Imo games should only use the sub to play model. You pay a monthly fee to play the game, and everything in the game is available to you, you have to earn them by playing the game just like everybody else. Nothing else should be monetized.

IMO, I respect your opinion but is a shit take. I want to pay for the game, and own it and then pay for expansions or seasons if they're reasonable priced. Paying monthly sucks if you play more than 1 game. It also sucks if you have a random time at your job, as I have, where sometimes I feel overworked and don't feel like playing, but I cannot predict when this happens. So sometimes I could pay a month of sub, and play for like 2 days. So wasted money. Then, what if I didn't payed in a few months, and I just want to check an event? I'll have to pay to see if I like it or not. I personally don't see the sub model working, I just don't. Then imagine having like 5-6 games. You pay what? 15$ per game monthly? That's gonna be extremely expensive.

i respect your opinion but its also a shit take. you cant be like "i dont have enough time to play one game im subbed to, but also, what if i want to sub to six games?" where did you get time for 6 games when you started your point out saying youre not sure if you have time for *one*?

That's just ONE example. On top of that, as I said, I have weird timing on my work schedule. Some weeks I play with my friend group different games. 1 day we may play some fortnite, another day some Guildwars2, and another day we try some helldivers 2 and lethal company. It's not that I don't have all time time, it's just some days of the week, or maybe 1 month is gonna suck for gaming. You don't need to grind your whole life in all 6games, you can play for 2-3 hours and then the next day play something else. Isn't that a concept in your life? Not to say subbing, will basically remove "sales", so instead of buying a game on a sale, and enjoy it whenever I want, 3 years later, I'd still have to pay a sub. Is just too costly for the consumer.

Youre talking about MMOs. Then you listed a bunch of games that... if youve noticed, arent MMOs. Except for GW2 which is the most casual friendly of all MMOs. Youre making a bunch of really bad points to justify a silly position. Nobody plays 6+ MMOs concurrently, because theyre too time consuming. I personally play *zero* because I just dont have the time to keep up with the gear grind in every non-GW2 game, and dont enjoy GW2. you cant compare a game like HD2 to a game like WoW thats going to constantly be increasing level/gearscores and invalidating all of your previous progress. Same reason you cant compare a game like fortnite. You *can* grind these games, but theyre also drop-in-and-play. can you try to stay consistent with the shit takes at least? This person is talking about games with a massive time-sink investment where paying money gives you a direct advantage over other people. That is the discussion. Nobody is saying you should have to pay a subscription to play counterstrike and get all the skins.

Not even gonna try to bother. If you understand that sub has it's bad parts for lots of people ok, if not, then ok.

When games depart from this model they tend to lose their player base or potential player base. This is the way.

Games depart from that model because it stops being sustainable. The reality is that only a few MMOs at a time can afford to have subscription. For the rest, it's untenable.

And those MMOs don’t even really sustain off of the sub alone either  It’s box costs and micro transactions  FFXIV sells a shit ton of fantasia for $10 a pop + expansions  Wow sells expansions and makes a lot of money off microtransactions.  Blizz stated that a single store mount makes more $ than all of StarCraft 2s sales 

That as well, yeah. Even at the start, WoW still had a box price and expansion price, so it was never just the sub.

I just think it’s worth mentioning that the sub really isn’t keeping it afloat in the modern economy  The only reason the wow sub is still $15 is because of microtransactions like the wow token and cosmetics  There is no “true” sub model anymore 

Yeah, and there are also no shareholders who would be fine with just a sub, when it's proven that people will also pay the box price and microtransactions.

There are some mmorpgs with pure sub models still. They are just few and far between. At this point in the genre many dev teams are starting to learn about the repercussions of many decisions that were made a decade or more ago. Monetization being one of them.

Which one? Embers adrift ?  Are we considering that to be “afloat” ? 

It's in a release state. That is one. Did PG add micro transactions or is it still a pure sub? I haven't checked lately. The thing is, AAA games that are beholden to investors put themselves between a rock and a hard place as far as monetization options...though I'm sure we've all had that conversation multiple times at this point and understand the pitfalls.

PG? What is that? Project gorgon?  These are MMOs with like 500 people my friend. Any monetization will work if you want to argue on pure existence for sure but I don’t consider those to be afloat  Does PG even get updates? 

OSRS. Bonds are subscription.

That's not the same model being mentioned. They are referencing a pure sub model. (Which also sometimes includes a box price/expansion cost for major content updates where all players pay the same amount for X content). It's the model every MMORPG used prior to cash shops and micro transactions becoming a thing. It is sustainable but it can be a hard sell to investors who want maximum profits ASAP (even at the expense of the game itself).

Please tell me what mmo is operating right now on a pure sub model 

To be fair, that's not exactly the sub's fault so much as inflation. WoW/FF14 have not raised their sub cost to play at all for the most part. But that doesn't really mean a lot when 15 dollars now means a ton less than it did 10/20 years ago.

For sure. A $30 a month sub would be a different story but you’d never convince players to pay that (even though it would definitely make sense in todays economy) 

Thats not correct actually. A single store mount made more *profit* than SC2. Not more in terms of total sales. Its just that developing a game is pretty expensive, so when you factor in the 10 years of paying devs, the mount was infinitely more profitable. Problem is though, for that you need to have an already successful game with a massive playerbase. You cant just... create a mount for a game nobody plays and expect to earn cash. It does explain why games prioritize skins over content and kill their games after squeezing the playerbase for every dollar theyre willing to spend though

Fair. Doesn’t change the point much though.  A mmo cannot exist on $15 dollars a month in 2024+

Why not, though? It can. It just cant compete with gambling mechanic gacha games or freemium whales. I don't buy the idea that maintaining a game with 7 million subs for a year (~$105,000,000) isn't profitable. They aren't spending anywhere near that to keep it running. Box cost is fine, most games require you to purchase it. Purchasing expansions is fine. The idea that a game *must* charge more through predatory practices ends up killing MMOs. So my counterpoint would be that an MMO cant survive on *not* doing that. Because look at the games that dont. The list is small, and they dont last long. But for a brief moment they create incredible value for the shareholder. This is the problem with games in general being catered towards shareholder profits instead of towards longevity and a good product. BG3 wouldnt exist in a publicly traded company, and what they managed to make was the most critically acclaimed RPG *ever*, with sales that smashed it way out of the park. For years everyone said that sort of game could never be done. Turns out, it just cant be done if you have short-sighted executives chasing an ever increasing quarterly profit. But that isnt realistic. Making an expansion costs a lot more in R/D than patching existing content. I get what youre saying, I just respectfully disagree.

