This is the worst idea I've seen in this thread so far. 90% of people don't give a flying shit about 'tournaments', and of that 10%, only 1% are actually good enough to win anything. So go ahead and tell me what Joe Average Gamer, like me, gets out of your tournament idea? Some twitchy build-order-obsessed 13 year old gets to win money, I get... nothing? Why would anyone subscribe to this? The only people who get ANYTHING out of this are the people who stand a chance of winning money, and I highly doubt that if it came down to it, you, or anyone else in this thread, would even be in the Top 10.

You seem to think competitive gaming is both bigger than it really is, more popular than it really is, and more important than it really is.



... aaaaand we've come full circle to EA.



Even if they were released every 2 months, it's cheaper to pay $15 than $50. And at least I also get the satisfaction that some socially impaired kid who has reduced the game to nothing more than a mathematical numbers game isn't getting rich off my money.



The entire reason Xbox Live works is because it's a monopoly. Such a stupid system won't and never will work on the PC, because our internet is 'free'. No self-respecting PC gamer would fall for an Xbox money trap, and trying to cash in on Xbox Live would be an embarrassing fiasco.

The only people that would be stupid would be those justifying put a dollar sign on something that has been, for over ten years, free.



You must play a lot of Xbox. Break a $40 expansion into 4 parts, and you get the same game, for $60, that you can't play in one sitting for 9 months anyway. Enter Valve's "episodic content" scam. Buy smaller games, for more money, released slower.

I love how you call everyone either an idiot or a thief.

EDIT: GO AWAY



I love how you call everyone either an idiot or a thief.

*sigh* Stupid forums.

never called anyone an idiot
never called EVERYONE a thief

but, I am calling you a liar for your above statement.

I really hate hijacking the topic by having to defend myself, but trolls like Uranium - 235 force me to.

I'll just stop replying to this topic.

I am with "Karryle" and others. The best updates are the one that not only modifies game play but also modifying the engine and over-all systems as well this game has a lot of room to grow so I would like to see major changes in updates not just a mod here or there. But in all areas of the game so a year or two or when ever they are ready is a good release schedule for me. I think if we let the developer's work they can come out with some other really cool stuff.

Depending on your definition of troll, I think you fit the bill given that your last dozen posts or so have just been 'YOU'RE WRONG LOL'. Go dig up the part where you called everyone a liar because they wouldn't flush money away. That just made me what to slap you.

I'm not a pirate and I'm not lying when I say I would not pay a subscription for a game. I like playing games. I find it relaxing, but it's not so important to me that I'd be willing to pay monthly fees of any kind for a game. If it comes to the point where games require that, I'll stop playing new games and stick with the ones I already own. If you don't believe that, well, it doesn't make any difference to me what you believe. But I will not pay a subscription fee for games.

You're right. As a casual gamer, you should pay the most money possible and that is through the one-time purchase. I explained on the previous page that the consumer pays less money with the subscription method and pays more money with the one-time purchase.

The subscription method does not benefit the business (only the consumer). So, I have changed my mind on this. One-Time purchases are definitely better than subscriptions as far as pc games go.

At $8 per month, with a subscription, the average casual gamer will pay $24 for 3 months of gameplay before he stops playing the game and moves on to a new one. It is much better to force him to pay the $40 or $50. With inflation, these prices will move up to the $60 to $80 (US Dollars) within the next couple of years.

Most casual players are not going to play the game longer than 3 months. The hardcore gamers will, but not the casual ones.

If you mean you just start with a subscription at x dollars per month and that gets you the base game, and subsequent updates/new content/whatever comes with the further x dollars a month (In other words, the base game only costs a month's worth of subscription fees); if that's the general idea, then yeah I can see that being cheaper for the base game only. Of course, that type of model is one I'd avoid, so it would be even cheaper for me, as my outlay would be zero dollars.

And if the subscription method does not benefit the business, then do you really think any business would even explore that as an option? Successful businesses do what's good for the business.

