Brenlo has said that your Station Pass money is distributed proportionally among the games you play based on the time you play them.
Well, if SOE can do that with their games, why can’t they do that with other people’s games?
I’d pay $29.99 a month if my “Station Pass” could buy me access to EQ1, EQ2, Vanguard, LotRO, World of Warcraft, Dungeon Runners, Gods & Heroes, Star Trek Online… I’d pay even MORE, probably.
Why restrict it to just SOE’s games? There’s got to be a valid business model in here somewhere. I bet Auto Assault (or even City of Heroes) would be doing better for NCSoft if all the two millions of World of Warcraft players in NA and Europe could drop by for a look.
Someone will make this happen. Having to pay $15/month/game makes us choose unnecessarily between one or two games. Why not $30/month for all games? The money distributed to the game publishers in the proportion I play them? If I am 100% into WoW this month, Blizzard makes double their normal fee (minus the percentage the brokerage takes)! If I play just WoW and City of Heroes, NCSoft and Blizzard get their due as well.
SOE, please, do this before someone else does it. Break off your Station Pass/Launchpad business, negotiate with MMO publishers large and small, and make this happen. Somebody will. It’s what people want.
Asian players often play in Internet cafes and support (from what I understand) a “play by the minute/pay by the minute” deal that allows the Asian market to support tons of MMOs both large and small. So. Millions of gamers in the world already have this sort of deal and it has given Asian MMOs success undreamt in the West (except for Blizzard, who is doing so well worldwide precisely because it does support this).
So… come on, SOE… Make it happen before someone else does.
4 thoughts on “An MMO Brokerage?”
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I love that idea. But i doubt any other company would sign up for it. Blizzard and the other companys, want your 15 bucks. With a station access thing there a chance that there player might not play there game as much meaning for every player they won’t get the 15 bucks.
So to the sales department of though games is going to see it as a very bad thing.
I don’t have an active WoW subscription because I can’t afford it. So they lost ALL of my $15/month when I returned to EQ2. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to play WoW occasionally, and maybe if I hadn’t had to make the choice between WoW and EQ2, I might have bought the BC expansion and really gotten back into WoW.
As it is, I have to ask myself if playing WoW again is worth giving up EQ2.
Now SOE is asking, do I like Vanguard enough to give up EQ2? And after trying it out in beta, I decided… not yet. Maybe in a year, when Vanguard is finished, it is so wonderful that I want to play that. So EQ2 loses all my $15.
Maybe Warhammer or Conan is so compelling that I want to play those. I have to make that decision again, and this time I decide I like Warhammer more than whatever I’m playing now. Now SOE and Blizzard get NONE of my money, EA/Mythic gets it all.
No game is an island. We Western gamers go along with this model because it’s all we’ve known. Innovation is stifled because every game has to be all things to all people in order to grab a player’s entire MMO pie. Eastern gamers get better deals, they have hundreds of games to choose from in genres we can’t even guess at. Golf and tennis MMOs? MMOs about… I dunno… working in a hospital? Corporate politics?
Instead we get overblown games tossed out way before they’re ready which can’t focus on one or two specific areas they might do well but have to provide the entire package because the only business model the big players will accept is This Game Shall Be Your Only Game And Ye Shall Have No Other.
I wonder if Sigil ever stepped back and said, hey, we have this Diplomacy thing that has never been done in an MMO before, and we have all this generic fantasy crap that has been done a zillion times before. Raiders? Yeah, we have to have raids. Crafters? Yeah, we have to have crafting. Group play? Yeah, we gotta do that. Solo play? Yeah, we gotta do that because we want EVERYONE from WoW and EQ2 and DAoC and FFXI Online to be positive they will get to do everything they already did in some other game because we want them to stop playing that other game and play ours.
Why not… take that diplomacy idea… and MAKE a game based upon seizing control of cities via Diplomacy, making political parties, spreading rumors and increasing the sphere of control and set it in an innovative setting like Renaissance Italy? Along the Medicis and the Donatellos… and the Machiavellis… I mean, REALLY get into politics and hierarchies and famous families and diplomacy, assassination and war… The battles between the Church and State… Florence and Genoa and Venice and Rome…
Instead, it’s a minigame in a generic fantasy because they have to have it all and will in the end get something less than they want and due to its generic sameness will never stand out from the crowd.
The MMO world is in stagnation at the moment, and it’s largely (in my humble opinion) due at the root to an “all or nothing” business model.
At least Turbine is willing to let us try Lord of the Rings Online for a lesser price that makes it more economical for me to have only an EQ2 subscription AND a LotrO subscription than to have a Station Pass and not be able to afford to try out new games.
For those of us with MMO ADD, this would be perfect =) I have subscriptions active to 5 different games…thats a hell of a lot of money =P/
I’ve been actively playing EQ2 and WoW, but with LotR on the horizon one of those two are going to have to go. Sigh, maybe the lifetime LotR subscription is the way to go.