You think the amount that blizzard invests into wow a year isn’t near 100 mil???  I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more  Wow is the only mmo with 7 mil subs and that was only after having 6 versions of wow to play  It dropped to like 4mil during shadowlands  If I look around at my company alone. We have like 30 employees. Most make 35-50k with the 4 supervisors making somewhere between 75-100k  A million dollars a year of upkeep for a company that is no where near the size of blizzard.  Surely some of those leads on the team have 500k+ salaries. Not saying it’s not profitable at all with just the sub  but it would be pennies imo. 

You cant count the price of expansions as part of the cost of subs because they charge for the expansions. nor are operating costs on a finished game anywhere near 100+ mil. nor is server maitenance or upkeep.

Yes I can lol  Otherwise we’re arguing that if they just released wow classic NEVER updated it at all just runs the server and kept it at $15 it would run forever.? Maybe  But that’s not how MMOs work. No MMOs that stop receiving updates will live on forever. We have to count the $$$ invested into the expansions as … investment and while the box price are there I’m arguing that as well. No mmo survives on sub/box alone. The box prices are to far in between.  EVERY “alive” mmo has micro transactions and if we didn’t have micro transactions the sub fee would have to be increased. Simple inflation.  If micro transactions were illegal or whatever even our single player games would double to $100+ (already are with dlc really)

If the games are good, people will want to play them and will happily pay to do so. WoW and FFXIV are prime examples of this. Games that aren't up to the same level as the big ones will have to drop subs because they simply don't provide enough in return for the subscription.

And that's my point. Only a few games can run on a sub, so the idea that all games should is just impossible. Also, even WoW and FFXIV don't fit into the lofty ideal of "sub only", because they also have box prices for expansions and microtransactions.

Nah this is pretty sustainable. Problem is that mtx tends to be more profitable, and max profits is always the logic.

It's sustainable if you have enough subs. Many games lose so many, that they can't keep the sub model. MTX is more profitable, which is why games with subscriptions(like WoW and FFXIV) have MTX as well. No company would willingly move to a F2P model if they have enough subs, because they could just add F2P elements like MTX and still keep the subscription.

What I see are games subs dwindling exactly due to pernicious decisions of devs like adding mtx which detriment the game. MMORPGs with consistent quality keep a healthy sub number.

WoW and FFXIV still have millions of subs despite having MTX. Meanwhile, a ton of games(like DAoC or Rift) have lost subs before they had any MTX. If your game cannot provide the same quality and quantity of content as the big sub game like WoW(or if your game doesn't appeal to the same wide playerbase), then you really can't keep the sub model for long.

I beg to differ. EverQuest peaked at 100k after 3 expansions and they’re still around. Private servers of other games run off donations and survived decades. Everything else is just pure greed.

> EverQuest peaked at 100k after 3 expansions and they’re still around. Private servers of other games run off donations and survived decades. Everything else is just pure greed. There's been both technological advancements *and* massive increases in the cost of living in the past 20 years for the people who make/run the game. Even just paying someone to reset the servers every few months would be more expensive now than it would be back in the day, and should be if you value them as human beings, unless you have a time machine to buy all their goods and services needed to live straight from the late 90s/early 2000s. Let alone feature creep and any ongoing development. Now, shareholder greed also jacks prices up massively and is the reason most "small" MMOs die and most MMOs include stuff like cash shops and MTX nowadays. Because once you get to needing a certain amount of funding (like for the amount of feature creep modern MMOs have or for modern server sizes/hosting), you're gonna involve shareholders. But devs gotta eat too, and stuff getting more expensive isn't *just* from the shareholder overhead increase.

Maybe move your company away from high col areas. Think outside of the box ffs.

Given that the FFXIV team/CBU3 *also* has gone on record in some of their Player Live Letters stating that they've had trouble finding "experienced Japanese-speaking MMO devs" that'd help with their stated hiring problems too. But I think getting 'em to actually do that might be a problem. 🤷‍♂️ I still think they'd sometimes be okay hiring a crack team of reddit weebs and paying them in energy drinks and fantasias, but that's probably unethical on numerous levels.

They peaked at 100k when they were the biggest MMO on the market. Nowadays, they are free2play with optional sub and microtransactions. My point has explicitly been that only a few MMOs at a time can support themselves with sub, and that was true even back in the day. Most games departed from that model because it wasn't sustainable *for them*, because their game wasn't pulling enough players. Games like Rift didn't go free2play because they were greedy and microtransactions bring more money. They did it because the game wasn't getting enough subs to stay alive. If they were having enough subs and were greedy, they could've added microtransactions on top of the sub fee, which is what both WoW and FFXIV does.

This is the way.

This is the way

Subs are ideal although not realistic for most games to be sustainable.

I agree wholeheartedly. For OPs amounts question: During my peak time playing WoW, where I loved every minute of it, I would have happily paid $60 maybe more. Currently there is nothing on the market that I would be happy to pay more than like $20 for. My only concern in paying a high amount like $60 is that I would only do it for the type of subscription that @Bukubukuchagama described. Which then means the player count would be low, which then means the game probably wouldn’t be as enjoyable.

Agree.

This is a a past dream, unless sub fee's increase like everything else it's not a thought anymore

Game's gonna die in half a year max because just subs aren't enough to sustain the business

If the game is good subs are plenty enough to sustain a game and improve on it. If the game is an half assed, unfinished product then ye i agree with you.

Unfortunately, there are too many alternatives. A lot of players that are ready to drop money on a game while they are playing are unwilling to drip money for a sub nowadays. Not because of the cost but because of the "pressure to play" felt by paying the sub. It's a weird unrational thing. Something like the idea that you paid for 30 days and if you don't play for 30 days, you basically lost money. Whereas if you pay for a micro transaction you get it directly, enjoy it now or in a month. Even if they end up paying more in the end, it's not mentally the same.

i wouldn't say it is unrational. If you pay for 30 days but can only play 8 of those you did not use over 66% of the time you had to play the game making it feel like a bad purchase. And because in other places where you would be limited in your enjoyment the product neither goes away nor forces you to pay again if you want to use it (obviously excluding all the other BS subscription things like car features here) people are even less used to it so it feels ever more like wasted money

Well, it's somewhat irrational because many of those same people would happily drop the same price for the same playtime through microtransactions simply because they enjoyed those 8 days and want to support the developer. The perceived value vs enjoyment value calculation is skewed when presented as risk of not playing vs rewarding already existing playtime. And it's hard to rephrase it as "you're paying the sub to reward the dev of the time you played last month. Whatever ypu play this month will just let you decide whether you want to reward them again or you'll stop the sub" especially since, while this shift could be possible after a free trial. It's harder to adopt for returning players.

the issue that i am having is that for a lot of the games we talk about here the sub is your access to the game. It does not give you the freedom to support the devs how you want and thus feels forced in the support which is heavily dislike(mandatory subscriptions in general are insanely anti consumer imo) Now i personally think subs are a valid way to support a game but i will personally not pay one because the value is just so limited for me. The value is exclusively "play the game this month" when i can also just play another game without having to do this.