*edit* I'll leave my post as is, but I see you edited while I was writing mine. I'm unclear on your subscription model: are you saying that the initial outlay of (from your example) 8 dollars is going to get the consumer a playable game? If so, what's the incentive to pay 8 bucks the next month? And what happens after 3 months if you decide to cancel your subscription? Can you still play the game?

That's why I said I changed my mind. Initially, I thought it would gross more income for the business but not true since most casual gamers play for less than 3 months. It has to be what's best for the business.

The casual gamers outnumber the hardcore gamers. A subscription method would only gross more money with the hardcore gamers.

It would really depend on the ratio of casual gamers to hardcore gamers. This is where the excitement level (or the margin of utility) of the game comes in to play which would determine this ratio.

Aye, agreed. The only way I can see that type of model working is if the initial outlay for the game is at or close to the present day cost of a game at release. And that's what I've referring to when I say I'd not pay a subscription. The initial outlay is what I'll pay, but I won't pay more and more per month to keep playing the game.

I can see subscription fees for a multiplayer game (MMOs and the like, maybe even to access on-line play for this type of game if it's popular enough), but not for something that the consumer is looking at for either predominantly single player or LAN play.

Ahh, I would try to explain how you are wrong on all counts, and there really is no 'best' way as far as money goes for this type of game, you simply have to choose a model that you believe will work and go with it. However, content-wise, I believe the full expansion model w/ good support and patches in between is the best one. But you're not about to listen to anyone, so I shall proceed to the following.

Now to expand on Uraniums post regarding you:
It is hard to believe how incredibly stupid you are. Stupid as a stone that the other stones make fun of. So stupid that you have traveled far beyond stupid as we know it and into a new dimension of stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid cubed. Trans-stupid stupid. Stupid collapsed to a singularity where even the stupons have collapsed into stuponium.
Stupid so dense that no intelligence can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot summer day on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one minute than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. It cannot be possible that anything in our universe can really be this stupid. This is a primordial fragment from the original big stupid bang. A pure
extract of stupid with absolute stupid purity. Stupid beyond the laws of nature. I must apologize. I can't go on. This is my epiphany of stupid. After this experience, you may not hear from me for a while. I don't think that I can summon the strength left to mock your moronic opinions and malformed comments about sins or your other drivel.

I spit on you for degrading me to the level of a flamer. However, that is the only thing I see left to do in response to your idiocy. There must be some kind of response made to your complete and utter lack of intelligence. If there was not, who knows what would happen? Maybe people who happen to be more intelligent than you normally will actually listen to you instead of thinking for themselves? Perhaps eventually some of them will start to think like you and we shall all be sucked into, and destroyed by, the gaping black hole that is your combined stupidity. You, sir, are the reason I have just recently given up hope for the survival of the human species. You have singlehandedly convinced me that there is no hope. None. Ever. I am now considering undergoing dangerous genetic treatment simply to attempt to distance myself from the human species to which you belong. I request a simple yes or no answer, if you are actually capable of that, to the question of whether or not you are actually human, or simply a monkey chained to a computer with a spelling and grammar checker integrated in it that posts every time something semi-coherent oozes forth. If this IS in fact the case, I would suggest you pee on the keyboard rather than actually attempt to push buttons. I am certain that this would result in much higher quality thoughts to be issued on your posts.

EDIT:
To Frogboy: I did post my opinion back there a ways, and apologize for posting what I consider to be a flame(and I think most will agree) in your thread. As I said, I think reasonably priced full expansions would be a better road to take than "micro-expansions" as you have outlined... while I am sure the quality of whatever is in these would be high, based on stardock and Ironclads work to date, there usually isnt enough meat to things like that for most to justify paying another fee... even if it is only $9. I'd rather have more meat in a package for $30 and feel like I got something than pay $9 three times for minor changes each time, that add up to major changes, but still feel like I got cheated a little bit after each micro expansion. Of course, this is just my opinion.

Ban Uranium - 235 for being stupid.

He's started flame wars in like multiple threads now.

This is my major concern, many game companies have offered these things, but with very minor exceptions (such as Bethesda with it's downloadable content for Oblivion - but that's not a MP game at all so it makes no difference) these ongoing updates usually turn into "if you want to win, guv us moar moneiz!!!111one" and that can easily turn a clientele against a company, I know it would ailenate me. It's viral, antagonistic and downright sleazy.

