Why do online games charge for software?

Having just completed the COH and Lineage betas, I once again find myself wondering why the hell game companies continue to charge $50 up front for game software. On top of that, they rarely make the game available for complete purchase online - you have to buy a retail package which is a pain. I have wasted so much money on online games, it is why I am getting much more aggressive in getting into betas so I can check them out for myself. I ended up buying both COH and Lineage II and will actually play both, but in the past year I have bought Horizons, SWG, Shadowbane, FFXI, Asheron's Call 2 and DAOC - all which I am not playing because in one way or another they end up sucking horribly. COH and Lineage both managed to capture my interest. The monthly fees keep getting higher, and they still charge for a useless client software that can't be used without the service. They should just provide the software I know it is an attempt to reap profits from the game on top of service fees, but it is still frustating as hell.

Cristiano

PS - thank you SL for not charging for the SL software upfront, even though this is actually the most expensive online service I've ever used

I would venture a guess, more profits.

I hated having to go out and spend $50 for the TSO software, especially since I had been beta testing it and it was already on my system.

I think games that require a monthly fee ought to be free upfront, or at least have the purchase price applied to your monthly account.

I always wanted to try EQ, but the monthly fee kept me from it. Pay for play games have a lot further to go to prove their worth. I generally wont buy a game if it has a monthly fee. TSO suckered me in, having played beta I wanted to see where it was going. Paying for SL was not so bad after having gotten used to paying for TSO.

The next one I pay monthly to play will have to be out of this world, I still avoid them. There are too many games that offer free multiplay along with the singleplayer game.

1) Because they can, especially if they create enough buzz ahead of time.

2) It's a form of commitment; if you've already spent $50 to buy the software, you'll be that much less likely to walk away after the trial period is up, and admit that the $50 was wasted.

3) (the only positive reason) It limits abuse: waves of griefers disrupting the game, banned players easily and cheaply returning, muling, mind games involving multiple accounts, etc. Are the SA Goons going to mass-grief City of Heroes if it costs $50 a pop? Nope.

Well, CoH can be bought electronically..

The box price covers as much of the initial development as it can, and also your first month of service. Plus, boxes sit on store shelves to attract attention and buyers. This is the reason for boxed expansions as well, a new refresh on shelf space instead of fading out. Once everyone's bought in the initial hit, and the development costs are mostly offset, further boxed sales at reduced price plus monthly fees pay for ongoing maintenance, servers, etc.

I think that with the fact that people who play have superior connections they would just offer a download and skip the whole packaging gig all together. Not only to cut costs but to cut waste...with todays tech to put software in a box is nothing short of absurd. And to charge a huge fee upfront is shortsited...the reason the satelite industry is so profitable is because they give everything away in the beginning and then charge ya monthly to compensate for the "loss". That is why it is called a loss leader. From a business perspective it is far more expensive to gain a customer than to keep a customer. Sometimes this can even be up to 200 percent of the cost with advertising (the creation of buzz) and new customer retention (because new customers do require some level of hand holding and "training" which is costly) Just my .002 from a rl business stand point it is like charging people for an estimate. If I did that with my rl business well I wouldn't have one.

edited to add:

I do understand stopping mule accounts and griefers ect but really there are ways of doing that other than charging upfront fees. And these things will always be a problem anyhow. I don't think an upfront fee for software will solve this with the ability to create cd's and codes fairly easily.

Now for the IMPORTANT question Cris. What is your name, and what server are you on in L2? I am Devlin Storm on Bartz.

Well they have to pay for shipping and marketing and all the stuff in the box. Also they usually give you a 'free' month.

Some games you can download online and you have to pay to register, and get a free month that way.

Horizons is like that. You can download the free trial and upgrade it to the full version without buying the box.

After all the time and money spent on initial development when no profit at all is made, maybe they need to put a big dent into their debt?

Cristiano - what don't you like about Horizons? I'm sort of playing it now.

I didn't like horizons either. I beta'd it. Thought it was too dependent on crafting myself.

I agree that $50 is too much money especially if I wasn't in a game's beta. I don't want to risk $50 and find out later that I dislike the game. Maybe publishers should start charging $25 or $30; who knows, perhaps more people will buy the software then--I know I would.

I dont understand. I played Everquest at least 30 hours a week, thats 120 hours a month, not including the weeks of holiday I took which would add another 30-40 hours a month to this.

10$ a month divided by 120 = 8 cents an hour

Not really a big deal considering it costs 3$ an hour just for cybercafe fees, maybe fractionally less for amortization of a decent PC + internet connection.

Azelda

Azelda,

That's great that you got your money's worth. I'm not complaining about the monthly fees, though they are creeping upward. What I am upset about is the hundreds of dollars wasted on buying the stupid client software for these games, only to have them suck. I bought EQ at two points - when it first came out, and further down the line after a few expansions - and both times summarily hated the game. They should either lower the fee on the game or give longer amounts of time without billing. Until then I will keep trying out as many betas as I can.

Cristiano

That's one of the nice things about L2, the expansions (Chronicals) will be free.

I found the crafting to be very cool at first, until I realized you can't make anything really unique, and it quickly becomes tiresome. If they had allowed us the flexibility to affect the attributes of the items we created (for example, the color at least), it would add some variety to all the generic items sitting at the pawn shop. Horizons is beautiful but tedious. Perhaps I may go back to it at some point, I'm not sure - I haven't given up totally on it, but at release it was pretty lame after awhile. I also hated the giant text signs, they were just visuslly jarring and out of place in the game world.

Cristiano

Horizons is that way now - it was not at release, when the big interest in the game is there. Same things with Asheron's Call 2 and Anarchy Online. City of Heroes is supposedly going to offer CD keys, for a downloadable version for $49! That is just silly to me. Of course so was paying $50 for CDs I did not even have to install because I already had the beta version, I only needed that CD key to upgrade my account.

Cristiano

I haven't created a release character yet, I did ground shipping on L2 lol. Do they at least offer more customization options than the beta? Some of the races had 2 faces you could choose from.

Cristiano

Haven't got mine either, just ordered it Wednesday. Any new character models won't show up till C1 at least. Thats in June now. If you made a Beta character you get to keep that ya know. No wipe at the end of Beta.

I'm gonna get L2 as soon as the stupid stores around here get it in.

First MMORPG that has captured my interested since I betaed Horizons.

I loved Horizons in beta. Then about 2 weeks before release, they screwed it all up. All the beta testers knew it was screwed up. And they didnt fix it. I jumped ship 2 weeks into release.

Was looking forward to that norse one from microsoft alot, then Microsoft cancled it after everyone was all pysced up about it.

What's different with Horizons from the beta version? I'm finding the crafting a bit tiring, and if it stays like Cristiano says its like with no real customizing, then it'll get boring.

I'm finding the quests repeat monotonously for the lower levels of the different training options.

I got Horizons for a real good price new on a website. Most of their games seemed relatively inexpensive compared to other sites and stores. If I can find it, I will post the link.

The biggest fundamental ones were in crafting. They made it harder to get resources, harder to get formulas, etc. It was still tedious, but at least you didnt have to perform Mind Numbing Quest X fifty jillion time to get that last formula you didnt have.* In beta, mobs dropped formulas of all sorts quite often.

*disclaimer: I havn't played since about 2 weeks into live, this may have got better, I don't know

Lineage 2 arrived this morning, now I don't have to haunt these forums as much.