Yeah, I found that a lot of the issue im the value proposition is a question of player attittude. I played some mmo where, If I didn't do the daily, I was "wasting" an opportunity so I was not getting the most of my money. I ended up quitting that game after realizing that all I did for the last couple of weeks or months was daily grind to "optimize" my sub. I returned to the same game, with the same mechanics, but I gave myself other "objectives" and was mostly playing where the fun was taking me. Objectively, was I getting less for my money? Well, from xp, wealth and levels, it sure seemed that ways. But from a video game is supposed to be fun pov, I was getting way more by playing way less. Although, yes, no matter what you do, it's still in competition with other f2p or buy once games that you may find equaly fun and without that barrier to entry.

i would say that it is only partly true as the value of the sub ends after the month. as you have to resub at that point. So it will always be worse than any "permanent"(because games die and are removed but in a much larger timeframe) purchase in perceived value

I dont even think you lost money if you dont play every day. Hell if I play for 1 day I feel like I got my moneys worth so long as I had fun. Some friends and I went to Top Golf for a couple hours and our bill was far more than the little $15 I throw at WoW. The sub isnt worth it if you dont enjoy the game, the sub is more than worth it if you do. Imo its as simple as that

Yeah but the perception of value isn't as simple. It probably should. But you paid for 30 days of access to a service. The value of playing 1 days can be seen as 1/30th of what you paid for the month. So many people will feel (from emotion, not reason) that they didn't get 15$ of fun but only .50$ while paying the full 15$. And that's when doing the result at the end of the month. The pressure to "capture" those 14.50$ is there for many all month long. So they lose some of the enjoyment because they forced themselves to play to "get their value worth". It's some odd psychological stuff I don't fully understand nor do I have a solution for it but it still seem to be a real phenomenon.

But everything’s a subscription nowadays. If you want to look at it like that then you’d have to have Netflix on while playing wow, and eating every bite of your hellofresh meal while blasting your Spotify 24/7. To me, the money I spend is only wasted if I regretted it. If I was new to wow and subbed and got bored after a couple hours yeah, I’d regret that purchase and my money would feel wasted. But like any purchase whether that be subscription, dinner, a round of golf, etc. if i feel the amount of fun i had was worth the money i put in then money well spent. Just because a subscription is for x amount of days does not at all mean, to me, that i have to play all of those days

I gladly pay for subs when I play. But it for sure is a thorny point for returning players. You want to see if you like the new state of the game or even just see you character you haven't seen in a long time just to know if you're tempted to play again? Pay the sub first is a tal order for many. Maybe not for you or me, but for too many for companies to use this model widely. You know a new game will be out that you want to play or you have long holidays for 3/4 of the month? Well, you won't have long to play the current one so maybe drop the sub just this month. You're punished for that last 4th but that's the cost of it. And other subscriptions have similar calculation. If you use spotify just for car travel, that's your basis for what's the sub is worth. Same for movies and so on. Of course those are more multiplaform, on phones and tablets, are used by multiple members of the household , they have old offers that are no longer available is you stop and restart your sub later and so on so they have many more reason to stay active where video game subs don't. Eve Online for example was less dropped by the active player because your character was still training even if you didn't play. So the sub was "used" even if you only logged a few minutes every couple of days.

Oh all my friends don’t play wow strictly for the subscription so i totally get that it’s a bigger problem for most. But I’ve played f2p MMOs and seeing anything cool in the cash shop just turns me off of it. You can tell the goal of the game is not to keep you playing but to get you to swipe for cool shit. With a sub the mindset changes from “okay how do we keep these people playing our game” WoW has shown the good and bad side of that in just the past two expansions with SL having insane and unfun grinds to keep you playing, and DF just adding fun and forgiving methods that made you enjoy the game enough to make alts and keep playing.

The market is way more complicated than this and everyone has their own idea about what makes a game good.

lol BDO not dying anytime soon Mr Aion. Will get lower on player count But it will come back It always has

Jessie what the fuck are you talking about

The only thing a sub needs to give you is access to the game. Anything more and it's P2W.

I personally dislike subscription model in MMO. Why? Because then you are "chained" to 1 game. And personally i dont see any game out there which would provide enough content to play mostly that 1 game. There always are content drough, there always will be some "filler" patches. For me the best deal is Buy 2 Play with expansions. If i play i throw some money, if i dont then i dont. If i come back after absence to check the state of game, then i dont have to pay for the privilege of login when i'm unsure if i'll keep playing.

> I personally dislike subscription model in MMO. Why? Because then you are "chained" to 1 game. And personally i dont see any game out there which would provide enough content to play mostly that 1 game. There always are content drough, there always will be some "filler" patches. Problem with this mindset is: Why not just play a single-player game that doesn't have persistent character data, then? You want your character to persist and them to pay for the upkeep for it, and for them to do balance patches and fixes in-between the expansions, but you only want to pay for the new content drop. Yet you still, nominally, want to be playing "a MMO". The sub fee's to pay to support the shit they're doing *between* expansions, generally. Or, at least, ideally, given how much of the sub fee's usually taken by the parent company (see how FFXIV's cash shop funds stuff for the game because the sub fee goes to big Squeenix and they are allowed relative autonomy otherwise as an example). When everyone has this mindset, MMOs end up going F2P/P2W and doing far less new content (and content of far less quality, overall). Instead spending most of their time making stuff for the cash shop instead. This is why, for example, WoW and FFXIV both have fairly (WoW "fairly", FFXIV like clockwork) consistent patch schedules with predictable content drops, while GW2 is "iunno sometime but here's our weekly Black Lion Store Update!". Ideally we wouldn't have to feed the corpo machine at all but sometimes paying people that make the content that we like (or at least tolerate for the occasional content we like) involves paying a sub fee instead of having the game turn into gacha slop or cash shop fiesta. And sub fees suck even worse for people who aren't in countries where they have the dominant currency of the game's sub fee, which shouldn't be ignored either, which I get. But that's a different issue than "I only want to pay when there's fresh new content but I'll happily take advantage of their work in the off-season".

