"Your 'free' month is costing you $50." - Sharpei Diem

Better than paying $50 for a game that you finish in two days and never replay again.

I think everyone is pretty unanimous on this one. If you want to pay it, then pay it. Otherwise make a statement and don't pay.

I for one will not buy it or pay for it. :-)

Hey hey hey, nothing is that simple! Flames are entertaining, so take your sensibility and go elsewhere. We will not stand for your anti-trolling here!

I think everyone is pretty unanimous on this one. If you want to pay it, then pay it. Otherwise make a statement and don't pay.

I for one will not buy it or pay for it. :-)

Prices at gas stations work completely off of supply and demand. What would indicate otherwise to you? Try to put aside conspiracy theories regarding "big oil" and the "Bush dynasty" that's been force fed to you by the lying liberal socialist machine.

Little OT here; never intended it to become a discussion in itself, but...

Experience pretty well indicates it to me otherwise. Long ago, used to pump gas in a full-service station. I worked alot of graveyard shifts - we'd get a truck in to fill the tanks on wednesday....friday (noon, usually), price would go up. Week after week. Station kitty-corner to us would rise/lower to match whatever we did within about a half hour. It's better here(CA) than when I was living in Canada. I've seen price jump $0.10/l ($0.40 a gallon) just because it was a long weekend. But they got a whole other problem because of the dominance of Petro Canada...

anyways, you might call it supply and demand, I call it collusion...and no matter what else, It has NOT ONE THING to do with SOE or SWG

...but it does pass the time...

Prices at gas stations work completely off of supply and demand (well, you can throw outrageous taxes in on this one). What would indicate otherwise to you?

Try to put aside conspiracy theories regarding "big oil" and the "Bush dynasty" that's been force fed to you by the lying liberal socialist machine.

ahahaha

jesus you're an idiot

Gas pricing is based of supply and demand... except SUPPLY is decided by OPEC. It's not price fixing, but it has the same effect: they just limit production when they want the price to go up.

OMG MASSIVE LIBERAL MEDIA SOCIALIST BUZZWORD CONSPIRACY

Go back to the O'Reilly Factor.

...and only listen to the conservative, blue-blood, industrilaist here. Fuck liberals and fuck you too. Only a complete fucking moron would compare the SWG pricing to gas prices or bring in politics. You are both paragons of retardation. Game on.

lol....I never made a comparision, I made a glib remark. The hemorrhage in your brain must have made you read paragraphs within my 6 words.

...and only listen to the conservative, blue-blood, industrilaist here. Fuck liberals and fuck you too. Only a complete fucking moron would compare the SWG pricing to gas prices or bring in politics. You are both paragons of retardation. Game on.

They do have a point though. I mean if you knew that on the release date for this game, no less then 500,000 people were going to buy it and play it for at least 3 months, would you not charge $15 a month? Hell I'd charge $20. Then when the game starts to set in, lower it to $10 a month. Its just marketing strategy. They know a million people arnt going to buy the game off the bat, but they do know half a million other people will play the game for at least 6 months. So really in the end, its not the servers or the staff costs that give a high price. Its us, the gamers. The more people that play, the more they charge. The less people that play, the less they charge until more come. Simple Economics. Ahhh the american way - Greed rules all.

...and only listen to the conservative, blue-blood, industrilaist here. Fuck liberals and fuck you too. Only a complete fucking moron would compare the SWG pricing to gas prices or bring in politics. You are both paragons of retardation. Game on.

Prices at gas stations work completely off of supply and demand (well, you can throw outrageous taxes in on this one). What would indicate otherwise to you?

Try to put aside conspiracy theories regarding "big oil" and the "Bush dynasty" that's been force fed to you by the lying liberal socialist machine.

There's no price concpiracy. Price concpiracies don't work in a free unregulated market that contains competition.

Right, just look at gas stations...X|

Supply and demand determines price. If the demand is less (enough people don't play) the price *will* go down. If enough people play, it doesn't matter if you like the price or not, the price *will* stay the same (or go up if demand overruns supply).

$15 must fit SOE's perception of what the demand versus their supply will be. This must be based on some kind of research and they'll know soon enough if they were wrong and the price could change - up or down.

There's no price concpiracy. Price concpiracies don't work in a free unregulated market that contains competition.

"Whining has far less power than economic success..."

Yeah, that's what I meant. Don't pay their outrageous prices and be vocal about it.

I really cant understand why you think $15 is a big deal when you could spend that much on a two hour movie, and something to eat and drink.. for the same amount you can have a months worth of entertainment.

It wouldn't be such a big deal if you were allowed to have alts. As it is if you want to start an alt and play on your home server then BAM, another 15 bucks a month.

Its just that there is no excuse to only allow 1 character slot per server. If they are that hard up for capacity then maybe set a budget for, say, a max of 5 characters total between all servers, and let the player decide if he wants to use all 5 slots on one server.

Its a money grubbing scheme, and a blatent one at that.

This comment was edited on Jun 20, 12:45.

