Free World of Warcraft

[qwertyas]

Originally Posted by PrBlahBlahtson

Servers cost money to run. And new content/quests/spells/items are produced by people that have to be paid.

Maybe so, but when you buy a game that cost you around 75$(in Canada anyway) and that each addons cost the same, I think that you paid enough to get all of those servers running and people paid. And then you have to pay to play?

And it's not like you can play offline. At least if it had an offline play mode, you could decide if you wanted to pay for the online gameplay or enjoy it alone.

[Katt]

Originally Posted by qwertyas

And it's not like you can play offline. At least if it had an offline play mode, you could decide if you wanted to pay for the online gameplay or enjoy it alone.

Enjoy what alone? You wouldn't be able to do group quests, instances, PvP, raids, auction house, professions would be near useless etc. etc.

Seriously, is 15 dollars a month THAT big of a deal? And their expansions come out like once every 2 years... not like Guild Wars and Everquest.

EDIT: Also the expansions cost $10 less then what the orignal game cost (in the US). And your $15 doesnt just go to the people who make content. It also goes to their customer support and server maintenance for their 11 million subscribers.

[The_Nameless_One]

Originally Posted by qwertyas

Maybe so, but when you buy a game that cost you around 75$(in Canada anyway) and that each addons cost the same, I think that you paid enough to get all of those servers running and people paid. And then you have to pay to play?

And it's not like you can play offline. At least if it had an offline play mode, you could decide if you wanted to pay for the online gameplay or enjoy it alone.

I sense a flaw in your logic.

You pay 75 canadian dollars, and expect that to cover the costs of development/production, the fees of the server setups and other machinery, the added bills to keep the systems running (electricity for example), the fees for the people working on keeping the servers running, the fees and equipment of the people developing the content patches that are regularly released.....and so forth.

Unrealistic is the name of the detected flaw.
Sure it can cover decent parts of development costs etc due to large scale.
What cannot however be covered forever is keeping servers running (replacing parts periodically), technician fees etc.....if you dont pay monthly.
In that case your 75 bucks would run out, servers would crash for good and you're left with no gametime.


Sure I dislike paying monthtly too, but at least I understand the principle that without this payment, the fees to run servers/techs and produce content-patches cannot be covered for more than a small amount of time.


(oh...and private servers are illegal and therefore suck and are process-forum-unworthy.)

[qwertyas]

Originally Posted by The_Nameless_One

I sense a flaw in your logic.

You pay 75 canadian dollars, and expect that to cover the costs of development/production, the fees of the server setups and other machinery, the added bills to keep the systems running (electricity for example), the fees for the people working on keeping the servers running, the fees and equipment of the people developing the content patches that are regularly released.....and so forth.

Unrealistic is the name of the detected flaw.
Sure it can cover decent parts of development costs etc due to large scale.
What cannot however be covered forever is keeping servers running (replacing parts periodically), technician fees etc.....if you dont pay monthly.
In that case your 75 bucks would run out, servers would crash for good and you're left with no gametime.


Sure I dislike paying monthtly too, but at least I understand the principle that without this payment, the fees to run servers/techs and produce content-patches cannot be covered for more than a small amount of time.


(oh...and private servers are illegal and therefore suck and are process-forum-unworthy.)

Actually, I'm not a player of this game. But I don't like to have to pay more than the fee of the program to play in general. I mean, Bliz have SC and Diablo LOD II running and they don't ask a penny for the maintenance you talk about. And they haven't put those services for only a year or a few gamers! So why do it with Wow? Or any other games for that matter?

I'd actually like to see how much it cost for a compagny to produce said CD. If they didn't make a profit on selling the cd only, they wouldn't even produce it in the beginning.

[The_Nameless_One]

Originally Posted by qwertyas

Actually, I'm not a player of this game. But I don't like to have to pay more than the fee of the program to play in general. I mean, Bliz have SC and Diablo LOD II running and they don't ask a penny for the maintenance you talk about. And they haven't put those services for only a year or a few gamers! So why do it with Wow? Or any other games for that matter?

I'd actually like to see how much it cost for a compagny to produce said CD. If they didn't make a profit on selling the cd only, they wouldn't even produce it in the beginning.

True, Diablo and SC are run for free. (which is how I prefer it to be done). However...Blizzard has chosen a pay scheme for WoW. (perhaps since it requires loads more employees like techs and gamemasters online and servers. Plus doubt diablo for example had weekly maintenance to keep things running smooth etc.)
And they definitely wish to make a profit, like any healthy company.

But....you've missed the point I tried to make. (Likely due to me typing too much).

Seems to me this is how they decided it:

Content patches + technician fees + server running costs + profitmargin = monthly fee.
(more or less)

Development costs + production costs of disc (which is absurdly low) + ...whatever + profitmargin = Purchaseprice of game.

Take away the monthly fee......and poof go servers+technicians meaning unstable game with no help till it crashes. Oh...and no free new contentpatches or fixes.



(The world might be ending since apparently I'm defending blizzard now instead of yelling at them to lower their prices.)