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Bill Roper speaks out
Ozmodan
Member EpicPosts: 9,726
Article on Gamepro:
http://www.gamepro.com/news.cfm?article_id=145448
Well all I have to say Bill is that basically if you don't subscribe to this game you are up the %*&* creek without a paddle.
Not to say the game is not fun, butt even old Diablo II is a better game and it is still free.
The limitations on free play in my opinion make this game a travesty. As to the subscription, TR has more content in their little pinky than your game does and people have been complaining about lack of content in TR, how does that feel. So much for you trying to justify the subscription.
As I said earlier, just a very good example of braindead marketing. Bill, I did not realize how out of touch with the market you guys have gotten. Complaining about all the criticism is just absurd, if you can't understand a bad marketing plan, you are really in trouble.
Comments
I have hope for this team. They were preasured to release it on time and I think over time they will make the game amazing and a lot better then most out there.. But the thing is when will that be.. I know it will happen but when there 50k subscribers or 1k....
SNIP
Well I can't fault people for complaining about the business model but before they complain I am not totally sure many realize that there arent many games out there that are totally free.
F2P - Games such as Guild Wars , which I played the game for 2 years, between buying the game,extra character slots and expansions I must have payed close to 200 bucks. That is almost a 2 year subscription to Hellgate.
Mini Mall games - So many people pay $5.00 and sometimes more a month in these types of games just to get the extra perks and advantages. I don't see the major outburst and complaints flying on the forums about this. Some people pay more a month than what Hellgate's business model is.
$15.00 dollar a month games don't even supply their players additional content throughout the course of the year until they come out with an expansion and charge you atleast $40.00 for it. So in these types of games compared to Hellgate, people who prefer the $15.00 a month games are simply not getting their monies worth of content. Atleast with Hellgate you can coun't on getting more content 4-5 times a year for just $10.00 a month.
If some do not like the game then that is fine. Noone is forcing you to do anything. If you like the game then great. So really, before anyone starts judging or complaining about business model just remember there are many games in the long run that cost more and give less content than what Hellgate offers. Have fun !
Sorry, but I agree with him. Have you played TR? Yeah, suffice to say, I was hyped about it, had a collectors edition pre-ordered, and then I played it, and promptly canceled it and lost all interest, there was simply nothing to it. Personally, I didnt go into hellgate london looking for a deep engrossing MMO, so yeah, maybe I have a different view on things. But people need to quit bitching about the damn subscription thing already. There is a perfectly fine, perfectly playable free game available. If you want the extra shit, then subscribe. "Oh but theres no content bawww" no shit sherlock, the game has been out for a whole week? Week and a half? What did you expect them to develop in that time frame? Everyone is ready to pass judgment even though the first actual update isn't slated until December.
In summation: Everyone needs to quit their BAWWWW
Bans a perma, but so are sigs in necro posts.
EAT ME MMORPG.com!
Do you honestly believe that come December the first patch, which costs 1/4 of the price of the game to try will contain new content = to that finacial value?
I don't have to wait to December to start laughing at that. They can't make that much content in one month.
The difference between $15 a month MMO subscriptions is that you are primarily paying for the highly expensive server hire. In Hellgate, as in Guild Wars and Diablo you aren't.
The december content was being produced prior to this. If you read the last interview, they're working on patches in parallel, so that they will have it ready on a semi-regular basis. Hell, if you even read THIS interview, they mention the new content is going to be a new town area and surrounding areas consisting of an entirely new area tile set. Oh, and the financial value argument is flawed, because if that's how you want to equate things, then you can say "oh, I just canceled my acocunt after playing for ten months, so I just threw $100 away".
As for the "difference" between the $15 a month MMO subscriptions, the only difference is you're paying $9.99 instead of $15. Where do you think the server saving your character, storing the global stats, and hosting the main towns is located and being funeded from? The magical bandwidth fairy? And who do you think runs all this stuff and develops it? Friendly woodland gnomes? No, that shit costs money, and while they can probably recoup some of the server infrastructure from the in game ads, development costs and the additional storage to make storing 24 characters and the extra stash items even possible in the first place costs money. Guild wars did not provide content updates, they pushed out full price expansions every once and a while. I don't even know where they got the money for their server upkeep given that the prices for the initial software would barely come near covering their development costs. As for Diablo, the scale of the hosting was much different, and there were no content updates period.