The "movie" argument is perfectly valid, you are paying for entertainment, you get one month free which offers more gameplay than any singleplayer game including epics like morrowind, then you have the option of paying for more. Lots of movies are not ready for release or should never have been released to begin with. Frankly I'd much rather pay $15 for a game that might not be up to scratch than watch something like friggen tombraider.

Your 'free' month is costing you $50.

Tombraider was crap, so I didn't pay to see it (I did eventually see it on an inflight movie). My gaming budget is finite: I get more bang for that $15 by checking out bargain bins.

Let's just say it takes them 6 months to fix things up - stability patches, hack patches, balance patches - you would have paid $125 ($50 + 5 * $15). That's quite a bit to pay to be a beta...

$15/month really isn't the big issue for me: My issue is another game being released in beta form...and that they're going to get away with it because it's Star Wars. Would you pay $15 to see a half hour composite of Terminator 3 and then $5/month to allow you to keep watching it as they gradually add a few minutes to it each month - with no guarantee that they'll even ever finish the movie?

See, now that's the problem. Whining WILL change something. We're the consumers. We have the power. Unfortunately, most people will just shut up and pay it rather than take a stand and force them to lower the price

Whining has far less power than economic success. If they don't hit their target amount of sales/monthly subscriptions, I think you'll see them drop that price quickly.

Unfortunately, i don't think it will happen: they'll get enough subscribers to keep them going till they patch the game enough to get the others onboard.

Do you know the difference between MB/s and Mbps?

Do you really think much if any of the $30 space addon will end up in the developers hands to pay employees? It MIGHT pay for 15+ jobs if they only work for a year.

The games I was talking about include, jumpgate, neocron, planetside, AA, and yes the SWG beta which for me uses around 5-7k/s downstream and 1-3k/s up.

The "movie" argument is perfectly valid, you are paying for entertainment, you get one month free which offers more gameplay than any singleplayer game including epics like morrowind, then you have the option of paying for more. Lots of movies are not ready for release or should never have been released to begin with. Frankly I'd much rather pay $15 for a game that might not be up to scratch than watch something like friggen tombraider.

Who knows maybe will this become the Sims Online, a popular franchise that failed in the MMO genre due to flawed gameplay.

I sure as hell wouldn't bet on it though.

"Besides its not our call anyhow. SOE Decreed $15 a month. Pay it or dont Play it. Whining will change nothing."

See, now that's the problem. Whining WILL change something. We're the consumers. We have the power. Unfortunately, most people will just shut up and pay it rather than take a stand and force them to lower the price.

Which online games are you playing Ingen? I happened to have a few screenshots still on my machine from in Beta, in which I had the network monitor open. One of those shots was taken on Naboo, in one of the busier cities, and it showed a download of 2.2K. In several of my other screenshots, it varies between 1 and 2 k. So if we really calculate stupidly here, and assume that every player needs 3k (which was a peak rate I never saw) EXACTLY at the same time (which will never ever happen) then a 3500 player server needs (3*1024*3500)/1024000 = 10.5Mbps. Take two of those bandwith deals I mentioned, and you're talking 5500 bucks a month per server.

Development staff. Agreed. The game costs 50 dollars to purchase = Funding for your development staff.
Extra Staff for space addon. Agreed. Which will be sold for 30 dollars if not more. Which pays for them.
Tech Support. I don't agree, since tech support is a general part of Sony as a publisher, and gets paid out of the yearly budget. They don't get written off as an expense for this game in particular. (And quite frankly, they are so bad, Sony might not as well bother.)
Server Admins. Agreed. But they better not cost a whole lot of money, since it still takes the fuckers two hours to reset the damn server if it crashes at any time other than 9 to 5. If I took 2 hours to reset the mail server at any of my server admin gigs, I'd be fired the next morning.
Did I mention that SWG is going to be the first MMORPG that has NO GM's?

And yes, we've had the "d00d, going to a movie costs money 2!!!!" discussions on here plenty of times, and quite frankly I really fail to see what they have to do with anything. I'm not talking about why you go to a movie theater where a ticket costs 15 dollars, I'm talking about why 15 dollars per month is absurd for a game that's nowhere near ready for release.
So, unless you've played the Galaxies Beta, and have seen different numbers than I have during that Beta test, I don't really think you can say I'm pulling numbers out of thin air, now, right?

Creston, having great fun "working" at night...

Edit : Forgot half the answer.

This comment was edited on Jun 20, 05:03.

Perhaps you should not pull numbers out of thin air either.

Just about every online game I play including MMO's uses between 6-12k/s. Multiply 6k/s by 3000 and you have each server chewing up around 17MB/s bandwidth, if that figure goes up to 12k/s then you have 34MB/s per server, times 20 odd servers is a shitload of bandwidth. 340MB/s if each player uses roughly 6k/s, thats 20.4GB every minute across all the servers!! Now that has to cost a lot.

I havent even got started on development staff who are still working on the game after release, or the extra staff who are being employed for the space addon, tech support, server admins, etc etc. I really cant understand why you think $15 is a big deal when you could spend that much on a two hour movie, and something to eat and drink.. for the same amount you can have a months worth of entertainment.