A View From the Road: The Subscription Equation

We'Re all about tightening our belts and pinching pennies this week here at The Escapist – how to game on the cheap in today's crap-tacular economy. If you browse the comments on almost any major gaming news site when it posts a story about almost any major MMOG, there's forever at least along soul who brings up the same old tired argumentation: "Dispiriting, simply I'm never going to play a game with a monthly subscription." Though I've previously examined the virtues of some alternate pay models, this mindset has ne'er successful sense to me, because if you take the actual numbers? MMOGs – even subscription-based games – are the cheapest form of entertainment on the market, handily.

Rent's look on at the Numbers, shall we? The standard monthly fee for an MMOG is $15, and while some propose cheaper options, rent out's collocate with that for the moment. Immediately, on its ain, $15 isn't all that more – that's what, three morning coffees? A dinner at a moderately-priced restaurant? – but rent out's compare that $15 to other forms of entertainment.

Without any snacks or refreshments, let's say that an average film ticket costs $8 for – being gift – two hours worth of cinematic amusement. So that comes down to $4 an hour, which in an MMOG would mean about four hours' worth of gameplay. If you pass one hr every weekend in whatever given month playing online, you've equaled your cost-to-meter ratio for loss to the movies.

Now, the standard game price these days is $60 – yes, you can e'er bribe used games operating theatre wait until they flatten in price, but for consistency's sake, let's just go with this for now. Do you buy more than trine games in a year? If so, then you're already paying many for your gaming than someone with an MMOG subscription, but let's look back at this the equal path arsenic before.

I'll be super charitable here, and say that every game has 30 hours' worth of gameplay in information technology, which means that it costs you $2 per minute to represent this game in question – eight hours of your MMOG. All that agency is two hours a week (or one particularly game-gravid weekend), and you've gotten Thomas More time for your dollar in an MMOG than you wealthy person in your other game.

Standing don't believe these numbers? That's approve – these are altogether hypotheticals, after all. Sol, let's look at something mathematical. After a year-long expose from Howler, I renewed my subscription in January 2008, and started a new character (the Night Elf Druid referred to here), and have been playacting that character ever since. How much money have I born on WoW since and then? Well, buying WoW and Burning Crusade set me back a composed add together of $90, with finally November's Ira of the Lich King driving that up to $130, earlier you count subscription fees.

It's immediately September, so a year and ix months of World of Warcraft, at $15 a crop up (well, it's a bit cheaper since I buy multiple months at one time, but let's just be agreeable) means I've exhausted $315 in subscription fees. Plus the cost of the games, and that's $445 ended two years. That sounds like quite an a flake of money – and it is – but then, let's look at how much time I've spent in-game.

The /played command on my Druid tells me that since creating her back out in Jan '08, I've logged 68 years and 6 hours traipsing through Azeroth, getting my Feral on (and Resto, and Balance). That's… well, okay, that's kind of sobering on the one bridge player, but strictly mathematically, this way that my $445 has gotten me a total of 1638 hours of playtime: approximately 3.68 hours of play per dollar.

That's pretty damn cheap. If this same price detail applied to movies, we'd be salaried $0.54 for a two-hour flick, and $8.15 for a 30-hour game. If you'ray the type of person who looks at an MMOG and waves off the $15 monthly fee, past you damn cured better glucinium stringent that your $60 games have 220 hours worth of content in them, operating theatre you're getting the raw end of the deal.

"But waiting!" I can listen you argue. "That's just for a hardcore gamer who's signed his life away to the game!" While I'm not going to argue that a swell fortune of those 21 months were spent living a lifestyle perhaps not as flourishing as it ought to give been, even these days, performin WoW for maybe trine hours, deuce nights a calendar week nets me 24 hours of gameplay for $15 each month. So on this model (1.6 hours per dollar), I just require to demand a mere 96 hours of gameplay from my $60 gimpy. That's much Sir Thomas More reasonable, don't you think? And yet, I haven't clocked that much yet in Team Fortress 2 (a one total of just over 74 hours) one of the most replayable non-MMOGs in recent memory.

Freshness is a concern, but hither's the thing about many MMOGs – because they're multiplayer, the content always feels a bit changed. It's the same principle behind wherefore I can crowd along the cart in TF2's Goldrush map and still birth a good clip even if I've done the map a hundred times by in real time. Beyond that, most MMOGs are continually updated: In the 21 months since I started my Druid, WoW has seen an expansion, four John R. Major content updates, and unnumbered other minor additions. So I guess if it really made you feel amend, you could rightful think back of it as a game with tons and lots of extra DLC.

To be fair, it does come lowered to a question of value. If you ramify over $60 for BioShock and only get 15 hours of exhaust of it, simply they were the well-nig mindblowing 15 hours in your life, then maybe it was worth information technology for you. Notwithstanding, the next clock you find yourself about to vehemently swear you'll ne'er pay monthly for a game, check for a moment and guess it over. Involve yourself, when was the last time you got 96 hours worth of gameplay out of a $60 game, and if you can't commend? Cured, maybe you've been acquiring the short-circuit end of the stick after all.

John Funk doesn't want to amount his complete /played metre since January 2005.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/a-view-from-the-road-the-subscription-equation/

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/a-view-from-the-road-the-subscription-equation/

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