It makes it an extremely hard line to cross; USEFUL and MEANINGFUL updates that do not UNBALANCE or SKEW the game itself. The easy solution to this of course is to release these updates in new patch numbers 2.5b or 2.5f, so only players with updates A, B, and C can play with each other making them completely balanced - as they all have access to the same features. The downside in this is that as a game ages only the "harcore" players are usually left to do such things and the downright truth is that if a casual player 'remembers' this game and wants to play it they've been outclassed 100x fold over and with the current functionality of Ironclad Online supportng only one patch number (unlike say Dawn of War) they've actually /lost/ functionality.

I like the idea, but the word OPTIONAL is easily smashed. For me, the risk is too dire to turn this into another "free to play, buy additional content to win" -esque game.

innociv: But his points are valid. It would also hate to see StarDock behaving like Microsoft or EA in that regard. The XBox live thingy will never work on PC and I don't like Steam even a tiny bit. The episodes cost more then a "normal" game, that's the only reason they are done. To milk the customer for more money, hoping that he is stupid enough not to notice it (and it actually seems to work!).

As for the subscription: Even if it costs only 1 cent per month, paying it a hassle (especially for Europeans like me) so I wouldn't subscribe, no matter the cost

(1) Sadly, I have to agree with this bit.

(2) If tournaments were going on, a lot more than 10% would be interested in them. Tournaments are fun to watch even if you don't game at the highest level. You can learn fun tidbits at the very least.

(3) Competitive gaming invigorates a game's community. It provides a launch pad for game balance and makes people more interested in more aspects of the game, even if they aren't progamers. So you'd end up with a better, fuller, more balanced game at the very least. With that said, I have to disagree HEARTILY with the proposed membership fee stuff.

(4) QFT, comrade. Look at Shadowrun and the incredibly unfortunate Universe At War. Epic fail all around. The Shadowrun community is already dead, and Universe At War is probably well on it's way if it's not completely out by now. People are already paying for internet connections. They are already paying for your game. They are not paying you to add more zones that you can raid with your guildmates in. I don't think I can really stress enough how bad of a blunder it is to charge for multiplayer gaming on PC's. Even a one-time small-amount payment for multiplayer will be the kiss of death for your game because PC gamers' skin will crawl at the thought of it.

(5) The only reason that Xbox owners pay for Xbox live is that they mostly don't know any better. To someone like me, who has been playing Starcraft for nearly 10 years online for free, the thought of paying a monthly fee (even a small one) disgusts me.

I used to play Guild Wars, and I'll tell you it's some of the best money I've ever spent. It's a one-time fee for the game, and there's no pressure at all to play it. I can play it whenever I want. No monthly fee bleeding out of my account every month making me ask whether I'm getting the value out of the game that I'm putting into it. When I stop playing the game for a year, I haven't lost a character that I effectively spent hundreds of dollars on.

They make tons of money off of tournaments (because they have damned good PvP) and sponsorships and selling 'stuff' that you could otherwise get for free if you just spent a little time. Some people like to pay for stuff, others like to get it for free. The choice is theirs.

In a few years, even Xbox owners will catch on. The only reason the market is so big is because they're fresh to the scene. To be totally honest, so many console owners don't know that some of the games they buy are complete crap. They don't have a history to look back and say 'why are games these days worse than before?'. But soon, they will mature (note for the pedantic, I'm not saying they are immature as people) and will expect quality games just like PC gamers (there are some good console games, but most of them are utter drivel). No longer will you be able to shit in a box and sell it to millions. No longer will people tolerate paying monthly fees for something that already makes lots of money. I personally can't wait to see the day Epic pisses their pants when they realize that people on consoles are getting more discerning. Maybe they'll blame it on piracy again instead of their half-ass developing 'efforts'.

(6) Like I mentioned earlier, it's easy to make money off of online multiplayer without having your customers pay for it directly. If you make a good game, you will have lots of eyeballs watching your sponsored tournaments with ads and all. If your game isn't so good, you wouldn't exactly be cashing in the megabucks either way.

