Is 15$/month the best way to go?

The title really explains my main thought. many of my friends have told me that the main thing that drives them away from MMOs is because of the continual price. What makes developers choose that particular number. Lets look at WAR. Lets just say it has 500k subscribers because we really don't know, it might be a bit generous but who knows? If they are charging 15 bucks a month excluding the price of the game they are pulling in 7.5 million every year.

But what would happen if Mythic changed the pricing from 15$/m to say 5$/m? To make that change worthwhile they would need an extra 1 million subscribers. If WAR has 500k subs now you have to think where did the other 200-300k people went who signed up for the beta. Perhaps if Mythic dropped down the price they would instantly get those extra 300k people back who had originally signed up for beta. Now we know that there isn't any way that all of them would come back, but we do know that there would have been plenty of people interested in WAR before release who didn't sign up to the beta so 300k could be a fair estimation.

5$/month isn't a lot of money at all and I reckon Mythic could easily get an extra 700k subs very quickly if they dropped it down. A lot of people wouldn't think it too much of a stretch to have a WAR sub and a WoW sub then as it doesn't cost a whole lot more. Without too much imagination this seems an viable payment plan for Mythic so why don't they try it out?

Although, if we do say that this all goes fine, and Mythic get their extra 700k subs then that is purely breaking even with the old plan, then comes the issue of profit. Mythic would need 3x more people to get the same amount of profit. Then it becomes questionable.

1 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Well to me the money is not an issue, the gameplay is. If a game is fun enough it really doesn't matter if it's 5$ or 15$. It does however matter if I want to try out a game, since I'm not very happy to pay 15$x2 until I can figure out which one I like the more.

Maybe it would help WAR, or maybe not. I doubt they could make EA agree to it though. The market is pretty adjusted to the "standard" 15 bucks and charging lower would seem stupid in their eyes.

 
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