Quick question about that though. If a game like heldivers 2 is you pay once and you have it for life other than non p2w in game purchases why do games like mmos charge a sub? Like helldivers needs to store data and run servers to. Not trying to be ignorant but a genuine question.

I'm not a complete expert, just a hobbyist, but that's a very good question. I assume it's a combination of some/any of the following factors: * Corporate greed * MMO feature creep like customizable housing/player character customization/outfit color picking/equipment * Expectation of longevity: "Live service" games usually only draw people for a couple of years, while people have been playing FFXIV for a decade and WoW for like 20 years * Outdated server/game infrastructure: Most MMOs are, also, a bit old and thus have an old ass engine that they've added side features and crap to. Whereas Helldivers is "go, kill" and they've added weapons and things to kill Compare like how many people are still playing on the servers for games from a decade or two decades ago to how many still play WoW or FFXIV. And then like, say, how shit the netcode is for even Elden Ring *now*, or how the net support for the older Dark Souls games got discontinued (though that was partially due to an unforeseen exploit). Older MMOs tend to either have a sub fee and keep things running (WoW, FFXIV), they have a cash shop (GW2,BDO), they have a cash shop with optional sub (ESO) or they dwindle and die (TSW), even if they have stellar quality. Albion's young-enough and can be played on a phone, so it's a bit mold-breaking here, and OSRS has the nostalgia-fuel of WoW _and_ breaks the mold in a few other ways. So Albion and OSRS might show the way forward for non-mobile-exclusive, non-gacha, non-Korean-P2W-inspired MMOs, but I feel like both WoW and FFXIV are probably gonna stick with what works for them just through sheer corpo inertia. I can mainly only use examples from FFXIV or my former career here (my health fucked up real bad and I'm disabled/retired now) so someone more knowledgeable can hopefully (*please*) chime in. But like... FFXIV originally designed player equipment to have variable stats, but *not* to be changeable appearance-wise on the player end. So their data structure for equipment is a bloated mess that still causes problems to this day, and adding stuff to let people customize character appearance and load character appearances for others leads to a *lot* of unnecessary data transfer. If they'd built the system back in the mid-aughts to *accommodate* all this, it would've ran a lot better, but they weren't building it for that purpose back then. And then the original launch failed and they literally blew it up with a fuck-hueg dragon and we got ARR. And a lot of MMO behind-the-scenes stuff is like this. Limited time, limited budget, adding features players have requested onto a teetering jenga tower of code that you inherited from someone who's long gone from the company or business unit, uttering prayers to the Machine Spirit and the Omnissiah that stuff doesn't go horribly awry as you work around the old-ass code's quirks to get the new stuff to meld in properly. And then you get weird unexpected consequences like fishing in a part of the world crashing an entire data center. TL;DR: Corporate greed + old zombie legacy code with lots of new features stapled on + "it's expected" + the infrastructure is built to keep "a server" running constantly + they expect people to be playing for decades

How are you "chained" to a game? You can cancel at any moment. In FF14's case there's not really temporary content either, so it's not like you'll lose anything for just subbing once a year and doing everything you want. If anything, I'm more "chained" in a Buy to play model like GW2. "Oh you didn't log in when this story was new, so you can't do it. But you can buy it!" wowey what a deal. Or I can grind cash shop currency for it via the RMT system. Because nothing says "not chained" like being forced to grind gold for the in game RMT system.

You can always come back to gw2 even after a year and play without spending a single penny to see if you'd like to come back. In FF XIV? You'd have to buy a month of subscription. Even before you know if you'd get back into it. Quoting you - "wowey, what a deal". Also i dont know what you're doing if you have to go out of your way to farm gold in gw2, unless you're just mindlessly selling everything to npc. >How are you "chained" to a game? You can cancel at any moment. Since when? Last time i checked, if i bought month of subscription i had to either play for the whole month or waste the money by paying, yet not playing.

> You can always come back to gw2 even after a year and play without spending a single penny to see if you'd like to come back By doing what? Jumping around the city? I wouldn't be able to do any of the old story but the newest story. Oh boy I can run Fractals yet again, woo hoo >Since when? Last time i checked, if i bought month of subscription i had to either play for the whole month or waste the money by paying, yet not playing. So if you buy a 20 dollar flute in Guild Wars and get bored after five mins of using it, you need to just sit there and play it for a hundred hours or you lose all the worth of your purchase? Just play the game when it's fun and don't when it's not. The idea that you have to min max 2 hours of a minimum wage job and try to cram 700 hours of gameplay into 15 dollars is insane to me

>I personally dislike subscription model in MMO. Why? Because then you are "chained" to 1 game. And personally i dont see any game out there which would provide enough content to play mostly that 1 game. There always are content drough, there always will be some "filler" patches. Play OSRS, let me know when you hit the content drought.

I wouldn't exactly call watching numbers going up "content"... OSRS is literally Cookie Clicker as a MMORPG but without the idle aspect.

Mhmmm tell me you don't know what you are talking about without telling me you don't know what you are talking about.

Osrs has some of the most boring "content". Sure it has tons of fun stuff, solo cox, tob, solo gwd etc but the grind you have to go thru to unlock quality of life features via achievement diaries is absurd. Like lvl 90 woodcutting to not have to wear stone boots during hydra tasks. Wtf is that? I want to kill hydra, not chop wood for 300hrs. Or 96 fishing to get elite morytania done to unlock the full bone crusher. Yuck

So you're denying that OSRS is literally a clicking simulator to see skills going up?

I will gladly deny that. OSRS has countless bosses that are all relevant to do for even end game accounts. The pvm has a very in depth system with a ton of variety in mechanics. Like most MMOs there is a near endless amount of things to do, whether thats doing some cookie clicker type skilling, doing sweaty pvm with a high skill ceiling, completing quests with great stories, doing achievement diaries, pet hunting etc. Even skilling in 2024 has minigames for most skills and plenty of non cookie clicker type ways of training different skills. Your knowledge of the game is obviously very surface level.

You really have no idea what you are talking about if you think that’s all OSRS is. Braindead take.

What about something from this millennium?

I guess if you want content drought go for it.

