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Are we absolutely sure about a pay by subscription model?


Anopheles

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The gaming world appears to be moving away from monthly fees for games.

 

Perhaps a flat fee would be better with payments for ENTIRELY non gameplay items like decorative elements, element skins or paying to import your own models/skins from Blender (subject to review before acceptance) etc?

 

Edit: title fixed 

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Frankly having the game be a flat fee inclusive of some type of cash shop for elements and other accessories would drive me away from this particular game only because of the fact that the developers would be spending all of their time developing more crap for players to buy in order to maintain their income and to have the funds to continue developing more crap for players to buy it is a ridiculous model and one that the industry as a whole should be ashamed of. Whole thing is a vicious circle and makes for poor player interaction and poor support because quite frankly it's designed to be a cash cow.

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You better check your calendar. MMO is moving away from f2p model. Which model will take its place is unknown. Now its a mix of b2p, freemium and cashshop. Maybe sub will rise again. And I'm very happy to see that DU is considering sub.

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Please keep the monthly pay to keep most of the toxic players out, its a simple pay for server maintenance, regular updates and customer service.

And yes i know what i am talking about, introduction of FTP is introduction of trash elements and goldsellers you will get a lot less with a monthly sub.

Even free trials are an introduction of this phenomenon.

Playing DU with a subscription is just something you can plan in your finance, it will be something between 10 and 15 euros a month. What would also mean your flat fee should be something of 240 to 300 euros to make sure incoming players will p(l)ay for about 2 years. 

Item shop is already announced, so that will be present on top of monthly sub.

 

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Microtransactions can't sustain long term development, it would be a cat and mouse game of constantly trying to - 

1) Gain players

2) Create new content to sell to players

 

 

Whereas DU is going to be a constantly evolving game, dedicating resources to creating new expansions on top of trying to push out constant microtransaction-backed content would be an uphill battle that would hurt everyone in the long run. It's hard enough for them to keep up development speed now with all of the resources they have.

A subscription allows them to have a solid metric on how much money they are bringing in every month and allows them the flexibility that the constant fluctuation of microtranscation-based income wouldn't give them. 

 

People think servers are cheap, and of course someone is going to go to the AWS pricing page and try and point out "oh but you can get instances for dollars a month it can't be that expensive!" but running infra in AWS isn't cheap, it's just cheaper than building out a data center with all of your own hardware to maintain. NQ has really strict hardware and rack requirements that add to those costs (I was told it's more akin to a weather modeling supercomputer than a traditional gaming cluster), and as they scale up to match the needs of their growing player base it's only going to get more expensive over time. At a previous job we were spending $150k a month alone on our web frontend, and if you counted all of the other supporting infra we had for our product, it was something like $3.5 million a month, it wasn't cheap, it was just cheaper than the alternatives. Nobody is going to convince me that microtransactions are the way to go when you have to pay for infra, employees, long term development, support, offices, advertising, etc. This isn't Fortnite where the core game isn't changing and they are tweaking things from time to time while adding new items to their store, DU's development is on a whole other level from that. 

 

Regardless of all of that, I think the bottom line here is that if you can't afford to pay $10-$15 a month for a game, then you need to reprioritize your hobbies (irrespective of the fact that DAC's allow people to play for free essentially). 

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2 hours ago, yamamushi said:

Regardless of all of that, I think the bottom line here is that if you can't afford to pay $10-$15 a month for a game, then you need to reprioritize your hobbies (irrespective of the fact that DAC's allow people to play for free essentially). 

 

Pretty much this..

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I'm so tired of the shallow game play that comes with ftp and b2p  with their cash shops.  I want a game I can sink my teeth into long-term.  Without subs, the whole game is then designed to bring in cash shop sales, NOT into creating great game play. There are several MMOs out there with subs and most of them have been around for years because they work for the subscribers and do what makes US happy to keep us coming back.  f2p and cash shops make the devs work for the money men and their cash shop/lootbox scams.

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  • 2 weeks later...

So long as DACs are accessible through hard work during the game, it might not affect the number of new players willing to try DU out. My only concern is if players start pricing DACs at extortionate rates that put off newcomers. It only hurts the core in the long run as they won't see much rise in the player base. But I'm open minded to that test. Hopefully the sub model won't be an issue when players decide between this one and its competitors.

