$15 a month is nothing. Where else can you get so much entertainment for such a low price? I will happily pay.

I have played both pay-to-play and free-to-play MMOs, and I've got to say that I much prefer the PTP model. Why?

1) I can go anywhere, and do anything, without hitting a pay-wall

I have played a couple of FTP games where I've wanted to explore a new area, but get hit with the "this area will open if you pay us" nonsense. I hate it. Absolutely hate it. I like to explore sometimes, and getting restricted by pay walls is infuriating to me.

2) No pay-to-win

If I spend months grinding something out to get good gear or some sort of in-game boon, and the guy next to me just started yesterday and bought the same items with real money, it's a real turnoff to me. Some people will just throw a ton of money at a FTP game and will have all sorts of advantages that people with budgets or lower incomes just can't do.

3) The nagging to buy stuff

FTP games only make money by selling stuff in their shops. So they tend to nag you to buy stuff, or make it really inconvenient to do things without buying stuff. And they also tend to not give you great details about the stuff you're buying. So that if you do spend money in the shop, you might buy something that is in actual practice quite useless. I'd much rather spend 15 bucks and know what I'm going to get than to spend 10 bucks and gamble.

4) But the biggest thing is the community.

In the FTP games that I've played the community is childish, trollish, and just pretty much unhelpful unless you join a guild or a chat channel specifically set up to play the game better. FTP games also tend to have more gold spammers without a pay barrier to entry, which can flood zone chats with useless garbage. And ignoring them only helps for a few minutes until they create a new account. Meanwhile, I feel like the PTP games I've played have a more friendly atmosphere to them, with people willing to help you out with questions and if you get stuck on a certain quest. I can't tell you how many times I've seen questions in a zone chat on a FTP game, I answer helpfully, and I get a tell in response like, "wow, I thought I was just going to get flamed as being a noob. I can't believe I actually got a helpful response." If that is what you are expecting of a community, it's not a great vibe for a game.

this +1

Yup this is what I always try to explain. It's the cheapest entertainment around. Going out to a movie for 2-3 hours total of entertainment is almost $15... ($10.50). I'm sure the people complaining go out to a movie and are fine paying that price.

Going out to a decent restaurant cost more than $15 per person.

Cable tv I never watch is way more than $15.00, I'm thinking of canceling it because all I really do is play games or watch DVDs.. Speaking of DVDs... $15-20 per.

I can keep going but these guys should have gotten the point by now. You're paying 15 dollars for 24 hours a day for an entire month. That's a lot of cheap entertainment especially if the quality of the game is worth it!

Don't really mind the 13 euro's a month myself, as long as they keep their promise and deliver new content regularly. It's not that much, considering you usually pay 60 euro's for a game that lasts 15-20 hours.

What it really comes down to me for is whether or not they can keep me interested in the game, through whatever content they provide and keep providing. If they keep me interested, I'll just keep on paying the subscription.

I'm pretty curious as to what payment options they will allow though. They should also keep their European customers in mind and not just the North-American ones. Pre-paid cards would make the most sense to me.

Still, every post is yet another opinion on F2P vs P2P. Did anyone else actually read the article, or just the title?

I did read the article, and found it basically written by someone with very little sense of economics or history in the gaming world, other than a cursory glance at games and why the writer THINKS that they had trouble.

$15 has been a pretty standard fee for an MMO subscription for years. When you consider inflation, 15 bucks is worth less now than it was when this price was first applied to MMO subscriptions. So in real dollars, you're actually paying less for TESO than you were for WoW when it first came out.

I also think the author is interpretting the actions in his own mind, without actually thinking about it from a business perspective. He also ends with the trope of "I haven't played it at all, but I know it won't be worth it." Well how do you know you don't think its worth it if you haven't even played it. You can guess, but you can never say for certain.

"I don't like James Bond movies."

"Well, have you seen one?"

"No, I can just tell."

It's hardly a logical position to take. Much like this writer's stance.

That's not at all what I got from the article. What I read was a piece about how MMOs are basically the only thing that tries to act like both a product and a service. I'm not going to re-write my first post, though. It's still there to read.

If you think about it it makes sense, since MMOs are both a product and a service.

Yeah I read it. He whines and complains about having a sub fee and he has to buy the game and pay a month for as if it's not going to be worth it.

He's the type that's fine with paying 60 dollars for a single player game and spend 10-30 on DLC and then he's fine with shelving the game because of no replay value, no more content, no more updates.

I'm sure he's a gamer and buys more than one game a year so he spends more in single player games than you would an P2P MMO.

Have you ever played an P2P mmo before? If you have, you would notice they get new content, patches, bug fixes all the time for years. Sounds like a product and a service to me.

Exactly.

Would I have been happy if TESO had been just a subscription cost with no cost for the actual game? Sure. Do I understand why that wasn't done? Abso-freakin-lutely.