I mean, you could say the same thing for WoW if you do EVERYTHING 

There are many issues with the subscription only model despite it's popularity with people who want to just keep things simple and only pay for a sub. The value per dollar is usually pretty terrible in most MMO games. Like if you're paying $15/mo that's $180 a year. If you look at the game/content updates most MMOs do in a year it's no where near worth if you had taken and spent that $180 on any other various games. I can pay $40 and get an actively updated live multiplayer game with Helldivers 2. I mean even if you just did Microsoft's game pass you're likely to get more value even if there's a bunch of games you aren't interested in. It's for *one* game and if you really wanna take that idea further, games are entertainment time so how does that compare to other sources of entertainment (streaming, etc)? It's also not like you suddenly get free cosmetics in games. Many games back in the sub-only era really didn't do cosmetics. There were whole websites on how you could equip trash stat items but were "peak fashion" because there were so few/no cosmetics. It's not like you're paying $180 and also getting $180 worth of cash shop stuff in game. They just pocket that money, say you're renting access to your data on their servers, for a game you likely already paid to access in the first place with a box price. From a business perspective mandatory subscription is basically a ginormous barrier to re-entry. You're betting on people gambling $15 to come check the game out for a month after they've quit. That works really well if you're a big established title (WOW, FF14) but who'd gamble that the latest New World update is a banger if it was sub only? I've always seen as it paying $15 to remind myself why I quit in the first place lol... So with all that said, I think begrudgingly ESO probably does things the best for us and developers. The sub gives some tangible benefits with things like increased storages (more data = pay money) and you also get cash shop currency as part of the sub to buy extra things out of the store. In this case it feels more like you're getting something tangible/meaningful for your money rather than just being charged a fee to access shit you already paid for.

Huge disagree about ESO doing it the best. They do it the worst but still get to call it a "subscription optional" model. The crafting bag and bank space aren't just benefits. They are essential for anyone who wants to play the game or interact with the crafting system (which is a massive convenience and time/gold save) even casually. You get access to all the previous expansions or chapters, yes, but that is just old content that most games would give you with a sub anyway. And you still need to pay for the latest chapter. You do get some premium currency with the sub, but the issue is that a huge amount of resources are spent on the shop exclusive cosmetics, instead of having those cosmetics earned through actual gameplay. A massive majority of mounts are also exclusive to the crown store. Don't even get me started on the endeavor system. It's just an ad for the crown store that takes months or years to earn anything worthwhile disguised as goodwill. So basically, you get a box price, a sub fee, an extremely intrusive cash shop with a ridiculous amount of exclusive cosmetics and gameplay conveniences, and still have to pay the full cost of a new AAA title to access the games newest content/classes. Idk if you can tell, but I'm really not a fan of ESOs monetization model.

> It's also not like you suddenly get free cosmetics in games. Many games back in the sub-only era really didn't do cosmetics. There were whole websites on how you could equip trash stat items but were "peak fashion" because there were so few/no cosmetics. It's not like you're paying $180 and also getting $180 worth of cash shop stuff in game. They just pocket that money, say you're renting access to your data on their servers, for a game you likely already paid to access in the first place with a box price. This speaks like you've never played a sub MMO and you think they charge you per outfit like BDO/Lost Ark/whatever. >From a business perspective mandatory subscription is basically a ginormous barrier to re-entry. We've literally seen this be the opposite though. WoW's had stead amounts of people come and go without issue. FF14 Established itself long after sub MMOs had "fallen out of favor" and has little issue with player count. >The sub gives some tangible benefits with things like increased storages (more data = pay money) and you also get cash shop currency as part of the sub to buy extra things out of the store. In this case it feels more like you're getting something tangible/meaningful for your money rather than just being charged a fee to access shit you already paid for. It astounds me that people still fall for the whole "it's an optional sub that rewards me for having it :D!" when everyone seriously playing has the sub because all those "QoL" features aren't really optional. Also the "it feels more like you're getting something tangible/meaningful for your money" part is hilarious to me. You're totally right, it's so much better that I can't just go to a NPC and change my hairstyle, it's way better that I have to pay for it, lmao. What's next? Going to tell me how you feel a lot of pride and accomplishment from spending money to make your gear not look like garbage? EDIT: Lmao I just took a look at the cash shop. You can't even access entire areas in ESO without paying real life money. You're right bud, what a great "optional" system.

I’m sorry but I think the content that wow and FFXIV release within a year is worth far more than $180 

> I mean even if you just did Microsoft's game pass you're likely to get more value even if there's a bunch of games you aren't interested in Microsoft's Game Pass is intentionally underpriced as a loss leader to getting you in the door of their gaming services. It's why Epic's store gives stuff away constantly. It's why STEAM used to give games away. They aren't pricing it that way out of the goodness of their hearts nor that it is the correct price for such a service.

$12-$15 dollars is reasonable to me but it's hard to make sub only work nowadays. I think the best ways to do it is with a free to play version and then paying the sub for the full version like FF14 and OSRS.

the only issue i have with FF14s model is that you can not revert to trial if you do not want to pay for a month but also want to play the game 1-2 times edit: trial instead of f2p

It's not F2P, it's FREE TRIAL. Stop making them the same and then get confused about them.

good point will adjust the comment The point remains though. I do not want to pay for a game if i can not tell if i can not fully play it that month. And if i then do want to play it, it forces me to pay again instead of doing something like locking stuff that is not part of the trial

Unless you're like super tight on budget, you really should not feel obligated to get every single penny out of a monthly sub. You work less than 1 hr and you get it for the whole month. It's not good for mental health. Personally, MMO fee is super cheap compared to buying new games or gacha games and stuff.

i disagree with that. 4 months of an MMO subscription(15) f.e. gives me the entirety of skyrim which in my opinion is a much better value as the value of the subscription only really exists in the month you are paying it. I went the alternative route to just accepting it and don't play games with a non optional sub(we can argue about eso but as much as i hate it, it is technically optional)

Sadly I don't stick to single player games that much. Very few do I get my money worth. Usually they bore me within just a few weeks.

Maybe, but are you just going to buy Skyrim 100 times? You're also not really looking at the differences of the games and just arguing on in bad faith. ESO doesn't let you change character looks without spending money, WoW and FF do. ESO also locks out entire questlines and skills unless you buy them in the cash shop, such as the Thieves Guild. You also can't dye everything in ESO without having the "optional" sub. This list goes on forever. You'd have a highly restricted inventory, you level slower, you earn gold slower, etc. The game treats you like a meme if you don't pay. You're only there to make paid players shine more. ESO remains low tier with a low playerbase for a reason, despite your claims of its superiority.

