Would you agree then that all of the hardcore Showtime watchers are being subsidized by all of the casual partial Showtime watchers?
If you subscribe to a pay channel like Showtime you're given access to content for a month. The Channel could care less if you had to work overtime or were deployed. You signed up to pay a set amount in exchange for access to content for a month.
If you don't feel you're given a fair value, you cancel. You don't go on about whining and carrying on until someone changes something for you.You don't ask for the whole channel to only broadcast cheesy shows because what you feel you should pay can only support low budget action flicks.
The $15 amount was arrived at as a happy medium. There isn't really anything else you can do for even 2 hours per month that will only set you back $15 or even $30. I think 2 hours playing per month is pretty low even by casual standards, correct me if I'm wrong.
Please try to stay with me here, it's hard for me to explain this in writing-
There's a casual player above who is upset and saying that they have always been getting screwed by having to "subsidize" the hardcore players. THEY would like to just pay for how much THEY play. Fine - let's say that the casual play pays $5 per month.
Then there's the "hardcore" player. They play all the time and since we're "un-subsidizing" they would have to pay their $15 sub plus the $10 remaining from the casual's sub - $25.
Let's make the total playerbase an easy 1 million. The breakdown of casual vs hardcore players is difficult. First of all the terms are subjective - they mean something different to everyone. A recent study (1) shows that the average player of MMOs plays 29.11 hours per week. That sounds pretty hardcore to me - playing a game for 2/3 the number of hours in an average work week, but let's really slant this in favor of the casual player anyways to highlight my point. Let's say a full 50% of the players are "casual"
So - we have 1,000,000 players all paying for the time that ONLY THEY play. 500,000 Casuals paying $5 and 500,000 "Hardcores" paying $25.
Now let's build their games... The casuals have a budget of $2.5 million, but it's shakey - sometimes they play, sometimes they don't so the dev doesn't really have anything to count on here. However the "Hardcores" have a solid budget of $12.5 million per month, paid up front even! Now let's build a world....
What? you say... but we all play the same game.!!??...
I say hell no! If I'm paying $25 per month for my $12.5M game, you're certianly not getting to see our content for $5 per month. I could care less if you're only there for 2 hours - I'm sick of subsidizing you people QUALITY when all you want to do is come dip your toe in once in a while and pay a one-off bargain basement price - go see what you can come up with for your shakey $2.5M,dofus gold... How would the game worlds compare? Which would you rather play?
LotRO? LoTRO,Dragon Nest gold, DDO, Conan... these are games that were built with the hardcore players $$, and then handed to the casual players after being injected with grind and P2W BS
I swear - MMO forums are the only place I've seen people become uppity standing on a platform of "I put less time in to my hobby" and "I pay less" and expect to somehow count more because of it.
(1)
or search for yourself for time played references - they're all roughly the same. I'd have gone with Daedalus, but the figures are from 97 - I wanted 2011.
The average MMO player is hardcore by default and getting a hell of a lot of hours of play for $15/month. Even casuals are getting a hell of a deal, so why bitch because someone else is taking better advantage of a good deal than you? With what you WANT to pay, you don't get games like these... at all. You get Farmville.
Tue Nov 29 2011 2:21AM
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