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Games Online: free and not free?

Stridder44

Stridder44

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Mar 24, 2003
3,973
198
California
I was thinking about this the other day when my friend was complaining about having to pay for Xbox LIVE, and I said you have to for most games. He replied that Blizzard games that use Battle.net don't. Guildwars doesn't either (yet World of Warcraft does) and it made me realize I don't know.


So why is it that some MMOs (like WoW) will charge when others (like Guildwars) are free? Or Battle.net (free) and XBox LIVE (not free)?
 
actually outside of MMPORG nearly all games are free.. MMPORG are despite warcraft more of a niche as a genre

Guildwars is financed through not dropping the price over time of the game and through selling half yearly add on packs which feature additional classes and dungeons etc.

actually that's a rather new concept so we will see if we see more such games in the future

why xbox live is costing money: somewhere microsoft is going have to make the money back

next time better put it in the games subforum
https://forums.macrumors.com/forums/101/
 
Why does World of Warcraft charge $15/mo, or whatever it is? Because 8 million people are willing to pay for it!
 
I guess what I'm curious about is do game companies like Blizzard charge monthly for an MMO (WoW) because they have to in order to keep all the servers running properly, or because they can and people will pay anyway?


If so, then why not Battle.net too? Wouldn't they need the money to keep B.net servers running too (think pre-World of Warcraft)? I can understand why XBox LIVE would charge (Microsoft's gotta make $$ back somewhere due to the huge lose they make with their consoles).


They way it looks to me is that running a server must not cost that much, if Blizzard can do it for years (people buying Starcraft/Diablo and not paying a cent monthly).
 
Stridder44 said:
I guess what I'm curious about is do game companies like Blizzard charge monthly for an MMO (WoW) because they have to in order to keep all the servers running properly, or because they can and people will pay anyway?


If so, then why not Battle.net too? Wouldn't they need the money to keep B.net servers running too (think pre-World of Warcraft)? I can understand why XBox LIVE would charge (Microsoft's gotta make $$ back somewhere due to the huge lose they make with their consoles).


They way it looks to me is that running a server must not cost that much, if Blizzard can do it for years (people buying Starcraft/Diablo and not paying a cent monthly).
Click to expand...

It's more than just the servers, though. It's about employee people to actively manage the servers, work to release bug fixes, introduce minor content additions, and generally balance the game.

With that said, Blizzard could surely get by charging less, but again, why would they?

Other companies might make a business model out of setting up free servers, but I doubt you'd see as much content development as you do elsewhere.
 
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