By Jim Rossignol on May 7th, 2010 at 7:05 pm.
Well? Would you? (Expanded below.)
A cynical man might say, “sure, plenty of people pay for World Of Warcraft”, but that would be more about people than the game itself. You can solo in most MMOs, but you aren’t obliged to. So, cloud-gaming streamed stuff aside, would you pay a sub for a game that didn’t have server and admin costs as an expense? (I think there’s a racing game and a hunting game that needs subs too, but let’s skip that for now.) My question is, more precisely, this: What would a single-player game have to do to make you pay for a subscription?
I got round to thinking about this in one of the hivemind’s regular discussions of how content patches and expansions first tried to evolve into episodic gaming, and more recently have regurgitate themselves as DLC. Episodic gaming has been subsumed by DLC to some extent – just look at the success of Borderlands in releasing a main game and then three larger bits of post-endgame content for gamers to play through – but now it’s becoming something else: a way of making us pay for content after release. An excellent way of making us want to buy more of the same, and finding a straightforward way of delivering it.
So say this gets standardised and formalised. Say Mass Effect 3 has a piece of paid content coming out each month after release, and you buy each one… suddenly you’re paying a sub? An optional one, of course, but it amounts to the same thing. Follow the trajectory of Bioware’s DLC experiments and this doesn’t seem all that unlikely. You could very easily imagine and endgame for one of their RPGs where you end up doing a “monster of the week” quest now and again, because you were paying $5 a month for the extras.
Extrapolate this: you could conceive of an open-ended game, perhaps an Elite-style game, or a Sims game, in which you trundled about in your sandbox, but pay for the privilege of having new stuff dropped into your game on a weekly or monthly basis. We’re used to getting a hell of a lot for free, so such additions would have to be pretty significant, but perhaps they could be sophisticated enough for it to be warranted, and being single player, you could even have a degree of control over it in a way that a multiplayer game doesn’t. “I’m ready for my alien invasion scenario now…”
Yes, there’s issues: issues with piracy, with the developmental planning and precision required to pull it off, with the risk of doing it at all. But…
Stalker with a content team steady expanding the zone: it’s working its way out into the world.
GTA with new suburbs and characters slowly being written in. Genuinely new headlines on the news.
Dawn Of War where new maps and units arrive week after week in an endless war, as long as you keep paying that sub.
Would You Pay A Sub For Single Player?
07/05/2010 at 19:10 sana says:
Nope! No money.
07/05/2010 at 19:11 Vinraith says:
With fees come new design priorities. Now the important thing is to keep the player playing so as to continue to bring in revenue, and this requirement supersedes all other priorities whether intentionally or not. The result is that these games waste as much of your time as possible, lack any kind of satisfying conclusion, and generally, IMO, aren’t much fun.
So no, I won’t pay a sub for an online game, and I certainly wouldn’t pay one for an offline game.
07/05/2010 at 19:21 Vinraith says:
Addendum:
As with online games of all sorts, “constant updates” are only a good thing until they start making changes you don’t like. In the case of TF2, in the case of Guild Wars, and in the case of every other online-dependent game I’ve ever played, sooner or later those updates you express such excitement about destroy what I love about the game. This is a bad thing, it means any online, constantly updated title is temporary and, once gone, irrecoverable. If the updates are optional, all is well. If they are unavoidable, it’s just a ticking time bomb under the hood of the game, waiting to go off.
07/05/2010 at 19:32 Feste says:
Ah, but by the same process they have to keep you interested for longer. Assuming a £5/month sub, they’ll have to get me playing for 6 months before making the same money as they currently do. As such, they’ve got to work for their money a whole lot more.
Furthermore, I get the option to pay £5 for a complete section of a game, not a demo or beta, and decide whether to take it further or not. As opposed to paying £30 and finding said game is awful.
07/05/2010 at 19:36 Vinraith says:
@Feste
No one is talking about removing the initial cost of the game, we’re talking about adding a monthly fee on top of the initial outlay.
07/05/2010 at 19:43 Michael says:
It’s a slippery slope. I’d rather not risk incentivising unresolved plot threads.
07/05/2010 at 19:43 Feste says:
Fair enough, although I don’t think I saw that mentioned explicitly in the article. The question remains though, as you say the priority becomes: “keep the player playing so as to continue to bring in revenue”. To me that means keeping the game fun, which is the whole point.
07/05/2010 at 19:55 bob_d says:
Yes, that dynamic is certainly true of MMOs, but I’d argue the opposite could occur if we’re talking about subscriptions that give discrete add-ons to single player content. The MMO subscription is what allows the player to continue playing the game, so the goal is to extend out the game as much as possible; from a design perspective you ideally *never* reach the end of the game. If you’re paying a subscription for discrete bits of content, the design intentions are completely different – the designers want players to reach that (end) content. You could continue to play the game even without a subscription. Players would not continue a subscription if they’re still slogging their way through content they got three months back, for instance. Each bit of content should leave players wanting more, not leaving them feeling stuffed with unnecessary padding.
07/05/2010 at 19:57 Vinraith says:
@Feste
Time consuming != fun. Addictive != fun. Quest screens that deliberately scroll just a bit slower, walk rates that are tuned to be slow enough that you only just tolerate the length of time it takes before you get to an interesting bit of content. Respawn to double the number of fights in a given location without having to put any more work into designing said location. Economy, experience, and progress systems carefully tuned to be only just rewarding enough to keep the addicts addicted. There are so very many ways to slow a player down, keep them playing, and keep milking them for-damned-near-ever.
07/05/2010 at 20:03 Feste says:
Why does a monthly subscription necessitate a time-consuming and addictive game? Slowing down menu scrolling would be a very strange decision. I would be paying by the month, not the minute.
There’s almost no way that content a developer builds in a month will take me a month to play. As such, I wouldn’t be on the treadmill that you describe. The grinding of level etc, that’s already in games with a single payment option and is just bad game design. The subscription for content model wouldn’t fix or exacerbate that .
I could see rushed, substandard levels and areas, but that’s a different story.
07/05/2010 at 20:17 Wolfox says:
Vinraith pretty much summed my thoughts on the matter. Quoting the last part:
“So no, I won’t pay a sub for an online game, and I certainly wouldn’t pay one for an offline game.”
Enough said.
07/05/2010 at 21:07 LintMan says:
Same here – I’m with you, Vinraith. I’ve found most DLC to be extremely ungenerous in the amount of content you get for your money, compared to the base game cost. The time and cost demands for developers to provide new subscription content on a regular schedule will only make this worse and as your suggest, would inevitably result in extremely “padded” offerings. It will also result in much less content being offered in the “base” game and reserved for subscribers.
No, thanks, I’ll still with SP games as they are now. Or stop buying them altogether if that becomes not an option anymore.
08/05/2010 at 00:32 Devan says:
To back up what Vinraith is saying: I am writing this from GDC Canada, where half of the sessions I’ve been to are preaching addiction and manipulation as ways to monetize the social/casual gaming market. I have yet to hear anyone talking about how to make games fun.
As the market and profit potential is growing (and it can be super-lucrative with repeating payments like subscriptions), the financially successful projects are the ones that place “fun” in the backseat and focus on profit in the game design. It’s pretty disappointing, but that’s where these pricing models are taking us.
So, no, I don’t want to support subscription models for single player games.
07/05/2010 at 19:12 Gianandrea C Manfredi says:
Nope, if that happens I am giving up gaming. The mood breaking ‘buy this DLC’ in Dragon Age was bad enough.
08/05/2010 at 15:10 Veret says:
Seconded, and I’m surprised no one else has brought that up before now. My enjoyment of single-player games relies very heavily on immersion, and constantly downloading plot-essential DLC will necessarily kill a game’s immersion every time you’re forced to do it.
This, plus all of Vinraith’s excellent points on free market incentives influencing game design, equals a world of no.
07/05/2010 at 19:13 jake says:
no
07/05/2010 at 19:24 Auspex says:
no
07/05/2010 at 19:39 Poltergeist says:
no
07/05/2010 at 20:40 disperse says:
Maybe?
07/05/2010 at 21:00 Solon says:
no
07/05/2010 at 21:12 Nalano says:
no
07/05/2010 at 21:18 The_B says:
THERE’S NO LIMIT!
08/05/2010 at 03:28 Thiefsie says:
I know
08/05/2010 at 09:52 Lambchops says:
Techno, techno, techno, techno.
08/05/2010 at 12:49 w says:
no
08/05/2010 at 14:01 Andrew Dunn says:
What a shame.
08/05/2010 at 15:46 Easydog says:
no
08/05/2010 at 16:16 Choca says:
No.
07/05/2010 at 19:13 Serenegoose says:
Hmmmm…. no. I go back to my games too erratically to ever want a subscription model for single player games. I can’t even practically afford a single MMO, never mind having to continually pay for games I bought. I’ll admit that the idea is an intriguing one – paying for a developer to keep your game fresh forever… I’m just not sure I’d get enough use out of it to ever want it.
07/05/2010 at 21:19 Gap Gen says:
Yes, it’d be a deal-breaker for me if you lost the ability to play a single player game once you’d bought it. The idea of DLC for a subscription might be interesting, but I don’t know if they could persuade me that losing the ability to play entirely in 5 years’ time would be a good thing.
The spectre of DRM raises its ugly head, too – you’d have to have some hefty DRM given that using a server as a remote dongle isn’t necessary.
07/05/2010 at 19:14 GetOutOfHereStalker says:
hell no i don’t even pay for multiplayer
07/05/2010 at 19:14 heartlessgamer says:
If I didn’t have to buy the original box, I would probably pay a subscription for a months worth of access. For example: $15 a month for access to Civilization 4 would be worth it IMHO. I’d be broke though :(
07/05/2010 at 20:03 nick says:
Or you could BUY Civ 4 outright for 10 bucks. Just saying >.>
http://store.steampowered.com/sub/1618/
07/05/2010 at 19:15 Centy says:
I would never pay a subscription for any game of any sort. Not because I am tight but because I delve in and out of games a lot for example once or twice a year since it came out I’ve gone on a TF2 bender for a month or so then I stop. Having to get then cancel a subscription multiple times would become irritating DLC is another matter as it’s a one off and it’s still going to be there (I would assume) years down the line if I ever want it again.
07/05/2010 at 19:15 TotalBiscuit says:
The single determining factor as to whether or not I’d pay a subscription for a single-player game is how much good content I’d get for my money. If it was consistent? Sure. Assuming the game was fun enough to justify it.
The factor to consider though is that one cannot afford to keep too many of such subscriptions running at any one time. I already pay for WoW, STO, my Lovefilm subscription, my broadband, my cinema card etc etc, the average gamer would have to be extremely choosy. Plus why buy such a game on launch? Why not simply wait until 12 months down the lane when it’ll have way less bugs and way more content, pay subscription for a month, beat everything then quit again? Seems somewhat self-defeating, sure you’ll get the early adoption crowd and launch-day lunatics, but in the long-run, you might end up shooting yourself in the foot with such a distribution model.
07/05/2010 at 19:16 Frenz0rz says:
Probably not.
With DLC for games such as Mass Effect I can take other people’s critical opinions into account for each of my purchases, to decide whether its really worth my money or not. With a monthly sub, theres no guarantee that I’ll be interested in everything that’s churned out, or the consistency of it’s quality and the effort put into it. It would just be a way for publishers to automatically deduct a sum from your bank account 12 times a year, regardless of what they are producing. There is of course the ability to cancel a subscription; however, the ability to “cancel” something implies that you do not wish to go back to it, thereby excluding yourself from any further DLC.
That said, this sort of thing could very much depend on the type of game you’re paying for, so I wouldnt discount it purely for applying to singleplayer games.
07/05/2010 at 19:16 Phoshi says:
First thought? No.
After the article? Fuck yeah I would, that’d be awesome.
07/05/2010 at 19:47 PHeMoX says:
That’s a just plain stupid change of heart you’ve gone through then. Excuse my bluntness, but who’s to say updates will be significant? Often times not even DLCs are significant enough to be really worth their money.
Let alone the fact a developer might take months to finish additional content, meaning you’d pay too much by definition.
I don’t get why one would change their minds about this. What’s next? Get half a game and then pay monthly to receive the rest divided over 5 years, paying monthly sub fee? Hell no!!
07/05/2010 at 19:48 Damien Stark says:
Seconded.
I was pretty skeptical until I read the bit about Dawn of War; now I have my credit card in my hand.
07/05/2010 at 19:55 Damien Stark says:
“who’s to say updates will be significant? Often times not even DLCs are significant enough to be really worth their money.”
I’m pretty sure the dude with the credit card (that’s me!) gets to decide. Like the DLC example you name – I know this seems impossible, but… I didn’t buy them.
The question Jim asks is not “are you excited about a world publishers force you to buy bad content?”
The question is, what would it take to get you to voluntarily choose to pay subscription for a single player game?
“Dawn Of War where new maps and units arrive week after week in an endless war, as long as you keep paying that sub.” is a pretty good answer to that question. Of course they’d have to be “significant” (and good) because if they’re not I can stop paying.
07/05/2010 at 20:07 Phoshi says:
Oh, it would have to be like this. I certainly wouldn’t pay if it were poorly done.
07/05/2010 at 19:16 Okami says:
Did you have to give them ideas? Isn’t it bad enough as it is already?
*breaks down and cries*
Why, Mr. Rossignol, why did you do this to us?
07/05/2010 at 19:22 Jim Rossignol says:
Seems to me that the DLC business is working its way towards this without my help. The question is at what point it might become acceptable.
07/05/2010 at 19:35 faelnor says:
dlc is not acceptable. Patches and reasonably-sized expansions are acceptable, but dlc is not them.
07/05/2010 at 19:53 Jesse says:
Jim, I think maybe the community isn’t ready for this discussion yet…
They would have to ease us into it. They could possibly get us there over time. On some level, depending on how it was handled, I would theoretically love to have just more Morrowind, forever. If it looked a bit nicer.
But no one can keep making the same thing forever. An author can only milk a series for so long before there’s no blood left in it. Like Vinraith said up above, what if they begin to change the game in a direction you don’t like? The fear of maintaining a game’s userbase would be so great it could cripple most games. The devs would have to be able to consistently bring people to a new place they didn’t know they would like – balancing the new with the old. That’s not easy. It’s not easy to do sequels now, and this would be harder, because there’s no precedent. And imagine the sense of self-entitlement the gamers would have! Imagine the state of the forums, discussing upcoming, proposed changes! It would be awful.
Valve would be able to do it. They’d probably be able to implement something, like a ‘vote for the content of the next update’ feature, and carry it out in such a way as to not alienate the losing voters. They’re good at dealing with their fans. Other, more ‘corporate-thinking’ developers wouldn’t be able to juggle their user’s desires with their ridiculous corpthink style of decision-making.
Me, personally? I like a sense of ownership. I like to buy all of a thing at once, and then have it on the shelf, nice and secure. That’s my habit, and I’d be very resistant to breaking it.
07/05/2010 at 20:00 jonfitt says:
But the crucial difference is DLC is a pick and choose affair, no matter how often or piece-meal they dole out the game, each piece is optional at the moment. Each piece also needs to be attractive on its own. A subscription implies payment for some undetermined content.
I can see the argument that an individual subs update could therefore be designed for niche appeal without having to appeal to enough people to pay for its development, but in that case lots of people are paying for something they don’t want.
The only thing I can see myself paying for would be an upfront charge for a guaranteed series of episodes. I did this for the first S+M.
07/05/2010 at 20:15 bob_d says:
Get used to it; the AAA game industry is in serious decline right now. They’ve been driving off a cliff for a while and just this last year noticed it. Costs for AAA game development increase every year while sales revenue is decreasing. Income from Facebook games will eclipse the rest of the PC game market soon (if it hasn’t already). Game developers need new revenue streams if they’re going to stay in business and they’re scrambling to implement them. Neither the players nor the developers are really ready for this discussion, but it’s long overdue.
“But no one can keep making the same thing forever.”? Well, when most AAA games are sequels (with just the occasional risky new title) because they’re the only ones that have even a chance of making a profit, we’ll get to test that, because that’s where the industry is headed (it’s part-way there already).
07/05/2010 at 20:47 Jesse says:
You’re taking that quote out of the context I intended. No one can keep making the same thing forever (i.e. Morrowind, or Dawn of War, or whatever) and make it good. I would (in theory) enjoy paying a subscription for new content for the same game for quite a long time, but I think the creators would run out of creativity eventually, and slowly, causing a gradual souring and disillusionment. I picture us subscribing and getting strung out forever, to the point where I realize I haven’t been enjoying my new content for two or three months, but I’ve been paying for it anyway.
Also, of new games will still be made. Not everything will be a sequel. Don’t get hysterical. New properties also have a certain marketable glamour to them, and as long as that’s true, there will still be new properties.
07/05/2010 at 21:15 Nalano says:
I’m not buying that “development costs are rising” bullshit, bob_d.
It’s the same bullshit Hollywood does with it’s blockbusters: “Look! Look at the pretty CGI and the 3D effects! It took us 10 years to make!” when the story is a big pile of steaming effluence.
They want to dig themselves that hole, let them. I’m not responsible for paying them to do so.
07/05/2010 at 22:41 jonfitt says:
@Nalano
To a certain extent the increasing costs are a product of their own making, but lots of people do demand a whole lot more from their games nowadays. The increased fidelity of animation, art, models, environments translates into additional work which equals expense. There is a reason Indie games don’t look like Crysis2, or contain the 40000 lines of spoken dialogue Oblivion did.
You can argue all you want that you don’t require such wizardry to have fun, and maybe you don’t, but a lot of people really like the way games have progressed. Your local chess player probably mocks you for your fancy techno 8-bit games.
Without an increasing number of sales, or other ways to recoup costs, the books don’t balance as the number of require man-hours goes up.
07/05/2010 at 22:49 jonfitt says:
@bob_d
Activision’s method of churning out sequels yearly is actually the closest thing to a subscription we have. You pay your $50 CoD sub and they release incremental updates yearly. Sports games are the same way.
You could charge monthly and release the updates more frequently, but either way you end up with the same game milked endlessly.
07/05/2010 at 22:56 Nalano says:
It’s true, jonfitt. I simply can’t get it up anymore for FPSs without seeing the individual beads of sweat on those generic space marines #s 1 and 2 when they blast away generic aliens x and y. I’ll go tell Valve to turn in their Source engine for good, because those games just aren’t fun anymore. After all, jonfitt, said so.
07/05/2010 at 23:25 jonfitt says:
@Nalano
Don’t get snarky with me. The point is different strokes for different folks, and there are actually a lot of people who can look back at a game from 2005 and say that it looks like arse. There are people who refuse to play the original XCOM because of the way it looks. I’ve heard people bad mouthing Source too incidentally.
As a member of the Dwarf Fortress community who occasionally plays 25 year old strategy games, perhaps that is not me.
Saying “I don’t need it” doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist, and the market is definitely there for ever more impressive games. Just look at the number of people who were eager to drop more money on a computer just to play Crysis at full fidelity when it launched.
The cost of producing those games is ever increasing.
