Every game I've played with lifetime subscriptions made a mistake:
- in 2014, many new games will 'revisit' their business model. When that happens lifetime subscribers get upset.
- when you login to a subscription game, you meet people who like the game enough to continue paying for it. Lifetime subscribers aren't part of that group.
- lifetime subscribers tend to have (perhaps rightly) a view that they are 1st class citizens, and their views are more important than everyone else.
Otherwise, I assume there will be a yearly/quarterly subscription option (cutting down the payment processing fees should save zenimax a bit).
To be honest i'm not sure what i'll be doing in a year so i'll be damned if i'll shell out money that far ahead, i may not be even playing ESO after three months let alone 12 months.
Also shelling out for a year only to find after 6 months the game goes free to play = egg on face..
You do realize not all the subs they have now are the same ones they had at launch? I played at launch, so did a lot of my friends... out of like 10 only one person is still playing today and even he took a long break at some point... WOW may have slightly larger numbers... but i said AVERAGE... so look at the other MMO`s... most went F2P, hell EA even said most people did not want to pay 15$/month that`s why SWTOR went down, he may be right as you have seen a lot of people don`t want a sub.
You get -1 for thinking that the same people that played WOW at launch kept paying, then more came, nobody unsubbed until they reached 12 mil... LOL. They could still have a 6months/1year average sub per person... because as far as i know it has close to 100mil account made, but only 8 mil playing. Then, as i said, you have the other MMO`s where things are worse.
A lifetime sub from a guy that will pay the sub monthly(so no 1 year deals) for 2 years is them losing money... but a lifetime sub for a guy who would quit after 6-12 months is a win for them. And the numbers say that most players never sub for 2 years... if they did every MMO that launched would be a hit...
Think about that and stop misleading people.
That's funny. It's always the same story in these sub polls - the vast majority are happy as things are.
I'll concede the annual thing tho. I wouldn't offer a big discount, but the idea of making a small saving annually ie
Monthly fee: $15
Yearly fee: $180 -> 20% off -> $144
That would make some degree of sense. The things is, the vast majority would probably still pay monthly just due to the amount. I can see how it would be less risk to Zenimax though.