 

Yes yes "10 dollars a month is nothing" and "DU has no competitors" but you gotta hope everyone thinks like you.

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7 minutes ago, blazemonger said:

Don't count on a month playtime being $10.  It's going to be more like 15 I'm sure..

From what I understand from developers: there will be 2 type of subscription: DACs and normal monthly subscription, which makes perfect sense as not everyone need ability to gift or trade subscription, in fact, very few players will need DACs and buy them only as gifts or to get quanta boost in-game. Obviously DACs will be more expensive as they are trade able items in-game, but if you pay normal sub for 6-12 months it should be around 10e/month.

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Subs is definitely the best system, hands down. Think about it.

Name another system that incentivises the developers to continue to develop and maintain the core game; It's in their vested interest.

Drop the ball and the subs disappear.

 

Elite dangerous suffered from this.
5 years ago they charged players a massive amount ($300) for the Alpha and promised Life Time worth of free downloads.  Just before the game went live, they offered a $100 LEP (Lifetime Extension Pass) on top of the cost of the game ($60) which promised to give the later-comers free DLCs for life, just like the Kickstarted, Alpha and Beta backers...

The game had no subs.

Instead, the moved to microtransactions on cosmetics.

Result: five years after release and only one proper, solid expansion (Horizons) and a bunch of half hearted later addons (Beyond), while Frontier, the company, moved on to develop Jurassic World and Planet Coaster and a new IP coming this year. However, no fear, there are hundreds upon hundreds of mediocre colour palettes from which to choose from to colour your ships or add stupid bobble heads to your ship's dashboard. Pretty pathetic for half a decade's progress, IMHO.

Reason: No incentive to do anything since they already had the money from tens of thousands of LEP owners and Kickstarter/Alpha/Beta players.
 

 

The subscription model should ensure that they try to keep the players interested for as many years as possible.

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JC in one interview said that 59.99e for 6 months is what they are aiming for (obviously price can change but this gives us basic idea of what pricing can be), not sure if 12 months will be cheaper per month

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Why have TWO payment methods?

 

Why not accept DAC for the subscription, and you purchase DAC with cash?   In my opinion, it gets players used to purchasing DAC, and they will be tempted to purchase additional DAC to sell on the in game market. 

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On 7/2/2019 at 5:39 PM, Ripper said:

Why not accept DAC for the subscription, and you purchase DAC with cash? 

That is the point of the DAC, but having it as the only form of paying for subs isn't gonna happen. It simply defeats the purpose of them. If you look at the old ks rewards a single DAC is going to be around 18 euros/usd(if you go with how packs are priced now). The purpose of buying a DAC with real world cash is to sell it on the market. It costing more than the standard monthly sub is part of that, and because you are making money in game off it.

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On 6/15/2019 at 3:39 PM, Anopheles said:

The gaming world appears to be moving away from monthly fees for games.

 

Perhaps a flat fee would be better with payments for ENTIRELY non gameplay items like decorative elements, element skins or paying to import your own models/skins from Blender (subject to review before acceptance) etc?

 

Edit: title fixed 

It's hard to balance between reasonable decorations and completely ruined customisation because every significant thing will cost like AAA game

 

If game will worth it, it's nothing bad to have monthly fee which also work like a filter against a immature ppl 

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While I can now see the arguments for this pay model, I still hope that skins  for elements can, after vetting (handwaved as r&d time), becomes a thing.  They wouldn't take up much of a work day since it will be a simple "does it have a swastika on it or does it look like a make member" yes or no question and swipe right operation.

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5 hours ago, Anopheles said:

While I can now see the arguments for this pay model, I still hope that skins  for elements can, after vetting (handwaved as r&d time), becomes a thing.  They wouldn't take up much of a work day since it will be a simple "does it have a swastika on it or does it look like a make member" yes or no question and swipe right operation.

See automatic translation from Russian and didn't get even half :)

 

There's hell a lot of games which have B2P model(and even more F2P, especially in ex USSR) completely ruined by "kind of free" business model, closest example of ruining: Space Engineers which mutiplayer suck while developers are busy making paid skins. In result it means more paid skins and still broken multiplayer in future.

 

So from my pov it's better to pay subscription to get better service, than pay for skins to get more skins

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