07/05/2010 at 23:51 bob_d says:
@Nalano:
No, it’s not “bullshit,” it’s a fact. Games development is not the same as movie development, to even compare the two is absurd. Take a minute and think about this. First of all, we’re talking about AAA games here, that means it has “current generation” graphics, not “Quake 1″ graphics. The models, textures, environments and animation are all more detailed and complex. That means it takes more people and therefore more money to make them – in fact, exponentially more. These are basic production costs; nothing in film-making has exponentially increased in complexity, in fact digital cameras, editing and special effects have actually made film-making cheaper. When sound and then color were added as film technologies, the actors already had those qualities built in. If you adjust for inflation, blockbuster movies made in 1915 cost as much as modern day blockbusters even though they didn’t have to record or edit sound or deal with color processing in 1915. The problem is, you can’t sell a game with 1994 AAA production values and sell as many copies as your AAA game did in 1994. Games don’t exist in a vacuum, they have competition.
This brings us to the dynamics of the “hit” where yes, film and games are similar. Traditionally, the majority of both films and games don’t make money, but are subsidized by the few that do. Films have become more profitable due to broadcast rights and DVD sales, but games don’t have anything similar to recoup costs. So, in order to make money, you either need to have a small indie production that cost very, very little to make, or a big hit that distinguishes itself from other similar products. For movies this means by having the more popular actors, or more action and special effects, for instance. If you’re making games, having better graphics, bigger levels, more features or a longer playing game might do it (assuming the gameplay of the competing games is otherwise equivalent). All these things cost money. These AAA products are competing for the same audience, so to get the same number of sales requires ever increasing expenditures. The really serious problem that the game industry is having right now is that the total sales for PC games is actually shrinking, which means publishers have to fight even harder just to get the same number of sales while needed more sales to break even.
There is an alternative to the rat-race that AAA game development has become, and that’s Facebook games. I hope you like “Farmville,” because right now, that’s the future of PC gaming.
08/05/2010 at 01:01 Xaositect says:
@Jesse : ‘I think maybe the community isn’t ready for this discussion yet’ – t this strikes me as a somewhat strange comment; when will we be ready for this then? When we’re so used to the gaming industry pouring shit flavored sludge down our throats that discovering a lump of corn is going to make us go all weak at the knees? This is a dangerous idea because it sounds good – even logical – until you apply real world mechanics to it -Less content for more $. Theres the future.
If we can nip this in the bud by saying a universal no now, mores the better.
08/05/2010 at 01:07 Xaositect says:
P.s. Due to rantin-raving my comment is slightly blurred – not having a go Jesse. Using what you said as a spring board. A pol ogies
08/05/2010 at 12:16 jsdn says:
@jonfitt
I’d just like to point out that those supposed 40,000 lines of dialogue were voiced primarily from four people, and added very little to the game (case in point: Morrowind) when it wasn’t severely hurting the game (in one example: beggars).
The reason indie games don’t have cutting-edge graphics or fully voiced dialogue is not necessarily because it’s too expensive or takes too much time, but that it doesn’t directly correspond to a more quality game.
08/05/2010 at 18:09 bob_d says:
@ jsdn:
“The reason indie games don’t have cutting-edge graphics or fully voiced dialogue is not necessarily because it’s too expensive or takes too much time…”
But they do take time. A lot of time, labor and a lot of money. I work in the industry, and the last project I worked on, we had very little time and money (not a AAA budget). We realized the only way we could even think about getting the game done was to go the “Torchlight” route for the graphics – a fixed psuedo-isometric view with cartoonish (rather than realistic, cutting-edge) graphics. This allowed us to simplify the environments, simplify character models, use fewer texture maps, and have simple animations, because you couldn’t see the flaws and lack of transition animations as easily as you would with standard close 3rd person views. Our levels were going to be smaller and fewer in number than a typical AAA game, and voiced dialog was a luxury we couldn’t afford. Some of the work was to be outsourced to Asia to reduce costs. The savings in time, labor and cost were enormous; we were looking at making a fully-featured game with 1/20th the budget of a typical AAA production. (And we still had more resources than indie developers.) The Korean publisher, unfortunately, thought that our indie-style graphics weren’t pretty enough to sell the game, and ultimately the studio was shut down when they realized that our budget didn’t allow for anything more complex.
I know an animator who worked on the Diablo games (the first was released 1997). He marvels that when he worked on those games, a single artist could model, texture and animate a monster in a week. Now he’s working on equivalent production-value projects where one person models, one person creates all the various texture maps, someone rigs the model, someone else animates it, another person does the rag-doll set-up, and someone else does particle effects, in a process that can take a month for a minor monster (the process is sped along by the use of expensive middleware, too). All of those jobs individually require more technical knowledge than the one combined job did 10 years ago.
All of which is to say: if you think development costs haven’t changed, or that somehow indie and AAA development costs are comparable, then you are talking out of your hat.
10/05/2010 at 04:14 Anonymousity says:
If the AAA games industry is failing, let them fail. These things are companies not charities. If they can’t find a sustainable level with ridiculous graphics, tone down the graphics, do as sins of a solar empire does.
07/05/2010 at 19:19 Army_of_None says:
Nope. I’d much prefer them to spend their time working on a worthy sequel. Or, if the content is going to warrant it, packaging it into an expansion pack. People still remember expansion packs, right?
07/05/2010 at 23:32 jonfitt says:
I liked expansion packs. There was generally enough content to get me back into a game I’d finished. Maybe a whole new campaign, or a new faction.
An extra horse or flaming sword is hardly going to make me want to replay an entire RPG.
07/05/2010 at 19:19 teo says:
I don’t like the whole idea of it because it leads to worse content IMO. I want everything in one complete package, not fifty different things that are spread out
07/05/2010 at 19:21 clive dunn says:
I mentioned the other day regarding the APB pricing hoo-har, that i used to put loads of money in arcade machines. Basically paying a (small) sub for a single player game. I am consistantly narked by buying single player games and then hardly playing them. (either through playabilility pre-patch problems or just not liking the gameplay that much)
I think i wouldn’t mind paying maybe 5 pence a game or somesuch amount. Or 5 pence an hour maybe. The complicated thing would be calculating the right amount.
I think it’d be pretty cool to be able to try (a full) game like this.
I can imagine a screen popping up after an hour saying ‘INSERT 10p’. Now a good game would get a lot of payments and a shite game would wither and die. Or would it?
07/05/2010 at 19:21 Colthor says:
No.
Might buy the Game Of The Year box cheap after it’s finished, though.
07/05/2010 at 19:21 Brumisator says:
“Stalker with a content team steady expanding the zone: it’s working its way out into the world.
GTA with new suburbs and characters slowly being written in. Genuinely new headlines on the news.”
How about they release a full game at launch?
Now, DLC, okay, if it’s good and long enough, I’m willing to pay for one once in a while.
Maybe a cheap and above all else optional Monthly mini-DLC could be nice, but I don’t see myself obsessing over a game enough to feel an absolute need to get the new stuff all of the time.
If I just spend one month without playing that certain game, I’d feel like I just threw my money out the window.
Now, on the other hand, if the game were free at launch, and subscription only, I might give it a thought, but chances are the game would just be an embryonic husk in the early days.
Valve, of course, are making wonderful things, and for FREE, mostly with TF2. New content coming in relatively often, and all you have to do is pay once to get the game. But even at launch, TF2 was a solid and fun game.
so I’m 95% against it, the other 5% are me trying to rationalise getting inevitable F’ed in the A by publishers in new and exiting ways down the line.
07/05/2010 at 19:23 TotalBiscuit says:
“How about they release a full game at launch?” – Please define a full game. Because it sounds to me like by your definition, a game would never actually be finished.
Let me give you my definition of full game. A product with a complete plot (or cliffhanger if it’s sequel territory) that gives a satisfaction number of enjoyable hours for my money.
07/05/2010 at 19:42 Damien Stark says:
Man, television series suck. Why can’t they just put a full story in the first episode, like movies do? I hate those greedy bastards that expect me to watch an additional episode each week.
07/05/2010 at 19:56 Jesse says:
Television totally does suck for that reason, though. I can’t stand TV. Movies only, thanks.
07/05/2010 at 20:29 Brumisator says:
Well if we’re going to talk about a game with a storyline, I’d prefer it to be one big package I pay for once.
I guess my bringing up TF2 was a bad idea, since it is MP.
As for TV series, the comparison is flawed. Episodic content like the new Sam and Max games is rather like a TV series, a big overarching plot for one season, and episodes every once in a while, that all fit into the season.
But paying even if you don’t play the game one month? that’s preposterous!
07/05/2010 at 19:21 Gpig says:
no
07/05/2010 at 19:22 Seras says:
subscription only makes sense to me if there’s an online service that needs to be maintained.
I don’t see why a single player game would need an online service.
so, no, i would never pay a sub for a single player game.
07/05/2010 at 20:20 bob_d says:
I guess you don’t subscribe to any magazines, then.
07/05/2010 at 21:23 Nalano says:
The cost of a magazine subscription is close to a dollar a month.
The content of a magazine is about 30 or so pages of professional-grade content (with 60 pages of ads).
Magazines that don’t produce regularly and on time die.
What we’re asking here is ten times the money for one tenth the content on no clearly-defined schedule or quality standard.
I’m gonna continue going with NO.
08/05/2010 at 00:18 bob_d says:
Sorry, I was being snarky, responding to the notion of “I only pay for an online service,” because clearly people will pay a monthly subscription just for regular (not-networked) content.
That magazine subscription may only cost *you* a dollar, but only because it’s been heavily subsidized, not only by advertisements, but also by people who buy the magazine on the news-stand and by various promotional deals. Personally I spend more than five bucks a month on each of my magazine subscriptions, and I’ve put up with magazines that published irregularly and had varying sized issues because they were interesting enough to be worth it.
Obviously a game subscription would have to have a monthly (or otherwise very regular) release of content, and an understanding of the quality would have to be part of the deal or it wouldn’t work. Previous months’ content would have to be collected as DLCs, and they would have to be priced such that subscribers didn’t feel cheated, so that would define the minimum standard of how substantial each month’s release is.
07/05/2010 at 19:23 Vandelay says:
No. I wouldn’t even get a monthly subscription to a MMO, let along a single player game. As Centy said, I like to play a range of games and I rarely stick at one for that long, unless it is exceptionally good.
Also, I agree with Vinraith that when a game requires a monthly fee the developer will automatically be making games that require a greater amount of the player’s time in order to make the player feel like the game is worth their money. This would just encourage grinding and large barren areas to traverse.
Don’t give people ideas RPS!
07/05/2010 at 19:28 Flakfizer says:
Never, never, never.
07/05/2010 at 19:28 Alexander Norris says:
I refuse to play MMOs because I refuse to be gouged for 12€+ every month. If single player games were to start charging subscription fees, I’d simply find a way of not paying those subs – whether it means piracy (if the game they’re trying to sell me for 50€+sub is released with bits missing in order to justify the sub, as is currently the case with a some DLC) or plain just not fucking playing video games.
It’d be regrettable if I’m forced to stop playing games but if the industry wants to start charging monthly fees for single-player games I think it’ll have reached a point where it can go fuck itself and I don’t want to hear about it ever again.
07/05/2010 at 19:53 Vinraith says:
@Alexander
Yeah. There’s been ever-increasing strain on my relationship with PC games of late, from install limits to “games as service” systems to GfWL and Ubi’s psychotic DRM, more and more game purchases raise the “you’re being taken advantage of” flag for me. It grates. It makes a hobby that used to be a lot of fun an increasingly large amount of work and an increasing source of frustration and concern. I’m getting tired of it, and I’m fairly certain that the widespread acceptance of this would probably be the final straw for me and mainstream PC gaming. That’d suck, but not as much as how I’d feel if I continued to support an industry that was actively trying to bend me over a table.
07/05/2010 at 19:29 ManaT says:
No. I don’t like subscriptions. In any format, really. I spend money on either goods or services, and “allowing” someone to do something, in my mind, is not a service. I don’t like SaaS models unless the company I’m subscribing to is basically renting utilities, like server racks and cpu cycles.
If the game is running on my machine (ie. no MMO component), then it’s a “good”, and I’ll only pay to own.
If you’re implying that I would maintain access to the content even after canceling my “subscription”, then there’s really no functional difference between dlc and subs.
08/05/2010 at 04:44 Corrupt_Tiki says:
Well really a box that you buy from a shop is really still not yours to ‘own’
This sadly brings us back to all the hoo har in the EULA – Have you actually read the bullshit these things contain, I know I haven’t but I’ve read enough articles on this site and on others on the interweb about some of the shit this contains.
I’m with vinraith, I used to love games, they WERE great fun back in the day, but nowadays, need all constant internet connections to install even SP games, Shitty DRM (Ubi), crappy content (FAR CRY 2), and over milked and never satisfying ending games like COD:MW2 <- what BS was that campaign – I was taught in school a story should have a Beginning middle and end, not just a beginning and shitloads in the middle.
Ive started playing my old games, Diablo 2, RA2, C&C, WC3, and am trying to get into Dwarf Fortress too.
I'm sorry but I get quite fired up when I look at how shafted Im getting, I usually have to f*ck around for about 2 hours nowadays just to get the fking thing working. with C&C 3 I had to use Another computer – to install because securom gave me invisible disk symptom in my gaming rig, ONCE I FINALLY got GTA4 working with no internet connection, I found out it didn't like my SLi setup and was unplayable.
I think I may have gotten sidetracked from my main point….
07/05/2010 at 19:29 Bassism says:
I could certainly imagine paying a sub for a single player game. It would have to be one hell of a single player game, though.
Typically I maintain subs to two different games: Eve, and iRacing (yes, that’s that racing game you almost mentioned :P)
In the case of Eve, it’s all about social interaction. The game really is pretty rubbish, but I like my friends in the game and that game’s pvp is about the most fun I’ve ever had in a computer game. In short, commanding a fleet of 150 people from around the world to take out 150 other people from different places in the world is worth a continued payment from me.
In the case of iRacing, it’s all about the quality of the experience. I also own plenty of other racing sims, which can not only be raced online like iR, but generally include some kind of single player experience as well, which iR does not. But the ludicrous amount of detail that goes into laser scanning tracks and painstakingly modelling their cars really shows through. If it takes a monthly sub to pay for that development, I’m cool with that. (Let’s not go into the fact that even buying a single car or track costs more than I’ve paid for some entire sims…) Now, part of the value of iR comes from the online component, but supposing they gave you all the cars and tracks, an equally sophisticated AI, and so on in a single player experience…. That could be worth paying a sub for.
But I think there are certainly possibilities. Some of my favourite games of all time are the X series, which build upon the Elite model. They’re lovely games, but the universe tends to grow stale after a while. I have put immensely more hours into Eve than I ever have into X games.
But if a company created a game, seeded with enough new content to keep the game interesting for month after month, I’d pay a sub for it.
That’s the catch though. It needs to be something that is going to hold people’s interest. Even taking huge open RPGs, which typically last for 100 hours or more on a play, I’d expect most people are fully done with the game in under two months. With a 10 dollar monthly sub, the dev makes 20 bucks, then the customer stops playing because they got bored because there wasn’t enough interesting new content, or the game itself simply wasn’t good enough. They’re going to need to figure out a way to retain customers for at least 6 months to make it financially viable.
It could work, I think. But it would take a game more massive, deep, and high quality than anything we’ve seen in many years. And it would also require a full time commitment from the dev to keep the game interesting. Given the big publishers’ aversion to risk, I doubt we’re ever going to see them go for it. And I don’t think any indie team has the kind of man power it would take to pull it off.
07/05/2010 at 19:30 Sébastien Richer says:
If it’s utterly the awesomest game of all time (past, present and future) ever… and that when I play it I feel completely complete and life gains meaning and I even get to achieve goals in life through it as well as helping the needy… yeah sure I’d give like 5k a year easy :D
But otherwise, I would’nt even pay a sub for x-com so… fat chance…
07/05/2010 at 19:30 Malleus says:
“How about they release a full game at launch?”
That sums it up pretty well.
07/05/2010 at 19:31 Malleus says:
Oh, as for the question in the article:
Never!
07/05/2010 at 19:32 James G says:
I don’t think I could.
For a few months I had a WoW subscription, and hated the feeling the sub made. I felt guilty playing other games, and constantly was worried about getting my monies worth. A similar thing with a single player game would mean a monthly assessment of whether it was worth it, and I certainly couldn’t keep more than one on the go at a time.
07/05/2010 at 20:03 Jesse says:
That’s right! The psychology of it doesn’t sit well. It feels like giving too much control over to the developer. And there are very few developers worthy of long-term trust. If Black Isle could somehow be reconstituted and given autonomy, I would subscribe to them. Valve, maybe. Jeff Vogel and Spiderweb, yes.
Ubisoft? Activision? No no no.
07/05/2010 at 20:54 Jesse says:
And to reply to what you were ACTUALLY SAYING… So hypothetically, if all games were subscription-only, we would all become single-game consumers, wouldn’t we? I wouldn’t subscribe to two games at once. It seems wasteful and, like you said, guilt-inducing. Would that be good for the industry? I don’t have the data to say – others of you will know more about this – but I think I put more of my income into the games industry now, paying about ~$30/month for game purchases, than I would with a $15/month subscription fee (and I would probably not consider paying more than that).
08/05/2010 at 12:33 jsdn says:
Just think about an hourly subscription for people who don’t play enough for a monthly. It’d be difficult to take in the atmosphere of a game when you feel your pocket getting lighter. Or maybe trying to time your gameplay perfectly so that you don’t get screwed from paying in advance for an hour you don’t have, and forget you’re supposed to be enjoying the game.
07/05/2010 at 19:33 cyberpope says:
devils advocate!!!
Id pay. id definatly pay if it means my games go on and on. itd be nice if everyone was as mad as valve and gave all this shiny new stuff away for free but lets face it people need money. Of course id expect it to be optional since some of its bound to be a bit shit now and again and id like to opt out of some.
back to normal
If this wild scenario did happen though we would never have a new game ever. everyone would think “FUDGE IT! ill just keep bolting on the old game” and not bother with sequels and new ideas. eventually all the studios will be working on mass of duty: bad reach 2 and we’ll be stuck with 1 game we can never complete
this scares me and i am opposed!
07/05/2010 at 19:34 frymaster says:
no, but only due to my playing habits
from that point of view, DLC/expansions are a better fit for me, as I play in bursts
07/05/2010 at 19:35 westyfield says:
I find it interesting that you say this: “Say Mass Effect 3 has a piece of paid content coming out each month after release, and you buy each one… suddenly you’re paying a sub?”, as my response to your question “What would a single-player game have to do to make you pay for a subscription?”
was ‘be Mass Effect 3′. I dearly hope they don’t do that, but I’m such a fanboy I probably wouldn’t be able to resist. I quite like the DLC system that currently exists (bar the stupid Bioware points system) – I want to get the Kasumi Goto content, but not the extra outfits/armour. A sub would be a way for a company to force lesser-quality content and justify it by saying ‘look, we’re gonna release some awesome stuff soon!’, in my opinion.