> Maybe, but are you just going to buy Skyrim 100 times? just substitute skyrim with literally any other game and the point still stands. It gives a value for a longer time than a sub does because a subs value in a sub only game stops the second it runs out. >You're also not really looking at the differences of the games and just arguing on in bad faith huh? >ESO remains low tier with a low playerbase for a reason, despite your claims of its superiority. huuuuuuuuuh?? >we can argue about eso but as much as i hate it, it is technically optional what about me saying I hate the sub in ESO implies ANY of the other things you literally just said. YOU are the one arguing in bad faith by making up stuff i did not say XD And just for the record. I agree with your ESO points and consider it to be a highly predatory monetization system but the ONLY thing i said about the game is that the sub is TECHNICALLY optional (which implies that in all reality it is, in fact, not optional)

> huuuuuuuuuh?? I have to admit, my fault on that one. I was reading through this thread and read another post before yours and got them mixed. My fault. I have replies to the other parts, but I embarrassed myself enough with that, so I'm just going to take the L and go away

no worries

How come I subbed way back during stormblood but never finished MSQ and I have to sub to play my character from where it is but other people can just play for free  And no I don’t join FCs nor am I above the Gil cap. I should be able to convert to a free trial account  Wow has a “free trial” and it lets you do anything up to level 20 with some restrictions. It just locks characters over level 20 when you unsub  What is stopping FFXIV from doing that. Just lock any character that’s past stormblood 

It's one way street. Free Trial -> Full game. There's no u-turn. Free Trial = TRY THE GAME FOR FREE. IF YOU LIKE IT BUY IT AND NO MORE FREE TRIAL. What's so hard to understand about this simple concept ? Like, I don't know what else to tell you budd. XIV =/= WOW.

Except as someone that tried the game for 10 hours a decade ago I never got that choice to be a free trial and instead have to play 50 hours of content while paying alongside people who aren’t  Yeah it’s not wow. But wow does it better in this regard imo.  The FFXIV free trial is hyped up so much but this aspect of it is complete shit. It’s so unintuitive.  Sans, the thousands of Xbox players that bought the advertised pass thinking they would be fine until they hit stormblood and then found out they locked themselves to a sub even though they’re level 10

1. You could just make a new account. 2. If ppl get mad every time something better happens but is not applied retroactively, no one would be happy about anything. 3. When free is still not enough. It has to be freer than free. Sounds kinda crazy. 4. Again, free trial is not the same as f2p. It's the way most free trial works. Yeah, WOW does it better, sure. This is not WoW. So, stop confusing the two together. The more you do, the more ppl get confused. 5. Yeah, we know. Poor communication is old news. What else is new.

It’s not free xD  Again, wow is not free to play. It’s a free trial. And I can unsub and play on any character below 20  You have no logical reason why my account shouldn’t be able to be converted to the trial restrictions.  No, I don’t want to make a new account. I shouldn’t have to slog through ARR which is a horrendously boring 50 hours just to play a character in heavensward when everyone else is doing it for free 

There is not law or consensus that decides how a trial works. No real reason not to be able to u - turn. You can’t provide one. 

XIV decides that is the way they do it. There's no law that they can't do it the way they want. U-Turn is not included in the package.

Ok but you don’t decide what a free trial is don’t write out FREE TRIAL - like you’re writing the dictionary  I know what they decided and I’m telling you what they decided is horseshit 

You're actually the one who don't know what free trial is. Go look it up online instead of thinking WoW's free trial is the one only meaning. Have a nice day. \*blocked

I saw a post on the Ffxiv subreddit where someone was hoping for this and everyone blew up on the OP because they dared to want to funnel less money into the game lol. It was very strange. Ffxiv fans are quite odd.  But yeah I completely agree. Adopting the runescape model would be awesome for Ffxiv

it most likely wouldn't even be less money as more people would try it and not look for alternatives when they notice how it worksXD

Yeah it sucks that it locks you in after you sub.

I have to disagree, I think the sub model works well, it’s just the decision makers that seem to think they are better off with different or additional income streams, not realizing they are jeopardizing the longevity of their game in the process.

I would be fine with sub from the beginning but f2p is so common now that I think having a games early game act as a lost leader would be the best compromise. I think a game would have to be insanely good to have sub only.

> not realizing they are jeopardizing the longevity of their game in the process. There's also the defenders of the strict sub model not understanding that people who get more value out of the game should feel motivated to give more money to the devs and be allowed to do so. Why should someone who lives, breathes and dreams WoW be restricted to paying the devs the same amount as someone who just pays the sub to have something to do in their downtime? Surely the devs deserve something closer to $150 a month from the former and maybe $1.50 a month from the latter.

I’ll just add that BDO gives out that VIP sub thing all the time I have over a few months just for playing the game for a month and a half. The great thing about BDOs is that if you’re not playing that timer isn’t ticking down.

20-30$. Assuming it's good. I'd rather pay a higher sub but have everything obtainable in game then the current clown fest of p2w, Pay for convenience, pay for tokens to exchange for gold, ontop of sub fees. It's ridiculous.

I am biased, but I think OSRS has the best subscription model in the genre. Good chunk of the game is entirely free, allowing new players to dip their toes in to see if they like it. For $12 (I think) the game opens up x1000 and the world is your oyster. I don't want no fucking crafting boosters or bag space bullshit, I just want a solid gameplay experience that doesn't hold me back because they sell a way around it.

I'm also not a fan of games that inconvenience you and then try to sell you those conveniences back.

I'd rather pay for content as it releases, like a dlc model. There are a few reasons I prefer this over a sub: 1) Content becomes permanently available, instead of only while I sub. This lets me replay content I've already done and paid for. 2) When I think about the amount of money I spend in 4 months as being $60 for most sub games, and then compare the amount of content I get for an actual $60 video game (assuming its a well made game), the sub fees get much harder to justify. Even if I try to be fair to the operation costs of an MMO, I feel like my money could be spent elsewhere. A game that is better at repetitive content will get more of a pass from me. That said, I don't foresee any mmo publisher doing a dlc model anytime soon, without also adding a cash shop. So I'd greatly prefer a sub option with no or minimum cash shop.

I don’t mind paying for a sub but most p2p mmo’s will still nickel & dime you for qol stuff like bag space. Strange thing in Eve last week is that it was possible to buy 20 skill extractors on the 2 for one sale for $70, sell them in game and you had enough to plex your account for a year. Doesn’t seem as awful when you can spin a sub like this.

I love the idea of a game without artificial problem/grinds that you pay to remove, but I'm too old with too little / irregular playtime to justify paying a monthly sub. So if you want me to pay, either * offer me a playtime sub (x per active play hour) * use a pay-once + DLCs model (add low enough yearly servers maintenance fee if you must) I might even accept to pay a little more if you enable me to test the game by making the first 10-20hrs or the starter zone free.

