I'll be happy to pay $15.00 a month for quality future content.

15$ so lets see 50cents a day hmm what else can I do for hours and hours for 50 cents a day. the game is amazing id divorce my wife and marry it if I could just sayin. I love you ESO will you be my valentine?

Good points all... Just wait until these guys pay highway tolls and car tags and then hit potholes... I can hear up screaming now lol...

Not that I think the sub isn't worth it but running costs are fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Development is what costs. Operating servers and even customer support are cheap in comparison. Many moons ago Blizzard published detailed figures for this. From memory they were spending up to $50 million a year on customer support but revenue was close to $2 billion. I'll spare everyone reaching for a calculator - that's 2.5% revenue spent on customer support. The cost of running the servers was probably much lower than that. While WOW is an extreme case, server costs and customer support should be roughly proportional to number of players so I reckon it'd be reasonably safe to say that less than 5-10% of subscription revenue is spend on running costs.

I agree.

I decided to give Star Trek Online a second look when they introduced the Romulan content and with much better tutorial content I actually stuck around and enjoyed it for a while.

But in various ways the game is designed to irritate everyone (including subscribers!) into spending money to circumvent said irritations. If one is disinclined to reward that kind of design by pouring money into their pockets.... well the game just becomes generally irritating fairly quickly.

Paying $15 a month not be irritated, asked to gamble or have my sense of immersion kicked in the nads by thinking about spending real world money inside the game, works for me.

I just want bulk pricing. 6 - 12 month payment plants work much better for me.

They said when they announced the payment model that there would be more details about things like bulk pricing later, but oddly enough we still haven't heard anything about it.

Pricing is standard and I'm used to paying these prices with WoW, EQ, Lotro, Swtor, rift before most of these all went f2p and ever since they went f2p I never played them again.

Well except for lotro... Something about that game keeps bringing me back. Of course I still play WoW it's the only quality mmo that still has my interest.

I quit playing those f2p games because of the lack of content, horrible community they turn into, nonexistent bug fixes, horrible support, gates, having to spend more than 15 a month to get the full experience.

I mean I would have played swtor again if that new DLC they added wasn't a pvp thing but had a pve version... Pvp isn't my thing and bioware said it's too "costly" to add any more story content... Have you seen their forums lately? They're complaining about not being able to get any content, bugs not being fixed, lots of other things and the devs tell them it's too costly lol, welcome to f2p. Yet they say they are profitable... Hmm weird.

If ESO was f2p or b2p I wouldn't buy or play it because I already know what I would be in for, I prefer quality over a freebie like most of the kids like these days, they don't care and they seem to worship gw2 and their model, I mean hey if that game is so great just don't worry about ESO anymore and continue to play gw2, what are we complaining about?

Oh you wanted to play a new elder scrolls game without a sub? Well wait for the next single player game to come out, you should be used to the waiting by now.

Perhaps you have a hobbit fetish.

How do you feel about large hairy feet?

LotRO is the only MMO that I bought a lifetime subscription for.

The pricing is fine. Comparing running an MMO + updates to Skyrim with DLC is ridiculous. It takes a ton of manpower and money to run servers capable of what ESO's are, and the added content is icing on the cake. Who are you to dictate what $15 buys? It buys a game with integrity every month. If you want to see what F2P does to games, go play Rift or GW2 and you'll see why a pay model is so much better.

$15 a month is fine, but the exchange rate woes that some folks are facing are unfortunate.

People pay $50+ a month on television, this is cheap as a primary form of entertainment.

I just wonder how the people not able to spend 50 cents a day on entertainment managed to get computers capable of running TESO in the firstplace...

Quite certain you're wrong. As I pointed out a few posts up some companies have released this info and demonstrated how very low the cost of maintenance is, even including the really big expense of paying customer service staff.

I've seen the f2p model do horrible things to some games but GW2 is b2p not f2p and I don't play it regularly but I pop in occasionally and have never seen any indication of that payment model hurting them. They made a hell of a lot more than they needed or expected from box sales so financially I think they're so comfortable that they don't need to put the squeeze on. Could you give some examples of GW2 badness?

A penny saved is a penny earned. Which are pennies you can spend later to buy computers.

I have a hard time to believe someone who cannot spare even 50 cents a day on his entertainment would save penny by penny to buy a gaming computer (as opposed to, well, food).

