monthly fee for a service that is like the current B.net. I would never, ever do something like that, and I think that's one of the contentions at hand. Some people see D2 and say "it was free to play, why would you want to pay when it can be free" without thinking of the stuff that you get.

It's also important to note, all the companies that people hold in such high regard as great and giving don't actually give that much. Valve doesn't do much other than provide an anti cheat function and game matching service, people still have to rent or buy servers to run the games they want to play. B.net does similar but the games are hosted on peoples computers, or at least, most of the information is. This is a far cry from the service you get with a game like WoW, where they constantly ban people who cheat, they have a mostly clean economy (with exception of gold farmers), they have a very robust support staff for people experiencing problems / bugs / scams, they have a major patch every 3 or so months, they have a great ingame messaging system and it's all heavily hosted server side.

I simply would like to see these things in D3, and I know it's foolish to expect them for free. I think really what we have here is a misalignment of expectations. You don't expect as much as I do so you think a monthly fee for online play is preposterous. I expect far more than you for online play so I think having no monthly fee is a bad decision. I expect more and I expect to pay for it. I don't expect limo service from a bus.

Soup kitchens.

Someone pays for them, it's just not the people who eat the food.

Sorry for cutting up your post and I kinda reordered part of it I Think. And it's super late so I apologize if any of that doesn't make sense.

Edit: I wrote 2 essays and I Was actually trying to avoid this thread...

ThulRasha

31-07-2008, 15:41

Paying for bug fixes and improvements against hacks? No way, that should be covered by the initial product already.
Now if there would be additional content such as what WoW does from time to time, then it's a different story.

We will see from Starcraft2 what extras the new battlenet service offers. Perhaps there is something more than only patches for bugfixes and hacks.

sicilian

31-07-2008, 16:08

From what I've been hearing, it doesn't sound like D3 is going to be p2p on its own, but battle.net 2.0 will be (which includes SC2). A few concerns with this for me:

1) I liked Starcraft, but I'm not enough of an RTS guy to be willing to pay monthly for SC2. So now, if there's a fee for battle.net, I'm essentially only getting half of the content I'm paying for, unless they do something like $5 for D3, $5 for SC2, or $9 for both.

2) I generally play with only a few people that I know. I don't go into open games, and I'm probably one of those casual players who wouldn't use all of the battle.net services offered. So basically, I'm paying $10 per month for the right to mule and play with a friend. As long as I can do those things without battle.net (maybe a single player item transfer system + tcp/ip games), they can charge whatever they want for the online extra services.

3) Content updates. Some of these would be good, adding new items/recipes/side quests, etc. But what soured me on WoW was there was NO ENDING. If content updates kept adding to the storyline or added a new end dungeon, it would make me feel like, "What's the point? There's just going to be a another demon after this anyway..." Expansions work better for a Diablo type game in this capacity, because you have a sense of accomplishment at the end of each one.

Sein Schatten

31-07-2008, 16:09

But why are games more expensive? Recently it came to my attention on a Fallout board that Fallout had as many people working on it as Oblivion did. Only Fallout was made almost 10 years earlier. Sure the programming might be more difficult nowadays, but there are better tools for the job as well. So all in all the amount of work should be roughly equal. So why are games nowadays so much more expensive? Does all the money go to shiny graphics? I’m genuinely curious about this. It is not something I was able to find a lot of information on.

It is not all about graphics. But it is a part of it. The enemy "Voice of Nature" from OOO uses usermade items. Those items are so badly opimized that it slows down your game to a crawl. That happens with badly opimized items.
The quests are difficult to create and need a lot of bugfixing. Have you played the usermade mod The Lost Spires? It is one of the best questmods for Oblivion. Go ask there how long it took to create that.
VO is a huge part of games, too. It is anything but easy to make them. And it costs. Try and play a mod with bad VO. It is a big immersion breaker.
You need people who are good at programming and those people you need after you create the construction set because OB has a scripting language. YOu cannot use designers to script complex scripts.
I could go on and on about stuff and all of that needs to be excellent and this excellency is achieved by hiring the best people. Go to any large scale mod. Look at what is needed. Worldbuilder, interior design, VO, scripters, questmakers, modellers. It may be the same total number of people but maybe they get payed better?

chenghao

31-07-2008, 16:24

if it is fun , i dun mind paying. but i am not hoping for it to be p2p

Funkopotamus

31-07-2008, 16:27

NKlint

31-07-2008, 16:31

Flagship's reputation before hellgate was being the team behind the Diablo series. I know their game was rushed out but imagine if you had to pay for their bug fixes, or anyone's bug fixes. Maybe it's just me but that'd be a big strike against their company.

If we had to pay for fixes to the game, then the game would be out tomorrow and we'd be paying for it for the rest of our lives to play it.

Mad Mantis

31-07-2008, 17:28

As to why it's more expensive now, well you have inflation which has increased the cost of living. Game developers are a pretty high skill job so the pay has to increase with inflation. Aside from that, the production cycles are much longer because all of the content takes so much longer because it's so much more detailed. So in part it is due to fancy graphics, but also that gamedevs are more expensive and generally a team has to be bigger, if the team doesn't have to be bigger, you're talking about using a licensed engine which can run from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars (unreal 3 engine, iirc).

I couldn’t find information about the development times on games throughout the years. I’m guessing it also depends on the company making the game. With that in mind, the reason that game production nowadays is more expensive is because the industry got greedy? High salaries and exorbitant licensing costs? Because if development teams need not be any bigger than the cost of the team has gone up. I’d be really interested to seeing charts on how the budget on videogames is split over the various teams that work on it.

Another reality though, is that making a game "for the love of gaming" isn't really possible. I mean you've got a engine licensing company like emergent who needs to review and consult with you, train you how to use their engine, then charge you for the training, the tools, and the engine. Plus you need developer salaries for several years. Plus you need to get someone to publish your game (though this is increasingly easy with things like steam, which is good) which cuts into your profits, and that all adds up to huge huge loans. If your idea doesn't look good enough, the publisher could decline, the capital investment lender could decline or the game engine company could decline. Not to mention it's incredibly risky to make a game that cost several millions of dollars to make. It's not just because of the suits, it's a simple market reality.

With "for the love of gaming" I'm not talking about indie developers that make games using whatever means they have at their disposal and targeting niche markets. There are some Eastern European companies that still make games for the love of gaming. They genuinely want to place a good game on the market. They don’t seem to take huge budgets to develop. Games like STALKER and the Witcher. Although I have to confess that I can’t back this up with facts since I can’t find the numbers (I’d love to see them though). It just seem to me that most game companies go about it the wrong way. Using up huge amounts of money and needing to recuperate that by selling a lot of games, DLC and monthly fees.

And unfortunately goodwill doesnt make money. It can make you sales, but when sales are 90% sunk costs, that doesn't leave much for paying teams of people to work on released products after they're released. That's why D2 only got 1 patch in the 5 years between 1.09 and 1.10. It's also why the realms got dirty very quickly and still do after ladder wipes. No offense intended here but I think you're romanticising your D2 online memory, yeah the online service was free, but the anti cheat measure were just short of non existent, there was no game support staff, the patches were infrequent etc. That's all because they only had 1 person working on the game post 2001. You cant pay salaries on good will alone, and in that way, there is simply no incentive for the kind of costly online support that modern p2play games provide.

Goodwill alone does not make money. It does however increase sales and the number of people willing to pay extra for services. It is pretty important for companies and it is something that is paid for in takeovers. Continuing sales of game units could potentially cover for upgrades, depending on how the online environment is set-up and what we understand under upgrades.

I haven’t played D2 online much, mostly because I don’t enjoy playing with random people. The average person on the internet is an asshole. Or it could be that the average person I meet online is an asshole. I know that all manner of hacks and cheats exist on Battle.net and that support for that is not optimal. If I remember correctly part of the trouble of Battle.net is that it was not built from the ground up to deal with that kind of thing and be easy to maintain. A well developed system could save you a lot of headache and costs on that part. Just look at Steam.

I'm not sure why you're of the opinion that things like anti cheat measures and balancing / patching passes are things that should be "standard issue" while you think additional content warrants pay. Both of them cost the company money. Perhaps our idea of anti-cheat measures are different, but my idea is working against people who cheat and develop cheats in real time, it's not like they can simply write a code to make their game exploit free.

I'm not talking about paying a monthly fee for a service that is like the current B.net. I would never, ever do something like that, and I think that's one of the contentions at hand. Some people see D2 and say "it was free to play, why would you want to pay when it can be free" without thinking of the stuff that you get.

Anti-cheat features and the like I consider a service. I bought a game that came with an online component. In order to keep the customer from enjoying his game in the provided online environment certain services are needed. These anti-cheat measures keep the customers pleased and ready to buy anther game from said company.
Additional content is something that was not released with the game I purchased. It is not something needed to play the game as originally purchased. If I do want that content I think it is only fair to pay for that.

People are talking about paying for a kind of Battle.net as it is at the moment. They are willing to pay for only anti-cheat measures. It is not about extra content in most cases. These people just want a sturdy online environment. That is something that can be made free.

It's also important to note, all the companies that people hold in such high regard as great and giving don't actually give that much. Valve doesn't do much other than provide an anti cheat function and game matching service, people still have to rent or buy servers to run the games they want to play. B.net does similar but the games are hosted on peoples computers, or at least, most of the information is. This is a far cry from the service you get with a game like WoW, where they constantly ban people who cheat, they have a mostly clean economy (with exception of gold farmers), they have a very robust support staff for people experiencing problems / bugs / scams, they have a major patch every 3 or so months, they have a great ingame messaging system and it's all heavily hosted server side.

I simply would like to see these things in D3, and I know it's foolish to expect them for free. I think really what we have here is a misalignment of expectations. You don't expect as much as I do so you think a monthly fee for online play is preposterous. I expect far more than you for online play so I think having no monthly fee is a bad decision. I expect more and I expect to pay for it. I don't expect limo service from a bus.

This could be indeed the problem. I don’t play MMO’s. I don’t expect that D3 will be like an MMO. If there is an online component I expect it to be more along the lines of D2. I expect the game to be mostly finished and free of game breaking bugs. If during some time it appears that there are other game breaking bugs or huge imbalances they need to be fixed. There is no need for huge patches every 3 months. As long as they make an effort to ban cheaters and provide some community options it is good. I expect service along the lines of Steam and current D2.

