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The two problems I see with your analogy to books is that books don't have an ongoing cost for infrastructure maintenance which online services do. I wouldn't p
by ehnus 16y ago
The two problems I see with your analogy to books is that books don't have an ongoing cost for infrastructure maintenance which online services do. I wouldn't put it past EA to figure out the cost of services provided with a game diminishes over time with one owner, but if someone new were to pick up the game and start playing then they would be incurring a heavier system load than originally forecast.
Book publishers also generally aren't trying to recoup $50-100,000,000 development budgets.
- dman 16y agoIn that case it would be a simpler mental model for the user to just decouple the usage cost from the game cost aka the World of Warcraft model. Why let the original purchaser play as much as they want, cap their usage too (~40-50 hrs of playtime for free) and charge them for usage beyond that. Also if the cost of running servers is so high and such a big drag,why dont they let third parties run game servers and charge a fee. That way competition among game server hosting companies would bring the price down closer to what it should be in the real world.
- ehnus 16y agoThat doesn't address my second point of recouping high development costs. Anyways, they would have to coordinate this with the platform providers which tend to keep things bolted down quite tightly when it comes to the provision of online services. Are there even any console games available for the Xbox 360 or PS3 that charge monthly fees?