07/05/2010 at 22:44 karthik says:
All of the extra armour/weapons is either stuff you don’t have to pay for, or pay right at the start by buying one of the several “deluxe editions”.
(I think there’s been one cosmetic DLC, and no one seems to care about it anyway.)
07/05/2010 at 23:17 Manley Pointer says:
Outside of the Kasumi thing (which cost too much) the ME2 DLC was worthless. I think developers have a really poor track record of putting out DLC that a) matches the quality of the original game and b) matches the style of the original game (i.e. isn’t an “arena” or Operation Anchorage or some other low-effort “experiment”). I’ve almost never seen paid DLC that was worth the price, and even the developers that have made some decent DLC have produced over 50% garbage.
Every piece of DLC needs to feature the voice cast (when appropriate) and production values you expected from the original game. If it feels in any way cheaper or less polished — which is almost inevitable, given the smaller size of DLC dev teams — it hurts the original game by association.
So, unless the sub-plan content is magically better than the half-assed DLC that developers usually make, it wouldn’t be worth it. And if developers aren’t doing a good job under the current system, imagine what DLC would be like if their subscribers paid for it in advance — they’d have even LESS incentive to make it good.
07/05/2010 at 19:35 Cooper says:
No.
I’m gonna use the ‘but, Valve’ argument so many people hate.
Valve regularly update TF2 with some great content. They do so for free for people have purchased the game.
They recoup their costs by having special price deals around the updates, bringing in new players, keeping the game strong, bringing old players back and keeping the game fresh, busy and in people’s minds.
With this model, Valve have ruined the chances of any publisher seriously trying to get people to subscribe for extra content.
07/05/2010 at 20:49 Brumisator says:
Best selling games on Steam on the week the passing, Free DLC for L4D2.
L4D2 : 20€
CoD:MW2 map pack: 15€
My point, you ask?
1) Valve kick ass for doing it for free, and they make money doing so, everybody wins.
2) People are stupid and will pay billions in order to eat shit if you tell them it’s caviar.
07/05/2010 at 23:35 jonfitt says:
I might just point out that TF2 is a multiplayer game, where the rules of updates work very differently.
08/05/2010 at 00:06 Jimbo says:
It’s unreasonable to hold the rest of the industry to Valve’s standard. Valve recoup their costs by owning Steam. Whilst you’re signing in to play your freely supported TF2 and L4D2 updates, you’re probably buying every other Steam sale you pass on the way in. The ‘generous’ TF2 and L4D2 updates are just loss leaders for Steam.
08/05/2010 at 13:52 Jamus says:
Spot on Jimbo- I don’t get how people miss this vital but obvious point.
The TF2 and L4D2 strategies are simply to pull in as many additional players as possible, and get them locked into using Steam regularly. Its a useful side effect the this also keeps existing players happy and loyal to steam.
The COD:MW2 strategy is completely different, leveraging their existing user base to milk them for additional DLC. Its so much more effort to pull in new users versus milking exsiting users. Why would you go to so much trouble trying to entice anyone who *still* hasn’t bought TF2, COD or L4D2- the answer is simply the future value to Valve (whereas there is very little for Activision).
Valve could effectively give away these games if it locks people into Steam and keeps people coming back and buying new games in the sales. Its just to maintain the illusion of generosity that they charge us anything at all!
07/05/2010 at 19:36 juv3nal says:
The problem with a subscription is you get taxed while you’re not playing it. If I buy dlc, I can not touch it for a year and it’s still there. Versus paying for 12 months of playing nothing if it were a subscription. If subscription rate went by how much time I was actually *playing the game* and the price was right, I’d consider it, otherwise hell no.
07/05/2010 at 19:36 Mark says:
Hell no. Then again, I won’t even pay a subscription for multiplayer.
07/05/2010 at 19:45 Mark says:
For a monthly subscription, I would feel like I’m throwing away money if I go for more than a few days without playing it substantially, and the half-dozen games in all of recorded history that I’ve ever played that often were already presented in the form of a nice convenient lump sum payment, and, judging by typical monthly rates, I’ve saved money by buying them for standard retail price anyway.
For an hourly subscription that only charges me for the time I actually use, I would feel like I’m throwing money away if I don’t rush through the game as fast as I can. That’s actually okay for some games, but they’re not my favorites.
07/05/2010 at 20:05 Mark says:
Of course, the example you provide is not a subscription: it’s paying for expansions. They don’t go away when you stop paying for them, you can (presumably) skip the ones that look like crap, there’s market pressure to make them worth the price of entry, nobody feels cheated if they stop making new ones or fall behind schedule… it’s superior to a subscription in every way. And we’re pretty much already there.
07/05/2010 at 19:38 Feste says:
Assuming that this is a subscription, and not paying for continued access to my game, then depending on the quality of the product, sure. Ultimately if I end up paying a similar or slightly more amount for the game, then all that’s happened is that the cost has been defrayed over time. If it was for a longer period of time, then we’d have to see at the bang/buck ratio.
There’d be no reason that I couldn’t go back and replay, indeed the shortened section length would be conducive to that as going back to play a full game in a new way is always slightly daunting. However, playing a 5 hour game again in a different way would just be fun.
For an open world game, I think that you would need a significant amount of world to start of with. Maybe not the entire galaxy as Frontier did, but maybe a stellar arm?
07/05/2010 at 19:40 Feste says:
A slight proviso: Horse Amour, and it’s nickle-and-diming ilk, have made me deeply suspicious of how a lot of companies view DLC and episodic gaming. So it would have to be an awesome game.
Also, isn’t this just a restatement of the premise of episodic gaming?
07/05/2010 at 19:40 Jaz says:
In theory, if it was that absolutely brilliant and there was nothing like it and you wanted to experience it, you’d have to.
07/05/2010 at 19:40 Daave says:
I’d pay a sub for Elder Scrolls 5 if the amount of new content was high and it was of good quality.
07/05/2010 at 19:42 Bozzley says:
If they went and did proper episodic gaming, then yeah, I probably would. 24 eventually bored me, but if it was a game series instead of a TV show? One new “hour” a week? Fuck yeah, I’d go for that.
07/05/2010 at 19:42 karthik says:
Not a subscription, no.
I did buy some ME2 DLC. As long as I can pick and choose the extra content I want, and the game is complete in every respect without any of it, I don’t have a problem with DLC.
Can’t be selective about extra content with a sub, can I?
07/05/2010 at 23:15 Snidesworth says:
Exactly. I’m fine with DLC. I can choose what I want and pay for that. Subscriptions mean that I get everything, the bad and the good, and if I ever stop paying for it then I loose access to it all.
07/05/2010 at 19:43 PHeMoX says:
What would a single-player game have to do to make you pay for a subscription?”
The mere question is a downright insult.
Not even MMOs will make me pay for a sub, there are no games that are actually worth paying each month for. Not even a Halo 3, Crysis 2 and so on.
The only legit reason for anyone to ask monthly payments for a game, is because there are expenses involved keeping the servers running.. and even then I think multiplayer servers should be free as developers can stop support for them at any time and for any reason.
Subscriptions for games are like a cancer. It’s like pay-per-view, except you’re being forced into paying way too much.
07/05/2010 at 19:50 Feste says:
In what way is it an insult? We’re talking about money for content, the barter of goods in fair exchange. My understanding of the context is the idea of subscriptions in the magazine sense not in the MMO sense; i.e. you’re paying money each month for new content. That’s pretty much at the heart of the modern world. Capitalism.
07/05/2010 at 21:06 Nalano says:
Content? Content? WHAT content?!
Buying a game is exchanging money for content.
Renting the right to play that same game is money down the hole.
At best it provides a captive audience (ie: you) to whatever “content” the developer decides to add on to the game. This includes the infamous “horse armor” DLC. This includes map packs, mission packs, weapons mods and multiplayer modes that used to come FREE. This includes “add-ons” that come every four months and have one hour’s worth of content. You pay regularly, independently of the quality of the product offered. There becomes no need to produce a quality product, because sales are guaranteed. And this assumes you the consumer even get to access any of this the second you cancel your subscription.
It’s a damned insult.
07/05/2010 at 19:43 Wednesday says:
Some kind of constantly expanding thing akin to a televised serial drama, but the way they make games today just wouldn’t do it for me.
I’d require reliable, consistent and regular releases of high quality and decent length. I’m not talking some new maps or a new area, but a small expansions worth, much larger than any recent DLC offerings other than Awakening.
Not very likely to happen.
07/05/2010 at 19:44 Reverend Speed says:
I kind of already do with the TellTale games.
Would I sub for the Mass Effect 2 DLC? Nein x giggles = hohohono.
07/05/2010 at 19:44 Robert says:
I did, and would do so again.
Sam & Max series 1: ep 1t/m6.
For games where this sort of episodic content is possible, contained stories with head and tail, I would do it. Else, no.
08/05/2010 at 08:48 DSX says:
Agreed, games which package nicely into episodic style content, and are PRICED to match, I would indeed pay for. But 60 bucks for 60 hours of ME3, and then a monthly 10-20 dollars for 5 more hours of play? No way. I’d pirate that shit like everyone else.
07/05/2010 at 19:44 Eric says:
It’s easy to argue that this isn’t so different from what Fallout 3 did; the Fallout 3 expansions were essentially regularly scheduled content additions with a $10 almost-monthly fee, they just stopped it after five of them rather than continuing to churn them out forever. In theory, though, they could have kept it up. The pricing model was different but the concept wasn’t by much.
My answer is probably no, though, because I don’t think you can keep any game interesting forever just by tacking more on top of it. The games that last forever do so because their central mechanic is good enough that you don’t mind repetition or slight variation on a theme, not because somebody slaved away on yet another bunch of cookie cutter quests or a few new enemies to toss into the mix.
What I would do – and have done – is pay a season subscription to an episodic game with a finite end like Tales From Monkey Island. I have no problem funding episodic development in a lump sum, if I trust the content developers to deliver a solid product.
07/05/2010 at 19:45 Alex Weldon says:
For sure, provided I wouldn’t lose access to the stuff I already had if I stopped paying the subscription. The way I see it working in the future is with regular releases of DLC, wherein you can buy them a la carte if you want, but get them more cheaply if you take a “subscription” to receive (and be charged for) them automatically as they come out.
If the subscription is required to play the game at all, then no way in hell. But subscribing to add-on content, sure.
07/05/2010 at 19:45 deimos says:
Nope.
I’d probably lean more with the DLC option, I could skip things that I don’t want. With subs, they’d give you (potential) crappy content ‘regularly’.
07/05/2010 at 19:46 Sagan says:
I would not if it was as expensive as having a copy of the game which I can play whenever I want.
But: Recently there was news of StarCraft 2 having a subscription in South America, China and Russia, (or something like that) and the model there is that you pay half-price and can only play the game for like a couple of months. Then you have to start paying. For some games I would do that. Not StarCraft 2, but for example Far Cry 2, I would have gone the half-price-with-later-subscription route. Because I only finished that game once, and I don’t plan on playing it again. I don’t want any DLC or anything else, I just want to play through the game once.
That being said, a subscription model for the western European market would probably be as expensive for players as the full price game. The only reason why StarCraft 2 has that model in those countries is, that Blizzard can’t make as much money with the traditional model.
And it’s not like publishers want to make less money, so subscriptions would be expensive. And for that I don’t want to pay.
But there are tons of models for which I would.
07/05/2010 at 19:47 Tauers says:
In a perfect world where developers make very interesting and polished DLC every week or month it would be cool. Sadly, a few games have done it properly and big publishers aren´t doing fair business. How many games are broken on release? How many “horse armor” DLCs?
07/05/2010 at 19:49 Lobotomy Lobster says:
no
07/05/2010 at 19:50 [21CW] 2000AD says:
Gut instinct is ‘no’ as to me a subscription means I only have access to the game as long as I’m paying. As it is right now DLC is fine, if I want the extra levels the I pay for them, if I don’t then I just stick with the old ones and everythings fine.
If it was a subscription then I’d have to keep on paying just to play the old stuff. I regularly re-install and replay old games, frankly I can’t picture myself doing that if it meant I had to pay for them again.
A subscription to recieving new content would be ok, a subscription just to play the single player game would be out of the question.
07/05/2010 at 19:52 Navagon says:
I wouldn’t pay a sub for any damn game. I’m willing to pay for DLC where it’s of sufficient value and episodic games such as the Telltale adventures, but that’s as close as I’m willing to get.
07/05/2010 at 19:55 Nalano says:
Hell the fuck no.
07/05/2010 at 20:28 Nalano says:
Charging me a subscription for a single-player game is double-dipping. It’s double-fucking-dipping. First I have to buy the game then I have to buy the rights to play the game?
Is it just me or is the average cost of a game’s worth of content growing faster than inflation gives it any right to? Why is it that I must pay full price for 80% of a game, then an add-on’s price for the rest of it, then another add-on’s price for a map pack, then another add-on’s price for new weapons, then a budget title’s price for an add-on?
Why don’t I just hand over my credit card info directly to the publishers? Or better yet, just have them take it straight out of my paycheck like taxes. Why even make the game? It’s already bad enough:
Bethesda’s “Have a game-breaking accessory for only ten dollars more.”
Bioware’s “This probably should have come standard and will in the sequel, but right now you pay.”
TellTale’s “Pay us before we even make the game, like investors that can’t sue.”
Infinity Ward’s “Remember when mappacks were published for free?”
LucasArt’s “Yeah, paid subscribers get unfair advantage in multiplayer. Suck it, non-premium owners!”
RockStar’s “Just because it’s a year late and totally unattuned for your platform doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay full price.”
Ubisoft’s “Just because it’s a year late and even worse for your platform doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay full price.”
07/05/2010 at 21:43 Jimbo says:
Subscriptions don’t necessarily have to work like that. If you stop subscribing to a magazine, they don’t come round your house and take their old magazines back. What it does do is give the producer enough confidence to keep producing content, knowing that they will sell / have sold at least a certain number of copies – and in return the subscriber receives a discount. There is no reason this model can’t work in games, and as stated, Telltale have already used it.
I do agree that they couldn’t both sell you a single player game and then charge you for continued access to it. MMOs get a pass because they have on going expenses to cover.
07/05/2010 at 21:45 Jimbo says:
clarification: “…for continued access to any content you’ve already paid for.”
07/05/2010 at 21:52 Nalano says:
I. HATE. TellTale’s business model.
I am not an investor.
I cannot sue them for substandard output.
07/05/2010 at 21:56 Jimbo says:
Then you can pay a little extra than a subscriber and take it on an episode by episode basis, just like you can with magazines.
07/05/2010 at 22:21 Nalano says:
Or I wait ’til they’ve all come out, been bundled into one package and sold on discount on Steam.
Like I did.
08/05/2010 at 00:29 Jimbo says:
‘Old stuff costs less than new stuff’ seems like a rather tenuous reason for dismissing the existence of a subscription option.
So long as the subscriber is getting it cheaper than the regular customer whilst the content is still new, then it’s a fair and reasonable option for them to offer. You can still wait for the price to go down at a later date if you want, but you can do that regardless of whether or not there’s a subs option available.
08/05/2010 at 03:59 Nalano says:
“Old stuff costs less than new stuff…”
unless you’re buying an EA game, an Ubisoft game, an Activision game, a Rockstar game… or just about any console port. but I digress.
08/05/2010 at 09:05 Teachable Moment says:
Fuckin’ TellTale. I paid for ToMI upfront cos of the DVD + sexy slipcover dealie. Now the slipcover is available to anyone, and the shipping for the DVD is SEVENTEEN DOLLARS to the UK.
Never again.
07/05/2010 at 19:57 _Nocturnal says:
And how about the opposite?
A steady stream of new content for free?
When asking for subscription fees you set yourself on a downward course. Each new addition concernes less and less of your potential audience. Some of them still haven’t bought the game, so what do they care about DLC (they still have to experience the main game)? Some of them could have gotten stuck at a point where the new content is still unreachable for them (many people don’t finish the games they buy). Some of them could have moved on to another game (especially without the holding power of a community to play with). A title’s subscriptions are sure to diminish over time, forcing the developer to abruptly stop producing more content thus alienating it’s remaining, most loyal fanbase that would still be willing to pay for more. Even if all of this is accounted for, just think how much better would it be if it were the other way around.
Like with TF2.
Each new piece of content you add sweetens the deal. Makes your core game that much more interesting for the potential buyers, as well as the ones that already have it. Breathes new life in the community, instead of making it more and more exclusive to die-hards. And you can plan it however you like. The financing part? Well, having great sales numbers beyond the first week can’t hurt. Plus, once you’ve reached a sufficently expanded fanbase, you can unleash the sequel on them.
07/05/2010 at 19:58 manveruppd says:
Some of your examples sound potentially attractive. I wouldn’t rule it out.
07/05/2010 at 19:58 bhlaab says:
No
07/05/2010 at 19:59 Wulf says:
No. Never.
Ever.
Not ever.
This isn’t about the money, it’s what it does to both the gamer and the game.
The simple question: How do you make a subscription worth it?
The obvious (and invariably the only) answer: Grind.
You know of grind, we all do, that evil, monotonous, vampiric thing that would seek to suck your social life away and foster a cocaine-like addiction in your brain, because you have to play for one more day and when the subscription rolls around, you do. You do. Or if you, specifically you, don’t then at the very least you probably know people like this, people who play these games like crackheads. It’s almost a form of enjoyable enslavement, for them. It operates on behaviourally conditioning the weak-willed. You probably know people who’ve fallen for it, I know I do, and some of them disappear.
That’s why I won’t pay a subscription. The only MMO I seem interested in is Champions Online (which I have a lifetime sub of, so that I don’t feel I need to play it frequently in order to justify a monthly debt), but there it’s because of a broken system, one which I can exploit with a half-decent build to blow through content faster than they intended. I’m sure that my clever builds (which are even concept builds) will be nerfed eventually, and then I’ll probably lose interest for a while. That I’m mixing up with other activities and games to make sure I don’t spend too much time in there, since I don’t want to get caught in the trap.
Now, what if this came to single-player games? What if we had to grind like in World of Warcraft? What if we had to grind like in Everqeust, or Lord of the Rings Online, or Aion, or… [your example here]? That would happen… because they’d need the content they provide to last out over a number of months. If you consumed it too fast then they invalidate their own subscription.
07/05/2010 at 21:16 Jesse says:
Yes, the rate of game consumption… It takes so little time for a gamer to race through content. At the risk of extreme over-generalization, I would guess it takes a lot of us…what, a month to finish a game? I know I’m usually looking for a new game every month or two. And it takes a long time to make a decent hour-long chunk of game. Even if the basic framework is already in place, level design takes time, and lots of testing, to create something worth playing. You can’t make a new level for Half Life every month; I think Half Life 2 Episode 3 has shown us that. Even with genres where we’re not talking about the creation of lots of new sets and level geometry, testing must be done. You could release packs of new units for an RTS game every month, but they still need to be balanced against what came before. And after a certain amount of time the stable of units would become unmanageably large.