You need people who are good at programming and those people you need after you create the construction set because OB has a scripting language. YOu cannot use designers to script complex scripts.
I could go on and on about stuff and all of that needs to be excellent and this excellency is achieved by hiring the best people. Go to any large scale mod. Look at what is needed. Worldbuilder, interior design, VO, scripters, questmakers, modellers. It may be the same total number of people but maybe they get payed better?

The makers of Fallout weren't fanmod makers. They were a professional company, just like Bethesda. So why did Oblivion cost so much more to make as Fallout, when the teams were equally professional and of equal size?

Sein Schatten

31-07-2008, 17:46

The makers of Fallout weren't fanmod makers. They were a professional company, just like Bethesda. So why did Oblivion cost so much more to make as Fallout, when the teams were equally professional and of equal size?

I know that... But devs and modmakes use the same tool and thus its comparable.
The dollar was worth more in 1980 then it is today. 10$ today is 2-4$ in the 1980.[1] [2] Did you took that into account?

Why is there no [sup]? :( I need mah [soup]. :(

References
___________________________
1. Six Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to Present. http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/
2. The Shrinking Value of the Dollar. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001519.html

Mad Mantis

31-07-2008, 20:42

The dollar was worth more in 1980 then it is today. 10$ today is 2-4$ in the 1980.[1] [2] Did you took that into account?

No. I took the euro into account and looked at what a euro buys me now and what a guilder used to buy me. I admit I was totally unscientific in my cost estimate.

Still that would mean that a game would cost anywhere between 5 to 2.5 times as much to make nowadays. Budgets are higher than that.

Sein Schatten

31-07-2008, 21:14

TBH, this was all more or less guisswork why it could be. Just some reasons that are plausible for me. A lot of things cost more today as it was twenty years ago.
I have no clue, though, I am not a game dev. David Gaider said once, there will never be another Baldurs Gate because the development costs of such a mammoth is too big and can't even break even with sells alone. That makes me sad. :(

Mcwhopper

31-07-2008, 23:05

Nobody's going to buy stuff from a company that releases buggy software and doesn't fix it unless you pay.

Hellgate London?

Everything EA makes?

That was easy to parry :coffee:

Also: give me sc2! This has been the slowest year ever for good pc games! Damn developers are ya sleeping? Dont snort when Im talking to you!

Lord_Jaroh

31-07-2008, 23:09

The simple reason why budgets are larger is simply advertising. You have to pay for the game to "get out there" so that people know it's coming, and the more in your face ads you have, the larger the cost.

Maybe if companies would stop with their over-the-top, in-your-face advertising, costs would go down, but that is wishful thinking which is never going to happen. I would still like to see advertisements, and those involved, all burn Diablo's realm, since I think they are all wastes of perfectly good air that should be reserved for something more important (like balloons). There is absolutely nothing good that comes from advertising, especially to the degree it occurs now, and it is a waste of my time, as well as it being an unwanted intrusion. I do not need someone else telling me what I do or do not want.

Sorry, that's my rant for the day, but I absolutely loathe anything to do with advertising as it stands right now.

Mcwhopper

31-07-2008, 23:15

Aruix

31-07-2008, 23:29

To add in a few cents..

Diablo III itself should not be pay to play, but I could see Blizz moving Battle.Net in the direction of other services like say Steam or Xbox Live, maybe just not to the same degree.

I played WoW for well over 2 years, and was so frustrated by the direction the game was going, and how it will continue to go in their new expansion, that I simply had to say enough and put an end to wasting my money. Money doesn't always equal good patches/bug fixes and "balancing" isses. Anyone who has played WoW long enough can't honestly say that game is balanced . Of course I have to bring WoW up in my point, as this is the only game Blizz makes anyone pay for thus far, and while it used to be decent, things are not how they were.

I feel I am entitled to bug fixes and the like for free after a game has shipped. If the company in question shipped out a game with such flaws that warrant patches, why is it my responsibility to pay them for their mistakes? Of course, don't take that statement the wrong way, I understand things happen, but that also doesn't mean I should be held by my wallet to get things fixed.

Just my 2 cents

Funkopotamus

31-07-2008, 23:38

Hellgate London?

Everything EA makes?

That was easy to parry :coffee:
I wasn't aware EA, and Flagship by association, made you pay for bug fixes. I'm afraid I'm guilty of theft because my copy of hellgate has patched many times and I've yet to pay a dime for them.

Lord_Jaroh

31-07-2008, 23:41

Wow if you hate adds that much; You must have huge issues when watching television, listening to the radio, going out, walking around town!

It's just adds mate, lighten up.

Also, many of the games I really like have about as much ads as welll.. Do you now Eu3? That's how many ads they have!

I don't watch T.V. anymore, I simply download the shows. I don't listen to the radio, simply make my own music mixes so I can listen to what I want to hear. As far as going out, yes, I still do that, but I do so hate all the advertising everywhere.

Sure, it's just ads, but they are so intrusive now that it is very difficult to do anything without them appearing. Surfing the web? Pop-Ups or else loud annoying ones placed in obvious places (this site itself has those). Going to the movies? Zoom-Zoom and other such drek that play repeatedly. Movies themselves? So much blatant product placement in most blockbuster-style movies it's not funny. T.V. That one is self explanitory. Magazines? There are more pages of ads almost than actual articles. And what can you do to get away from it all? Not much.

Omikron8

01-08-2008, 00:27

microtransaction yes such as $10 for a large content update

monthly fees hell no not even $5/month, if i want that i'll go play some grindfest traditional holy trinity MMO (ie. any MMO)

5zigen

01-08-2008, 01:17

I couldn’t find information about the development times on games throughout the years. I’m guessing it also depends on the company making the game. With that in mind, the reason that game production nowadays is more expensive is because the industry got greedy? High salaries and exorbitant licensing costs? Because if development teams need not be any bigger than the cost of the team has gone up. I’d be really interested to seeing charts on how the budget on videogames is split over the various teams that work on it.

The makers of Fallout weren't fanmod makers. They were a professional company, just like Bethesda. So why did Oblivion cost so much more to make as Fallout, when the teams were equally professional and of equal size?

The cost of the teams HAVE gone up. Back in the day it was easy to put an NPC in the game, they were just an animated sprite that could be thrown together in something like an hour. Now days, a character has to have things to make it look real, not just from a technical point of view but from an artistic point of view. You now need Programmers (usually 2, at least) a producer, a 3d artist, level designer, 2d artist, animator, producer, designer, then you also need to pay the software licensing fees: Engine (if used), 3dsmax, photoshop (generally need at least 2 copies of each or more, 1 copy of engine).

I know you said the Fallout team weren't some fanmodders and I don't know how you got that impression. The fallout team, to my knowledge, had to develope the game from the ground up. They needed to create an engine, create tools, and generate all the content in the game and do all the art. Betheseda on the other hand Didn't have to create the engine, because they licensed one.

The reason why fallout costs so much less to produce? First off it was released 10 years before oblivion. The CPI has gone up a LOT in those 10 years. Second, because licensing software costs much more now. Third, the development cycle for oblivion was probably a lot longer. you seem to want to chalk this whole situation up to corporate greed, but it's actually because of consumer demand. We want the things big budget games include, so they make big budget games. But we also demand them at a super low cost, which makes it an incredibly high risk to make the games. When you have to sell over 500,000 copies to recoup your investment, it makes you wonder if there isn't some other way.

Goodwill alone does not make money. It does however increase sales and the number of people willing to pay extra for services. It is pretty important for companies and it is something that is paid for in takeovers. Continuing sales of game units could potentially cover for upgrades, depending on how the online environment is set-up and what we understand under upgrades.

I haven’t played D2 online much, mostly because I don’t enjoy playing with random people. The average person on the internet is an asshole. Or it could be that the average person I meet online is an asshole. I know that all manner of hacks and cheats exist on Battle.net and that support for that is not optimal. If I remember correctly part of the trouble of Battle.net is that it was not built from the ground up to deal with that kind of thing and be easy to maintain. A well developed system could save you a lot of headache and costs on that part. Just look at Steam.

I think what you're also assuming is that if blizzard charges a monthly fee they will lose all of their good will. That isn't the case. Continuing sales of a product COULD potentially cover the game costs, but that's not how it works usually. IIRC not much of the money from "continued sales" goes to the game's developers for ongoing content and things of that nature.

Goodwill is great, but if you can garner good will and get paid at the same time that's much more important than trying to maintain a halo status that's impossible to upkeep.

Anti-cheat features and the like I consider a service. I bought a game that came with an online component. In order to keep the customer from enjoying his game in the provided online environment certain services are needed. These anti-cheat measures keep the customers pleased and ready to buy anther game from said company.
Additional content is something that was not released with the game I purchased. It is not something needed to play the game as originally purchased. If I do want that content I think it is only fair to pay for that.

People are talking about paying for a kind of Battle.net as it is at the moment. They are willing to pay for only anti-cheat measures. It is not about extra content in most cases. These people just want a sturdy online environment. That is something that can be made free.

People are willing to pay for the anti cheat measures, because, to do them right that's what needs to be done. VAC that you're so in love with works in some cases, but it's not impossible to get around. D2 realms were designed to stop cheating. They tried to make sure that duping wasn't possible and that it was impossible to hack your character by storing it serverside.

But I still don't understand why you seem to think that anti cheat is something that is part of the game experience. You can avoid cheats yourself, but simply playing with people who do not cheat. What you're suggesting is that the company should be required to support their product indefinitely with the only income stream being future game sales, which in most cases simply won't cut it.

This could be indeed the problem. I don’t play MMO’s. I don’t expect that D3 will be like an MMO. If there is an online component I expect it to be more along the lines of D2. I expect the game to be mostly finished and free of game breaking bugs. If during some time it appears that there are other game breaking bugs or huge imbalances they need to be fixed. There is no need for huge patches every 3 months. As long as they make an effort to ban cheaters and provide some community options it is good. I expect service along the lines of Steam and current D2.

Steam and D2 don't make an effort to ban cheaters... If vac catches you it initiates some sort of auto ban process last I checked. I haven't heard of people getting banned from D2 in actual bannings in a long time. They almost never went through to fix the hr duping etc in D2.

