I Zeratul I, on 18 May 2014 - 08:11 PM, said:
Ah, but you're forgetting something! That business model isn't viable from a financial perspective! Hence the reason microsoft never bothered developing a Mechwarrior 5. As games become increasingly complex the development curve steepens and cost to launch rises. Mechwarrior 4 costs more and requires significantly greater man hours to develop than Mechwarrior 3. It naturally follows MWO is more expensive and requires more manpower to develop than Mechwarrior 4. Games like Starcraft II may be possible from a business perspective with a $50 up front price tag. Games like those have huge player bases and make up cost differences on sheer volume(like wal mart). That business model could never work for a game like MWO with its significantly smaller market niche. At least not for a smaller developer like PGI with limited resources & budget that probably couldn't afford the initial start up costs without taking extreme risks. The cost to develop a big multiplayer online game isn't far from the cost of a big budget film. It costs millions of dollars. Example, the cost to develop World of Warcraft might've been $60 million to $100 million. Those are only development costs. Without including the cost of servers, tech support and other extras. If every copy of WoW costed $50, they could need to sell 1-2 million copies just to break even on their development costs. For a game like MWO, which might not have a big enough player base to sell millions of copies, that business model doesn't make sense. The easiest and safest way to do it is to break development up into pieces and use a micro transaction based business model. Not necessarily because PGI is greedy or evil. It makes the most sense given the size of the player base and extremely high development costs.
Look,
I completely understand a viable model for them to make money and proceed with making more content, and you bring up some valid points.
However,
I can also see the other end of it as a soon to be 37 year old war gamer/ table top, Warhammer 40,000k, historical gaming, paint my own armies, build gaming tables, been doing it since 10 years old. I have been gaming for years also, started out with ColecoVision system....over atari. Moved on to Nintendo, SNES, Sega, and then dropped main stream gaming systems building custom gaming rigs, turning to PC gaming and never looked back. I really, really want to help support this game, and on a very small scale I have bought into it, and spent very little money at this point compared to the rest of this mostly Awesome group of people. Some of you are new here, young gamers that don't have some of our history and experience with Battle tech and the table top version. Hell, I remember back in the day of heading to Chicago to play at the Battle tech center and thought the prices to get in the cockpit was rather high for the amount of time we got to play.....but it was fun! Fun enough to make me want to drive over almost two hours to go there, and spend my money. Most of the players that I have run with here, I enjoy playing against them, and some I have added to friends to drop with because I enjoy being in battle with them.
This game has great promise, but so have many games. I get it takes money to make all this happen.... but is the amount of money for all these things, that we can't ever use again if the sever goes down, or anything that might ever happen, like a company dropping the game or going under, worth the amount being charged? IF this game has a single player version that you don't have to be online to play.... I might just be able to drop such amounts of hard earned cash on buying them. With its currant state, I just can't even begin to drop more then $60 dollars for a package for all clan mechs just released. PGI can keep the gold mech, enjoy it ;-)
I so want this game to mature and become the awesome we all want it to be. Even if things are not in perfect balance..... just great content is what this game needs! CW, factions, depth from missions to cripple other factions, taking planets,.....etc. etc.
I so want to build a custom mech pod, maybe a eyeifinty set up, foot pedals, joystick, I mean really make a bada$$ pod to play and support this game! I have the skills to do it, and really want to. I hear both sides of "you just can't afford it, quit hating" and "Prices are insane for anything". I am sure there are many of us here that can afford to blow money on this game, problem is guys, make us want to and not regret it. We all have bills, I don't care how much you make.
Bottom line.....are the high prices really the only way for PGI to give us this game at its current level of content, or lack of content depending on who's opinion you read on these forms? If they lowered prices by 50% could they still further progress on this game and add the content we would all like to see or has been promised? Would they get twice the amount of sales if they lowered prices by 50% and get much more love from this group of fans who love this game?
Seriously I love Battle tech, and like where this game is at, but for the money one needs to spend to get things in this model.... all I can say is WOW!
I am looking forward to the new Warhammer 40K due out in late 2014.... hopefully this is not where all new games are going. Example: Just bought Shadowrun returns and the berlin pack a while back and it was reasonable for the price paid, $28 dollars total for both. Full content and a User generated content editor to make your own missions and play others USG after downloading it for free on steam. IF you guys make the game we want, money will come, this is a great group of people that love this game.
Edited by Bill Lumbar, 25 June 2014 - 06:52 PM.
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