Rockstar seemed to have a good thing going with its Liberty City Episodes. The city is there, waiting, and all they had to do was populate it with new stories and some new mechanics here and there. But it still took a year to get those two episodes out. And how much longer could they keep it up, anyway? I’ve played all of it and I’m getting ready to move on to the next thing. They’d have to be very creative to keep me coming back, even to such an amazing game world as Liberty City.
So yeah, I’m skeptical that triple-AAA titles could generate content fast enough. GTA IV and its episodes are maybe as close to subscription-based singleplayer as can be done.
07/05/2010 at 21:24 Wilson says:
@Wulf – I disagree that the only answer is grind, though it depends greatly on the type of game. As Jim suggested in his post, it could work really well for strategy games. You wouldn’t have to grind for the new units/sides/maps or whatever, you’d just get access to them. A few new units and maps every month for use in skirmish, and a new side or campaign every few months maybe. That would be pretty awesome, and that isn’t even really using the full possibility of a subscription.
That said, I would be skeptical of any subscription based SP game at first. If it did well and got lots of new content (so it wasn’t going to go bust) then I might be interested.
07/05/2010 at 20:04 Koldunas says:
Single-player subscription could work. However, it has to be a completely new genre/way of storytelling. What we see today with DLC are just shots to try and milk the cash cow a bit more. SP sub game would have to have a long-term plan on these updates for a long while, so that they don’t feel random. I don’t think any of the now existing games could work this model.
07/05/2010 at 20:09 Phil says:
I’d cheerfully pay every month for DLC for a game I loved, but I wouldn’t pay a Subscription for a single player game.
DLC, once bought, is yours. With subscription games, when you stop paying the subscription the game is gone. If DLC is released late, you simply pay late – if subscription content is released late then you paid for nothing that month. Finally, if DLC is released which is poor, or gamebreaking, or simply uninteresting you can simply not buy it.
07/05/2010 at 20:11 Legionary says:
It’s just conceivable that I’d pay a recurring fee to receive a constant stream of new updates but they’d have to be pretty damn good to justify even a small fee. It’s inconceivable that I’d pay a subscription to simply access a singleplayer game.
07/05/2010 at 20:12 Mereli says:
If they keep updating the game with all sorts of interesting content often enough I actually might do so.
But since I doubt they will keep it interesting enough instead of realising more of the same stuff I probably wouldn’t do so.
07/05/2010 at 20:14 Tei says:
I could pay extension to packages, like I did for Borderlands buying all the DLC’s, but that was multiplayer.
I have play one extension of Dragon Age, and I regret it. I will probably will not buy any other DLC, other than maybe more Borderlands if are fun.
07/05/2010 at 20:15 Rikard Peterson says:
Subscription? No, I don’t play enough (or regularly enough) for that to make any sense.
I don’t mind – even approve of – Telltale’s episodic format. But speaking of Telltale – I’m still just halfway through Tales of MI, even though I like it a lot. I just haven’t had the time for it. Had it been subscription-based, it’d have become way too expensive for me to consider.
Well, ok, I see how it could make some sense for a non-story-based game, where you just jump in and play. But even that wouldn’t make sense for me, as I’m not enough of a hardcore gamer.
07/05/2010 at 20:18 blargh says:
I’ll keep it short and sweet: NO!
07/05/2010 at 20:19 Birdman Tribe Leader says:
Several good points already mentioned that make this an emphatic NO:
1. Many (most) adult gamers don’t have that much time to play games, and subscriptions make them pay for something they’re not using. With single-player games, I like to be able to come and go as I have time.
2. There are a lot of games I want to play. I don’t want to spend all my time playing one single-player game, no matter how good it is. These days, frankly, I prefer when games are short and get irritated when games go on too long.
3. Following up on that, games are already too loaded with nonsense that’s designed to drag the game out but doesn’t enrich the player at all: dumb collectibles, achievements, sections that are long but don’t do anything new. A subscription model is only going to make this worse by incentivizing developers to make the player play as long as possible.
4. For games that attempt to tell a story (RPGs and adventure games, especially), subscriptions and DLC also provide a problematic incentive not to tell a complete story. If you want to keep releasing little mini-stories every couple months, you are forced to end your story in a way that it can be continued later or negate the significance of the ending in your later content. Can you imagine DLC for a game like Shadow of the Colossus? Monkey Island 2? Yes, Curse of Monkey Island. Exactly my point. This is already a problem in games because companies are always hoping to squeeze more sequels out of a franchise even when the story should be over; it just seems to me that DLC or subscriptions add to this problem.
5. The last problem, and the reason I usually don’t buy DLC for story-driven games, is that the DLC is generally pretty lame compared to the game proper. Once I’ve finished Mass Effect and completed an epic quest and saved humanity, I don’t want to spend a couple hours solving some less important problem somewhere in the galaxy. It’s only going to be less dramatic and impressive than what I’ve already experienced, and it’s usually not quite going to fit into the vision and complete story arc of the original work.
07/05/2010 at 20:20 Cullnean says:
depends how good it is TBH
i pay for eve becaues it keeps me engrossed for hours, and i have met some decent chaps as well
(come back jim)
so if a games good enough and will provide content to keep me going then yes i probaly would.
07/05/2010 at 20:20 DJ Phantoon says:
I note people that are pro this are forgetting the question is about SINGLE PLAYER, not Dawn of War 2 having Grey Knights finally.
So no, I’m against it. Usually the first box purchase is good enough for a developer.
07/05/2010 at 21:28 Wilson says:
@DJ Phantoon – There are different sorts of single player. Do you mean a single player campaign? I accept that it would be harder to keep a single player story based campaign going with a sub, and it might not feel right. But if the game has a skirmish mode, or a flexible main game which doesn’t rely on a pre-defined story (like Civilization 4 for instance) then a sub would be fine. As I said above, a few new units and maps every month, and a bigger piece of content (like a campaign or new side) every half a year or so.
07/05/2010 at 21:42 Nalano says:
There’s more than a few folks in this comments thread that are basically saying, “I’ll do anything if they keep making stuff for [insert favorite game].”
Do not trust these people.
07/05/2010 at 21:59 Vitamin Powered says:
@Nalano
Yes, Nalano, people who would consider paying a sum of money for continued access are obviously somehow dishonest with their opinions/themselves. Because, obviously, as soon as you don’t say no to it, then you’re obviously willing to do anything for your extra crack-content, no matter how little it is.
07/05/2010 at 22:25 Nalano says:
Obviously.
08/05/2010 at 00:17 Wilson says:
@Nalano – I don’t think people are saying that. They’re saying they wouldn’t rule out paying a subscription for a single player game in return for support. I doubt anyone is going to pay however many pounds a month if they don’t get anything worthwhile back. They just won’t renew the subscription, and the game will fail.
I personally would be very uncertain about any single player subscription games until the devs prove themselves to be competent. But I’m not going to dismiss it out of nothing more than principle. You shouldn’t trust anyone who does that either.
08/05/2010 at 04:00 Nalano says:
Wilson, support comes free now.
08/05/2010 at 14:27 Wilson says:
@Nalano – Hmm, a fair point. I don’t know the details of producing a game, so I don’t know whether you’d be able to ramp up the extra content if you were working solely on one game. So to bring the extra content above the kind of thing we get for free every now and then anyway (just to clarify, when I said support, I meant extra game content rather than technical support). If you got expansion pack level content every quarter/half a year maybe, and lots of small stuff and special events in the intervening time, assuming it was done right, would be offering more than what we get now.
09/05/2010 at 04:53 Nalano says:
Or, of course, we can wait half a year to a year and get an add-on.
07/05/2010 at 20:23 terry says:
Absolutely not!
07/05/2010 at 20:24 Mario Figueiredo says:
No, if that means pay to play. I just won’t.
Yes and No, if that means just extra content. “Yes”, because I would pay for extra content (that’s what we have been doing after all with the DLC thing). But “No” once I get to a certain level of expenditure or if the DLC just doesn’t carry content I care for.
Notice however that DLCs would be an unthinkable thing just 10 years ago. So what I consider today horrible, may tomorrow be a fad. So, there’s no telling how things will turn out. I happen to think that the video gaming market is a little too permeable to abuse from companies. More than other markets where it is indeed the consumer that dictates more effectively the supply-demand rules. This happens because video games are things of pleasure and want. So companies do tend to successfully explore that weakness of the human mind.
07/05/2010 at 20:24 Chizu says:
No.
I dislike DLC as a general model anyway, It’s just a way to make us part with more money. DLC is often planned long before the games completion, and at times is just content we could have had in the initial game, cut out and given to us later, at a price. (asscreed2)
I don’t mind so much when its somethign they have genuinely developed after launch, taken some time with and is genuinely worthwhile (EFLC), but most games launch with a set DLC plan, even having “day one DLC”. I mean really.
And Horse armour.
Also, I don’t play any subs based games anyway, its not a model I am fond of (and mmo’s all suck anyway :D)
07/05/2010 at 20:26 Spiny says:
Nope. In fact I won’t sub to any game. Why? Because then I’d feel obliged to play it to the exclusion of other games. I wouldn’t want to leak my subs money down the toilet like a gym membership I never used.
07/05/2010 at 20:26 Britpunk says:
very definitely not. I will never commit to paying a monthly fee for any game since my attention span isn’t that great.
I would, however, buy an expansion pack that collected together additional content, if I felt it was worth my while. This would be on my terms, when I’m ready to pay, not a monthly commitment.
07/05/2010 at 20:29 FunkyLlama says:
The day games start regularly charging for single-player is the day I quit games for good.
07/05/2010 at 20:29 KillahMate says:
No. I’m already OCD enough about the games I play. I scour the Internet for mods and patches before I start playing anything, terrified of getting an ‘incomplete’ or ‘suboptimal’ experience. I play games a year after they come out, so that I can be sure all the bugs have been squashed. Do I want a game that will never be ‘complete’, not until the sequel comes out, and that I will have to continue paying for, over and over? God no! I break out in cold sweat just thinking about it.
I also have never and likely will never ever play an MMO, especially any MMO I have to pay for. I like consuming games the way I do books, as self-contained units of entertainment. I don’t like the games-as-service approach, and don’t care for any social aspects – in fact, I couldn’t imagine a dumber way to spend my time than playing World of Warcraft – except perhaps Second Life.
I also greatly dislike DLC, especially DLC I have to pay for. Finish your game, dumbasses. I’ll play it when you’re done.
Wait – I guess there is a way I’d play a game like what you suggest. I’d wait two years until it’s finished and then buy the Collector’s Edition or GOTY Edition or whatever edition has all the damn content in one place. And then I’d play the damned finished game.
07/05/2010 at 20:30 Frank says:
No.
07/05/2010 at 20:31 Brer says:
No. The last expansion/DLC story content that came out and was any good was Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer. It was designed as a substantial stand-alone experience that could be sold on its own merits. Comparing it to the quality of the incredible ME2′s forgettable DLC tells you everything you need to know to answer this question.
No.
07/05/2010 at 20:34 bookwormat says:
If an offer is good or bad depends on what I get for what price. If a recurring fee is good or bad depends on the fee, the game, the license agreement..
I already subscribed to many services on steam, I will probably do that again soon.
(Of course, Steam subscriptions are one-time fees. not recurring). The point is that I have no problem buying a steam subscription, I just don’t pay $70 to get one.
07/05/2010 at 20:36 Dreamhacker says:
NOOO! I don’t even buy DLC!
07/05/2010 at 20:38 alseT says:
Never. Not with the current state of “DLC”. This must be Activision and Ubisoft’s wet dream but I just won’t put up with it.
07/05/2010 at 20:39 Monkeypeachy says:
Main issue is the total cost. iRacing is about £100 a year. Borderlands with all the DLC is/was £60ish. If it was a matter of £2-5 a month (with no initial lump sum) then it might be ok. I would have paid £5 for borderlands and £60 for Stalker!
It has a bad feeling about it. Like DRM. I think lots of us like games to be packages like a film or a book. A single cost, an experiance that can be replayed (in ten years time even).
I think DLC is a better path. But I’m still someone used to paying £20 for a good game and then getting free awesome mods…
07/05/2010 at 20:43 Monkeypeachy says:
After reading others comments:
Free DLC adds value to the game and increases sales. (cookie for which developer/publisher who was once quoted for WTTE?)
07/05/2010 at 20:39 Nova says:
I don’t play MMOG’s and I don’t buy DLC. Bought DA:O Awakening but that was an Add-On (this term seems to be dead nowadays).
So, no.
07/05/2010 at 20:39 Baf says:
What you describe here is basically the model used by Kingdom of Loathing. Which isn’t exactly a single-player game, because you can trade items with other players, but it’s close enough.
07/05/2010 at 20:41 Delusibeta says:
The only way I would subscribe to a sub would if the developer produces a stream of quality DLC (and I’m talking Fallout 3 type stuff here), you gain access to it a week early and if you drop the sub you still get to keep the content. Alas, a GotY version would shoot this idea several times in the head.
07/05/2010 at 20:43 Mr Cakey says:
I think it’s a great idea…if GSC starting doing that with stalker I’d jump on it!
07/05/2010 at 20:47 TychoCelchuuu says:
Yeah sure. Not for something like Deus Ex / V:TM – B / even Mass Effect where it’s supposed to be a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end (which is why the Mass Effect DLC frustrates me so much: it’s like having scenes for sale after I’ve bought and watched a DVD of a movie). But for a sandbox game or a single player FPS that keeps dropping new missions and weapons in or for an RTS with a campaign that just keeps on going, why not?
07/05/2010 at 20:48 bobince says:
Pay a sub for one single-player game? Not a chance.
But a sub for a wide range of games, on an all-you-can eat basis or “£A for B hours of gaming a month”, with the creators being paid out of £A depending on the proportion of time spent in their games? I’d definitely bite for that.
07/05/2010 at 20:49 BigJonno says:
Theoretically, yes. I’d quite happily pay a monthly sub for a RPG that kept on going, however I’d expect the quality and the gameplay hours to be comparable to a full retail release. It’d need to be in the region of five to six hours of content a month for about ten quid and I just can’t see content being produced that quickly.
07/05/2010 at 20:50 Duoae says:
I’d say no….. No subscription for a singleplayer game. Of course, i think, my idea of a sub appears to be different from the idea that RPS is pushing in the article. That is to say that RPS’s idea of a sub is effectively no different from buying sequels or epsiodes separately (even DLC) and being able to opt out at no loss or cost to the user at any time.
A subscription usually means that you’re locked in for an “agreed” time, regardless of quality of content AND if you want to opt-out, you pay a fee of some sort.
The main problem i have with DLC/episodic etc is the differentiation of where the game, as it is developed, ends and the after content begins. How much is shifted around that would before be released day and date (for free) with the main content compared with these days when it’s instead charged for on the basis that it otherwise would have been cut. A prime example of this sort of business thinking is paid for DLC that is already on the disc you bought.
I’m happy to pay for something that i think has worth for/to me… and i’m happy that content is produced for other people that think it’s of worth to them. What i dislike is the trend towards /real/ subscriptions for single player content along the lines of Steam et al. whereby once the service is gone, so is your content, even though you paid full price and not a subscription price.
07/05/2010 at 20:50 Brumisator says:
Also, why isn’t this a poll?
Because the “No” is so obvious?
07/05/2010 at 20:52 Jim Rossignol says:
That and our poll plugin is so wonky.
07/05/2010 at 20:53 Ed from Brazil says:
I think charging subs for SP is a surefire way to increase piracy to amazing new heights.
07/05/2010 at 20:53 negativedge says:
Translation: someone is paying you to collect this kind of information
07/05/2010 at 21:03 Jim Rossignol says:
I wish. Looks like easy money.
07/05/2010 at 21:26 The_B says:
Man, and I was nearly duped into thinking Jim was offering someone a nice cup of tea earlier. His enquiry into how they liked their tea was clearly collecting data for Cravendale and Tate & Lyle.
07/05/2010 at 20:54 arjuna says:
WILL PAY FOR MORE GOOD CONTENT!!!!!
07/05/2010 at 21:06 bwion says:
It would, of course, depend on the terms of the subscription, and what I ended up getting for my money.
I would probably not pay a subscription fee for *access* to a single-player game, or at least not access that would be revoked when the subscription ended. But I would consider paying one for regular infusions of new content to that game.
So basically my answer is a nice definitive “Maybe”.
07/05/2010 at 21:08 Corporate Dog says:
A subscription based model for “endless” amounts of DLC would sort of be a dumb business model. And here’s why:
Player A buys the game at launch. He pays a $10 monthly subscription fee for six months, and picks up the handful of maps/units/weapons/quests that are released over that time frame.
Player B DOES NOT buy the game at launch. He picks it up six months after it comes out. Presumably, he’d get all the subscription DLC that had been released to that point, right? But he paid $60 less for it.
If Player B DOESN’T get the subscription content that came out in the first six months, then what does he have to do to get it? Pay $60? You’re now back to the same payment model that we’re using NOW for DLC.
07/05/2010 at 21:16 TheSombreroKid says:
what’s to stop you waiting and paying later, thus getting a tonne of content other people have paid for.
i will only ever pay a subscription for a service which has operating costs in the same region as the subscrpition revenue
07/05/2010 at 21:18 Zwebbie says:
I’m not so sure if subscriptions of this sort are the rigth kind of thing. If they’re tacked onto the full game, then they don’t only come out when I’ve already put the game aside, but the ‘final’ game would be incredibly expensive (like WoW is), when I think even the regular €45 is rather a lot for games these days.
If, however, you split it up a bit more evenly, or even get rid of a ‘main’ game altogether, you end up with episodic content – we all know Telltale seem to be the only ones capable of pulling that one off. Which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t mind more people trying :) .
Anyhow, I wouldn’t want to respond with a clear ‘no’, even though I wouldn’t actually pay a subscription for a singleplayer game. The idea would, I think, handle some of the issues that have been plagueing gaming.
For one thing, the main price could be lowered and you wouldn’t have to pay a full €45 (give or take) for a game that you might well end up not liking.
Secondly, it might put an end to the ridiculous sequel mania that has been going on for a bit now. If you want to cash in more on, say, Mass Effect, have your writers do some additional Mass Effect and release it as a big extra; don’t put your programmers and artists on re-making Mass Effect, that’s just a waste! They could make fancy new stuff.
Thirdly, as they could make games longer, the designers would get more experience with the engine and such. And they’d have the ability to experiment! Sure, it’s expensive to have radical game design when you have no experience and it’s got to go out the door and please an audience for €45; but it’s easy when you’re familiar with the game and only ask a minor fee. Have a look at Jack Monahan’s thoughts on game recycling. This also makes it very possible to spot which types of gameplay are popular and which aren’t.
In the end, I could see shareware with regular ‘episodes’ (or stand-alone gameplay experimentation episodes) working for some games, but a subscription-like-WoW, not so much.
07/05/2010 at 21:22 Jimbo says:
For a start, it depends what is meant by subscription. If I stop subscribing to a magazine, I still own all of the previous magazines, but if I stop subscribing to WoW I lose access to the game entirely.
I don’t consider monthly optional DLC to be either form of subscription – that’s more like walking into WHSmith and picking up a copy of a magazine if you feel like it.