But whatever, bitch bitch bitch. I've said it before, trying to explain that servers and staff don't just magically fall from the sky seems to be beyond the people complaining about this, and there isnt a damn thing they could ever offer that would actually satisfy you guys.
Bans a perma, but so are sigs in necro posts.
EAT ME MMORPG.com!
The server saving my character stats does not cost very much to run. In fact this PC I am typing on now is fully capable of doing that.
This PC is also fully as capable of storing 24 characters for everyone as it is for just 3. What difference .01 kb or 0.24 in this day and age. You could have 2,000 different characters if you liked, and it still wouldn't cost a penny more to host the data. Ten's of thousands of you could all have 2,000 characters each and it would still all fit on the smallest harddrive money could buy.
Again hosting maintowns is a low bandwidth affair. I have never seen more than 30 people in any one zone at the same time. They don't fight or do anythin complex. Just move about and look different. Once again I could run simultaneously run all the stations on this PC I am typing from, using my existing domestic bandwidth.
We aren't talking a Sun System here. This isn't the Eve Online server we are discussing.
Funny isn't how servers and staff all magically fall from the sky at all the other games companies. Funny that you can't explain how.
Guild Wars gets it's money for the server upkeep the same place as Unreal, Novalogic, ID, Dice and everybody else gets the money to keep their servers up from. Box sales.
Funny isn't how other companies can provide more expensive servers and more of them for the inclusive price of the game, but Hellgate needs to charge you extra for less.
As for offering something to satisfy me, I'd be happy with an expansion pack in a years time for £20. Everyone else makes a tidy profit doing this business this way and at this price.
That way I could see what their content is before I hand over any money and they wouldn't be able to charge far more than going rate in drips and drabs every months so that I never realised.
There are so many satisfactory games manufacturers and service providers out there. I have plenty of examples to choose from. Plenty of competiiton to turn to also.
There is no reason at all for me to pay more for less. I won't be missing out on anything, I will be getting more for my money somewhere else. Only the subscribers to this game stand to lose.
Sorry but I have no idea what you are on about with your $100 lost. Would you care to rephrase?
I don't know what to think. This game has so much potential that after the next couple patches i think i will subscribe. What does it for me is how they make grinding so fun. No two weapons are ever the same, character custimization is endless not to mention the kick butt graphics that run great on my one year old comp. I think the biggest htring hold me back is know large scale pvp - who knows if this will ever be, and the memory leak. But seriously, i would pay 10 bucks a month for this as opposed to paying 15 bucks for a treadmill of leveling that doesn't look half as cool.
Memory leaks aren't a long term problem, sooner or later they'll solve that one.
Unreal? ID? What servers are they running exactly? You mean the FPS game servers that are hosted by players and not the company?......You also give no actual source of this income you claim all these people are getting that it should be obvious where it comes from.
What difference .01 kb or 0.24 in this day and age.
Depending on how large of a playerbase is multiplying that amount, and how fast your server needs to search through it, quite a bit. Database management is your friend. And you are MASSIVELY understating those numbers. I would REALLY like to see where you're getting sub 1k character data from. The character name ALONE is going to take up a few k, now toss in the characters inventory, his position in the game, his quest status, achievements, etc etc.
Main hosting maintowns is a low bandwidth affair. I have never seen more than 30 people in any one zone at the same time.
First of all, it's not just main towns. Information from the instances must be gathered so your character is synced with the server at all times. And while you might not see more than 30 people in any one zone at the same, thats because they are designed that way! The towns are instanced as well and appear as channels. So while YOU are just seeing "no more than 30 people in the zone at any given time" in the place we call reality, there are roughly a good 30+ instances of each town going at peak most likely, each with 30 people in them. Do the math.
Oh, and what is this paying more for less crap? Last I checked, $9.99 hasn't been the standard for any subscription game since 1996
Since you're clearly pulling technical details out of your ass, my discussion with you ends here. I'm not wasting any more words.
Bans a perma, but so are sigs in necro posts.
EAT ME MMORPG.com!
Exactly how much information does you character consist of. 4 scores for your stats plus another 50 points of skill tree. plus player name, plus a code refering to each item and it's position in your inventory.