I don't expect 32 to be a mmorpg. Of course mmorpg has so many connotations to it that saying it has lost all meaning. I expect robust online support from D3 though, I would enjoy extra content, I expect constant maintenance and purging the player base an economy of cheats, dupes and bots. That simply isn't maintainable in the long term on box sales alone.

P.S. Sein, Just because the dollar value is low doesn't mean inflation has not increased. There was over 5% inflation in the US last year. The currency (Euro vs Dollar or GBP vs Dollar) exchange doesn't dictate inflation and actually devaluation of the dollar can be directly or indirectly related to high inflation rates.

PlasmaTorture

01-08-2008, 02:10

To add in a few cents..

Diablo III itself should not be pay to play, but I could see Blizz moving Battle.Net in the direction of other services like say Steam

completely free? :scratchchin:
I do agree with you, though. :yes:

@Omikron8: How can you want microtransactions? It's the worst idea the devlopers have ever had for gaming. Do you not recall the Battlefield: Bad Company fiasco? The inernet gaming community was in an uproar about the microtransactions in the game (you had to pay additional to get 5 more guns to choose from). The result? EA went back on their decision and you can unlock those guns if you buy the regular version... those who pay more for the gold version get it immediatley. A bad situation resolved well.
Anyways, microtransactions = bad.

Content "packs"? I'd rather just have a complete storyline in the game when it comes out. If they can add content that makes sense storyline wise, then sure, I guess... but then why not just do an expansion that adds story AND content? I do not want to see it become WoW-esque at all where they keep adding new dungeons and storylines and having you become more and more lore-breakingly powerful until you're combatting the gods who created the world themselves just to give the players something to do. It's a bad, bad road to head down.

@5zigen: You do realize that Blizzard is making so much money from WoW that if Diablo 3 didn't sell at all they basically would still be fine financially? Hyperbole, I know, but don't try to paint it like having good battle.net 2.0 features would cripple Blizzard if they weren't free. Someone suggested just upping the cost of WoW subscriptions to cover the b.net 2.0 features, if it was needed, and I have to say that seems like a good idea. WoW players are already used to shelling out $15 a month to play a game they already bought, and I doubt they'd complain if it rose to $15.50 or $16 with an excuse of "inflated economy" or something to cover it up. :whistling:

ReturnOfMichael

01-08-2008, 02:17

I would not want D3 to be Pay to Play. And I don't know why you think it will be since it has already been practically confirmed that it will be free over Battle.net

tmorrow

01-08-2008, 02:37

What I dont get is why people seem to think they are *entitled* to getting things like bug fixes and updates for free.

Grow up: Nothings for free. Nobody is going to work their *** of if there isn't a reward at the end of the road.

We've all grown up, why don't you. If you purchase a game in most countries, there are consumer laws protecting buyers from faulty products. Once a company agrees that that a bug exists, it's incumbent on them to fix that bug.

As for your point that nothing is free, I think you are overlooking the bleeding obvious - the customer paid the box price! That's the company's reward. The less defects in the product, the more they'll have in their hip pocket at the end of the day.

Companies used to, and largely still do respect these rights outside the software industry. Only in the software industry is the "Microsoft shaft approach" somehow acceptable to ship products with outrageous numbers of known outstanding bugs and then to charge customers full price for what are cosmetic fixes at best. Don't get me wrong, Blizzard is at the other end of the spectrum, producing high quality product by most people's standards, and their patch history is fairly good, but the software industry has some problems in this space. It's a relatively new industry and appropriate consumer laws still aren't in place.

No one is looking for a free lunch. They're buying a game and expect it to work. If it doesn't work, they expect it to be fixed at no extra cost. Yes, they are entitled to it, it's their right.

MooCQ

01-08-2008, 02:42

What I dont get is why people seem to think they are *entitled* to getting things like bug fixes and updates for free.

Grow up: Nothings for free. Nobody is going to work their *** of if there isn't a reward at the end of the road.

We are all entitled to updates and bug fixes, because we paid for a "quality" game. How could you possibly believe, we are getting something free?!

The initial $50-60 dollar box should be worth the money. Not only that, but BNET itself pays for itself, thru all those annoying ads.. A company is obligated to provide us with a high quality product, service, and updates - as need arises. We should not have to pay everytime they find flaws in their game code! It's their lazy *** effort - and not our fault, that a game is flawed or corrupt, hence their responsibility to quality and not ours! Nothing is free!

My point being, is that we need to demand quality from the start (because we the consumer are always paying) instead of letting these big corporations take advantage of us.. and by having people willing to pay more (for what?), that only signals to Vivendi-Universal, that we enjoy low quality crap, that will break often, and that suckers are gonna pay for crappy coding.

Telzen

01-08-2008, 06:05

I would not want D3 to be Pay to Play. And I don't know why you think it will be since it has already been practically confirmed that it will be free over Battle.net

No it hasn't. They have specifically avoided talking about wether it will be free. And stuff like this has been said:

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Jay Wilson, lead designer on Diablo III, summed up the developer's policy on the microtransactions issue: "I think we always look to make the game we want to make, and then figure out the kind of financial model that works with that game."

Telzen

01-08-2008, 06:11

SlechtWeerBeer

01-08-2008, 06:19

I'd rather pay a small fee than have laggy games filled with duppers.

Taken out of context for your pleasure.
The reason D II has dupers (one P) is because BNet 1 is flawed. Besides, char info is stored client side, come on... You're asking for exploits and hacks then.

PlasmaTorture

01-08-2008, 06:47

MooCQ,

Do you think that 50-60 dollars(and not all goes to them) is enough to pay for the years of work that goes into the game and also pay for the bandwidth and work for years of b.net service? The fact is battle net costs money to run and if a little money isn't charged then Blizzard will eventually let the service start dying just like they are doing with the current one. I'd rather pay a small fee than have laggy games filled with duppers.

The vast majority of it does go to them as they are their own publisher, just so you know. Also the only reason Blizzard has started to "let the service die" (which it really hasn't - it's about the same as it's always been) is because they haven't released a new game for it in like 5 years. Every time they released a new b.net game, they improved b.net/used b.net better, and the experience just worked. Wacraft 3 has a very very good set-up in many ways. Perfect? No. Good? I think so. The fact is, they still are keeping tournaments going and such in that game, so clearly they haven't given up patching/support for the games. I mean, what are you complaining about? The last patch for the older games came out this June!

The service has stayed relatively the same throughout its history and has clearly not caused any financial problems for the company and now they've got huge piles of cash flowing in from WoW. Do you seriously think they can't support an updated battle.net without a fee?

Mad Mantis

01-08-2008, 10:54

The reason why fallout costs so much less to produce? First off it was released 10 years before oblivion. The CPI has gone up a LOT in those 10 years. Second, because licensing software costs much more now. Third, the development cycle for oblivion was probably a lot longer. you seem to want to chalk this whole situation up to corporate greed, but it's actually because of consumer demand. We want the things big budget games include, so they make big budget games. But we also demand them at a super low cost, which makes it an incredibly high risk to make the games. When you have to sell over 500,000 copies to recoup your investment, it makes you wonder if there isn't some other way.

All I’m really interested in is trying to understand why games are so much more expensive to make. I just don’t understand it. What is it about games these days that causes them to need incredible budgets? I read about the multimillions of dollars that go in a game, but there doesn’t seem to be any info on where the money ends up.

I think targeting less wide audiences should allow the costs per game to go down meaning you’d need to sell less copies. Sure your market would be smaller, but the risk is also smaller. You could afford to let a few titles bomb. As an added bonus you can tailor the game to that niche almost ensuring more sales. Specialisation can work.

I think what you're also assuming is that if blizzard charges a monthly fee they will lose all of their good will. That isn't the case. Continuing sales of a product COULD potentially cover the game costs, but that's not how it works usually. IIRC not much of the money from "continued sales" goes to the game's developers for ongoing content and things of that nature.

Goodwill is great, but if you can garner good will and get paid at the same time that's much more important than trying to maintain a halo status that's impossible to upkeep.

Obviously they don’t loose goodwill. Many people are more than ready to pay for the services. That is what strikes me as odd. In my world a company would loose goodwill because people wouldn’t want to pay for basic services. But clearly people do want to pay for it. Some are even expecting it. I understand the companies in supporting this type of behaviour as it increases their profits. What I don’t understand is the willingness of the people to fall for it.

But I still don't understand why you seem to think that anti cheat is something that is part of the game experience. You can avoid cheats yourself, but simply playing with people who do not cheat. What you're suggesting is that the company should be required to support their product indefinitely with the only income stream being future game sales, which in most cases simply won't cut it.

Avoiding cheats is similar to saying to just avoid the bugs. No need to patch them. It isn’t a part of the game experience so much as it is a part of the online experience. You are providing the online component and should do an effort to keep it entertaining for people as that is in the best interest of the company.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say indefinite support for a game. The fact that D2 is still being supported after all these years I find very commendable. The game is ancient. Normally after a while you’d see a definite decrease in the number of people playing to where you reach a point where the service could stop.

I don't expect 32 to be a mmorpg. Of course mmorpg has so many connotations to it that saying it has lost all meaning. I expect robust online support from D3 though, I would enjoy extra content, I expect constant maintenance and purging the player base an economy of cheats, dupes and bots. That simply isn't maintainable in the long term on box sales alone.

What kind of constant maintenance would there be on a game like D2? D3 will probably be more similar to D2 than WoW, so I'm using D2 as a reference point. And what does robust online support mean? Cheating and dupe purging is something that I also expect. Extra content I'd like to see in the form of expansion packs. I don't know what the costs are for the type of support I expect and how a company can finance that. I just don't have the numbers for that.

Just for the record, I do enjoy this discussion. It has give me some valuable insights.

sbn

01-08-2008, 10:55

We are all entitled to updates and bug fixes, because we paid for a "quality" game. How could you possibly believe, we are getting something free?!

The initial $50-60 dollar box should be worth the money. Not only that, but BNET itself pays for itself, thru all those annoying ads.. A company is obligated to provide us with a high quality product, service, and updates - as need arises. We should not have to pay everytime they find flaws in their game code! It's their lazy *** effort - and not our fault, that a game is flawed or corrupt, hence their responsibility to quality and not ours! Nothing is free!

My point being, is that we need to demand quality from the start (because we the consumer are always paying) instead of letting these big corporations take advantage of us.. and by having people willing to pay more (for what?), that only signals to Vivendi-Universal, that we enjoy low quality crap, that will break often, and that suckers are gonna pay for crappy coding.