There are only two forms of subscription for single-player content I would entertain:
1) Extra, quality content on a regular basis paid for up front – Telltale have kinda already done this.
2) Access to a catalogue of games that I just pay monthly access for – Metaboli already do this, amongst others.
If somebody offered 5-10 hours of top quality content every month or two for, say, Assassin’s Creed or Mass Effect or Dragon Age, then I’d have no problem subscribing and I’d pay handsomely for it. The question is, can they turn that amount of content around in that kind of time frame? And can they sell enough subscriptions to prevent it being prohibitively expensive for each subscriber? I doubt it. It isn’t impossible, but it would require a lot of confidence and pre-planning on their part.
07/05/2010 at 21:23 Ricc says:
Well, there are two kinds of subsciptions. One that allows you to play the game (like an MMO) and one that entitles you to future updates. I don’t want either of those, to be honest. There are only very, very few singleplayer games, that hold my interest for longer than a month. And those that do (played a single character in Dragon Age for a long time) the money per hour value is usually so good that I really don’t need additional DLC to extend the game. (I don’t buy games on day one either, so that’s important to me.)
In short: no
07/05/2010 at 21:24 mandrill says:
In a word: No.
In slightly more words: If you’re going to pay a sub for a single player game, then you might as well play a multiplayer game.
If continued access to the game was predicated on paying the sub, then definitely not. I own Dragon Age, I have completed Dragon Age (the main storyline at least, I haven’t got Awakenings yet). I can go back and play through Dragon Age again should the desire take me. If I had to pay a sub to get access to it then I wouldn’t bother buying it in the first place.
Single player games are more suited to a micro-transaction model than a subscription model. What if I don’t want the spangly new DLC that they bring out for it? It may be an optional download but I’m still paying for it, whether I actually want it or not.
So to sum up with the word I started this comment with: No.
07/05/2010 at 21:24 undead dolphin hacker says:
If I don’t have to buy a box/client, then sure. I hardly play any (single player) games past a month or two anyway. Assuming the traditional $15/month, that drops my payment for a new game by half at least.
What sounds great about this system is that it could potentially resist piracy in a way similar to MMORPGs.
07/05/2010 at 21:24 Radiant says:
Shit is out of hand.
07/05/2010 at 21:27 Nalano says:
Word.
07/05/2010 at 21:24 Pus Filled Sac says:
Would I pay a subscription for a multiplayer game?
Also no.
07/05/2010 at 21:25 Uhm says:
Why would I not wait until it’s had lots of content added before buying it?
Not to mention having to manage a subscription for every single game I own, cancelling the subscription when I’m not playing anymore, re-subscribing if I want to play again at a later date?
No, thanks.
07/05/2010 at 21:26 MadTinkerer says:
I absolutely would pay a subscription for a single-player game, but it would need to have a different paradigm than the one on offer.
Forget the paradigm of DLC. There’s some good DLC on offer, but generally it’s cheap junk.
Forget Episodic. While there are lots of good episodic games (Strong Bad FTW), I prefer to buy my episodic adventure games the same way I buy TV series: whole seasons at once.
Think Expansions.
Now back “in the day” expansion packs and sequels using updated engines were the only two ways you’d get more milage from the foundation of a particular game. Expansions were more than just extra storylines tacked on the end: Ultima expansions, for example, added new large islands/small continents on the map for you to explore, and everybody got new toys and monsters to fight.
If there was a single-player game that was updated sort-of like Team Fortress 2, but way more often (say, the equivalent of all the major updates we have now plus the engie update happening in just one year) and had a bit more substance to it, I might pay a subscription for it. Basically, I’d expect major updates on a regular basis, monthly at minimum, with more and more content of all kinds. It wouldn’t have to be the same content type with every update (and it would be better if they mixed it up a bit, say one update they focused on genuinely new monsters, the next you got more toys, the next you got monsters and toys and a new dungeon all based on a specific theme), but I’d want about the same amount of content in a year that I’d get from buying a major expansion a year later.
07/05/2010 at 21:37 MadTinkerer says:
Oh, to be clear: the system I described would require that there be some kind of option for me to play if i stop my subscription. Like how you can still play Hellgate single-player if you want, but Tabula Rasa is GONE. (Hellgate isn’t the best example because they didn’t put nearly enough effort into their subscription content. But my point remains: you can still play Hellgate singleplayer.)
Basically, the potential is there but the company MUST put in an obvious effort to convince me to keep paying.
A specific potential example I neglected to mention: Gimme some freaking new places to explore in Bioshock 2. I don’t care about the cheap junky multiplayer DLC. Give me a new section of Rapture to explore, make sure to include a Power To The People machine or two, and maybe even a new plasmid or tonic. But mostly MOAR EXPLORINGS PLZ. That’s the sort of thing I’d subscribe for if the updates were done consistently.
07/05/2010 at 21:28 Gutter says:
Seeing as I paid 12$ to get the Cerberus Network thingy in ME2, which was supposed to bring new content to the stations’ newsfeeds and it never happened, then, nope.
07/05/2010 at 21:28 DMJ says:
I would normally scream and run away from this idea, but I thought about it instead.
I would happily pay… say… $1 per hour to play a game with no up-front charge.
That way I’d never end up spending more than $1 on a buggy piece of crap, and any game that actually kept my attention for multiple hours would be worth the money.
The main reason I think this would never work is because the majority of stuff nowadays is such utter tripe that most developers and publishers would go out of business rather rapidly.
07/05/2010 at 21:32 rocketman71 says:
No
07/05/2010 at 21:35 GT3000 says:
Has the paranoia died? There might be a lull so better spit this out quickly.
I would do a subscription system ONLY if there was a content schedule ahead of time. Like for example playing an RTS game with sub that spelled out what and when came out each month. E.g. “Feburary has two 4p maps and new armored unit for each side.” then tossing us a few previews and pricing the sub appropriately. 5 bucks a month is a cup of coffee for some people and I can spare it if the content is worth it. If a month passes then offer the past months in seperate (and afforable) DLC packages. Don’t restrict my gameplay, don’t force online only, and provided adequate preview of the content to come. Lastly, I believe it should have an end-life. Maybe 12 or 16 months down the road the subscription service ends. That’s it. Developers are out of ideas.
TL;DR Make it affordable, provided subscription content roadmap, offer previous months as DLC, and have a termination date for the subscription service.
07/05/2010 at 21:44 Nalano says:
Then why have a subscription? Buy the content piecemeal.
07/05/2010 at 21:46 Nalano says:
Better yet, why buy the content?
Eastern Front is a CoH mod that added not only new maps and new vehicles, but new sides, new sounds and new gameplay.
For free.
07/05/2010 at 21:47 GT3000 says:
The same reason you preorder something, to have it first. If you must, incentivize it by having content that will not be included in the DLC like an extra map or two or unit skins. Then people complain that they’re getting gipped as gamers. You people demand it.
07/05/2010 at 21:48 Vinraith says:
@Nalano
Mods? Now why would a subscription-based publisher allow something like that?
07/05/2010 at 21:55 Nalano says:
I don’t pre-order jack shit, for the obvious reason that I don’t know what I’m getting.
I am a customer, not an investor. If they want me to invest in a game they haven’t yet developed, I’d better damn well get a cut in the profits.
And don’t get me started, Zinwraith.
07/05/2010 at 21:59 GT3000 says:
@Nalano
I’m fairly sure I did say that subscription shouldn’t impede your satisfaction or operation of the core game much less divide the community. It is extra content designed to expand (if you see fit) your experience. You really need to get that chip on your shoulder checked out.
07/05/2010 at 22:18 Nalano says:
“If you see fit.”
Then why have a subscription?
07/05/2010 at 22:26 GT3000 says:
I must be drilling through a particularly thick piece of your skull. What part of “optional” are you not computing? It’s one word. You can’t exactly choose here.
Make the subscription optional. The purpose of the subscription is additional content for your enjoyment. Make the content meaningful. Make the subscription affordable. Incentivize the subscription so it gets used. Make previous months (sans bonuses for subscribing) available as even cheaper DLC. Do not impede use of the core game. Fill in that chip on your shoulder.
07/05/2010 at 23:18 Nalano says:
That’s not a subscription. That’s just DLC you pay more for without the benefit of quality review beforehand or the option of picking and choosing.
So, in that stead, let ME drive THIS into your thick skull:
There is no benefit for the consumer.
There is no benefit for the consumer.
There is no goddamn benefit for the consumer.
It’s a payment model that every company that could conceivably get away with it would enact because it would print them money, but don’t you dare fool yourself into thinking that you are getting anything out of it.
07/05/2010 at 23:36 Vitamin Powered says:
@Nalano
Well, no benefit apart from content.
Okay, a little more seriously, what if the subscription model was similar to the preorder scheme a lot of indie’s are using now? Early access to the soon to be released content, with your opinion used for playtesting?
I also think you’re forgetting that the system is, in part, based around a trust mechanic; the end user trusts that the developer will release good content (based around previews, reputation etc.), and the developer has to live up to that expectation in order to keep the current subscribers and gain new ones.
Somewhat akin to a magazine subscription; you pay, say PC Gamer, for the content in advance, trusting the publisher to release the magazine you expect, and not 120 pages of cracker biscuit reviews.
07/05/2010 at 23:38 GT3000 says:
You’re so hardwired to believe that every company is trying to bleed your pockets dry that you aren’t taking into account the two fundamental variables here. One you have to agree to what is an optional subscription and two deem if the content is worth your time, your arm isn’t being bent to pay here. If there is proper previews to the features or additions then you can decide whether to shell out or not. Never-mind that it covers it’s own base by offer the same content (sans subscription bonus of something trival like horse armor or something that doesn’t change core-gameplay and obviously having it immediately as opposed to a month later) by being offered as DLC at a later date. So not only do you avoid not having to pay for a sub if you’re unsure, the additional content is entirely available at your discretion at a later date. This isn’t a mandate for a developer to print money, if the content is crap then you can expect people not to buy it. If it’s worth the money then I don’t see the problem. How does this NOT benefit the consumer? You effectively get an extension on a game that you enjoy thoroughly or don’t partake in the DLC.
I’d even take a step farther by allowing developers to offer mods as DLC so these mod teams see some cash. I don’t know about you but some mod teams like the ones behind CoH Eastern Front deserve to see some reward for their hard work.
08/05/2010 at 03:55 Nalano says:
120 pages of cracker biscuit reviews… like PC Gamer.
You seem to be of the assumption that subscriptions = more content.
No, more content is more content.
07/05/2010 at 21:37 Moonracer says:
Isn’t this what the Sam & Max series has been doing?
07/05/2010 at 21:37 A-Scale says:
Fifteen more Assassins Creed 3 Guilders and you get the hidden blade!
07/05/2010 at 21:38 geldonyetich says:
A lot of MMORPGs released recently are more casual friendly fares that don’t do MMORPG well. In that case, I don’t particularly feel well about paying Sub for even MMORPG, because they are selling an experiment that I can get just as good or better in a single player game.
However, I would be willing to humor paying sub for a single player game under two conditions:
1) No box price.
2) Frugally priced subscription price.
The thing is, when I pick up a copy of any game, it’s not as though I’m going to play it forever anyway. It actually works out well to my advantage to only pay for the game as long as it entertains me, and then cancel my subscription. Tossing out a bunch of old manuals and DVDs of games I never play with anymore is just a chore, anyway.
Bottom line, this is is why I prefer to rent anything that’s not on a PC from GameFly.
07/05/2010 at 21:51 Zinic says:
Hellgate: London. Need I say more?
Yes, it was officially an MMO, but the subscription was for the additional content far as I remember.
To get back on subject though, there’s a couple of problems that come into place with this idea.
First one, stagnation. You can only continue a single player game for so long, no matter the story and setting. Take the example you mentioned with GTA IV. What would you do when you reach the point where there’s simply no more you can add to the city itself without making it a repeat of what you’ve already done, only with a new set of paint? Or when you run out of ideas? Would you start remaking some of the older stuff to make it of the same quality as the new one? In that case, new players would miss out on some of the old content, and older players might feel that they’ve lost some of the progress they’ve made. A single player game making money from a subscription can only go so far before it’s not worth playing anymore. And what do you do when you consider the game finished? Continue the subscription model even though there’s no new content coming out? Release aGold Edition with all the content included?
Another matter, one of the problems with Hellgate (I assume, anyways), is early adoption. Who is going to pay the initial cost of the game, and THEN an additional monthly/weekly subscription when there’s little to no content to get this way? In the best case scenario, most players might wait a couple of months before biting into the extra content, after they’ve already finished the game once or twice. Having you reach the end of the retail copy with a screen saying “To be continued. For €9.95.” Would most likely piss people off enough to leave the game permanently, no matter how good it might be. The problem is that if it’s extra, people don’t really feel the need to pay for it, because they don’t really need it. Or they might just pay for one month/week and get all the extra content, play through it and never touch it again.
Third would be persistence. Few people would be willing to continue playing a single player game for weeks, months or even years if there’s no real competitive element. This is why a subscription model works for MMOs and multiplayer games. People get to flash their e-peen. What’s to say that one week/month might slip for content, so the developers can get a good batch together the next week/month. People might choose not to pay that month and return the next in that case, but that’s a month/week of no money going in.
The fourth would be pricing. How would you price this subscription? DLC ranges from €2-20 generally, and varies in content as well. Would you want to pay €12 a month/week for a monthly/weekly pack of new clothes for your characters in Mass Effect 2? That’s a bit of a stretch, but a scenario that could happen. It’s hard to honestly say what the ideal pricing model for this would be, even assuming that there’s the initial retail price to take care of.
Last reason is developer laziness. Having a single player game might encourage developers/publishers to release half finished games thinking “Well, we can always fix it in post-op, so why bother?” I can think of at least one or two publishers that would jump this concept in a blink of an eye. That’s not to say that this would be the case in all cases, but it would still happen, and then we’ll get a shitstorm of games that will only be half done. That’s a worst case scenario though.
Of course, even though there’s this many negative points, there’s some good points to this as well. Think of a Fallout 3 or Mass Effect game that was ever expanding, especially seamlessly. I’d jump at that in a heartbeat, because I know those two developers can deliver content that would keep me playing (of course, it remains to be seen if they could actually do so on a monthly/weekly basis). As good as those games are already, I keep finding myself wanting more of it, no matter how big they get. STALKER would be another good example I guess. Other examples might be sports games, because it’s technically only player/team data you get, but updated in realtime as the changes take place in the real world. Would mean we wouldn’t get Madden 2010, 2011, 2012, etc. in the stores, cluttering the bestsellers lists either, because you’d just buy one of the games and keep getting the updates to it instead.
But it really depends on the game. The Sims is a good example as well, especially when you think of all the expansion packs for those games.
Anyways, just my two cents.
- Zinic
07/05/2010 at 22:04 jaheira says:
Sure I’d pay a subscription if I thought the content justified it. It’s just a different payment model. Who cares?
I’m actually hoping (and thinking) that TOR is gonna be like this.
07/05/2010 at 22:21 neolith says:
TOR is an MMO, not a singleplayer game.
07/05/2010 at 23:55 jaheira says:
Well yes I know, but I’ll be soloing it like I soloed (solo’d?) LOTRO for six months. The problem with MMOs is all the other people in ‘em. If TOR is as solo-friendly as it looks like it might be, it’s basically gonna be the perfect game for me. This is why I’ve got no problem in principle with a subscription single player game.
07/05/2010 at 22:05 Fyr says:
What you are talking about is just DLC, not an MMO-like subscription.
MMOs revoke your access to all the content if you don’t stump up that month. You can’t play at all.
That I can’t see myself buying. When EA tried something like this with their limited reinstalls on Spore there was a huge outcry. Of course lots of people complain about DLC and yet enough people do buy it make it profitable (myself included!). You don’t have to keep everybody happy as long as you keep enough happy to make money :)
But I fail to see a difference between optional DLC offered regularly and… your proposal here.
You don’t even get to stop playing for months and get all the interim updates for your monthly fee like an MMO does allow. You still have to pay for them individually and pick and choose which you want to pay for and which you don’t.
That is just DLC that’s released on a schedule.
There is another third alternative though: DLC that gets aged out if you don’t buy it.
“Area 52 is only available this month, get it before it’s gone!”
Again it’s not really a subscription model, but if you want everything you’d be paying like a subscription.
That’s somewhat risky for the publisher because I can’t really see more people buying it during the offer month than if it was permanently available. And you definitely lose out on future sales, and create a disincentive to buy the original game a year after release because latecomers can never access that content. (On the flip side, much like a pre-order bonus it will give an incentive to buy it early…)
Anyway… that one I would pick and choose content with like I do with permanent DLC and not particularly care if I miss out on the chance to ever own something.
08/05/2010 at 00:55 Jimbo says:
Nobody would make content unavailable for sale after a certain time, because that’s krazy with a K.
I’d see it working like this: Company X is going to release 6 monthly mini-expansions. If you pay up front you pay $40. If you buy them individually you pay $10 each, and that price is guaranteed to be set for at least 2 months after release.
Company X gets some capital up front to fund development and some idea of how many copies they can sell each month. The subscriber gets a discount for the risk they’re taking on the quality of the product. If Company X falls short of the subscribers expectations then Company X bleeds subscribers for Season 2 or anything else they make in future.
It’s just the magazine subscription model but for game content. Some model that permanently locks out potential customers just isn’t going to happen.
07/05/2010 at 22:06 thesundaybest says:
I could be convinced. Many video games end just as you get powerful enough/interesting enough to want to keep going. You slave for hours on end to level up to a certain point, only to fight one last boss or finish one last whatever and be done with it. A game that recognized that it should keep going (new locations, different plots, etc) could keep me going. It would have to be a pretty special character though, and some fairly significant content.
But I could see it working.
07/05/2010 at 22:06 Flimgoblin says:
No, and I happily pay subscriptions to online games.
I’ve yet to find a single player game I’ve got into enough that I would pay for the DLC for – but I’m not discounting that. Micro/macrotransactions for more content I can get with – and even a monthly mini-update if it was fun and I played the game enough, but I’d expect to be able to pick and choose which month’s content I buy.
07/05/2010 at 22:18 Don says:
I think it depends on how the game is delivered. If provided via something like Onlive where no code, other than a generic client, is on my machine a subscription model would be a sensible way to go. And quite an attractive option, I could subscribe to a game for a few hours and if I didn’t like it I’d be much better off than if I’d paid for a DVD and installed the whole thing on my HD.
OTOH if I had paid for a DVD and installed a singleplayer game on my HD then I certainly wouldn’t be willing to shell out a subscription to keep on playing it.
07/05/2010 at 22:19 neolith says:
No. Never. Never ever.
I don’t rent games, I don’t buy episodic games and I don’t buy horse armor. Not even for an IP like StarCraft. For all I care, every developer that tries that shit on me can go stick a dry thumb up their butt. No matter how good the game itself might be – they will not get my money.
07/05/2010 at 22:24 Vitamin Powered says:
I’m definitely on the side of the “depends” people. It would all come down to what was being offered, terms of the offer, etc.