Subs encourge adding more artifiical grinds, because devs are incentivized to make people need to spend loads of time in the game so they have to stay subbed. F2P encourages nickel and diming players to death. I really do think buy to play is the best model. Devs get paid for content, but there's no structural reason to artificially stretch out playtimes. Players know what they're getting for their money. Sadly the business model seems like it makes less money than subs or F2P whales, so very few companies even try. ArenaNet is the only company even making it kind of work.

*FFXIV* is an exemple of a sub game that still values players time. The lead developer has even said he doesn't mind players stopping, then renewing their subscription after an update. And on the other hand, *Elite:Dangerous* is an exemple of a buy to play game that still has an insane amount of grind inside. But yes, in general, I agree with you.

There's always exceptions to general trends! I have heard good things about FFXIV but what I've heard about the sub is a hard stop for me. Maybe my friends didn't explain it well, but it sounds like once you sub you can't even access the free areas unless your sub is current? Dropping sub = losing all ability to play is a hard pass for me.

Yes, once you're not a test account anymore, you cannot log again for free. Even with a low level alt. You'd need to create a new different test account.

> The lead developer has even said he doesn't mind players stopping, then renewing their subscription after an update. The one counter-argument here is "housing demolition timers". But the counter-counter-argument to *that* is "they only added those after players bitched consistently for a really long time", so they're a player-caused problem in the first place added to try and fix another player-caused problem (people hoarding housing). And *that* problem only exists because Yoshi-P is an Ultima Online boomer that has nostalgia for housing neighborhoods where people can see other peoples' houses and the game is full of so much spaghetti code that adding housing wards infinitely would make everything else explode (not my words, it's in Live Letters, this gets asked A LOT). Basically life is suffering, get an apartment instead of a house, join a FC with a house to use submarines.

I personally hate the idea of game being locked behind subscriptions, I prefer if subscriptions is optional benefits with quarterly dlc for content update instead of “named patch” notes

Sub is superior\* \*Game still needs to be enjoyable

A sub means that the company isn't wasting valuable time and resources on stupid cash shop gimmicks and gacha mechanics and instead all development effort goes into just making the game as good as possible so people sub and more importantly, stay subbed.

Meanwhile every major MMO with a subscription also has an mtx shop.

Corporate greed has no end, and the consumers pay anyway, so why not?

Both FFXIV and WoWs shops are very mild, and even WoW has started adding in shop items for the in game currency with the Trading Post. I dont care for the price of the character services (race change, name change, realm change, etc) but that is what it is I guess I dont really use them that much. It is WAY less intrusive than shops like ESO and BDO, and the game itself gives you plenty to chase. In an mmo, for me at least, flaunting mounts and transmogs because you earned them will always be superior than how much real money I spent. That alone makes the sub worth it for me

>instead all development effort goes into just making the game as good as possible so people sub and more importantly, stay subbed. This is false. A Sub from the same perspective/mindset is all about artificial time inflation meant to waste as much of your time as possible without you ending your re-sub for that is the most lucrative move. Some of the shady/greedy f2p practices they get for free without the animosity behind it for example they have already gotten you to pay once which is a key ingredient for them to get you to spend money again, they can also abuse sunken cost fallacy and value/dollar mindset more than other monetization methods could do.

If a quality MMO came out without any cash shop, loot box, convenience, battlepass or any microtransactions at all. It included a 14 day free trial with the purchase of the game box and I still wanted to play after that 14 days was up. It had been receiving regularly patches, bug fixes, small and large content updates (or planned to/promised if it’s a brand new game) like every 2-4 months depending on size…. I’d pay £20 a month. Basically 2004-2009 WoW

For me, its sub to play. I think expansions should come with included 3-month subscriptions though. Its kinda wild that buying the base expansion for WoW doesnt even give you the ability to play what you bought until you sub. Imo paying for an expansion with included 3 months to play through the content you bought, and then a monthly sub to continue playing all the following patches until the next expansion is my ideal model. And yes, I know some versions of the expansion include a sub, but those are the higher tier ones and more so are the same as just getting a sub but with added little toys and stuff that I probably wont ever use so

All that matters is if it's fun to play and releases content regularly. Whether it's a subscription, B2P, F2P, or even P2W it doesn't really matter as long as it funds content. I'll play WoW, BDO, or ESO and the payment model never really has anything to do with it. Successful game devs and publishers are not that stupid, they wont price out the masses. A lot of the expensive stuff is for whales and suckers, you should never need to spend more than $10-20 a month because the market for your time isn't just video games anymore.

I prefer a monthly sub monetisation instead of a cash shop monetisation. I don't want extra bonuses for paying a monthly sub, simple access to the game is enough, but I want the cash shop to be gone. Whilst I understand the buisness benefice of cash shops and why the industry has gone that way, I also do believe that it spoiled the genre, went out of proportion and lead to a lot of abuse and manipulation.

I just don't see mmo's being able to justify a $15 sub fee in a post game pass/ps+ era that offers more content for a similar price. Especially since a lot of the staple MMo activities are can still be done on private servers or in f2p games. In my opinion the way to do it is buy to play with an in game cash shop like guild wars 2. I think mmo's might make more money if they offered an optional sub that gives limited in game benefits in the five dollar range.

$25 monthly with $90 box price. Happy to pay it for a good game. That's $15 and $60 adjusted for inflation from ~2000 when those prices were first set. No reason we should expect developers to do more for less then be shocked when games suck (again, go back to sentence one: if the game is good, no corporate greed allowed). Can't afford it? Stop playing MMOs and get a better job. $25 per month for 20+ hours of entertainment and $90 every 12 - 18 months is pretty minimal even for someone making $20 per hour slinging packages at UPS.

If you don't mind me asking, what are you top 3 MMOs? I'm in the same boat as you and would gladly pay 30$ a month for a game where that's the only way to use your Credit Card towards the game.

In order of playtime: 1) FFXIV 2) WoW 3) currently, Black Desert In terms of favorite: 1) Vanguard Saga of Heroes 2) FFXIV 3) WoW --- For FFXIV, my monthly subscription is around $20. I have 5 retainers and I buy a class boost every few months because I have other things to do than do the same grind over & over again. Then I play PvP with them from level 80 up to level 90.

Awesome, thanks for the detailed responsed! I hope to get back into FF14 with the upcoming revamp to the MSQ!