E...freakin...xactly! We already DO pay, so why the bleeping bleep do people want to pay more?

Honestly what is the biggest content they could/would add if this was pay to play? Do you really think there is going to be an expansion size one made available every year? Not in the least bit. I would much rather just have a separate expansion like LOD to provide new acts, creatures, maps, etc..

But paying for something you can get free is just bleeping..bleep. Would you all mind sending a check now monthly to ABC, or NBC? You know they are free? And the reason they are free is because you do pay for it by sitting through ads. Bnet does the same thing, fortunately they are just not as obtrusive, so Bnet DOES pay for itself (so let us now also please end the old and tired comment that we should worship Blizzard because they still let us play on Bnet for free...duh)

vendrox

01-08-2008, 12:00

DII was never paytoplay.. But I fail to see how Blizzard didn't make a fortune out of it anyhow. A game like diablo doesn't NEED paytoplay to make big money, more than enough to sustain us with patches/content upgrades for infinity. IIRC, Diablo 2 has skyrocketed once again on the sales list..

Paytoplay is the grotesque spawn of a world revolving around money. And it's sad to see mere mortal people backing this **** up.

Also someone said Valve never made a bad game.. Please, that's just horribly incorrect.

Funkopotamus

02-08-2008, 00:03

ThulRasha

02-08-2008, 00:15

It pays for itself trough game series as well.
Diablo -> Diablo2 -> Diablo2:LOD -> Warcraft2 -> Warcraft2:BtDP -> Warcraft3 -> Warcraft3:TFT
For every game and expansion that was released, a small percentage of the income from box prices goes to sustaining b.net.
As long as Blizzard keeps making games (and I'm sure that is their intention) they will always have funds to sustain it.

CarsV

02-08-2008, 00:16

People keep saying bnet has advertising. Where? All I see are the same ads for other Blizzard products at the top of the screen, the same ones that have been there since 2000.

MooCQ

02-08-2008, 00:40

Do you think that 50-60 dollars(and not all goes to them) is enough to pay for the years of work that goes into the game and also pay for the bandwidth and work for years of b.net service?

Yes, I believe Blizzard to be the utmost of powerful skills (it makes ya wonder their purpose - why'd they gotta nerf Frozen Orb?) They make a ton of dough .. they would keep b'net running indefinitely, since they've really done a great job, brainwashing the user base into thinking the service is free.. ha!

ELox

02-08-2008, 01:52

It's already been brought up but I prefer to pay for a game and also pay for an expansion rather than pay monthly and receive patches/content that way.

GuildWars has a great business model and I feel that it would apply well to the Diablo series. Arenanet runs a great game (if you disagree that's your opinion but over 5 million copies sold tells me it's a very popular game) and manages to keep hacks, exploits and duping almost non-existant. The servers are very stable and there is less downtime than Bnet or even WoW for that matter.

Guildwars makes their money by releasing expansions for their games and they manage to pay for all their support and patching and anti-cheating through the cost of expansions alone. I'd like it if Diablo 3 could do the same. If Diablo 3 has the same level of server stability, support, patching, new content, anti-cheats and cost as Guildwars I will be very pleased.

Funkopotamus

02-08-2008, 03:22

People keep saying bnet has advertising. Where? All I see are the same ads for other Blizzard products at the top of the screen, the same ones that have been there since 2000.
Perhaps getting the word out of their other products to their customers makes it worthwhile.

Telzen

02-08-2008, 04:39

The vast majority of it does go to them as they are their own publisher, just so you know. Also the only reason Blizzard has started to "let the service die" (which it really hasn't - it's about the same as it's always been) is because they haven't released a new game for it in like 5 years. Every time they released a new b.net game, they improved b.net/used b.net better, and the experience just worked. Wacraft 3 has a very very good set-up in many ways. Perfect? No. Good? I think so. The fact is, they still are keeping tournaments going and such in that game, so clearly they haven't given up patching/support for the games. I mean, what are you complaining about? The last patch for the older games came out this June!

The service has stayed relatively the same throughout its history and has clearly not caused any financial problems for the company and now they've got huge piles of cash flowing in from WoW. Do you seriously think they can't support an updated battle.net without a fee?

Its always been pretty bad then I guess. I remember when I went to start playing again, think it was in 2007, and US East stoped working. Appearently it was to much trouble for them to fix it. Stayed down for I think 5 days. I think part way through they finally put up a message saying it wasn't working, and then it took another two days before they did something.

Metalshredderr

02-08-2008, 10:21

Wow this thread really took off lol, haven't even read it since I made the first post :S

5zigen

02-08-2008, 12:05

All I’m really interested in is trying to understand why games are so much more expensive to make. I just don’t understand it. What is it about games these days that causes them to need incredible budgets? I read about the multimillions of dollars that go in a game, but there doesn’t seem to be any info on where the money ends up.

I think targeting less wide audiences should allow the costs per game to go down meaning you’d need to sell less copies. Sure your market would be smaller, but the risk is also smaller. You could afford to let a few titles bomb. As an added bonus you can tailor the game to that niche almost ensuring more sales. Specialisation can work.

Specialization can work. But it cant work for a tripple A title.

So for a game you need writers, programmers, producer, director, level designer, character designer, animator, 2d artist, 3d artist. This is the largest cost of any game. Paying 10 people for over 2 years is expensive. If you're developing the engine from the ground up, expect at least 1 more programmer or a significantly longer development cycle. Specializing a game doesn't make it any easier to develop, you still need to pay the salaries of everyone who's working on it. You still need a business manager, accountant and still have several 1 time costs in licensing fees, legal fees etc. Specializing it may, however, mean you can cut some of the other costs, things like voice acting and such.

Some games have recently come out with "small" budgets I suppose. Perusing gamasutra I found 1 with a 300,000 budget with 300,000 budgeted for post release support. Still, $600,000 isn't some small chunk of change to laugh at.

For more on game budgeting browse gamasutra. Here's link I found: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010504/ahearn_03.htm though

Obviously they don’t loose goodwill. Many people are more than ready to pay for the services. That is what strikes me as odd. In my world a company would loose goodwill because people wouldn’t want to pay for basic services. But clearly people do want to pay for it. Some are even expecting it. I understand the companies in supporting this type of behaviour as it increases their profits. What I don’t understand is the willingness of the
people to fall for it.

Avoiding cheats is similar to saying to just avoid the bugs. No need to patch them. It isn’t a part of the game experience so much as it is a part of the online experience. You are providing the online component and should do an effort to keep it entertaining for people as that is in the best interest of the company.

What you and I think are "Basic Services" differs radically then. It's a basic service to support online play. It's not a basic service to prevent behavior from people. You're falling into the "fall for it" trap, as if people are somehow being bamboozled into paying for something that should be free, which is getting to the point of being insulting actually as it's such a common sentiment in the anti p2p crusade.

To suppose that you can support a game indefinitely on box sales alone is pretty absurd. Sure it might have worked with D2, but then again at the same time I've shown how it DIDN'T work. Blizzard couldn't afford to maintain the realms. Unless you want to argue somehow that the 1 person on the Diablo team from 2002 to 2007 was simply because of corporate greed or something.

And the idea that you can simply "avoid" cheats and bugs is short sighted. Sure you can make design choices that will limit the point of hacking or running bots (as GW has done) but in doing that you're sacrificing a large part of the gameplay. Just imagining that you can eliminate cheats without some ongoing effort is silly though. There's a lot of money in the cheating industry so there's a lot of people working against your game. If you aren't fixing loopholes as they show up, eventually your game will be overrun with cheats if there is any incentive to cheat.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say indefinite support for a game. The fact that D2 is still being supported after all these years I find very commendable. The game is ancient. Normally after a while you’d see a definite decrease in the number of people playing to where you reach a point where the service could stop.

What kind of constant maintenance would there be on a game like D2? D3 will probably be more similar to D2 than WoW, so I'm using D2 as a reference point. And what does robust online support mean? Cheating and dupe purging is something that I also expect. Extra content I'd like to see in the form of expansion packs. I don't know what the costs are for the type of support I expect and how a company can finance that. I just don't have the numbers for that.

Just for the record, I do enjoy this discussion. It has give me some valuable insights.

Your definition of support and my deffinition of support differ. D2 had no support for the majority of it's life and it still has little to no support. The most blizzard has done is wipe the realms, add a few runewords and a new event into the game. It went 5 years without a significant patch, when in those 5 years there were several bugged aspects about the game, and several loopholes for which to dupe items and the biggest one of all, maphack, which was such a prolific hack something like 70% of B.net used it.

Blizzard couldn't afford to fight these things because they didn't have anyone working on those aspects of the game. The team consisted of one person (Peter Hu I believe).

Sure, they supported their game in that they left their realm servers running, but they didn't do anything to maintain them or to keep them secure. It's still very easy to dupe in diablo 2, and it's obvious as (at least as of 2007 when I played last) the game servers crash at least once daily from the activities.

I knew so many people that botted in D2 and it drove me nuts that they never received any repercussions for it. I know account hijacking was and is still super rampant. People are constantly advertising hacks and bots.

Again I'm going to defer to WoW as an example. Yes, there were some issues with bots (wow glidr, whose parent company was actually sued by blizzard on an obscure copyright violation), but barring the incredibly clever. People who used bots would get banned. Account phishing and hijacking was virtually non existent in game, because doing that stuff would get you banned. Whisper spamming was a bit of a problem, but nothing like d2. Yes, sometimes you see the occasional speedhack, but that player usually gets banned within 2 days.

All of these things are maintainable in a WoW esque system because there are people to combat the behaviors. People who you can report ToS breaking behavior to. There is money for server infrastructure and upgrades to make your servers less susceptible to attacks and crashes (see again diablo 2 where the servers seem to crash daily which enables the duping).

Aside from this, an ongoing monthly fee gives a lot more freedom for the company to improve the game post release. It's somehow commonplace for the sentiment to be "I don't think a game should need improvement post release" which I think is silly. There are many insights that you gain postmortem, and I don't think any gamedev could tell you honestly that after they release their game they dont see anything that they would like to improve.

In WoW again, as an example, the UI and player matching systems are 10 times more robust than they were at release. Partially this is due to the moddable interface, but for blizzard to actually implement some of those features into the game has been really a positive aspect. The fact that with an ongoing fee a game can improve, not only in content, but also in features is a very powerful argument imo.

