A Home For Rent
by BONZO, HSM Editor
Have you noticed that most MMO games have been going free to play?
Here is the deal: games like World of Warcraft, Star Wars The Old Republic, and DC Universe Online offer a few deals. Completely free to play with a level cap, and restrictions on your in game economy per day, and limited interaction with other players. Spend a few bucks on upgrades, and you get a few more perks. Or pay the full subscription price and get unlimited access to the game, including DLC add-ons.
Has that formula worked?
Well, it has and it hasn’t. Subscriptions for WOW are down, and City of Heroes will no longer see support after this year. However these games have been around a long time, and the new kids on the block like The Old Republic, and Star Trek online may have some shelf life left as free to play MMOS. What they are banking on is the concept that you will enjoy playing the game, but you’ll be so deterred by the limitations that you will either pay for a few upgrades, or see the benefit of paying a subscription. Either way, you will at least give the game a shot as long as it is free to try, hoping you might just get hooked.
Home went free to play from day one. There are a lot of freebies, and a lot of content for pay. Some have reasonable prices, and some are slightly elevated unreasonably. The last few months have seen an explosion of content in Home: new games, and new updates every week. A lot of work goes into developing so much content, and there is no coincidence the summer months – when most teens are off school – saw so much content, but will it continue or will this truly be the Golden Age of Home? Will the content decline from here, or will we see more development?
Home Tycoon has yet to be released, Uproar is coming our way, and FUBAR has been teased. So odds are good more stuff is coming, and the content coming will contend for our money. Some of us will have to make decisions about what to spend money on. Games can be free to play, but a few upgrades make the difference and support the developers who bring them to us. The risk with everything new that comes out is that very few will pay for it. Often, the major deterrent is the price. Once a price level reaches above a certain number, we begin to compare the price and the content with a disc-based game or a major AAA title. Look at the forums, and see how often it comes up!
So what if Home offered a subscription service? How would that work? How would it impact it’s user base? What would be the benefit of it?
Suppose there were three subscription options. Keep Home free to play of course, giving the user the option to spend as little or as much as they want. Then have three levels of subscriptions. For example, what if for five dollars a month, you could get access to only SCE developed content on a trial basis for the week of it’s release. So if SCE brings out a new space, or new clothes, then you get to play around with it for a week. Every update, you’d lose access to the previous week content, and get access the current release. Not every week sees new content from SCE, so a five dollar a month subscription would be a reasonable price to try a month’s worth of content.
The next level up would be ten dollars a month. For that price you’d get access to SCE content, and a few partnered developers. If Juggernaut, Granzella, and Heavy Water jumped on board, you’d get to try out their stuff for the month of its release. The monthly subscription would give you access to the spaces, the wardrobe items, the companions, and access to x7. This also gives you the option to still purchase items to keep permanently if you chose to. But like most content, you grow tired of it almost as soon as the checkout process is completed.
The top tier of subscription would be fifteen dollars a month. That’s about the standard for most MMOs, or rather 14.99. What would you get for that subscription price? How about access to everything, except for non-permanent commodities, like the green ticket, gift tokens, and Cutthroats coins, et cetera. And I mean everything, past and present, and not for just a week or a month, but for as long as your subscription is active. Unlimited access to all the content. That may be pushing it a little, as there a lot of developers at the moment. But what if it was still available with the developers who chose to partner up with the subscription program. Access to all the back catalog content from, let’s say, Lockwood, nDreams, or LOOT. Even if only SCE and a few third-party developers jumped on board, a fifteen dollar a month subscription for access to all their content would be an amazing deal. Core users who actually spend money in Home on a regular basis usually have a budget for what they will spend in Home. These budgets may range from five to ten dollars a week. That’s between twenty to forty dollars a month. Lowering that to fifteen would open it up to many more users, and plenty more who may hesitate to spend now may be more willing to spend that subscription price.
PlayStation Plus currently gives away a game or two a month with the subscription; if your subscription runs out, and you wait more than a month to renew it, you lose access to the free game for that month your subscription lapsed. The major criticism for Plus is that you don’t get to keep the games. Why is that a problem? If you love a game so much that you want to keep it, you can buy it. However, few games this console generation seem to have had that impact on us, and most, as soon as you play it through, you never touch again. Plus has given me access to games I never thought about buying, and yet I enjoyed a great deal; such as Costume Quest, Plants vs Zombies, Borderlands, and War Hammer. The other criticism is that the free games are older games. Again, I fail to see a problem here; if I’ve never played the game, it is new to me.
So perspective is a huge part of it. The older content in Home is something that is rarely looked at, because we are too focused on what the new flavor of the week is. If you had access to everything from SCE and a few developers in a subscription program, you may just be inclined to look through the older content as an addition to your current wardrobe. You may just want to spend time visiting those old spaces that are now forgotten if you had access to them with your subscription.
The shelf-life of the virtual goods is very limited; we are excited and intrigued when something new pops up for the first few days, but by the time the new content is announced for the following update only five to six days later, we are over it, and our sights are set on the next update. So limit the subscription a bit then, access to everything in the subscription developer partners for content that is at least two weeks old. New content at least for the first couple of weeks wouldn’t be part of the subscription access. Give the new content a chance to sell.
The platform exists already. The PlayStation Plus t-shirt and Plus halos, and the Batman motorcycle helmet are accessible in Home based on the current status of your subscription to PlayStation Plus and DC Universe Online respectively. When my DC Universe subscription expired, I lost that helmet in Home. So the system allows for giving you access to content, and then taking it away based on a subscription already. The question is, how would the Home community react the subscription program?
There would be the detractors of course. Just as we have seen with the x7 access being based on owning the mansion, but many would welcome such a program regardless of true ownership of the virtual goods. Many users would just accept that they are paying to rent the content rather than paying to own it. Keeping Home free to play would keep the status quo, but a subscription would be at the discretion of one’s personal choice.
September 14th, 2012 by BONZO | 3 comments
BONZO is an editor and artist for HomeStation Magazine.
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Repeat visits and multiply accounts are what makes money for developers. Hong Kong home seems to rely on other region users having an account otherwise it would be really dead instead of just dead, think we are too far along now. Any drastic changes to the way we pay for home will wait for PS4 release. Good article it makes me think would I pay or just switch to a game thats totally free online like RDR
Bear in mind, I wasn’t suggesting eliminating the free to play function that exists today. That option to spend as little or as much as you want needs to be there, but the suggestion would be to have an option for subscriptions that have their own benefits. Its like PSN is still free, but you have PSN+ that you have the option to pay for, and get perks from.
I think home has already soaked up enough of my wallet, a subscription would make me think otherwise just like wow did after a short while. Not to mention all the stability issues and lack of interaction with other avatars that a virtual world like Home should have already implemented.