Monthly fees are the kiss of death for PC games (note for the pedantic, non-MMO's). Only the 'hardcore' fans will pay, and most casual buyers will shrink away, perhaps even from buying the game itself. I mean Shadowrun might as well have printed 'AIDS-covered needles included!' on the box because that's about how many people bought the game.

If you have a multiplayer game and take care of it like it's your baby, people will notice. Your community will reward in some way or another, directly or indirectly. There will be people that will do work FOR FREE for you to make your game better so that others can like your game as well. Keep this in mind. The COMMUNITY is a reward in itself.

*breathes*

Stardock used to have a game called Stellar Frontier that had a 'pay money to win' deal going on with it. Honestly, it was a fucking fantastic game, and if they released it today with peer to peer servers, LAN play, bug fixes, and balances and nothing else changed, I'd pay 50 bucks for it. The problem, however, with the 'pay to win' content was manyfold:

1. The developers have a conflict of interest on many fronts. Do we make the paid content better and risk crushing the spirits of those who don't pay? Do we make the paid content a little more balanced and risk inflaming our paying customers?

2. The paying customers felt no sense of accomplishment in beating others (it was a VERY competitive game with a ranking system and everything).

3. The non-paying customers had pretty much no chance to win and, further, realized the predicament of the paying customers - this created a self-fulfilling prophecy of 'we'll never reach critical mass of paying customers to play a good balanced competitive match'.

Like I said, Stellar Frontier was an INCREDIBLE game, one of my top 10 favorite of all time, but the community never gave itself a chance because of the difficulties presented with paid-vs.-nonpaid gameplay.

PS
(Stardock, please rerelease Stellar Frontier!)

GPG did something interesting with their standalone expansions which is another possibility to explore. Owners of the stand alone were only able to play the new faction online, and had a small sp campaign with some new units. The advantage was that those who owned just vanilla sup-com can still play with those with the expansion, or those with both.

Something similar can could also be done with sins, where once or twice a year an stand alone expansion comes out which expands the game to those who own the other expansions.

... I think I love you, Mettra.

HOWEVER...



I disagree. While I don't 'follow' tournaments and competitive gaming, I have played many games that have had rabid competitive involvement. In my experience, competitive gaming is really nothing but detrimental to the game's health.

I really don't feel like going into elaborate detail, but I'll just mention a few things. The issue of game balance is a two-way street. While it's PLAUSIBLE that competitive gaming could complain enough to 'fix' balance, I've never seen a game that actually validates this statement. One could say Starcraft is a good example, but Starcraft also took years of patching to get into that balanced state. It's impossible to say that competitive gaming drove it, or if it was just a matter of time and the law of averages.

I'm really not sure what you mean about the "people more interested in more aspects of the game". You completely lost me there. Are you talking about modding? Because honestly I find the lamest, crappiest mods are the ones designed around competition.

Finally, you said it invigorates a game's community. Wow. Full stop. Abort abort abort! I've never seen this, or anything close to this. In fact, it's far easier to say that competitive gaming FRACTURES a community.

Call it generalizing, I really don't care, but I've decided over about ten years of online gaming that the 'competitive scene' is really just a euphemism. While yes, there are exceptions, by and large every experience I've had, and this comes from both as a player, community member, server admin, and server owner, in various games, that the competitive playerbase is the most obnoxious, self-centered, elitist, annoying, immature handful of social rejects I've seen. Be it from 'justifying' their opinions because they're in a clan and I'm just a 'scrub', trying to claim they can do whatever they want because they're "CAL-P" (whatever the fuck that means - I just know the A means Amateur which means dick-all to me), and other nonsense. It would get to a point in some games where I'd ban a player for being a douchefuck, and his tag-wearing retard friends would swarm the server trying to crash it, trying to ruin it with cheats, whatever (and my banlist got a little longer).

Furthermore, I have a real example. This might get a little wordy... Tribes 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. I believe it's one of the most underrated, best MPFPS games ever made. I played and enjoyed Tribes 1, but Tribes 2 really took FPS gaming to the next level. The game was a decade ahead of its time.