I think it's foolish to suspect that these types of things can be done with no monthly fee. In fact I think it's impossible. People seem to act as if producing games should be a 0% profit endeavor, and that subscriptions are simply "lining the pockets" of executives, but that simply isn't the case.

Games, for good or bad are a business, and in general you get what you pay for and you pay for what you get. I understand if you don't want these features and therefore don't want to pay a monthly fee, but this is something I am extremely interested in. This doesn't mean I think the game should be online only, either.

I think the game should have 3 "incarnations" It should have single player, Online / TCP/IP (ala Open B.net) and a Closed B.Net with a full support staff and several offerings unique to the online version of the game. In essence, I would like to see B.net 2.0 go as p2p with promised features of security and updates (and achievements as they've announced). I have a suspicion that this is how the game will be, but obviously I don't know for sure. If anyone reads this I know they will cry about how this "was fss model and it sucked" but It's actually not like that. FSS model suffered from a value loss problem in that free players got exactly the same service as pay players. This model would be more direct and obvious in the advantages of paying. But this is all opinion on how I think the game should be. (on the other hand, if there is a monthly fee I think they should damn well do their best to eliminate the excessive advantage of owning a second account of the game.)

Regardless of that fact, my position stands. I've seen the plus sides of an online subscription fee first hand (going back to WoW) and I would like to see some of those pluses translated into D3's online experience and I know that doing so for free (or as part of the box price) is not really an option. If the game turns out to be as (un)robust online as D2 or any of the offerings via steam, I expect it to be very free.

An interesting look at the single release RPG vs MMO type model from 1998: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19980109/online_retail.htm
Note that many of the numbers have changed since then. If you're really interested in the industry and whatnot gamasutra is a great site.

SlechtWeerBeer

02-08-2008, 13:58

The fact that with an ongoing fee a game can improve, not only in content, but also in features is a very powerful argument imo.

I think it's foolish to suspect that these types of things can be done with no monthly fee. In fact I think it's impossible. People seem to act as if producing games should be a 0% profit endeavor, and that subscriptions are simply "lining the pockets" of executives, but that simply isn't the case.

GW does not have a monthly fee. The last release was GW:Eye of the North. It's 320 days ago that EotN was released. Still ,they manage to have a full team at the ready to help, patch up bugs, hacks, imbalances and whatnot. They also have a steady Wiki running, http://wiki.guildwars.com/, which is visited daily by a lot of people.

Sure, it's a powerful argument. But baseless, since it's just not true.

Oh, and another thing: The D2 servers are as ancient as the game itself. No wonder they're not steady. Sure, you could demand Blizzard setting up new servers. But would they? Probably not. Why? Because it's ancient. They could afford it, I bet.

Brother Laz

02-08-2008, 14:21

With diablo 3 being pay-to-play, imagine the updates the game would get. It would be like WoW, where when one hack is introduced, it gets patched practically instantly. Plus no laggy cheap servers or any of that.

When you start to play, there are no hackers.
Why should I keep paying monthly just so Blizzard can maintain the status quo?
If I pay, I should be seeing improvements, instead of steadily losing money and gaining no benefit over what I used to have 3 months ago.
In fact, I expect improvements on par with what I'm paying - a new game every 5 months.

Of course, no company ever delivers that. Why not? Because monthly fees are never justified and are just a cheap way to make money off those who don't know the running costs of a server park. Hint: Google is paid for by advertising and it indexes and stores the entire web. Surely if you sell 10 million boxes you have enough money to keep a bunch of servers running that pretty much only do location, damage and drop calculations and store 4 KB character files.

Oh, and if the hacker battle costs them so much money, it is because the game was poorly designed in the first place. Is it that hard to attach a random 64-bit number to every item and then run a daily scan and delete every item with the same number?

......

Anything that does not involve physically breaking into the servers can be blocked if you practice defensive design. And there is a solution for break-ins, too: it's called the police.

Mad Mantis

02-08-2008, 14:29

What you and I think are "Basic Services" differs radically then. It's a basic service to support online play. It's not a basic service to prevent behavior from people. You're falling into the "fall for it" trap, as if people are somehow being bamboozled into paying for something that should be free, which is getting to the point of being insulting actually as it's such a common sentiment in the anti p2p crusade.

Preventing behaviour is something that I see as a component of supporting online play and as such people are being bamboozled into paying for something that should be free. You don’t consider it as such and don’t mind paying. I don’t think we are going to agree on this subject.

I’m not expecting MMO services from a game that is geared towards single play. I don’t think the online component needs these kinds of services. What everybody can agree on is that cheating in any form should be countered by Blizz. You are willing to pay for that. I’m not. They have sales and ads and this money should be used to ensure that we have the quality product that we paid for in the first place. It is in their best interest to do so. At least it was. Nowadays people are willing to pay for it. Those of us who do not want to are being depicted as cheap whiners who think they are entitled to the world. In reality all we want is decent support for which we already paid.

And the idea that you can simply "avoid" cheats and bugs is short sighted. Sure you can make design choices that will limit the point of hacking or running bots (as GW has done) but in doing that you're sacrificing a large part of the gameplay. Just imagining that you can eliminate cheats without some ongoing effort is silly though. There's a lot of money in the cheating industry so there's a lot of people working against your game. If you aren't fixing loopholes as they show up, eventually your game will be overrun with cheats if there is any incentive to cheat.

I wasn’t advocating that we could avoid cheats. I found that a ridiculous statement. I was responding to your quote of you can avoid cheats yourself, but simply playing with people who do not cheat, I found that a preposterous position to take. The company should make an effort to keep the online experience as cheat free as possible. They can’t stop it, but they should make an effort. That effort is something I expect from them in providing the online component.

Aside from this, an ongoing monthly fee gives a lot more freedom for the company to improve the game post release. It's somehow commonplace for the sentiment to be "I don't think a game should need improvement post release" which I think is silly. There are many insights that you gain postmortem, and I don't think any gamedev could tell you honestly that after they release their game they dont see anything that they would like to improve.

No game is ever going to be finished. You can’t change this with a p2p service. Single Player games shouldn’t be thought of as a MMO. MMO’s tend to ship broken. They let the players test it and then fix the game. You pay for this. They need to add content or else you’ll stop paying. Single Player games should have been tested before they shipped. Things that drastically need improvement and slipped through QA can be fixed with a patch. Things that the developer want added can be sold as an expansion pack.

If you're really interested in the industry and whatnot gamasutra is a great site.

Thanks for the link. From what I've seen at a glance there really is a lot of information. Should be interesting and informative.

Brother Laz

02-08-2008, 14:58

I’m not expecting MMO services from a game that is geared towards single play. I don’t think the online component needs these kinds of services.

Exactly. If I'm paying for upkeep I expect it to be for upkeep that is actually somewhat expensive: a persistent world.

Remember that all a server has to do is 'roll the dice' and keep track of what is going on. Graphics make no difference. And D3 does not have a lot more stuff 'going on' than D2. On the other hand, servers have gotten massively cheaper since 2000.

So I see no reason why the technological part of things should cost any money at all.

......

Hackproofing? For D2 they expected too much of serverside games (in a closed b.net game, the server is running the game, everyone is a client), which was primarily aimed at defeating the common D1 cheats: autokill, townkill, godmode... And it worked.

That is to say, it worked for those particular cheats. There is no godmode or autokill in D2. But they didn't really expect duping, so they didn't build in a way to eliminate dupes after the deed. The checksum in 1.10 was a futile attempt at patching up the old flawed system.

Now they know that duping is the worst enemy, and they will do something about that. A checksum on everything would be a good start.

They will not be able to prevent maphacks, bots and chicken type hacks, but IMO they really shouldn't. You can remove the need for those through defensive design. People use maphack and you can't really prevent it? Then just reveal the map already. People use chicken hacks? Put a 10 second timer on both town portals and quitting out of town.

They have sales and ads and this money should be used to ensure that we have the quality product that we paid for in the first place. It is in their best interest to do so. At least it was. Nowadays people are willing to pay for it. Those of us who do not want to are being depicted as cheap whiners who think they are entitled to the world.

This is not because the pro-p2p people are really convinced that only their money will ensure good service. This is because they want to show the community that they're rich (well, they have a job) and they don't care about their money. Conspicuous consumption.

And, of course, then there are the spoiled kids who will assume you're a jobless socialist leech if you don't have the latest gaming rig. These make up the (entire) audience of games like Crysis. That said, we know how well that game sold.

5zigen

02-08-2008, 17:44

No game is ever going to be finished. You can’t change this with a p2p service. Single Player games shouldn’t be thought of as a MMO. MMO’s tend to ship broken. They let the players test it and then fix the game. You pay for this. They need to add content or else you’ll stop paying. Single Player games should have been tested before they shipped. Things that drastically need improvement and slipped through QA can be fixed with a patch. Things that the developer want added can be sold as an expansion pack.

Thanks for the link. From what I've seen at a glance there really is a lot of information. Should be interesting and informative.

Well, clearly we have different expectations for the online game. I feel the game should be focused on online play as opposed to single player play. I want the features and that's why I would not be opposed to a monthly fee. No game is ever going to be finished, but in my experience games improve much faster if there's a dev team working on them.

This is not because the pro-p2p people are really convinced that only their money will ensure good service. This is because they want to show the community that they're rich (well, they have a job) and they don't care about their money. Conspicuous consumption.

And, of course, then there are the spoiled kids who will assume you're a jobless socialist leech if you don't have the latest gaming rig. These make up the (entire) audience of games like Crysis. That said, we know how well that game sold.

It's funny how you can almost be making a credible argument then go and blow your credibility out of the water with ridiculous statements like this. Quite the pigeon hole though. Perhaps you should make it bigger.

And the whole "google is completely ad supported" thing is pretty misleading, Considering Google's ad revenue is something like 8.7 billion dollars...

Mad Mantis

02-08-2008, 18:35

Well, clearly we have different expectations for the online game. I feel the game should be focused on online play as opposed to single player play.

Yeah, that does make a lot of difference. I wonder how many of the other p2p people are expecting a large focus on online play. Maybe something for a poll.

mashimaro24

03-08-2008, 03:02

I wouldn't mind paying 2 playing long as it gives me a better experience. Since it's not an MMO, I don't think it should be $15 a month, but like $5 a month would be good.

