Why did Subscription services take off with the MMO genre? Even back in 1999 when EverQuest released everyone ate the Subscription model of payment up. It’s weird how people were so eager to go from one time payment to endless subscription
Why did Subscription services take off with the MMO genre?
The first multiplayer RPGs were made in a time where hosting cost was expensive, and the main audience were nerds who understood and accepted the subscription.
Then MMORPG like Everquest and World Of Warcraft came about. Hosting cost was minimal at this point, so they used the excuse of developing continuous content for the subscription cost. There wasn't much outrage against this, because the old nerds were used to paying for subscription and the new normalgays conformed to the norm of subscription.
Then at around Cataclysm, people realized that there was no way the pathetic drip feed content between expansions was worth $15 a month, and expansions were sold at full price anyway, so no excuse for development cost. Outrage, mass exodus, people went back to normal $60 games or full F2P games. F2P games largely evolved into the gacha games, which frankly are still less greedy than subscriptive MMORPG.
>Then MMORPG like Everquest and World Of Warcraft came abou
WoW came out over 5+ years after Everquest and the time between then saw hosting dramatically decrease in cost.
That's funny considering WoW was renowned for being full of poorgays due to how it could play on literal toasters
I think it's 2 things
1 - Preteens
2 - Killer app concept. Just like Apple products, they do something in a specific way, have marketing that targets a certain type of people that are just willing to pay a premium to have access to the product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application
This Ragnarok Online video is great too
Why was Ragnarok Online good? - Early History of Ragnarok Online by Mew's Vidya
>being full of poorgays due to how it could play on literal toasters
I remember this
You never played an early-mid 00s f2p mmo did you? Actual hell.
gacha games seem to have largely moved to the monthly pass model, which is pretty much just a subscription anyway. Funny how it comes full circle.
Not the ones that are Japan-only
>Why did Subscription services take off with the MMO genre?
WoW released before the 2008 recession and 20+ years of inflation. People had considerably more disposable income back then to spend on subscription games.
>Then at around Cataclysm, people realized that there was no way the pathetic drip feed content between expansions was worth $15 a month
People were happy to stay subbed year round to Vanilla WoW because it was not a seasonal content based game. You didn't hit level cap within a couple days and then raid log for the latest raid tier. It was a long journey where it took a long time to reach level cap, and then after that you still had to progress through raid tiers. You didn't just jump straight to the latest content and then get bored and unsub. By Wrath, WoW had transitioned to the retail WoW model where you no longer made friends along the way to level cap, and the introduction of LFG killed the sense of community. Hence why people stopped being motivated to stay subbed year round (along with the economic downturn).
>Outrage, mass exodus
Cata even at its lowest still had more subs than vanilla at its peak. And that low point was at Dragon Soul, the very end of Cata.
SOE mmo's held your account hostage. If your subscription lapsed for 90 days they would delete your account for that specific game. Even if you were subscribed to another SOE mmo, for example my Planetside account got deleted because I let the sub lapse and I was playing Star Wars Galaxies. FFXI was the first big MMO to change that but it's downside is that you couldn't pick what server you wanted to be on.
I'd gladly pay to avoid the super poors who can't even muster 15 a month, it actually improves things a lot.
Didn’t stop Xbox Live from being filled with poorgays. Maybe it only works for MMOs
Original live was brilliant and a bunch of people stayed away because it was too scary to pay.
this, holy shit
also its crazy that WoW is almost 20 years old and theyve never raised the subscription price
>and theyve never raised the subscription price
this isn't true at all, btw. they've raised it in a ton of countries.
They've raised it heaps, it's gone up about $8 since WoW launched here in Australia and other countries are the same. Not sure about Shartistan though.
it's cute that you guys believe a subscription would actually filter out poors or shitters. especially since most MMOs are designed to run on toasters.
subscription models pretty much died when other avenues of monetization opened up that didn't require a large number of players to keep the servers going.
that's largely due to gacha systems like lootboxes being seen as gambling in some countries which bumps them up to an adults only or outright bans them in some cases.
Free private servers are better than offical blizzard ones.
Only a select few. Kronos was badass for a while but even it fell to the shitters.
Nu servers are full of censorship and what they have added could hardly be considered an improvment.
>it actually improves things a lot.
No it doesn't, that just lumps you in with the moronic turbo zoomers that are too stupid to torrent a 3.3.5a client let alone actually play the game.
No one would complain about a subscription model that actually delivered very frequent new content.