8 bit's to the byte.
= 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2 (available combinations 256) . 1,000 bytes to the kilobyte. 1,000 kilobyte to the megabyte. 1,000 megabytes to the gigabyte. A 160 GB harddrive = £40.
So a total of 6 monthly subscriptions from one individual covers the storage costs of all the characters that will ever be made for Hellgate London form all the players combined. (not including electricity bills).
That would get 160 millions players a total of 256,000 bits of character data. Or 16 million players 2.5 million bits of charcter info or 1.6 million players 250 million bits of storage space...bla blah bla. Storage costs nothing. to give you some idea of the commercial rate for data storage, Google gives everyone who wants it, 2GB absolutely free.
ID and Unreal provide both free to connect to servers, which at 32 players use about 40 GB of bandwitdh per month each. You will find them amongst all of the privately hosted servers in your browser list. Last time I hosted a 32 player FPS server my monthly bandwidth cost was $300. That doesn't include server rental.
Not only do the games companies I mentioned provide some free to play servers for their customers, they also host the game service. A computer that stays online and permanently scans the internet for online servers. You connect to this server every time you are looking for a game to join.
The server browser is in fact a server in it's own right. Battlenet is a good example of this kind of server. Or the Online gamelobby screen in Unreal Tournament.
Guild Wars and Hellgate have a rather more sophisticated 3D game service. Towns.
Network games are designed so that you never see many people at the same time, because this saves bandwidth. If two people can see eachother the server must transmit that data to both players at the same time. If 3 people can see each other the computer must transmit to each computer that it can see both the other two players, and their 2 co-ordinates and game states, so that a data set equal in size to that of one players' game state is transmited a total of 6 times.
If 32 people can see eachother the server must transmit player data 32! times at the same time. (32x31x30x 29x ....x3x 2x 1). The more players that can see or hear eachother at the same time the more the bandwidth that is required. The ratio is exponential.
So yes you are right Hellgate London is designed that way. That's why a domestic PC can host the towns. Because the system is optimised to use domestic levels of bandwidth.
Eve Online and World of Warcraft on the other hand, have area's where players can see hundreds of other payers simultaneously. 100! is literally millions of times more bandwith than 32!. It is in a completely different league. Add to this that you need a much larger processor (set of processors) and quantity of Ram to calclulate who can see who when there are hundreds of players close to each other an not just 32. These machines are not domestic PC's. They are supercomputers. Either Sun Systems or multi-networked rackmounts that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds each.
Updates from instances, kit/ exps etc require no more computer power to store than updates to your online stats in America's Army or Battlefield 2. Once again we are not talking about a service that most other games companies aren't matching for free.
Once again this has a very minimal bandwidth usage. Please bear in mind that the information transmited, is under 1kb per person per second. (Only changed data is transmitted not the entire player stats) which means that 50,000 players could all update this info simultaneously on a dial up modem, with room to spare. So out of that 50,000 subs that's 1 months sub from one person to buy the modem, and local calls are free.
Baff, you are trying to tell us that according to your personal guess and speculation on how much it cost FS to run a server, you are also trying to determine whether its fair to charge a certain fee.
FS has a lot of costs, and the detail ledgers are not known to any of us (I presume). All you said is pure speculation. A 160MB might cost 40 pounds to you, but FS may not be using an IDE, nor a PC. We do not know that for sure.
Second, pricing is never determined by costs. Pricing depends on competition. Sony is selling PS3 at a loss literally, b/c the competitors are priced much lower. Cost based pricing is a myth. How much does it cost to make a brand-named jacket? Measure the fabric, threads and the dye. By your logic they should go for a dollar or 2 a piece. How far a firm can pass its costs to the customer depends on the market, how much the customers are willing to pay, and that depends on what options the customers have in terms of competing supplier.
You are free not to buy, FS is free to set it pricing policy. Freedom to choose to make mistakes, and be responsible for your own mistakes. If you decided not to buy and missed out a big game, you pay for it. If FS priced it out badly and flop, too bad for them. There is no justification for you to determine the pricing for them.
Baff, your HG:L subscription does not pay bandwidth or CPU - it pays manpower and the devs said so.