People have no problem paying $7 to $9 to watch a movie for 2 hours of joy, $5 for a meal at burger king, a dollar for a can of soda, yet have a problem paying for a game that gives them hours (maybe even hundreds of hours) of entertainment a month. Just don't watch one movie, or eat dinner at home twice a month.

I'm sure D3 will be good and playable if it's not P2P, but I'm sure it'll be BETTER if it's P2P (Simple business, more money it makes, more attention they'll put in it). Mind as well play a BETTER game if I'm going to invest my time playing it.

blankblank

03-08-2008, 10:35

Noooooo!! It's Diablo 3, not World of Diablo for God's sake you rich people!!
Blizzard does not rely on monthly fees to address issues, expecially hacks!
And what if there are no needs to balance skills, fix exploits, etc. Then we still pay?

If you rich kids really want to pay and pay, then I guess Blizzard just release patches that are pay-to-download. Like $2 a patch. I'd rather have that than paying monthly for something uncertain hoping Blizzard will fix this or that just to justify the monthly fee

Jcakes

03-08-2008, 10:49

Well, clearly we have different expectations for the online game. I feel the game should be focused on online play as opposed to single player play. I want the features and that's why I would not be opposed to a monthly fee. No game is ever going to be finished, but in my experience games improve much faster if there's a dev team working on them.

Diablo is a single player game though and it should be balanced such that it is playable as a single player (offline) game and I don't think a sp game would/should be p2p.

I
And the whole "google is completely ad supported" thing is pretty misleading, Considering Google's ad revenue is something like 8.7 billion dollars...

It isn't these days, however that is how it started off, these days a lot of the revenue comes because they own the advertising companies.

Brother Laz

03-08-2008, 13:13

It's funny how you can almost be making a credible argument then go and blow your credibility out of the water with ridiculous statements like this. Quite the pigeon hole though. Perhaps you should make it bigger.

Your side started by making ridiculous statements like 'if you don't want to pay you're a jobless whiner' about a year and a half ago, on hellgateguru.

It defies belief that one is willing to pay for something that could as well be free. This only happens in rare cases according to economic theory, including conspicuous consumption. (Also if the free product is clearly inferior, which it isn't if Blizzard does their homework regarding hack-proofing) And since most of those who advocated a mandatory monthly fee on hellgateguru also flaunted the latest gaming rigs and some were very rich IRL, and called others jobless and leeches for not wanting to pay, I can only conclude that they were just bragging about how money was not a concern for them.

The ironic thing is that €10/mo is indeed not a concern for anyone with a job. Unfortunately much of the audience probably does not have a job yet.

......

I feel the game should be focused on online play as opposed to single player play. I want the features and that's why I would not be opposed to a monthly fee.

And why would 'online features' cost so much more money than 'offline features'? Which would be more expensive:
- An auction house;
- Cutscenes?
...or...
- A supposedly massive world divided in zones;
- A Crysis-like graphics engine?

EQ and UO asked a monthly fee because those games pioneered the concept of games running on a server instead of the computer of a private host, and this was hard to do with '99 server technology. Nowadays there is no excuse. Perhaps gaming servers are made out of solid gold, but it is my firm belief that we have to pay through the nose (€360 for 3 years of gameplay is not ignorable) for no good reason only because there was a good reason for it in the 20th century.

Sein Schatten

03-08-2008, 14:10

The ironic thing is that €10/mo is indeed not a concern for anyone with a job. Unfortunately much of the audience probably does not have a job yet.

Nowadays there is no excuse. Perhaps gaming servers are made out of solid gold, but it is my firm belief that we have to pay through the nose (€360 for 3 years of gameplay is not ignorable) for no good reason only because there was a good reason for it in the 20th century.

Just a fyi, WoW gamers age is average above 25, IIRC.

The only reasons I can think of why you have to pay for is:
1) Fast, effective, nice customer support. GMs for example.
2) Steady flow of new content. Not included are bugfixes and cheatfree environment. That must be part of the initial sales.

The server structure is, imo, part of initial sales, too. Okay, WoW has 1 server per realm for old world (or was it two for old world?), one for BG, one for instances, one for new world. I can understand that part of the fee is to keep them clean, though.

LuckyNumber

04-08-2008, 03:11

I am totally against pay to play for a game like Diablo. No way!

CoQui

04-08-2008, 05:33

I don't want to have to pay to play. This ISN'T WoW. It won't be anything similar to an MMO experience in the way you interact with each other, group up and do whatever, etc. So there's no reason to be paying for it as if it was. Besides, you know an expansion will hit a year later which means more content at a 40 dollar or so price tag. Paying 15 or 10 bucks a month for acouple new armors or weapons isn't worth it IMO. That's not enough to justify the money. What they do for WoW really deserves the money, but that's a different case. D3 won't have nearly the content in a patch that they do in WoW, so theres no comparison on which would have more effective use of the money. Honestly I don't see why it shouldn't go the D2 route in that it has it's usual bug/balance patches with the occasion patch that adds afew dozen new weapons/armor, and then the expansion. That's it.

visom

04-08-2008, 06:15

andytheavs

04-08-2008, 09:37

This opinion has been expressed already, but I would like to support it. If DIII's battle.net component has a monthly fee or any form of microtransactions, and this is the only option for playing online, I may not bother spending $50+ to buy the game at all. I completely support paying for patches that result in additional content (story, characters, monsters, playing areas) being added to the game, since this sort of takes the place of expansion packs. That would be a great microtransaction. However, I will not pay a monthly fee for additional content.

More importantly, I think it is wrong to make anyone pay any amount for patches that consist of bug/exploit fixes, character balancing, and the like. The cost of such patches should be part of the original price of the game. If that means upping the original price a little (add $5, multiple by ten's of millions of people who purchase the game, use that money for ongoing online support. NOT rocket science, more like a business plan), so be it. Think of it as a warranty for a car or a computer. It is added to the original sale price. You may or may not need it, but it will be there because you paid for it up front.

If the battle.net portion is pay to play, that will be unfortunate but not the end of the world. As long as tcp/ip and something akin to open battlenet are still options, then I will be satisfied because I'll still be able to play with friends. That's about it.

Oh yeah, MOST importantly, BRING BACK the gauntlet cursor!!!!

CarsV

04-08-2008, 16:57

ThulRasha

04-08-2008, 17:19

No he didn't. He clearly made a distinction between "patches that add content" and "patches that are bug/exploit fixes".

CarsV

04-08-2008, 19:02

No he didn't. He clearly made a distinction between "patches that add content" and "patches that are bug/exploit fixes".

Yeah, he did. At first, he stated if bnet is pay-to-play, then he won't buy it. Then, he implied that if bnet is pay-to-play he'll still buy the game.

sbn

04-08-2008, 19:03

1.) Almost every single game out there gets patched for some time after the game is released. 8+ and they are still patching D2, so why pay monthly?

2.) New content has already come in the form of patches with D2 (items and runewords) as well as can be expected in an expansion. I think the only reason we ever got one expansion from D2 was that Blizzard was having some dysfunctional problems, same problems that caused D3 to be delayed. They could easily do one expansion per year for several years at $30-35...so why pay monthly?

3.) Naive to even think for a second that pay to play will prevent hacks and dupes. But this is one area that really kind of annoys me with it's idiotic hypocrisy. Now those that do play clean (they are mostly at Baron's anyways) I sympathize with them, they want a dupe free/hack free environment, and they should get one. But 95% of Bnet'rs including many here want no dupes...yet they all want godly 1.10 runewords. You can NOT have both, plain and simple. I would not be so annoyed with this subject if I saw the same amount of energy spent whining and being a hypocrite at the same time as spent on petitioning (seems people love to do that) Blizzard to either A. Remove all 1.10 runewords, or B. Change the drop rate of all HRs. But whether this has anything to do with a monthly fee is beyond me, as Blizzard should fix theses issues regardless....so why pay?

4.) Pay to play will have one effect only, and that is to turn off many who otherwise would be playing. Fact of the matter is one reason why D2 has remained somewhat popular is that it is free. Make people pay, and believe me a few years down the road you will not see the same type and size community left. The idea that this will get rid of "all the stupid little kiddies" is not only grossly incorrect, but in fact will have the opposite effect. You will find more annoying little brats who got their parents to pay for them. Ironically many older players will not be around, at the very least many will last a very short time. I know for fact my brother would not do it, and he has played since D1. so why pay?

5.) And for those that think we are being cheap, please come back after you have a family of your own. Have faced maybe one or both members changing or losing employment at some time. Health care (I am paying 4k after insurance today as a matter of fact for a dental bridge..out of my own pocket). Children's tuition, and all other related costs to raising children. Gas prices, my god I have seen my income drop significantly as a result of the last 8 years. I do not get a reimbursement from my employer since I am my own employer, yet my work entails visiting clients sites. Sometimes doing 200+ miles in a day. I do not know a single person who has not lost their job these past 8 years. My brother in-law who worked at Sun was un-employed for 4 years. My own brother lost his job in 2004, and the only thing he has found is a contract position that provides no benefits, or long term security. My former boss since 2001 has not ever found a permanent position anywhere, nothing but short term contracts. We have mortgages, 401ks, and now we look at putting as much as possible into our savings and retirement funds. So are we cheap? No, we are just not *****ing idiots who will pay for something that should be free in the first place. But you who want to pay, by all means please do send a check anyways to Blizzard, and while you are at it why not send a check to Public Broadcasting. Sure it is free, but they will gladly accept your donations.

You want to throw some freakin money away? Give it to a god *#*@ charity, they can use it a lot more than a corporation.

Lord_Jaroh

05-08-2008, 16:56

Yeah, he did. At first, he stated if bnet is pay-to-play, then he won't buy it. Then, he implied that if bnet is pay-to-play he'll still buy the game.

Actually, he stated that if bnet is pay to play and the only way to play online (I'm guessing he really means "with friends". He will still buy the game if it has TCP/IP, an alternate way to game with friends.

This is my stance as well. I do not want to have to rely on Blizzard's servers to play the game multiplayer, and I will most definately not support them if they try to weasel money from consumers by underhandedly making bnet the only multiplayer option.

Telefrog

05-08-2008, 17:06

Wait. Am I reading this right? There are actually people that think pay-to-play subscription schemes for an ARPG are a good idea?