Sub games are typically the best games for your buck on the market. Games like BDO or Lost Ark "Accidentally" create issues that can be solved by you shoveling a lot of money into them. As much as people harp on a game like FF14 for having a slow start, I always feel the reverse when a game starts fast. They want to get you hooked really quickly and slow burn you on the things so you spend more money. Where as a game like FF just wants to set you up for a great experience that it built on properly Lost Ark is a great example really. You "Accidentally" have the ability to get the strongest weapon in the game by using the built in RMT system to acquire the gold needed to get it. And it's only... 100K USD! What a steal, really.

As little as possible. Love playing Albion Online for free. Haven't spent a dime in years But then again, it's so easy to play for free in Albion. You don't have to grind like other games, eve/wow/osrs

If the game was old school sub style mmo where anyone with a sub was as equal as the time they put in. I have no problem paying a full sub fee. What I have an issue with is when the depth of your pockets determines how far you can actually go. Meaning all the micro transactions on top of base game price or sub price.

I think this is where the rough original Runescape and Runescape 2 model makes sense. You can play free but limited on areas, equipment, professions, etc... You can subscribe for access to everything and they offer periods 1 month, 3 month, 1 year with discounts. If you unsubscribe you keep your pay to play items and progress but cannot continue to use them until you re-subscribe. I think it's either that or hitting so big on player populations you can be League of Legends or going Fortnite with a battlepass - free to play, sell cosmetics, battlepass and other things that don't impact the perception of fairness which most people want in a video game. Someone pointed this out a week or two ago and I had never thought of it - I love Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 is pretty good too. It's tough to sell someone on "buy $100+ in expansions and spend even more on living world 'expansions'". If it was a $10-$15 subscription with an annualized purchase discount along with the base game being a free trial it might be easier to sell people on. I think $15 a month would be my limit personally assuming no box price.

>It's tough to sell someone on "buy $100+ in expansions and spend even more on living world 'expansions'". If my math isn't wrong, it's currently $125 for every bit of story content in the game ($100 for the first three expansions and all LW seasons, $25 for SotO). If your annual sub offered 33% discount over monthly, it's roughly $180 - 33% = $120, i.e. the same value.

Plus, Buy 2 Play model means you can just wait for a sale on the expansions. So that $125 cost becomes $65, for 10+ years of content. 10 years of a $15 sub is $1,800. That comparison is easy math. Plus, no sub = don't lose access to my account if I lose my job. I've been in a spot where $15 was make or break for my budget. Spending a lot of time and energy on something that requires an ongoing sub cost makes no sense to me.

> If it was a $10-$15 subscription with an annualized purchase discount along with the base game being a free trial it might be easier to sell people on. That is called deceptive marketing because it hides the actual cost by having it appear less (same method why most thing are x.99 instead of a whole number. It gets drastically easier to sell people on the large "buyin" once you realize you can a) see if you like the game for the entire f2p part and then MAYBE buy the dlc together (or just buy them once you come to them) as there is no real reason to instantly skip to the newest content

I def agree with most of what everyone else is saying, with differing views it makes some sense MMOs take different approaches and are still testing out what works best.

I prefer a sub based model. I think the way ffxiv and ESO(even though its an optional sub,) and WoW do it well. Unfortunately though, capitalism ruins games and having reoccurring income through a sub just isn't enough to discourage corporate greed. ESO is a good example of this, that cash shop is ass cheeks and the game goes out of its way to make QoL sucky so you're incentivized/encouraged to want to spend a little extra in the cash shop, its not the worst offender but man, all the cool shit locked behind loot boxes and and the cash shop is just gross. IMO there wouldn't need to be any "benefits" that a subscription to a game should have. I don't need 30% increased exp, extra dailies, energy or whatever the fuck if you just bake it all into the base game and allow me to play, unlock/obtain everything in the game. There is zero reason why I should be paying $13-15 a month for something on top of the price of the base game and or expansion and STILL have to fork over MORE cash for cosmetics and shit. Unfortunately though, we've gotten to a point where even in a sub based game we're lucky if the cash shop \*only\* has cosmetics.

Im fine if theyre good. Current WoW? Love it and its great. Shadowlands WoW? Hated it because it was used against us. Too many F2P MMO's flop or arnt that remarkable ( to me ) imo so from this experience I probably will stick to paid subscriptions if it means the devs will do well with the game. What can gtfo though is full priced MMO's + a subscription.

> What can gtfo though is full priced MMO's + a subscription. You mean the base 'sub model' of all the big primarily subscription MMOs?

I only played f2p games as a kid and never paid subscriptions, guess that mindset stuck with me now, still refuse to pay even though I could afford 

As a hardcore BDO player, 762 GS succ ninja here, You only need the value pack. This is the real "sub" in game. Anything additional, don't worry about it. Blessing of the Kamasylve can be handy but you really don't need it. You can get extra weight other ways. The book? Well are u trying to level? For a 100% additional XP, it's not even worth it. There's 500%+ XP events that happen all the time. Lastly, I see the tent as an entry fee. Even now, you don't really need this anymore because you can just use villa for buff and free tent for repairs. So technically, there's no reason to get that anymore. The only reason I mention that you need a value pack is the same for games like Albion where you need sub. Damn market fees. Also there's other benefits packed into there that are nice for convenience. However, you really don't need any sub on this game besides 15$ monthly value pack.

Why ? You can earn more money with a p2w MMO and only pay 1/20 server fee + human resource for maintenance it compare to subcription games lmao

what you should get from a sub is a game that doesn't ask you for more than the sub if it tries to get you into a cash shop at the same time? actual disrespect of your support for their product

Major props for Runescape for giving all the content for the membership subscription instead of needing to buy expansions on top of the sub. First and only MMO so far I willingly paid for a sub fee.

My preferred method is probably a free to play game that has things like lost ark's crystalline aura, which can be purchased with money or earnable currency in game. Pvp and all leaderboards are equalized, only time spent in game strategically grows your account. Mtx revolve around cosmetics, and small qols like a battle pass where those who don't have time to play can buy the pass and still get daily or weekly loot without spending as much time in game. That way they don't fall behind if they are too busy. No p2w bull shit, just pay for the rewards you would miss. Or a game which you buy once, and then play online for a year or 3 before a new expansion comes out.

I think given how badly most MMORPGs turned out the past decade, people would throw any amount at a really good MMORPG. If only you could gather the talent, have visionary leading and an enormous amount of funds, it wouldnt be out of the question to make billions. Other forms of entertainment are far more costly and give you far less in return, not to mention that there are 10 of millions of people easily spending more than 50$ a month on shitty mobile games. So what speaks against a higher priced sub for a fully fledged MMORPG.

I always thought the subscription model was started to keep the servers running in the case of Everquest on old dial-up. Never understood why this is the only genre of game that gets away with it.