Whatever profits they made with the original sales went to the suits long ago. Now the suits are only interested in how much the game can make them NOW. The badness lies in the fact a significant portion of developer time is spent not on how to make the game better, but on how to squeeze more money out of the players. Google this "Why I'm happy ESO is not F2P", read the reddit article. It has an interesting insider view on how F2P games work.

I Googled it, its worth the read!

As already said,if you are a grown up and you have a job,15$ a month isn't such a big of a deal.

Perhaps it might be if you are under aged or unemployed,but if you are unemployed,you should really try to find a job ASAP,and this game is the least important reason to do so.

Now if you have a job,and still don't want to be paying this subscription fee,you should ask yourself a few questions,like do you think you will like the game enough for it to be the main thing you will be spending your free time on ?

If once you finish a day's work all you want is to have something you are familiar with and is funny to spend some time on,perhaps an MMO would be a good idea,and in that case TESO.

If it's not like that and lets say you want to play numerous games,and just finish their campaign / single player mode once and not touch them again,then probably this game isn't for you.

You could still buy the game once and try to finish the "main questline / story" during the month that comes bundled,if you only care for story though.

Oh, you're certain? How am I wrong? Is it more expensive to upkeep Skyrim than ESO? Please enlighten me on how I'm wrong about what I said please.

You pop into GW2 once in awhile? Oh, how knowledgeable that must make you on it! The fact they have a cash shop that [censored]s out the integrity of the game to make money is why it svcks. Being able to buy experience boosters, special pets and locking the best aesthetic textures behind a cash shop makes a game garbage. When you pay $15 / month, everyone is on equal footing. When it's F2P (after the initial buy) and has a cash shop, it will never be equal footing. The integrity of the game dies.

Some numbers seem inflated though. $8k per month salary ?

Depends. There is a simple formula to calculate the funprice factor.

For example:

I bought Rage for 50 euro and only played it for 2 hours. Game svcked. So I paid 50/2=25 euro per hour which is a funprice factor of 1/25=0.04 funprice which is low.

I pre-ordered TESO for 90 euro. Say i pay 12 months 13 euro thats a whopping 246 euro. But if i play 8 hours a week that is 416 hours a year. 1/(246/416)=1,70 funprice which i high. So then the price is right because i know i will play more then 8 hours a week.

I'm undecided about the $15 a month because I've only ever played 2 online games that required payment that being world of Warcraft at $35 a month and The Hunter at $49 for 12 months but I'm a huge fan of the elder scrolls since I first played Daggerfall.

I would guess you have never played a quality MMO before? $15 a month (comes out to .50 cents a day) is par for the course for AAA MMOs. Unless you want blatant money grabs that other "F2P" mmos have, such as having to buy black lion keys to open loot chests in GW2 for example, you should welcome a subscription.

Also, whats with all the people expecting free stuff these days? Have we all become beggars? Bethesda is not a charity, it is a business. Data Center space is very expensive (well over 100k a MONTH!), Servers, depending on the configuration, can be over 10k each. Thrown in the switches and routers and we are talking big money. It costs money to keep the game running, pay the employees etc...

I can't understand this gamer begging mentality.

The monthly fee seems in line with other monthly-fee based subscriptions I've had in the past ie WoW.

From what I've seen of the game content I'd say it's certainly worth it. My WoW subscription is already stopped, and will be replaced with this.

Completely agreed. I think, to put it fairly bluntly, there are a number of trolling threads, a large proportion of whom are simply making a fuss and complaining about everything, on the basis they can't afford the monthly fees.

The fees are in line with most modern games.

The thing is, many games DONT have long term appeal. Think back to when WoW released. I probably used to buy a game every month or so, as most of them didn't have much long term appeal. When I started out in WoW, I was paying arounf ￡8 a month. I played nothing but that game for quite a long time. The net effect was that I spent LESS money on games thatn I otherwise would have, and it WAS good... until they catered for the elitists and killed the community in the process. It's kinda old news now anyway, and has had it's day.

I'm looking forward to ESO, and I know it's a great game. I'm aware there are bugs, but it's a test phase - what do you expect. Most MMOs have bugs on release, even the legendary WoW. I remember servers failing under load, terrain glitches, broken quests. All sorts. But they were fixed. A lot of the money was used for improving the game. In the longer term, when people are commited to subs, it's investment funds to add new content and enhance the game. It cuts the risk for the developers in funding expansions and content.

Thumbs up for ESO