Please see Hellgate for a lesson in consumer tolerance.

There just isn't enough content/service to justify paying monthly for an ARPG.

Sein Schatten

05-08-2008, 17:19

lol, sbn. I agree.
Seriously, D3 is not good enough competitor in the pay-to-play area. I would rather play WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAGH!!!!! or Jaffa! Kre! then D3 as I don't have the money and time to play both games.

andytheavs

05-08-2008, 23:38

I agree on that point, as well. I bought HGL in the hopes that the free to play mp side would be decent enough to play with a friend. Unfortunately, the game ended up being rushed out of production and lacked the necessary polish to really be fun. Very sad to see that HGL didn't hold up to expectations. Anyway, I agree that ARPG's are not conducive to p2p business models.

To CarsV: There was nothing contradictory about my previous message, and it is not my problem if you were unable to extract the pertinent information in my post. I thought it was pretty obvious that I said monthly payments are bad, fixes/balancing/etc should be included in the original game's price, and, of course, that Blizzard needs to bring back the gauntlet cursor.

Spero

06-08-2008, 00:53

Jcakes

06-08-2008, 01:20

I also hope it's pay to play and I'd rather that it be a little more rather than too small of an amount. I'd prefer $10 or $15 to $5 or some token amount.

Pay to play might cut down on some of the rif raf and help Blizz staff adequately to cope with the inevitable hackers (at least they're inevitable if Blizz makes a good game). Also, that money pays for servers, which reduce lag (my main complaint with DII).

WoW has shown that pay to play doesn't keep everyone away and you can still end up with millions playing for years.

I don't think it will cut down on the riff raff, if anything it will cut down on the casual (more mature) player. I for one know that I couldn't justify paying a monthly fee for a computer game and I believe a lot of the more mature (older) players who have famillies would probably not pay to play. Fortunately for me there is a sp and I personally will not venture out of sp if I have to pay for it.

NKlint

06-08-2008, 01:42

I don't think it will cut down on the riff raff, if anything it will cut down on the casual (more mature) player. I for one know that I couldn't justify paying a monthly fee for a computer game and I believe a lot of the more mature (older) players who have famillies would probably not pay to play. Fortunately for me there is a sp and I personally will not venture out of sp if I have to pay for it.

Exactly! People tend to blame the bad attitudes some players have on some misconceived notion that they're not mature enough or they're only playing because they took their mommies credit card. In a game that by it's very nature is competitive and anonymous.

"Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?"

Should Blizzard cripple the player base because some people would prefer they didn't participate because they feel that because they don't want to pay a monthly fee for a game that they aren't mature enough to play with others online? It shouldn't be up to the producers of these games to restrict who a gamer plays with it's the gamers' responsibility. Unless the game comes with additional content which is worth a monthly fee (and not simple aesthetic differences or the ability to create guilds)

ThulRasha

06-08-2008, 10:33

Yeah, he did. At first, he stated if bnet is pay-to-play, then he won't buy it. Then, he implied that if bnet is pay-to-play he'll still buy the game.

He didn't say anything like that at all. He said he may not bother to buy it if pay to play is the only way to play.

PlasmaTorture

06-08-2008, 10:47

I also hope it's pay to play and I'd rather that it be a little more rather than too small of an amount. I'd prefer $10 or $15 to $5 or some token amount.

Pay to play might cut down on some of the rif raf and help Blizz staff adequately to cope with the inevitable hackers (at least they're inevitable if Blizz makes a good game). Also, that money pays for servers, which reduce lag (my main complaint with DII).

WoW has shown that pay to play doesn't keep everyone away and you can still end up with millions playing for years.

WoW has also shown that it disenfranchised a large amount of the Warcraft-universe fanbase, and that the people who can't afford/don't want to pay for it are not playing.

But hey, because something is good for a percieved majority, the percieved minority doesn't matter, right?

Sein Schatten

06-08-2008, 14:56

Fortunately for me there is a sp and I personally will not venture out of sp if I have to pay for it.

As long as there is a LAN option you can play with whoever you want. :thumbup:

Starving_Poet

06-08-2008, 18:15

The whole concept that patches should not be free blows my mind.

What if MS charged you $5 a month so you can get your updates to windows? Would you still have the same argument?

And the whole cost / year concept is irrelevant because the player base in 1990 was so much smaller it's not even irrelevant. Remember, in the Playstation 1 days - it took 150,000 units up to 250,000 units in a year for a game to hit 'Greatest Hits' status. For PS2 it was 400,000 units in 9 months; PS3 it's 500,000 hits in 11. When volume sold goes up, price doesn't need to. What is so hard to understand?

Besides, Diablo II is still on the shelves in the stores, I need to look to find HG:L in lots of places. If a game is QUALITY, it won't need p2p, it will keep selling.

GlennDanzig220

06-08-2008, 21:50

freemanstretten

07-08-2008, 02:30

For me, the only reason (ONLY) that I didn't buy World of Warcraft was due to the monthly fees. I'm not sure that I would be able to play enough to justify it. It's not even that it's that outrageous of a concept, I just don't want to feel like I've wasted money because I didn't play Diablo for a couple weeks.

I thought Guild Wars was (and is) a stellar game.

I agree!
I have also never played WoW simply because of the monthly fee. I pay enough bills in my day to day real life, I won't be adding my play time to the bill list beyond the initial purchase. Nor would I be able to find enough play time to justify it. WoW looks like fun from what I've seen and read (but, I've never even tried a demo of it - a small resistance based on my principals I suppose)

I have played Guild Wars... enjoyed it as well. I probably have characters on their server still.

Anyway... no Pay to play for me (nor most of the friends I have that are super excited about Diablo 3)

Cheers all!

Spero

08-08-2008, 03:05

I for one want Blizzard to make money if they make a good game. $15 a month is NOTHING! I can't take my GF out to dinner even once for that. However, multiplied by thousands of players, that's something that will really help Blizzard to be able to spend more on people and hardware. I believe it will noticeably improve the game.

If I can get a really good, well supported product w/o hacks for $15 a month, that would be great! If I end up playing a couple times a week or more, I'm paying very little for the game, compared to other decent forms of entertainment.

Bnet was ok, but I want much better. I want more quality out of the game than I think Blizzard can provide for free. If it's the same as DII, except with a little better graphics and skills changed around a little, I'm not thrilled. I'll stay in the garage working projects in the real world.

coldsong

08-08-2008, 16:11

i concur. people saying p2p is too much should probably not be playing a videogame anyways but instead out making money.

Omikron8

08-08-2008, 16:26

so when did it become expected to pay hundreds of dollars to get a decent experience out of an online video game ?

sbn

08-08-2008, 18:59

i concur. people saying p2p is too much should probably not be playing a videogame anyways but instead out making money.

Wow, are you just freaking oblivious to everything we have been saying? It is NOT the actual cost of the game, but rather our OTHER interests in life. You do know that a few of use are no longer 15 year olds living with their parents who have no expenses?

Irony that the adults who are actually making income are the ones who do NOT want to pay, while the kids who have no real income are the ones who DO want to pay. That is until mommy gets angry and cuts their allowance, then they will be the first screaming that it should be free. But hey, if you have money to blow, I will gladly send you a P.O. Box where you can send ME $15 a month.

Stalin

08-08-2008, 20:53

I personally freaked out when I heard that they were making an MMO out of warcraft. Diablo seemed the perfect choice. It would have been way more bad ***, after all, it is Man vs. Hell. Warcraft is just... orcs and humans. Nerdy as hell.

Diablo would have made an amazing MMO. And if they did make diablo pay to play MMO style, I wouldn't mind it. But then again, there is also my love for the classic diablo play, the fast paced action. MMOs typically get rid of that for slower stop action play.

Either way, I would love to give my money to blizzard to keep diablo going forever, but it isn't going to happen. Not when they are debating whether to support 5 player games or 6. If I pay, I want everyone in the same game, warcraft style. Diablo just wouldn't work that way. It would change everything.

bigjoefro

08-08-2008, 22:18

Dont get your hopes up on diablo 3 being pay-to-play. The only reason any game is pay-to-play is for the company to pay for the large sever loads each month. Pay-to-play is mostly for MMO games. As we all know, diablo is not MMO. When you create a game in diablo, your hosting the game from your computer. Therefore, blizzard doesnt need server support for diablo games.

Image for a moment diablo being mmo and having to pay-to-play. There would be thousands of people doing the exact same thing! To me, that would just be annoying.

btw
Blizzard has always provided update patches for free of charge, which got rid of bugs in previous version of the game. Im sure diablo 3 will be the same way..

Diablo 1 is currently on v1.09
Diablo 2 is currently on v1.12

Zoa

08-08-2008, 23:11

When you create a game in diablo, your hosting the game from your computer. Therefore, blizzard doesnt need server support for diablo games.

You're probably wrong about that otherwise Diablo would be incredibly easy to hack! :(

ThulRasha

09-08-2008, 00:09

For Diablo1 it's true at least. And yes, that one is incredibly easy to hack.

CaptainDingo

09-08-2008, 02:19

Pay to play does not eliminate hacking. Pay to play does not eliminate idiots. Pay to play does not mean you'll only ever encounter intelligent, polite people.

World of Warcraft is an example as to why. Here you can find droves and droves of the kind of idiots that only a place like YouTube or 4chan could regurgitate. And every time you see an Orc Warrior named kljshfaslkg go running to Durotar, you can't exactly thank Blizzard for their airtight anti-botting/hacking defenses.

So instead of putting up with a bunch of punk kids for free, you'd be paying them to do it. That doesn't sound like a good deal to me.

Of course, I'm sure all of this has already been said, but damned if I'm gonna read 12 pages of posts.

JunkStory

09-08-2008, 02:50

I don't mind P2P as long as I don't get:

"Connection interrupted"
"Failed to join game"
"Cannot connect to server"
"Server temporarily down"
"Your account has been restricted"

etc

Panchito

09-08-2008, 11:58

What happened to the times when companies were expected to release quality working titles with good multiplayer support that just works? I'll never stop being amazed at how willing are people to part with their money and pay more for less features than they used to have just a few years earlier.

Telzen

09-08-2008, 14:54

Because the past has shown that not paying for these services makes them a low priority for the company and they eventually turn to ****.

PlasmaTorture

10-08-2008, 00:06

Because the past has shown that not paying for these services makes them a low priority for the company and they eventually turn to ****.

