MMO Subscription Fees: Are we moving past that?
With several triple-A MMORPGs finding new ways for gamers to pay for their MMOs, we could be seeing a revolution in MMO business models!
With so many new MMORPGs on the way, it's rather obvious that the next year or two will most likely mark the beginning of a high season for MMO gamers. From a graphical and game play point of view, players will certainly have a plethora of different "styles" to choose from, whether it's Final Fantasy XIV's stunning next-gen graphics and unique combat system, or All Points Bulletin with its Grand Theft Auto (GTA) inspired graphics and… well… GTA-inspired system. I can think of almost half a dozen MMO's that I'm really excited to play in the next year, and almost a half dozen more that I'm interested in checking out. Either way, looking at all of these new MMO challengers, it's certainly clear that some companies are poised to take on the current MMORPG behemoth, World of Warcraft, and they're going to be fighting with some fresh ideas.
But how else can an MMORPG development team challenge those age-old "assumptions" that seem to plague every industry? Well, these days it seems that one of the latest things to come under the microscope (and with a startling amount of success) has very little to do with how one plays an MMO, but, rather, how one pays for an MMORPG. That's right, I'm talking about subscription fees and how a few forward thinking companies in the industry have managed to give this archaic system the push toward change that it really needed.
Paying subscription fees has, since the very beginning, been one of the defining features of an MMO, and many MMO gamers can probably remember a time at least once in their lives when they've been mocked for having to pay $15 a month "just" to continue playing a game they like. For anybody who remembers, many MMORPGs that came from Asia for the first time (Ragnarok Online, Sword of the New World, MapleStory, etc) were all subscription based at one point or another. I remember when I was in High School and Ragnarok Online went subscription based in 2001; since I was still a minor, I was too afraid to ask my mom to use her credit card, so I ended up paying for the game subscription via money orders sent through the mail (that's right: using stamps and envelopes!).
As more and more subscription-based MMOs came into the market, however, more companies were discovering that the industry was rapidly becoming super-saturated, and so they made the shift back to the popular Asian revenue model - free-to-play, but with micro-transactions available to purchase luxury items. It was here that the industry cleaved itself in half, with "lesser quality" MMORPGs all going free-to-play, while most triple-A MMOs, like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XI, decided to collectively share the subscription-based MMO industry.
Flash forward to today, and you'll see that many industry leaders are realizing that the subscription-based MMO market is becoming super-saturated once again. This time, however, since there is a perceived "stigma" surrounding free-to-play MMORPGs, companies have been, finally, figuring out ways to create newer revenue models to keep up with today's consumers.