So, in other words, would I be gaining something I found entertaining / stimulating / beneficial for a price that didn’t make me me feel ripped off by subscribing? Because if so, then I would. And note, £1 for a Halflife 2 episode every month is, of course, an unreasonably low amount to pay.
This is no different from me thinking about an MMO subscription; weighing up the appeal of the offered content vs. the price.
What type of content would convince me to subscribe?
A Simcity game with monthly “concept” packs; say the first month they offer an expanded PT system, the next month you get to finely tune your commercial zones etc.
I’d be very curious about an RTS that released new AI systems (month 1 an awesome turtle-er AI, month 2 the player got a semi-control AI commander that helped with base construction…)
Story games I’d definitely be more cautious about, but there could be some interesting ways to do it. A vote-based system where the subscribers were allowed to nominate which aspect / character of the game they would like explored in further detail; start of each month the vote is tallied, and let’s say two months down the track we get a pack that explores this facet of the world.
Somebody above mentioned DLC for a Shadow of the Colossus style game… and yes, they’re right, if worryingly going for the worst possible example. A story -based game that plays with a set start and finish would not be a good match for this sort of idea.
07/05/2010 at 22:31 neolith says:
I have to disagree about this being the same as paying subscription for an online game.
In an MMO for example I pay for the servers I play on, the gamemasters or maybe stuff like tournaments being held. None of that is needed for a singleplayer game.
07/05/2010 at 22:57 Vitamin Powered says:
@neolith
Note that I say “for me”. The method of considering is the same in that I’d weigh up how I felt about the content vs. the price. The “well, MMOs have servers, so they have an excuse!” argument doesn’t ring true for me.
But you do have a point in that I’d be more likely to give an MMO a benefit for taking into consideration access to other players (so, server costs) etc.
07/05/2010 at 22:32 Hat Galleon says:
This already exists; it’s called episodic game development. You regularly provide an adequate amount of new content, people pay money for the new content. If the story and game environment and interactions with the game expand quickly over time, then it would be worth a subscription. Otherwise, there’s no reason to pay many times over for content that’s all available at once.
07/05/2010 at 22:33 Pentadact says:
For new content every month? Totally! So long as:
a) There’s no minimum number of months I have to pay for. I’d wanna know what content came out this month, and decide whether to buy it on the basis of that.
b) The main game isn’t full price. I wouldn’t pay £30 for a game I can’t play next month if I don’t wanna buy the DLC they put out then. £10 for the first chunk and £10 more for each further one, fine.
c) The main game isn’t sufficient. This is where Oblivion, Mass Effect, Fallout and even Dragon Age fall down to some extent. The game is great, as it should be, for full price. So I don’t need your Horse Armour, downloadable outfits, or one-off missions. I love those games enough that I’d probably swallow a monthly fee just to play them for two or three months, but I’d resent it and ultimately play each of them less than I did. After that, no amount of DLC would bring me back.
Part of the reason I’m open to this is that I think game structure is in a state of crisis, and has been for years. More than half of what I play is ruined by attempts to up the stakes, add variety, or teach you complex mechanics. If every section of a game had to justify its own price tag, I think we’d see a lot more thought go into making each one work intuitively.
The ultimate game for this, for me, is Hitman. If Blood Money had been episodic, and released a new mission every month or two, I could happily have paid £240 for that game by now. And I don’t think producing content like that would have the same kind of costs as running an MMO.
07/05/2010 at 22:39 Jehdin says:
I don’t buy DLC, I don’t play MMOs, I will never pay a subscription fee for a single-player game. What a retarded idea.
07/05/2010 at 22:45 jadam says:
TF2. Loads of new content on a semi-regular basis that’s often (though to also often disastrous results) inspired by community participation. You buy the game and though have to be trapped in Steam’s awful steamy mess, that’s it. No extra fees, and the team behind the game is willing to do this primarily under the aspiration that the new content will bring in new paying customers. While I understand that the ever-expanding DLC model, a wealth of new methods of doing business can evolve, I think that companies which keep the enjoyment of games above all other concerns do better business. Valve isn’t losing money on TF2, and they don’t need subscriptions.
07/05/2010 at 22:45 toni says:
simple answer: no
complicated answer: no
07/05/2010 at 22:50 TooNu says:
Jim never read Robert Jordans ‘The Wheel of Time’ books did you? Book after book after book, more problems everytime, no closer to finishing the story. Robert Jordan died and they ended the story in a book.
I suspect if he was still alive, he would be milking his universe still.
And that is the point, imagine if you cared about a character in game whose story never got finished because they milked the franchise to death. Then they just stopped producing content for your game leaving it up in the air OR even worse, finishing it in a really boring non-caring way. What if the writing team was changed and your characters story just didn’t feel right anymore?
Single player games should NEVER be subscription based because studios can not be relied on.
07/05/2010 at 22:50 Bluester says:
The full game with all content included. Possibly a worthwhile expansion. Who comes up with this nonsense (DLC, subs etc). Certainly not someone with the best interests of the games player in mind.
07/05/2010 at 22:51 Zogtee says:
This would be no different than any other content to me, I think. If the quality is good, then yes, if it isn’t then no. That said, the quality would have to be seriously good for me to sign up for a subscription. WoW has plenty of consistent quality, but it bored me to tears after a while and I quit. It was the same thing with Warhammer Online and I tend to not even consider MMO’s now. I see all this (episodic gaming, DLC) as the expansion packs of old trying to find their place in gaming today. I also see it as devs trying to deliver less content than they previously did in expansion packs for more money. The now infamous horse armor was a clear indication of that, IMO.
It seems everyone wants to find the shortest and easiest path to your wallet these days and I’m being a bit careful when it comes to DLC. Taking Mass Effect 2 as an example, I love the game, but I haven’t bought any of the DLC, because I don’t think it’s worth it. Devs need to tread carefully here. If the greed is too obvious, they risk alienating their target groups.
07/05/2010 at 22:57 Alaric says:
Not. A. Chance.
07/05/2010 at 22:57 Iain says:
Not a chance.
I don’t have a huge amount of time to play games and I generally have a backlog of titles that I’ll “get to at some point”. When I had a subscription to WoW, I felt as if I had to play that one game at every opportunity to get my money’s worth, while other games could wait – I ultimately cancelled my subscription partly because of this.
Apart from the fact that it’s extremely unlikely that a single player game would be worth the continued outlay to me, I can quite happily live without a situation where I’m guilting myself into only being able to play a single game out of my collection.
07/05/2010 at 23:05 Iain says:
Also – I always feel cheated when I pay full price for a game and the the game of the year edition comes out with all of the DLC included, usually for less than the price of all the DLC separately. Fallout 3 was particularly annoying for this. What happens when a subscription game becomes a budget title? MMOs become free to play just before they die, but by then it’s not the same experience since the player bas has degraded (or they wouldn’t be dying). A single player game is the same game two years later, it’s just got more competition. How annoying would it be to have paid some huge wedge of cash with all the annoying DRM and downloading and delays that would no doubt come with a subscription model, only to see whole package on sale for a tenner a year later?
The closest to this that makes sense to me is either the gametap model where you pay a subscription for access to a library of games (like your cable tv etc) or to a lesser extent the episodic model that Telltale use (is there anyone else managing this yet? Or does it only work with adventure games?)
07/05/2010 at 23:07 Iain says:
Hmm I’ve been assigned a random avatar since I’m not registered. It does look more like me than I would generally be prepared to casually admit, which can only be worrying.
07/05/2010 at 23:48 MaxNormal says:
If I know a game is expanding in a way that will be collected up again for a separate retail release (e.g. Fallout 3, Oblivion) what I tend to do is wait till they do that and buy that version. I want the full game – not to have to deal with DLC payments and DRM. I just got the GOTY version of fallout 3 new for less than the cost of half of the DLC. I can now sell my original game and have had the whole thing cost me 10 bucks.
I won’t touch the borderlands DLC unless it shows up in a complete collected form in the future. There is plenty of better other complete great games to play for cheaper thanks to steam sales etc. DLC always seems to be a crap deal. The only DLC I’ve ever bought is the expansion for pixeljunk monsters. It seemed like a good deal as my girlfriend had already spent months playing the original game.
07/05/2010 at 22:59 Tom says:
I think it depends. Would I pay a subscription to a game after paying full price? No. Hell no. Would I pay 10$ a month as a game is launched over 6-8 months, with episodic content coming each month? Probably. It depends how closely it sticks with an episodic release schedule, like TellTale’s pulled off. I like episodic games. They make they developer get to the point faster, because they have less time to pull off hours of introduction and tutorial. What I wouldn’t like is paying full price for a game, then having fees lopped on top of that to play the game. I am largely a PC gamer out of necessity (console games being more expensive at launch and longer), and while I imagine consoles would pursue this method quicker, I can’t afford 60$ for a new game, or more via subscription. It won’t happen.
07/05/2010 at 23:01 Stabby says:
I wouldn’t, but then I wouldn’t pay a sub for anything! I don’t believe in paying to play, so I just skip out on all the games the try to charge me subscription. So far I really haven’t missed much, it seems.
07/05/2010 at 23:02 Joinn says:
Never.
07/05/2010 at 23:06 Zogtee says:
Having thought some more about it, I don’t think a subscription would be good for all devs. I think there’s a serious risk of them getting lazy with a steady cashflow like that.
07/05/2010 at 23:07 Lots of good thoughts here.... says:
Oddly, I don’t necessarily see this as the coming wave (and maybe I’m just incredibly nearsighted) not because it’s bad for consumers, but because I think it’s something the developers do at their own peril. My impression of the MMO space is that part of the reason there’s this behemoth in the trad subs-based MMO market and many competent but not particularly different MMOs struggle has to do in part with the subscription. (The inertia of accomplishment in an MMO–how difficult it is to get started in a new one, and leave behind the achievements of the old–is also to blame, but for another discussion.) I think developers tempt gamers to pick their “one” single-player game at their own risk. Which is to say, someone will do it first and make lots of money, someone else will steal most of their ideas and do it better and with more polish and make even more money, and then everyone else will sink millions of dollars into trying to break in. I think Blizzard is the only company that can really be considered “thrilled” with the shape of the MMO-space (though other games have managed to carve out their niches.)
Though perhaps the “inertia” discussion is somewhat relevant here: what keeps people playing MMOs? The content updates, or the investment they’ve already put in their MMO of choice? I know I quit WoW when my friends quit. I will probably look to pick it up again when the new expansion comes out to see the new content, but then isn’t that in a way more akin to the trad xpack model, paying for new content when it’s available?
Still, I won’t rule out the possibility that I would pay a sub for content, but I do think the business model would have to be drastically different from both the current single-player and current MMO business models. And I think I’d be more likely to pay a sub as an investment (sorry, Nalano) in an indie game, than to a big box publisher. Although the one thing about the model that is potentially appealing re: AAA gaming is not having to put out a large lump-sum upfront; of course, the AAA publishers are also the ones least likely to take this approach, opting for something more in line with the MMO “buy the box AND pay the sub” model. Right now I “sort of” pay a subscription for single-player games in the form of my gamefly account, and that’s how I play most AAA titles; the key difference being that I’m paying my sub for access to everything console-wise and not just a single game from a single dev. It frees up my fairly limited monthly spend-it-on-whatever-I-want money for things like the Humble Indie Bundle, or something off of Good Old Games.
07/05/2010 at 23:10 Renegade Red says:
Paying for single player subscription? .
*Laughs*
1.) A good game is good not because it is long, but because the core gameplay is fun.
2.) You can’t break up “core gameplay” into TV-like episodes – the first episode would have to contain the entire game.
TV, magazine subscriptions and video games are not the same thing! Stop trying to carry over one’s business model to another!
07/05/2010 at 23:10 Quijote3000 says:
Personally, I don’t like the idea of watching a series while it’s airing. I still haven’t seen a single episode of Lost because I’m waiting if it’s worth it. That would be my opinion for episodic content. I would just wait for the budle.
But, a subscription service just to play the single player game? No way.
07/05/2010 at 23:11 patton says:
Never. No way in hell.
Games already cost too much to be really worth buying the at full price thanks to the middlemen and bloated, large companies run by souless suits not caring at all about the end product or its quality.
Paying subscriptions for singleplayer games wouldn’t lead to anything pleasant at all.
07/05/2010 at 23:17 Out Reach says:
Short answer: NO
Long Answer: Guild Wars + Valve Their no sub, but still update the game Model works, and will inherently beat any model with a subscription.
07/05/2010 at 23:22 boredgamer says:
There’s an awful trend to turn games into services or to embed services into them, in such a way that you can’t help but ask: Do I really own this game? That’s a reason to not pay for a sub-based SP.
Game development costs are becoming bigger and bigger. Even if you have the game engine, the assets and the dev tools to speed up production of new content, it’ll still be fairly expensive, and as the game world expands/changes, it’ll become harder to keep the entire game consistent, a problem which many MMORPG devs have to face. That’s a reason for publishers and developers to not actively seek out for this kind of business model for sub-based SP games.
07/05/2010 at 23:25 Paul says:
No i wouldnt pay for a monthly sub for a online game. I would never pay a sub for single player game. The only thing i would pay for is my ded server so i can admin it the way the rules are set thats the only money i would pay unless there is a expansion for the game. Look at CODMW2 IWnet crap would you want to pay for a sub every month for that crap i would say not no admins to admin the servers yeah that a lot of fun when you have a fucking noob disrupting the server making everyone leave. Another thing why would you bring up a fucking stupid post like this you must be a fucking noob from hell.
07/05/2010 at 23:26 undead dolphin hacker says:
The kneejerks in these comments are so bad that I’m wondering if I should start recommending neurosurgery.
07/05/2010 at 23:31 Mr.Ferret says:
No.
The racing game you where refering too would be iRacing an online only racing simulation used by real drivers, a subscription fee is required for the servers and each individual car and track is a seperate paid item. Bloody worth it if you want the most realistic racing game ever created and a great online communit to race with.
07/05/2010 at 23:39 suibhne says:
I’d be open to this if I saw anything decent happening in the world of pay-for DLC. As it is, Borderlands might offer the only reasonable DLC on the market; among other recent examples, Dragon Age and Mass Effect are both terrible. DLC almost always meters my gaming hours at a much, much higher rate than retail prices do, so screw them.
Take Dragon Age, for example, where I got about 1.65 hours of gaming per dollar. With the DLC I purchased, I got about 0.10 hours of gaming per dollar. Even if the DLC exhibits the same level of quality as the full game, that’s a pretty night-and-day distinction.
07/05/2010 at 23:40 Unaco says:
Wow. Lots of comments. I was just hoping there was more under the ‘random whimsy’ tag. But there wasn’t.
On topic. No, I wouldn’t pay a sub for a single player game. Though I hear this is exactly what they are doing with StarCraft 2 in Mexico and South America.
07/05/2010 at 23:41 Mwalk10 says:
My first instinct being NO! I have reconsidered, I would pay a subscription if it meant I basically got my own personal dungeon master. Something where every so often someone would analyze my game-play, and tweak something in my gameworld to give me the maximum possible amount of enjoyment out of it. Sort of like Left4Dead’s AI Director, but human.
07/05/2010 at 23:47 Chaz says:
No I wouldn’t pay a sub for a single player game.
Similar to a few others on here I dip in and out of my games too much. If when I bought a new game I just sat there and played it day after day until completion then the subscription model would probably suit me. However I often shelve games and then come back to them a few months later and it would be just too much of a pain in the arse faffing about with a whole load of subs for all my various games. What happens when you want a quick go on an old game but you’ve got to go through the whole process of resubbing.
Also subbed single player games means no more trade ins, as it will presumably become tied to an account.
07/05/2010 at 23:48 Inferno says:
Nope! Definitely would not. And you couldnt’ expect a good model from developers. I mean look at what APB is charging.
07/05/2010 at 23:50 Langman says:
I will never pay a sub for a single player game. Up until this point, I haven’t even come across a single piece of DLC that was worthy of the cost involved (in terms of truly offering something *extra/new/unique* on top of the standard game).
A lot of the time it’s just the exact same gameplay, only in a different location or with a minor selection of new items that don’t really alter the main experience.
07/05/2010 at 23:52 Finn says:
Short answer: No.
Slightly not so short answer: As time goes by and I get older I’ve noticed how some games (TF2 jumps to mind along with other very different games life Dwarf Fortress, Mount and Blade and Guild Wars ) are highly replayable and their cost was a one time thing and I still feel interested in them and their communities are thriving and other games (namely MMO’s like WoW) just keep me “entertained” by using cheesy grinding and achievement-whoring marketing tactics which eventually fail and I’m left wondering “damn, I’ve been playing this game for 5 years already? Just how much money have I spent on this grinding simulator?!”
07/05/2010 at 23:55 hatedbyall says:
Whoever thought of giving DLC and charging money for it was a genius
07/05/2010 at 23:55 vader says:
I wrote a 200 bazillion word post but in fear of your servers melting I’ll just post the short, short version.
No. Not ever.
08/05/2010 at 00:10 RC-1290'Dreadnought' says:
No. If developers want to cut development costs, they should focus less on content itself and more on its creation.
I prefer having less content and better mod tools.
08/05/2010 at 00:12 Adventurous Putty says:
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO and NO
Oh, and did I mention NO? Then let me do so: NO!
I mean, the scenarios you bring up seem reasonable enough at first — but it’s all about the precedent. One game does it, a slew of them follow…and I highly doubt that the companies that jump on board the singleplayer-sub bandwagon will be nearly as reasonable as the hypothetical-Elite-esque-game developers. It’s a very dangerous precedent.
08/05/2010 at 00:14 bleeters says:
No. I’m not even a particularly big fan of paying sub fees for online games, but those are at least justifiable to some extent.
If I buy a game, I want to be able to play it for as long as I damn well want. Infringement on that gets me various degrees of pissy.
08/05/2010 at 00:16 Joe says:
My original answer was no, but then when I read your three examples at the end I found myself saying “YES YES YES” to all of them.
So I suppose yes.
08/05/2010 at 05:10 Corrupt_Tiki says:
Your sense of logic is questionable
08/05/2010 at 00:16 Mark says:
I understand the people coming out against subscriptions, but what I don’t get is the hate-on for a la carte DLC in these comments. I thought people liked expansion packs. Though I suppose there have been examples of really puny DLC packs… but there’s nothing that says they have to be that way.
08/05/2010 at 00:25 madned says:
i see where you’re going with this, but the concept breaks when you step away from the cutting edge.
if you buy every month then yeah it appears to be a sub. if you go away for a while and come back. you still have whatever you had before at a fixed price. if you replay it you defray the investment costs over usage time.
with an honest to goodness mmo sub you can step away, but you must still pay to use older content. whereas a packaged goods model loads all the costs upfront.
but yes it would take new content every month to make me pay regularly.
on the other hand, i’d expect to be able to hold off and reap an economy of scale by waiting for an inevitable bundling in 6-12 months.
08/05/2010 at 00:30 PaulMorel says:
Yes.
Dragon Age with a solid monthly update. I’d pay it every month for a while.