When Tribes 2 came out, all the Tribes 1 vets migrated over. Emphasis on 'vets', as the competitive scene for Tribes 1 was pretty big. Immediately they started bitching, to the point where Sierra shut down the in-game forums. The game was too slow. They changed this weapon. They didn't have this map. The bombers were 'unskilled'. The grenade launcher was 'noob'. Whatever. The whining was non-stop.

After some time, someone had the brilliant idea to make a mod for T2 that made it more like 'Tribes 1', and was thusforth dubbed as a competitive mod. It made the game faster, twitchier, and really chopped a lot of what made T2 what it was right out. Let's call it Base++.

However, not all the Tribes 1 boobs who were all angry because Tribes 2 wasn't just a copy-paste of Tribes 1 were happy with Base++. So Dynamix officially released an unofficial mod simply titled 'Classic'. There was also a second iteration of base++ around that point as well.

So now the game was fractured. On top of all the major mods like Shifter, TAC, Meltdown, ConsMod, and GTW, we had three or four 'base' games to play. Whatever flavor you liked had fewer players than the game as whole had at the beginning. New players could join, check the server list, and see 45 servers, each running a different game. The playerbase dwindled and died and now only a few hardcores still play.

I've never seen competitive gaming as anything other than a source of strife, conflict, and noise, and I could really do without any of it. The only exception one could make would be saying that competitive gaming 'keeps games alive longer', but again, that's not the case. Starcraft is still popular, but there were a lot of reasons for that that a lot of people forget or don't mention. Starcraft is not the norm, at any rate, and it should never be used as a justification, because frankly, no game, competitive scene or no, will ever be as big as Starcraft.

This is quit and cant read through it all dont have the time. although i think some of those things are a good idea but should be free anyway the way to get people to pay is threw re-realising the game. like gold versions and what not adding along the way so realy insted of just droping it keep adding more and more content. monthy fees scare people i for one would never pay for that especialy a RTS lets not begin that trend i am sure this is already said however i would agree and thats something. Laslty i want to point out that Bioware one of my other favorite companies is about done with Neverwinter Nights. That is the first one. It was realeased a age ago and they have had new patches up till know and the "last" one is comming out. they have had had tons of support for that game  and they did the new version method although i have no idea how they came up with the money to patch a game maney times for what 9 or so years and there not quit done thats impressive.

As I mentioned Tribes 2, and you brought up re-releasing, there's something I think more publishers should do with 'good' games.

Go in, update the engine to take advantage of new hardware, make sure it *RUNS* on newer hardware, pretty up the graphics, dust off old bugs, add in new features, and re-release that sucker. Imagine if Bioware did that with Baldur's Gate 2.

Add me to the list of people that don't think concentrating on serving the competitive game market, or the elite multiplayer lobby, is a basis for a good future financial model.

That's altruism and good will, and those are desirable, but it's *NOT* money in the bank. Unless the game is truly legendary (i.e. Starcraft-like) most of any non-MMO PC game's or expansion's sales take place in the first couple months of release. I'm not saying that companies can just turn off their community relations and support as soon as that period expires - in fact, that would effectively be suicide for the release of any sequel title, and companies have been blasted for being non-responsive.

But what a company with a good business model should do is provide a satisfactory level of community support for the existing title while actively working on expansions and new licenses that will actually generate income instead of just reinforcing good will.

-- Retro

I wonder where these ideas came from eh?

I think the idea of a persistent multiplayer universe would be a good idea. However, I think that the tools to allow this should be put out to the player base and the players left to set up campaigns etc; particularly given some of the mods and intended multiplayer campaign systems being developed for them.

I would have no probs paying for such client and server tools, and officially backed campaigns with monthly prizes would be a great idea, but only in addition to the tools being put into the hands of the player base.

I would. Of course, that'll never happen.

Im really against the idea of subscription.It has been bad enough for those non credit card owners to get the game and the subscription will just make it worse for us.

I still prefer the traditional expansion method.