... except for Blizzard, whose past record has shown to be extremely good compared to other companies.

Omikron8

10-08-2008, 05:35

Because the past has shown that not paying for these services makes them a low priority for the company and they eventually turn to ****.

so who is going to convince these companies to provide these services without gouging their customers for more money ? the players who are eager to throw money at the developers for the chance of fixes and maintenance ? why would such gullible stupid customers convince the developers to care ?

blankblank

10-08-2008, 09:13

Let's accept it that some people are just too rich or some are still sucking milk from their mothers to have money to waste. I don't think Starcraft and Diablo 2 and even Warcraft 3 battle.net experience sucks just because they are free to play.

Some people are just stupid. If they release a game with multiplayer support, it is their job to make sure that it works properly. Why pay every month so that they can support that? They should have figured that out before they release a game if they will be able to support multiplayer. You pay every month if there are fresh content every month, just like MMOs.

Rich mama's boys want pay to play so blizz can actually patch/balance better? Have you not seen Starcraft was free to play yet after 10 years, they still patch it? And they still actually sell!! Blizzard cares enough for their products even if they are F2P, they didn't need P2P to support all those korean gamers before, they still dont need P2P to support Diablo 3 now.

Telzen

10-08-2008, 20:42

... except for Blizzard, whose past record has shown to be extremely good compared to other companies.

Ah yes battle net has been great to use over the years. Well if you love insane lag and not being able to join games. If new battle net doesn't bring in some money then its going to become the way the current one is, which is very ****ty. Come on would it be to bad to pay $5 dollars a month for better servers and staff? That's like 1 meal at a fast food place.

so who is going to convince these companies to provide these services without gouging their customers for more money ? the players who are eager to throw money at the developers for the chance of fixes and maintenance ? why would such gullible stupid customers convince the developers to care ?

Its not "gouging". These things do cost money to run. I'd much rather pay some to get good servers than have crappy servers for free. Do you really think they will spend a lot for a free service?

lol blankblank I get the feeling you are the one leaching of your parents. A few bucks a month doesn't make someone rich. I'm pretty damn poor really but I could still afford 5 dollars a month.

PlasmaTorture

10-08-2008, 21:53

Ah yes battle net has been great to use over the years. Well if you love insane lag and not being able to join games. If new battle net doesn't bring in some money then its going to become the way the current one is, which is very ****ty. Come on would it be to bad to pay $5 dollars a month for better servers and staff? That's like 1 meal at a fast food place.

New battle.net will improve on it. The main problems with the current battle.net are, 1) it was a pioneering service so of course some of its outdated, and 2) the servers they use are like 10 years old. New servers aren't that expensive and surely would fix most of the problems, and the fact that they now really know what they're doing with battle.net (see: the improvements WC3 and tFT made with the service) and there's no doubt in my mind that Blizzard can pull off a successful b.net 2.0 service for free.
If you think the current battle.net is ****ty, then I would ask you to look at any number of games that launched around when Diablo 2 with an online component. Are those games still playable online? Most likely, the answer is no. Usable internet > none at all, no?

$5 a month for something that should be free is a huge deal. You're paying infinitley times more money than you should be. Finally, I don't care if it's the same price as a meal of raw horse ****, and I have no idea why you'd bring that up in an argument.

Its not "gouging". These things do cost money to run. I'd much rather pay some to get good servers than have crappy servers for free. Do you really think they will spend a lot for a free service?

Yes. It's what's made Blizzard so successful in the past and there's no reason for them to stop, especially since they're sitting on piles and piles and piles and piles of cash from WoW.

Stalin

11-08-2008, 03:45

Battle.net, at its worst, is not that bad. I mean for a free service that thousands of people use, it has worked wonderfully. It could be so much worse, and even if it isnt fixed in any way with DIII, I would be perfectly willing to use it.

blankblank

11-08-2008, 15:07

lol blankblank I get the feeling you are the one leaching of your parents. A few bucks a month doesn't make someone rich. I'm pretty damn poor really but I could still afford 5 dollars a month.

:-D HAHA where'd you get that? If i was leeching money then i wouldn't care as it is not hard earned money.
I can afford to pay $15 a month if i really wanted to. my point is however small $5 may seem to, it adds up over time. 12x$5 = $60 a year it's like having 2 free games for a year.

And since blizzard is focusing on coop gameplay as they said, it is THEIR responsibility to make sure we have the best experience out of D3 multiplayer, not ours.

Starving_Poet

11-08-2008, 18:12

I haven't seen anyone mention that making a game p2p HIGHLY increases the blackmarket game-item economy and the creation of farming macros.

Stalin

11-08-2008, 22:23

As if DII didn't have massive farming bottage and a blackmarket economy...

Spero

12-08-2008, 02:23

Wow, are you just freaking oblivious to everything we have been saying? It is NOT the actual cost of the game, but rather our OTHER interests in life. You do know that a few of use are no longer 15 year olds living with their parents who have no expenses?

Irony that the adults who are actually making income are the ones who do NOT want to pay, while the kids who have no real income are the ones who DO want to pay. That is until mommy gets angry and cuts their allowance, then they will be the first screaming that it should be free. But hey, if you have money to blow, I will gladly send you a P.O. Box where you can send ME $15 a month.
I'm an adult; your argument makes no sense to me. I can't imagine you not being able to find $15 a month if you want something. Why would I send you money, are you planning on providing me a service? :whistling:

If they make a good game and the online experience is good, it will be worth some monthly money. If not, no one will pay and it's over. If you want a game equal to the older free of charge games, that's fine - I'm saying I want it to be MUCH better than those games.

Funkopotamus

12-08-2008, 09:05

Yeah, it's not really a matter of who's rich or poor, it's a question of whether or not it's worth the money. And that answer will vary from person to person.

CaptainDingo

12-08-2008, 14:58

It doesn't quite matter if I want something or not, it's more a matter of, Battle.net was always free in the past and I'd expect nothing less than it being free when Diablo 3 arrives.

I'm not the type of person to be all overly charitable and go "Oh you guys did such a great job, here, have even more of my money, no no please, take more, because I feel I didn't pay you enough when I gave you $50 for Diablo 3, $30 for Diablo 2, $10 for the expansion, $20 for StarCraft, $40 for World of Warcraft, $30 for Warcraft 3, $20 for Frozen Throne, $20 for Burning Crusade, and about $150 worth of World of Warcraft fees!"

I heard they're layering their cubicles in solid gold.

Not that I don't understand a fee for a game like World of Warcraft where the service you're paying for is to play uninterrupted on huge, fast servers in a persistent game world with thousands of other players simultaneously, but Diablo 3 doesn't do that. So obviously I'd not pay a monthly fee.

I mean, this is all besides the point since I hate Battle.net anyways, but this is assuming I liked it so whatever, use your imagination!

http://pbskids.kids.us/images/sub-square-barney.gif

Stalin

12-08-2008, 18:25

It isn't about the interruptions, its about the game that NEVER ends EVER!

If they can provide me with solid entertainment that lasts months on end, I am willing to pay a few bucks for it. Entertainment can be hard to come by at times.

BUT-diablo is going to be straight and linear with the usual battle.net fun. I personally think Diablo would have destroyed Warcraft as an MMO, but this theory will never be proven.

Starving_Poet

12-08-2008, 19:24

As if DII didn't have massive farming bottage and a blackmarket economy...

Exactly, now imagine if that economy not only had the cost of their internet access to cover, but also their subscription fees.

The out-of-game trade business, even if it's something we all disagree with, is nonetheless still a business. They will be wherever the greatest concentration of their target audience is.

Diablo 3 will be big whether it's pay to play or not; but if you make it p2p then you have to take into account these things:

a) Players will be more eager to get end-game gear more quickly because p2p furthers the concept of time-as-money in gaming, thus increasing the demand for blackmarket trades.

b) Blackmarket farmers will need to farm more to cover their account costs, as has been said. So, you take Diablo 2 and you make it worse.

c) People will take advantage of the people in a) and create trojans to steal account information from people thinking that they are buying from b).

d) As is the case with any p2p; given time, players who are sick of not being able to compete because of their morality (and game rules) will utimately quit leaving the p2p community only consisting of a), b), c).

Now, this is all totally ignoring that I don't understand the concept of p2p if there is no persistant world. The fact that people payed to play HG:L still baffles my imagination.

Randomm

12-08-2008, 19:54

Sein Schatten

12-08-2008, 21:17

stop writing h4x. you're a tool, and it's hacks. you're techno lingo is lame.
what is boxed? really? go to the store, but a game. it's in a box. hence "boxed".

d3 should absolutely NOT be pay to play. and the designers have already said as much that it wont be. pay to play does not at all work for casual gamers that might only put in a couple hours a week, unlike those freaks that play WoW or DDO for 16 hours a day.

That is a great first post. Do you always make a first post like this on other forums?

You correct him regarding h4x, but even an old german dude like me knows the difference between your and you're. (I have to admit, I don't know the difference between then and than. :( ) edit: ahh... then is time and than is for comparisons. Stupid me. :(

WoW is as casual as it gets. You do not have to play 16hrs a day. Even half an hour on work days is enough to: 1) Do some dailies 2) Work on your 10 arena games 3) Do other stuff.

visom

12-08-2008, 21:37

It's not a matter of how much money we have, its having a sense of worth.

If you feel that 15$ a month isn't worth playing D3 then good for you, save some money.
If you feel that 15$ a good thing is good, then have fun playing in a faster update, less hacking community.

As for myself I think its worth it. I'm starting my first year of college in 2 weeks. I already have to pay 80$ per text book, i have to buy 1 graphing calculator which is 80-100$, and classes are like 10$ each (weee gov't aid) and not to mention 10$ per week for gas. Grand total of $1040 per 10month (excluding summer vacation). 10months of p2p for d3 will be 150$, which is nothing compared to 1040$. But I did apply for financial aid, which is more than enough to pay for tuition. Sorry for the math lesson guys :D.

Omikron8

13-08-2008, 07:52

so people would be comfortable shelling out near $200 for HOPEFULLY (assuming the devs keep their promises, ya right) for a year of diablo 3 ? no wonder the MMO industry makes such a killing when they can serve up half-finished beta garbage and millions of people will line up to try it for a fee all the while begging the developers to throw them a fix once in a while