I’m surprised by all the flat-out “No” responses.
For a really good game, hell yes I’d pay $15/mo. for it. Assuming I got something (significant) new each month.
08/05/2010 at 00:40 Xaositect says:
An interesting and amiable concept, .however, fed through the eye of standard business practice, this would simply lead to ‘feature suspension’ = we would pay full price for half a game – and continue to pay monthly fees just to have the privilege of the full game we should have had in the first place – drip fed over the course of a year.
– This is an idea anathematic to gaming. So no, a thousand times NO.
08/05/2010 at 00:45 Urthman says:
How is this model supposed to compete with the current single player “subscription” model, where I buy a game and play it until I’m finished and then buy another game?
Basically you’re asking a single game to compete with the entire Steam catalog for my monthly gaming dollar.
08/05/2010 at 00:46 heartlessgamer says:
Mixed up my 4′s and 5′s.
08/05/2010 at 00:48 FhnuZoag says:
I would pay. I mean, isn’t this what game rentals are? As long as it isn’t ripping you off, I see nothing wrong with it.
08/05/2010 at 01:01 Mr_Day says:
“Elite-style game, or a Sims game, in which you trundled about in your sandbox, but pay for the privilege of having new stuff dropped into your game on a weekly or monthly basis.”
See, this I can get behind, simply because I have run through all the missions in games like GTA and said to myself “What now?”
New story arcs being added into a game would fix that problem right up for me – and I mean proper arcs, not a single mission such as Kasumi in ME2. It would also let the game writers let loose their imagination within the game that has been released, without having to worry about how they will be implemented later, which would hopefully mean a higher standard of storywriting in the long run.
“Dawn Of War where new maps and units arrive week after week in an endless war, as long as you keep paying that sub.”
This, not so much. If it was part of a larger bit of content, sure. But just new maps and units? Seems a tad too much like TF2′s current model, and I doubt I would pay just for that.
08/05/2010 at 01:06 Yargh says:
So far I’ve not found any of the many DLC offerings to be tempting enough for me to buy them, though I’m pretty close on the GTAIV expandalones right now.
So I’d have to say: offer me an awful lot, there are always other games to play and I’ve always got something else lined up for when I’m done with the current one(s).
08/05/2010 at 01:23 Sharkticon says:
No and never.
If that ever happened, I would be left with three options:
1. Wait however many months or years till all the content has been released and a sequel is coming out then buy a complete edition or something (see Fallout 3 GOTY)
2. Pirate pirate pirate!
3. If options 1 and 2 are not possible, there’s still the decades of PC game history to explore and enjoy.
Option 3 isn’t bad at all actually. Even nowadays such a tiny fraction of the games coming out excite me enough to want to buy them. There are always old games going on Steam to look out for, and GOG.com to plunder.
On the topic of DLC, compare good DLC and bad DLC:
Good DLC:
- Any of Just Cause 2′s DLCs, all are cheap, its an open world game, DLCs are actually fun/funny
- Later Oblivion DLCs like the wizards tower and the fighter’s stronghold.
- Shale
Bad DLC:
- SHALE. Potentially the one of the best NPCs and should have been included with the game at launch
- All the Dragon Age item DLCs
- Empire Total War DLCs, which never appear much in single player, and reportedly overpowered in multiplayer
- All Mass Effect 2 DLC so far
08/05/2010 at 01:26 Sharkticon says:
***I know Shale is pretty much included with the game at lauch (except if you bought it second hand), but still, it should have been part of the main game.
08/05/2010 at 05:43 Psychopomp says:
Dragon Age has been content locked and finalized for months before being released, due to waiting for the console port. They took this time to re-implement and polish Shale, who was cut for technical reasons. Putting him on the disc would have sent them through the process of finalizing the game all over again.
08/05/2010 at 01:35 Lighthouse says:
Hell no …! The day that starts happening is the day I take up a new hobby.
I’ll do the same as I do with current gaming trends I do not approve of, such as paid for DLC and mappacks … I just don’t buy the game/extra content.
The more publishers want to nickle and dime gamers, the less interested I am in something I used to love doing in my spare time. They are taking out all the enjoyment and making gaming feel like a chore to me.
08/05/2010 at 01:43 dingo says:
No way in hell would I do that.
I simply can’t imagine to stay with a single player game that long.
Some of them overstay their welcome already.
I also hate DLC because I want the complete game as a collector.
Bring back expansions like in the old times that I can buy when they come out (in a box) and work with my Collector’s Edition I bought when the main game came out.
08/05/2010 at 01:44 Honest says:
No, I would definitely not support this type of payment model for single player games.
08/05/2010 at 01:59 Bart Stewart says:
Funny — I was talking about this idea a couple of years ago: http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/search/label/Living%20World .
The idea is to build a deep single-player game whose world is the size of a MMORPG, with a working but simple main game, and give it away for free. The developer would — one hopes — earn back their development costs by offering high-quality content on their web site that plugs into the main game. You’d be able to buy individual bits of content at some reasonable but full price, or you could buy a bundle of related bits at a reduced price, or you could opt to pay a subscription and get every bit of content as soon as it’s published at the lowest price. And since the developer would be staffed as an ongoing concern, there’d be a steady stream of the highest-quality content produced.
In effect, the developer’s real purpose in life following this model is not to pop out one piratable mega-game every five years and pray it’s a hit to earn back the tens of millions it cost to make, but to live or die on the quality of the steady stream of content it produces for its world-platform. (And bear in mind this world-platform would be designed to offer dynamic content to enjoy while you’re waiting for the next installment of the specific high-end developer content you like.)
Of course this approach wouldn’t be perfect. What is?
The real question is whether it’s better or worse than the $60 play-it-once-and-done games we have now.
08/05/2010 at 20:50 Zogtee says:
Having the “highest quality content sounds great”, but I just don’t see that happening. Devs would most likely try to deliver as little content as possible for as much money as possible, because that would maximize profits. This leads to chopping out content from the base game and sell it to you as DLC later. Produce lots of cosmetic DLC, like new hair, tattoos, sunglasses, etc.
Take all the DLC released for any particular game and compare it to any old expansion pack. Chances are that the expansion had more content and costed less than the DLC combined. Games are more and more becoming platforms for various services that primarily want to sell you DLC and subscriptions, and in that process they are also becoming less like games. It seems devs can’t leave well enough alone. As gaming is becoming more mainstream, they’re falling all over themselves trying to squeeze as much money they can out of the new gamers and risk shooting themselves in the foot at the same time.
I don’t like where this is going, but I’m fucking glad we have Valve around, who seem to understand how to deal with their fans..
08/05/2010 at 02:12 tssk says:
This sort of talk always reminds me of what happened to the Arcade game industry.
Designers were mostly concerned with play blanace and fun where as the finance guys were all about play time. ANd they wanted to push play time down to about maybe 2 minutes per quarter.
So money began to trump good design.
See http://www.schoenke.com/tyler/sinistar/gen_info.html
“Unfortunately, the game that made it to the arcades was not the one the programming crew thought was the best. When the game was first tested, arcade operators complained that players were taking three minutes to die instead of two. They wanted players to die quicker. “We said ‘no,’” says Mical. “But our bosses said, ‘You don’t get to say no, you have to say yes.’” They were forced to alter what they thought was a perfect equilibrium of gameplay to make the game much more difficult. In the process, some of the animation like the Sinistar explosion didn’t get a chance to get changed and didn’t look as good. The whole crew burned their own ROM sets of the superior version of the game to keep. Mical vows that one day he’ll dig his out and make his Sinistar perfect again. ”
This was the start of a slippery slope which led to arcade games pulling cheaper and cheaper hits on the players which could not be avoided through skill but instead bought through with money.
If home gaming goes down that road I’m out.
08/05/2010 at 02:16 Lanster27 says:
Yes. I mean, no!
08/05/2010 at 02:17 Faxmachinen says:
Would I pay a subscription fee for a singleplayer game? Only if it was merited by the service. Picture this: By paying the monthly subscription, not only would you recieve new content, but said content had been customized to reflect your actions in the game so far. I would consider paying for that.
As has been mentioned, there’s no reason to pay a subscription fee only for new content, because DLC works just fine, and is optional.
08/05/2010 at 02:30 Max says:
Isn’t this basically the whole idea behind the (mosty failed) episodic development experiment? Release new content in small, cheap, chunks, and such.
The only difference is that with a subscription you would have to keep buying the new content even if you weren’t playing as much, so it seems even less appealing that episodic releases.
08/05/2010 at 02:33 Trithemius says:
Yep; if it worked – unsubbing as soon as the ongoing content seemed crap.
08/05/2010 at 02:50 Radiant says:
The logistics of doing this are impossible.
Look at the sheer blood and sweat that goes into creating your common or garden AAA game.
Now ask that same development team to go back to the same back breaking creative well to continually feed a never satiated beast.
Infinity Ward as a case study.
As self entitled as we are now; imagine that beast is paying monthly subs for monthly content.
Either the developers will revolt and kill the bean counters that came up with this idea or we will kill the publishers with our bare hands for not giving us enough for our money.
Or the quality of the game will deteriorate to such an extent publishers will kill anyone that tells them that to their face.
08/05/2010 at 02:54 ulix says:
Would I scrub out money for substantial monthly updates of my favorite games?
Certainly, if the content is good, and if its more then most DLC these days.
Would I pay 10€ a month for an episode in Liberty City half the length of the current ones?
Definitely, in a heartbeat.
But then again the GTA DLCs were the best value for money ever in DLCs, so thats not saying much.
It all depends…
08/05/2010 at 04:19 Jayt says:
Sometimes I’m surprised I get so much TF2 content for nothing, just saying.
08/05/2010 at 04:28 Justin says:
I’d buy more Stalker, whether it was in full games or showed up in little bits. Don’t really care how it gets here.
I suppose the question isn’t “Do you want to pay more money” but “do you want to get more game?”
08/05/2010 at 04:29 malkav11 says:
I wouldn’t pay a subscription. I’d be perfectly happy to get a steady stream of post-release content, and if the value is right I might even buy each bit as it comes out, but I’d want to pick and choose, and I’d want it to be available offline.
08/05/2010 at 04:48 Allrpg says:
No and Never.
I have already stopped playing many video games because of high price / DLC fuss / DRM issues. I’ve stuck with only one game in my life ie. ‘Football Manager series’. The addictiveness in it don’t let me dive into popular games and I’m really happy.
I have not played Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2, Assassins Creed 2 etc. in recent times and I’ve no regrets. Recently one of my friend lend me his Bioshock 2 and currently I’mm playing that. :)
I have decided to stop buying games and stick to FM-series. I’ll only borrow popular games from my friends if they buy.
08/05/2010 at 05:03 Corrupt_Tiki says:
I know this is far far far down the line in a galaxy far away blah blah blah
Simple answer: NO
They could never convince me this is a good thing. I have more important shit to pay monthly for. Gaming is not it.
I am already starting to reasses my gaming…
I dislike most of the chumbucket games being produced + the horrible DRM
If it gets much worse, piracy as much as I hate/love to admit it.
But I already use NOCD cracks for some of my games (C&C3, Rainbow Six Vegas) as the games won’t show up in my drive..
Although if i don’t end up pirating I will just walk away from it, f*ck them, they can keep their shoddy ass DRM riddled games
08/05/2010 at 05:11 bill says:
A single game? No. A collection of games (like gametap)? Yes.
I’d get bored of it too quickly. Personally I don’t finish half the games I start because I get bored or distracted. This applies even to great games. So it’d have to be a VERY special game for me to think that i’d get my money worth.
I also don’t think they could produce content for a single game at a fast enough rate to make it practical.
For a collection of games from different teams, such as gametap, I’d happily pay. Infact it’d make more sense for me than buying games. Because I mostly play single player, I rarely replay games, and so I don’t need to “own” them. A regular supply of games at a good standard price would be great. This could include DLC and expansions, and also episodic things like Telltale or Half Life (if it really was).
Selling subscriptions is probably the only way to make the episodic thing work anyway… but it’d have to be for more than one game. Otherwise the delays would be too huge.
08/05/2010 at 06:12 bill says:
Thinking back to the last 4-5 games I played, all singleplayer, I can’t see how this would work well with any of them.
Longest Journey – It could be split into chapters, and they could have added extra chapters. Actually, that might work. But I think the work that’d go into making each chapter would mean they’d be spaced too far apart.
Bioshock – Not really. It already felt like the ending was padded out too much. By the time I finished I’d had a great time, but i had no desire to play through the alternate endings, or to download any more content. Give it a year or two and I might want to return to that world, so I might try Bioshock2 at that point. *
Mirror’s Edge – Can’t see any way to add much extra content to it, and they’d already run out of ideas by the end. Shorter would have been sweeter.
Beyond Good and Evil – Needs a sequel, but again I think I’d rather have a break in between so that it’s fresh when I come back to it.
08/05/2010 at 05:18 Kevbo says:
I can honestly say that I have never bought any paid DLC and will continue :)
I personally abhor the direction console gaming is going and sadly its dragging most of the industry with it (except for modders and indies!) Half the devs release paid DLC one day, week or month after release and usually its obvious its just stripped out features.
To answer your question, no I would not pay any sub for any game really. I have way too many games to dedicate myself to one game for long enough to justify a subscription :)
08/05/2010 at 05:19 kirrus says:
Yes, if the content was interesting enough, definitely. Don’t know if devs would make it worth the time, but i’m awful at MMORPGs (apart from eve, but my graphics card hates eve :’( )
08/05/2010 at 05:41 Zombat says:
Hellgate tried it, it failed epically – shouldn’t that be lesson enough?
08/05/2010 at 06:01 Corbeau says:
No. I won’t pay subscriptions for online games, so I definitely wouldn’t do so for offline ones.
Episodic content is a different story, however. That’s a case where ceasing to pay doesn’t cut you off from the content that you’ve already purchased, which makes it okay in my book (as long as I feel the content is worth the price, like any game).
08/05/2010 at 06:37 Darryl Woodford says:
Is this not essentially what Telltale do with Monkey Island and their other series? Ok, so they’re not quite monthly, but the essence is the same… each is a chapter that is part of an ongoing narrative, so that eventually you make 6 payments (or buy a 6 month ‘subscription’) in advance in order to be able to play all of the content.
08/05/2010 at 07:51 Wertymk says:
I would pay for extra content that would continue a game’s storyline etc. if it was high enough quality. Something like 5 euros for 2-3 hours of more Mass Effect. It would have to have the same quality as the original game though, cutscenes, voice overs, new locations etc. No recycling.
I would not pay monthly for random stuff like sunglasses and new skins.
08/05/2010 at 09:40 Corrupt_Tiki says:
So you’d pay for Call Of Duty: Modern warfare black ops spec ops and that splinter cell-kinda ops 63?
myself im ashamed to admit it, I bought CoDMW2, but i was falsely thinking the story would end there… IM FUCKING SICK OF CLIFFHANGERS!*$
08/05/2010 at 10:41 Wertymk says:
Well, sure, if the story was interesting and the game good enough. Kind of like watching a tv series.
08/05/2010 at 11:46 Corrupt_Tiki says:
Thing is, although the game may be good enough ( I myself enjoyed the MP aspect of MW2 at least) I have yet to see a game series which is considered ‘good’ go past 3 series or episodes etc, it just gets boring and too samey – as vinraith pointed out, it would most likely lead to the designers starting to go towards a different style etc, which will more than likely turn you off that game, because they changed the style to something your not happy with.
I myself think games should limit themselves to alot of content on first release, but support modding more freely.
The community is often what makes some of the greatest games the best with all their mods, updates, quests and content etc. The company doesnt waste time milking their game dry, and they don’t pay for any dev costs, but it still keeps the origional alive, and keeps sales of the origional coming in, long after release.
like OpFP, has possibly the biggest community, and look at the behemoth of a game they made. ArmA series have a similar following, etc
Just my 2-cents, it’s getting late, and I’ve started to indulge in a few adult beverages so I will limit my comments to just this one while I still sortof make sense =D
08/05/2010 at 08:25 Spacewalk says:
That depends. How many single players are we talking about?
08/05/2010 at 08:49 Lobotomist says:
If you are asking. Does it means that some company plans it down the way ?
08/05/2010 at 08:53 IIshin says:
For me, it would depend on how often I would have to pay subs, how much, and the quality of the content. Realisitcally speaking, the kind of content a developer would come up with would have to be squeezed into a regular time interval. So would I pay for rushed content every month? Probably not. The thing about MMOs is that there are many people subbing, so you know that a) the developer’s budget is not hindered in any way, and b) there is an audience besides you that judges said content. For a single player game, you don’t know how many others are also supporting a game developer.
08/05/2010 at 09:09 Out Reach says:
Jim Rossignol stop giving Ubisoft ideas.
08/05/2010 at 09:16 sfury says:
No.
08/05/2010 at 09:22 Gassalasca says:
I never would have thought that such a topic could prompt over 300 comments in such a short time.
Anyway, to answer the question – dunno, probably not.
08/05/2010 at 09:55 Arnulf says:
Yes.
Conditions: the game has to be really well done, even the “pilot” has be to a full game in its own right. Virtually bug free, hard to meet I know but not impossible. The followups have to be worth it.
One slip and my subscription would be canceled.
08/05/2010 at 09:56 Lambchops says:
For once, I simply don’t have the will to read all your wonderful comments.
I’m just going to assume that for the large part they are in agreement with my response of “no.” Or more accurately “not unless they get a Scarlet Johansen lookalike (see i’m not overly demanding!) to give me a sensual massage and utter encouragement whilst I play.”
Never say never!
08/05/2010 at 10:15 TheApologist says:
What Vinraith
08/05/2010 at 10:32 FRIENDLYUNIT says:
No.
I dont play MMOs for the reason that they have monthly fees. I just cant afford or justify it.
08/05/2010 at 10:32 Brulleks says:
Never, I tell you, NEVER.
08/05/2010 at 11:11 K-k says:
Nope. There simply isn’t any reason to pay a sub. If there was a single player that required a subscription for stupid reasons, i’d likely pirate it.
08/05/2010 at 11:19 alinkdeejay says:
If the developers keep adding content on a monthly basis. And not just tiny content like horse armor but at least several areas or maps every single month. Something big. Real content that people want. Not just a few new skins or weapons. It has to be the equivalent of a healthy mod scene. This is very important. A healthy mod scene adds loads of new content, most of it is rubbish but there’s always good stuff in there. If the developers add good content themselves, it would actually be much more convenient than downloading mods with incompatibilities and half-finished work.
And the subscription would have to cost less than what what you pay for individual downloadable content.
When you stop playing, you stop receiving updates but you can still play the game. Then when you start paying again you start getting updates again, and the old updates you missed are available retroactively as downloadable content. And at a reduced price because it’s outdated.
Price has to be low, at least well under 5 euro’s. Otherwise you start to think you might as well have payed for an mmo.
08/05/2010 at 11:51 Corrupt_Tiki says:
Why not just encourage a good mod scene from the get-go instead of trying to discourage people from modifying your game.
The Devs don’t waste money on crap like DLC and new maps, and can start work on bigger better projects like a full fledged sequel, or expansion packs etc.