I'd wager it's because some people make money by selling gold and items outside of the game. There's also the guild element, in which you get roped into a group, spend a lot of time together, and in order to not abandon your new friends now you must pay $15 a month.
Personally, I only started playing WoW because my girlfriend's little brother was into WoW and I thought it'd be a funny troll to also start playing it because she'd complain about the game. Unironically she then surprised me by also playing it and levelling up way faster than I did. Then we broke up, fell into depression, and spent a couple of months playing by myself while crying on the inside.
Good game though!
>I’d wager it’s because some people make money by selling gold and items outside of the game
That just means other players are willing to pay even more than the monthly fee. Whatever players selling shit are making, other players are paying.
The justification used to be that the subscription went to server costs and ongoing development. That might have been at least believable back in the day but it's pretty blatant now that not even 1% of your subscription is actually going back into WoW or XIV or OSRS or whatever else you're addicted to.
pc Black folk always said payng for you internet was bad, but the most popular oc game out there was paid to keep playing
Playing wow in 2004 they were still fixing the game all the time and rebalancing and releasing the instances so I feel like it was worth it. I mean ya you were beta testing the game but it was fun. The release of AQ was lazy as frick tho. Huge grind for the instances and they did nothing to silithus really but throw around some shit bugs that didn’t drop jack shit. Naxx was worth it but then they had to rush the next X-pac cause only like 5% of the player base was getting in there. I was on a server where we were the only horde guild and there were 2 alliance guilds in there. When TBC dropped I went to 70 or 80 or whatever it was replaced all my gear with blue shit and /q the game. My epeen was highly offended by how nothing mattered anymore and I readily admit it. I wanted the best shit. I wanted to use riding enchants on gear people would never see. I wanted my meme tiger claws to kill people in BGs specd as a dagger raid rogue. Then I wanted my $15 bucks back. Was a good ride.
subscriptions usually entitled benefits, magazines back in the day used to send you shit if you stayed subscribed, sure it was shit but it was free shit.
it just stuck as a business model cause we all kept paying. so now it just means you pay monthly/yearly so the content keeps coming.
remember frick tigoel and furor
>tigeol and furor
WAT
Later known in wow as Tigul and Foror, they were EQ elite players who made a name for themselves talking loudly about game design and how they could do it better, and they then got hired by blizzard.
They are Kaplan and Afrasiabi, for what it's worth. Any references you see to the names Tigule/Tigol/etc and Foror are their old EQ names being modified. Tigole was origianally called Bigole breasts and was told he had to change it, and it became Tigole Bitties.
So a large amount of wow's dev input came from people who'd played EQ to the elite level and then got salty about dev choices.
And then later wow hired Ion Hazzikostas, the old guild master of Elitist Jerks, as first an encounter designer and then gave him the whole series lead.
>98'
SC
>2000
Diablo 2
>2001
Lord of Destruction
>2002
WC3
>2003
TFT
>2004
WoW
There was about a 7 year period where blizzard was damn near unstoppable. I remember there being entire pallet displays of WC3 at launch at Best Buy. I had never seen anything like it for the launch of a PC game.
Who fricking cares?
Why do zoomers make so many of these irrelevant, moronic pseudo-history threads? /vr/ is for playing and discussing RETRO GAMES, not "why did X do Y to cause Z? what would Q be like if W had developed B instead of C????"
Endless fricking garbage threads in the catalog. Why can't you literal dipshits just PLAY VIDEO GAMES?
I find these threads interesting because even if you didn’t play the game you can theorize. But then I also like Ganker which is what a lot of these boil down to since video games are first and foremost a product.
Okay, I'm playing a video game anon. Now I'm not making threads and the board has no one posting on it. Fantastic.
I care
It was a different time. Live service games were not a normal business model like they are these days. PC games would get patches after release but not really anything major. Expansions would come but those were a separate one time cost. People were willing to pay monthly for it because you were paying to play on large server with hundreds of simultaneous players that was constantly receiving content patches and updates in between major expansions which were basically just even larger content patches than usual.
There is a reason the sub model is dying off, it just doesn't really fit with the times anymore. WoW, FFXIV, and Runescape are the only major MMOs still using that model and that's probably because they have the player numbers for it to be sustainable. Dropping to F2P for MMOs is usually an immediate sign the game is in trouble financially or sub numbers have tanked significantly. Most MMOs just don't have the numbers to sustain a sub model. Can't see any of the previously mentioned games besides WoW going F2P though, FFXIV has only been growing and Runescape has a very consistent subscriber base. WoW probably never would though but that game has been in such huge decline and current management at Blizz is only making it worse.