What your subscription really pays for is:
- full security and support (which requires wetware)
- ongoing content (wetware as well)
So, instead of paying 10-15$ a month for CPU and bandwidth here you pay mainly for new content.... which is sold separately in "classical" MMORPGs.
So, in order to get full security and new content you pay:
WoW - 15$/month + a 50$ box with new content occasionally
GW - buy a 50$ box occasionally
HG:L - 10$/ month
If you stop paying the sub (expansions in GW):
WoW - you can't play, sorry
GW - no new content but you can use all the stuff you paid for so far
HG:L - you can play in a limited fashion
If you join/resub the game long after release:
WoW - buy all boxes to access all new content
GW - buy all boxes to access all new content
HG:L - pay measly 10$ and get ALL additional content released so far.
So the deal isn't that rotten now, isn't it?
Sorry to barge in. I do agree about the rest of your post, but not this one. At least not at this moment. The support is rubbish and isn't even worth 1 cent.
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Playing: Final Fantasy Online: ARR, Destiny
Most memorable games for me: UO, GW1, LoTRO
Sorry to barge in. I do agree about the rest of your post, but not this one. At least not at this moment. The support is rubbish and isn't even worth 1 cent.
I concur with that...
However, we're talking primarily about the subscription model as such and not the way it is implemented atm... (which is a total mess right now. I do advise people, especially from EU to refrain from subscribing until FSS and Ping0 get their act in order).
I won't be paying a subscription for this game until its turns into a real MMO, not a Guild Wars wannabe. Itsa very fun game, but its not worth 10 bucks a month or even one dollar. Its worth 49.99 when you buy it.
Many of you missed my point. If you enjoy this game, great, have fun with it. The subscription is pretty much mandatory, how long would you have played diablo if you could only play on normal mode, the answer is not long. Well you are restricted to normal mode without a subscription among many other significant restrictions.
Comparing this to other games with a subscription model this game just does not hack it. Maybe after they have added oodles of content over a period of several years....
Name me one FPS that charges a subscription? I don't know of any and there are some pretty good games out there.
I give this game at best 6 months at best, there will be a few die hard hangers on, but this game is NOT the next Diablo, not even close to it.
Like I said they brought out a marketing plan from hell along with the demons and they will pay for their mistake.
I still think they should have gone the "adventure pack" route. release a huge "adventure pack" full of feature and content every other month and charge 10 for them. Make the base game full featured, but make new content bought as mini expansions.
Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
Lao-Tze
So what other kind of restrictions besides only being able to play on normal are there. I mean I tryed to go to the website to the game. but unless you are a registered owner you can't even look at the forums. also the web page does not seem to tell you anything about the game feature wise...its really just no information.
Have you not read the Bible?
Oh, yeah, yeah... Not all of it. Actually, I'm listening to it on tape.
Don't tell me how it ends.
So Bill's throwing a hissy fit because people are saying bad things about his blatant money grab game. Whoopee. Maybe he should have thought about that before he and his buddies decided to try to use their "former Blizzard devs" status and tap into some of that good ol' MMO cash flow they walked away from when they walked out on Blizzard right in the middle of WoW's development. I've watched this game transform from a single-player game with multiplayer options to a lopsided mockery of a MMORPG. Bait and Switch. It's time for him to learn that there are only so many times you can fling the name "Diablo" around and get people's attention.
They've dug themselves into a big hole and are surprised that people aren't wanting to fill it with cash. If they had put out a polished, quality single-player product with a decent mutliplayer/LAN options and with at least a whisper of a proposed expansion, people would have flocked to it. And don't blame EA. If you look at all the crazy marketing gimmicks and employee perks they spent money on, you'll reach the conclusion that the well of cash for development was rapidly running dry and they need to start recouping money fast. Hence, the Founder's offer. They needed to release or lose it all.
As long as you've been at this, Bill, you should have known better. Instead, you tried to be Blizzard overnight. Good luck with your creditors.
"Soloists and those who prefer small groups should never have to feel like they''re the ones getting the proverbial table scraps, as it were." - Scott Hartsman, Senior Producer, Everquest II
"People love groups. Its a fallacy that people want to play solo all the time." - Scott Hartsman, Executive Producer, Rift
QFT