I think no to subs for a singleplayer game, and even a multiplayer game it should be no. (Unless MMO – people actually don’t mind paying for these, and it is justifiable – but not for me)
You pay $100 for a game, you should get to keep it – forever, non of this constant updating bullshit.
08/05/2010 at 12:00 Chaz says:
But most big AAA budget games now are multiplatform, and the DLC serves not just the PC but the consoles too, whereas modding alone is only good for PC gamers.
However with the current gen of consoles I think single player subs will be very very unlikely. Next generation however who knows?
08/05/2010 at 11:50 Chaz says:
I’ve only ever been subbed to 1 MMO at a time, so if I treated a single player sub like an MMO sub then I’d only buy and play one game at a time. Which in turn will mean less money in the pockets of the game industry. Currently I must have about 7 single player games on the burn at the moment, that would mean me having to juggle 7 subs, which just wouldn’t happen. Long term it would mean I get a much smaller choice of games for the same money that was previously buying me a good variety. Also the money I would be paying out would be spread less evenly across the industry as a whole, with my cash mostly supporting just a handful of titles.
Anyway as has already been pointed out, for a 1 off payment I already get to play my single player games for as long as and whenever I like, and I can pick and buy whatever DLC if and when I want to. A monthly sub would just take away all that freedom and choice from me.
08/05/2010 at 12:32 Tei says:
I will classify this article on the section
“I have a very very bad idea that I want so share with everyone”.
hehe.. nah.. just kidding :-)
08/05/2010 at 12:34 mrrobsa says:
I won’t purchase any game with a subscription. I like to feel like I ‘own’ a game and can play it whenever, wherever I am, or lend the disc to a mate. Subscription games make me feel like I’m borrowing the game or renting a licence and that doesn’t sit well with me.
08/05/2010 at 14:23 Wertymk says:
What if you got to keep everything you got before canceling your subscription? You don’t have to send back your magazines after canceling your subscription, now do you?
08/05/2010 at 14:41 dogsolitude_uk says:
+1, especially on the ‘lending disc to a mate’ thing. Witz and I often lend games to each other, something that has led to my purchasing a number of titles I’d otherwise never had bothered with. Plus I lend and borrow games off my girlfriend too.
09/05/2010 at 13:26 mrrobsa says:
@Wertymk:
Yeah perhaps, that doesn’t sound too bad. The only other problem is that I crave closure. I finish all my games, even the bad ones, so I’d be in the awkward position of making ongoing payments for something which is poo.
08/05/2010 at 12:52 Igor Hardy says:
I guess I’m sometimes willing to pay for episodes of a story, like Tales of Monkey Island, but in general I prefer tight, not-too-long game experiences like Braid and spending as little money as possible.
If a game is missing something vital and you need to buy it separately, it is incredibly annoying indeed.
08/05/2010 at 13:51 Jamus says:
Spot on Jimbo- I don’t get how people miss this vital but obvious point.
The TF2 and L4D2 strategies are simply to pull in as many additional players as possible, and get them locked into using Steam regularly. Its a useful side effect the this also keeps existing players happy and loyal to steam.
The COD:MW2 strategy is completely different, leveraging their existing user base to milk them for additional DLC. Its so much more effort to pull in new users versus milking exsiting users. Why would you go to so much trouble trying to entice anyone who *still* hasn’t bought TF2, COD or L4D2- the answer is simply the future value to Valve (whereas there is very little for Activision).
Valve could effectively give away these games if it locks people into Steam and keeps people coming back and buying new games in the sales. Its just to maintain the illusion of generosity that they charge us anything at all!
08/05/2010 at 13:54 Jamus says:
Reply fail. Any ideas how to fix this?
08/05/2010 at 14:37 dogsolitude_uk says:
I’ll happily buy expansions, but when I spend £17.99 or whatever on Play.com I expect to have a finished article ‘in the bag’, not some lightweight piece of chod that some dev’s promising to add to in the near future.
I hate subscriptions, full stop. My work pattern means that I usually have no idea how much I’ll bring home from one month to the next, plus I have no idea how much free time I have from one month to the next either. The last couple of months have been a nightmare: my blog, music, gaming, programming, contributions to forums (PC Gamer, this one and others) and social life have all suffered immensely.
As a result of this I’m glad I’ve not been spending money each month on something I simply cannot guarantee to be able to make time for!
The problem is, if one business model takes off there’s a danger it will squeeze out others. Limited-activation DRM is bad enough, Ubisoft’s is worse still, both are killing off the second-hand games market. A sub-based distribution model would mean that you never actually *own* a game… What happens if you get laid off? Would you have to stop playing?
I’ll happily buy expansions for games. If new bits are made available for STALKER I’d certainly buy them, but being me I’d also ideally have a box, a map etc. that I can put on my shelf with everything else and sell at a later date should I need to, rather than £15 for something downloadable.
08/05/2010 at 15:13 Azradesh says:
Hell no.
08/05/2010 at 16:23 cheal says:
For this sort of singleplayer experience:
GTA with new suburbs and characters slowly being written in. Genuinely new headlines on the news.
Dawn Of War where new maps and units arrive week after week in an endless war, as long as you keep paying that sub.
yes I would, in principal (though I wouldn’t really cause I don’t like Direct Debit or tying my games to an internet server) but it would still have the capacity to encompass some multiplayer elements. For instance, in your DoW version, each player would be a “General” and their progress would be compared in leader boards, or their progress based on the performance of themselves and other generals. Where by, if an enemy general re-captures a battle field, then one of the Generals on your team would have to fight that battle again. It wouldn’t be multiplayer furing the battles, but it would provide a dynamic and interesting campaign for all players.
people would pay a sub for that experience.
08/05/2010 at 16:36 Fumarole says:
I wouldn’t pay a subscription for a multiplayer game so I sure as shit wouldn’t for a singleplayer game.
08/05/2010 at 17:47 IvanHoeHo says:
Ideally speaking, it’s the kind of thing i’d love to see happen.
But realistically speaking, this’d probably cause them to lock out the possibility of modding; and for that reason alone, this is not something that I can condone.
08/05/2010 at 17:50 Icehawg says:
Absolutely. I detest MMO’s, mostly because of the attitudes of the players (and sported by most commenters here as well) and would happily pay Batman::Arkham Asylum if they added new monthly content to justify the cost. Definitely.
If you wouldn’t pay, ever, a monthly subscription for anything don’t bother commenting. You haven’t joined the real world yet. (almost) Nothing is free, good stuff (almost) always costs.
08/05/2010 at 19:25 dogsolitude_uk says:
“If you wouldn’t pay, ever, a monthly subscription for anything don’t bother commenting. You haven’t joined the real world yet. (almost) Nothing is free, good stuff (almost) always costs.”
Not strictly true. People with fluctuating incomes, perhaps those in temp positions, would probably disagree. If you don’t know whether you’re taking home £500 one month or £1500 the next, taking out a regular sub to an MMORPG is somewhat imprudent: better just to buy a self-contained game when you have the money. Keeps the overheads of life down a bit!
09/05/2010 at 09:46 Sam says:
…you appear to not understand the “real world” yourself.
My current OS didn’t cost me a penny (and, indeed, gets regular updates for no subscription fee). (In fact, in the OS domain, even Microsoft and Apple provide free updates!)
I didn’t spend a single penny for any of the applications on my phone (yet). Some of them are pretty good!
That said, I have, briefly, paid a monthly fee for an MMO. And I stopped when I realised how little it was worth.
On that basis: no, I’d never pay a recurring fee for a (purely) single player game. Ever.
08/05/2010 at 18:34 Chaos says:
Nope.
Can’t see it working for me – or the industry. The main points of difference between a sub and and regular dlc are two-fold. Firstly, for me, I can always choose not to buy dlc. If I hear that the new suburb of a GTA game is bad, I don’t have to buy it. A sub robs me of that choice. In the same way, if I stop playing a game for a bit and don’t feel the need to add the new dlc just yet (since I haven’t finished with the last one yet), I can put off the purchase. Of course, these are both reasons why someone might think it’s a good idea for their game to run off a subscription; they’ll get my money on those months where I wouldn’t be buying the dlc…
Secondly, though, with dlc if my mate buys a game, and I buy it a month later, we pay the same amount for the same amount of content. If there’s dlc, we both pay for it to add it to our games. If it’s a subscription, and I buy it a month later, I get the first month’s update for the purchase price and pay less for the same content than my mate. This rewards waiting – delaying buying a game for a year in the hopes of a GotY edition is a long while to wait, but if every month adds something new (and buying it later saves you money) I can see that impacting sales!
08/05/2010 at 19:28 Casimir's Blake says:
No.
And I have not – and never will – pay a subscription of any sort for an online game, either.
08/05/2010 at 20:35 hamster says:
IMO the author of this article didn’t give very good examples and that to me is illustrative of the inadequacies of the model. Let’s take the Dawn of War example: a subscription that added units and spells monthly? What on earth would happen to balance? And if not units and spells, then what could they add? A somewhat analogous problem occurs for other genres too. How can a dev continually add monthly DLC to a game? Are they going to advance the plot? What are they going to add if not? How are they going to plan a whole year ahead? How much do they add per month? Look at Valve and their Half Life episodes. Years between them. The amount of planning and work must be astronomical. I can’t imagine a dev planning ahead and building a few months worth of content (as a buffer) before release. Maybe a game that is episodically based from the outset (instead of full game + monthly DLC) but even then people may be less willing to buy a mere episode of a game, of course.
Let’s just keep things to expansion packs.
08/05/2010 at 21:05 Zogtee says:
“How can a dev continually add monthly DLC to a game? Are they going to advance the plot? What are they going to add if not? How are they going to plan a whole year ahead?”
I imagine it would have to be a static world (like in MMOG’s) where nothing really changes and they just drop missions and cosmetic stuff in there.
08/05/2010 at 21:56 MacK says:
Would You pay a sub for Masturbating yourself?
08/05/2010 at 22:27 Fumarole says:
Real world, eh? Seems to me someone forgets that nearly all games have an initial cost.
09/05/2010 at 04:07 drewski says:
I’m not opposed to the idea, particularly, but I like to play my games on my terms when I choose – paying a sub would just cost me money for content I’d forget to play. I’d just wait for the sub content to end then pick the whole lot up on the cheap as a package.
Then again, I don’t play MMOGs either so perhaps I’m just not the sub paying type.
09/05/2010 at 06:36 Torqual says:
Most SP Games have no replay value at all. I lost interest in most recent sp games after 10 – 20 hours of gameplay. Most additional gameplay comes from user generated content, so called mods. Very often official game releases are only enjoyable through mods. So to have a monthly fee the game developers had to kill mod developement beforehand. Would you pay, when there is better free user generated stuff out there? I would not support such behavior, because my best game experiences were with mods not with vanilla versions of games. So i would not pay a monthly fee for a single player game.
For online games i pay only a monthly fee when real-life friends of mine are playing the same game. Mostly I am not interested in the game at all, but in the communication with my friends. So i don’t pay the monthly fee for the game content, but for the social network the game platform provides to me. So no i would not pay a monthly fee for a single player game, because there is no social network at all :).
09/05/2010 at 15:55 pagad says:
I generally don’t give a shit about multiplayer games anyway and I sure as hell wouldn’t pay a subscription to play something offline. The subscription is the primary reason I’ve never played an MMO, anyway.
09/05/2010 at 16:31 DaveyJones says:
“Stalker with a content team steady expanding the zone: it’s working its way out into the world.”
When this happens, I will wipe my hard drive, and use it only for this. Also, I will never play another game, nor will I shave. Still deciding whether I’d need to bathe.
09/05/2010 at 17:10 rurur says:
Absolutely, positively, NOT. The answer is NO.
Some companies will try this and they’ll find out what the market thinks of this horrible idea. Enough bilking us.
09/05/2010 at 20:14 Pook says:
Nope. Gaming is too expensive as it stands. It’s getting to be that it would be cheaper to be a crack addict than a gaming enthusiast. And too much of the content is tiny little bits that should have been worked into the original product to make it a better, more enjoyable game.
As is stands, we’re paying MMO companies to continually Beta Test their programming and get nothing in return when their game or service becomes broken by all of their fiddling. Paying $60 for a core game with a short singleplayer campaign, only to drop another $30 in 6 months on the same product to be able to continue the story. And another $30. And another. They’d keep going forever if newer engines didn’t show up and blow their old product out of the water.
It should be about making more complete and functional games. Not about nickle and diming me for as much cash as possible as a Thank You for buying their products.
09/05/2010 at 22:40 Guhndahb says:
Absolutely not.
09/05/2010 at 23:01 canuter says:
No. Not ever for Multi-Player.
09/05/2010 at 23:11 mashakos says:
This is the kind of horrible idea that “makes sense” to stuffy business types brain farting with each other in closed conference rooms.
If this gets implemented and succeeds:
-Publishers will push for more recyclable “formula” type games and totally ignore innovative and creative concepts
-Managers will want to be more involved in the creative process and stifle developers and designers, to “maximise the performance of the subscription model for X title” (approximate imitation of suit talk)
10/05/2010 at 04:04 Wraggles says:
Hrm, in theory the idea works, and could be great, but as Vinraith mentions, I’m dubious about the affect the model will have on development.
In concept, if a dev said, here’s your RTS, for 20 bucks, dl it and it contains 3 maps, then EVERY WEEK, we will release a new map detailing more story for 5 bucks a month, and on the odd occasion we’ll throw in another unit or three. With this game intending to be a non-stop war for several years. Well then fuck yeah, I’d pay a good 5 bucks a month. Additionally if you ever stopped your subscription, and restarted it later, if they then allowed you to “catch up” with maps, even the most grumpy players couldn’t complain about value for money, re-register once every 3 months for 5 bucks, get 12 new maps. Perhaps give those who renew their subscription each month a bonus of some sort to encourage regular subscription (a special hero unit perhaps?). Hell cos it’s an RTS, you could easily add a multi-player component for a slight surcharge, 5 bucks more a month. Allow for activation at any time, instantly allowing to patch and “Multiplayerise” whatever maps you currently have.
The model itself would allow for some interesting styles of game to be produced, and isn’t in and off itself a bad idea. It’s just the area for abuse is quite large.
10/05/2010 at 09:19 Hmm-Hmm. says:
No. The sole reason I’m not against a subscription for massively multiplayer online games is that they require constant work and attention. Of course, that also means that I’d like updates/expansions to be free.
Some MMOs, however, want you to pay money ‘twice’ (or rather, thrice). Once for the game itself, once for the subscription and once for any expansion they come up with. However, there’s also games like EVE (where the expansions are free) and Guild Wars (only need to pay for the game and any expansion you want to have).
Okay, arguably Guild Wars may or may not be an MMO. But there are a lot of ‘free’ MMOs with micropayments which is somewhat similar.
10/05/2010 at 09:29 Dawngreeter says:
It’d have to be an awesome, awesome game. I’m talking EVE-grade awesomeness here. As great as it was, I would not pay a monthly subscription to, say, Mass Effect.
Although, now thinking about it… here’s the issue with this line of thought. I am not sure any single player game has the ability to be EVE-grade awesome. You can’t get a virtual world, no matter how much effort the developers put into the game. And with that piece missing, it’s probably not going to be something worthy of a monthly subscription.
Maybe we see a single player game at some point, constructed in such an incredibly smart manner that good, playable, actually game enriching DLCs are released monthly and it basically becomes a subscription? I’m not holding my breath, though. Companies seem to think DLCs are when people pay money for a different-looking armor and a new 20 minute quest which awkwardly sits in the middle of an otherwise polished game like a lump of cancerous growth that you feel embarrassed to look at.
That said, when i get around to playing Dragon Age I will buy the DLCs. I am a practicing hypocrite, yes. But only when it boils down to conceptual masochism.
10/05/2010 at 10:00 Kerome says:
If the content is worth it, what’s the problem? In the end you get something for your money, whether it’s fairly priced is something each person needs to determine on their own… Economy 101.
But I would point out that most of these DLC’s would not exist if people didn’t buy them. The analogy of a game with a subscription fee is not the correct one, it’s basically comics – episodic content. A sub indicates you’re paying for one product with a static amount of content, which is more like a service, and even MMO’s sweeten that pill with content patches.
10/05/2010 at 11:02 Apricot says:
No. I don’t pay subscriptions for online games and I have never paid for a piece of DLC either so I find it hard to imagine that they could do something to convince me to subscribe. I play lots of games in little bits most of the time so I would end up paying out a fortune for not very much.
10/05/2010 at 11:09 harvb says:
For me I can’t honestly say yes, but I equally can’t say no. I think I’d have to look at a case and say “Hm, yeah, okay, I’d pay for that”. But none of the options you lay out above would actually make me pay for a single-player game.
10/05/2010 at 13:47 Magic H8 Ball says:
At first my reaction was a righteous rage at such a dumb idea which blatantly rips people off, but thinking about it it’s not such a bad deal.
I’m pretty big on the whole “don’t pay for shit games, pirate first buy later” thing, and while not perfect, this is an acceptable solution for the market as a whole(since demos have been banned by Geneva Convention).
Instead of paying sixty bucks for a product of unknown quality you download it for free and then pay for every hour played. Like the game? Keep playing. Don’t? You don’t, the publisher will get only two-three hours worth of money, which isn’t that bad.
It gets even better – how many games you know with immense replay values and games which you only finished once and never came back to, even if you enjoyed them? Think of all the studios which failed because they had small but dedicated fanbase. With p2p system in place, a guy playing your game three hours every day is worth as much as three people playing your game for an hour.
There are some pitfalls here – such as mods, especially total conversions, but as long as the infrastructure was properly done(i.e. you “upload” amount of money from your account to the gaming account and that gets reduced every hour, instead of buying # hours which is unwieldy and often scam-y) I could totally roll with that.
10/05/2010 at 14:31 Jens says:
I would not pay an additional subscription fee for a single player game.
I like (and did pay for on several occasions) DLC as long as it feels like valid expansions (Borderlands, Dragon Age, Fall Out 3 come to mind) and not rip off (WoW/Celestial Mount). But if the business model is releasing half of a game for a full price and the rest afterwards as DLC to optimize profits that doesn’t get my money.
What I would subscribe to is some kind of pay-per-play service that offers most current games for a single monthly fee. There’s gamesload.de flatrates (here in Germany) for example which is actually quite cheap but lacks most of the current blockbuster games.
10/05/2010 at 16:43 Shodan says:
For something like Stalker where the zone is updated and changed, new rare items added, monsters, NPCs, big events etc, Yes. For a GTA style game with news, vehicles being released. Natural disasters and terrorist acts that cause chaos, yes. Paying 5 pounds a month for a new model or texture, no way. Effort has to be put in, it has to keep me hooked on new events in the story as well as letting me do my own thing sandbox-wise.
11/05/2010 at 03:36 zomd says:
The difference between a subscription versus DLC is with a subscription on a single player game, you’re prepaying for content you can’t assess. It’s ass backwards. I pay for content that I want. I don’t pay in the hopes that someone will give me something cool somewhere down the road.