Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Yeah, I'm talking about MMO's in general. I bought Guild Wars and played that for a while. I was fine paying a decent amount for that because there was no monthly fee. Aion when it came out here was in the high $70 mark... for what? You've still got to pay more before you can play it. Seems like a rip off to me.

I can't speak for other MMOs. There's a reason WoW is so popular.

Also, trailer on an English language site and screenshots:
http://www.gameslave.co.uk/game.cfm?group=1442&game=Warhammer-40000-Dark-Millenium-Online
http://www.gameslave.co.uk/newscomments.cfm?news=9212&title=Warhammer-40000-Dark-Millenium-Online-Screenshots--Trailer

I'm not saying it's not popular, or that I don't understand the reasons why people like it, but for me, I don't like the concept of an MMO to start with, regardless of genre. If WoW (or any MMO) was like a free (yet unplayable) download that you could then play by paying for a monthly subscription, I'd be totally down with that. I just can't see the up-side to paying monthly for a game that you still have to buy in a store.

It'd be like having to maintain a constant internet connection in order to play a single-player only game with no online content... oh wait... never mind...

I hate MMO's but more people like them than don't. I do think this trailer was better than the SM movie by a thousand times

Well that trailer has me very, very interested.

MMO's are good value, don't look at initial cost or cost per month to play.

Look at cost/hour of entertainment and suddenly you'll see exactly how cheap it is to play.

Going to Movie Theatre = $10 for 2hrs of entertainment ($5/hr)
Cable w/Premium Channels = $70/month (Assuming 2hrs a day watching TV, $1/hr or so...decreases if multiple people are watching)
40k Model Purchase = ~$40 for 10 Marines (Assuming 5hrs assembly, 20hrs painting, and 10 games each at 1.5hrs...total enjoyment = 40hrs or $1/hr...plus have residual value)
MMO = $70 initial purchase + $15/month after first (Assuming you play 30hrs a month for 6 months, you've got a value of <$1/hr. And the longer you play, since your initial cost is amortized over more months, or more hours you put in that cost/hr decreases. Can have some residual value depending on the success of the game and your ability to sell ingame currency, items and accounts)
Regular RPG (i.e. Oblivion, Dragon Age, Fall Out) = $70 purchase (~40hrs of play time for $1.75/hr)

We pay for any entertainment just a matter of figuring out what you want to pay versus the time you put into it.

I wonder if the micro transaction model will be applied to Dark Millenium. It would allow for people to come and go more readily as improvements are made to the game. Lots of possibilities, one big hurdle the 40K cannon has is that almost all the factions are isolationists, and MMO experiences need to be successfully social as much as they need to be successfully game play. So how to get social interaction between players while not straying too far from fluff will be a big challenge.

later,
WR

You're missing the point.

I don't care about the monthly fee. It's the $70 to buy a game I can't play without paying more that gets me.

Once I've spent my $70, what do I get from it? Nothing apparently, as I still need to pay some more money to get the damned thing to work.

Harpa wrote:http://www.fz.se/artiklar/nyheter/20100615/forst-hos-fz-wh-40000-dark-millenium-online

Heres the first trailer and the first pictures from the game Enjoy!

Feth'd in my pants

I have yet to see an MMO sold without a month of play time included initial price.

And LOTS of stuff is buy before you try...like every other video game out there. Few companies release demo's any more.

I've wasted lots of hours of my life and dollars of my money on movies that are horrible.

If you are worried about like/dislike...find reviewers who share your opinions and likes/dislikes and use their inside information to base purchases on. Don't simply write off a price model for all cases.

Oh yeah... that trailer has got me very interested as well. When we find out what the gameplay is going to be like then I'll make a full decision of whether I'll be playing it or not.

Trailer sold me, nuff said.


GG

The trailer was EPIC!!!!

ph34r wrote:Does that really sound unreasonable?

It really does. Guild Wars managed to be a pretty good MMO with regular updates, but without a monthly fee. Whereas WoW pretty much sucks and after 6 years they still can't get the classes balanced.

Anyway, I'm excited to see a 40k MMO. I've been wanting a good sci-fi MMO for a long time. The fantasy genre was tired and overdone before MMOs even existed, imo. Here's to hoping SMs are put in their rightful place as just another army...

WhiteRaven wrote:
MMO = $70 initial purchase + $15/month after first (Assuming you play 30hrs a month for 6 months, you've got a value of <$1/hr. And the longer you play, since your initial cost is amortized over more months, or more hours you put in that cost/hr decreases. Can have some residual value depending on the success of the game and your ability to sell ingame currency, items and accounts)

I payed 20 bucks for team fortress 2, It gets regularly updated almost monthly with new maps, new weapons, new achievements, new game modes. No cost associated with these updates. I have around 1400 hours into TF2. $0.0142857142857143 dollars an hour using your logic.

Companies don't need to charge monthly fee's for these games, Valve (Developer of TF2) has said, with every update, they sell more copies of TF2, enough to make a good amount of money. I wish MMO companies would stop trying to overcharge their customers and worry about how many more customers they could get with just charging whats written on the box.

WoW Classes are pretty well balanced if you take the whole game into consideration.

sure withing PvP and PvE spheres there's unbalance issues, but if you are trying to play a rogue as pure PvE you're doing it wrong.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Stubby wrote:

WhiteRaven wrote:
MMO = $70 initial purchase + $15/month after first (Assuming you play 30hrs a month for 6 months, you've got a value of <$1/hr. And the longer you play, since your initial cost is amortized over more months, or more hours you put in that cost/hr decreases. Can have some residual value depending on the success of the game and your ability to sell ingame currency, items and accounts)

I payed 20 bucks for team fortress 2, It gets regularly updated almost monthly with new maps, new weapons, new achievements, new game modes. No cost associated with these updates. I have around 1400 hours into TF2. $0.0142857142857143 dollars an hour using your logic.

Companies don't need to charge monthly fee's for these games, Valve (Developer of TF2) has said, with every update, they sell more copies of TF2, enough to make a good amount of money. I wish MMO companies would stop trying to overcharge their customers and worry about how many more customers they could get with just charging whats written on the box.

in WoW's case they have absolutely no reason to do that. with the new "pay for useless pets n stuff" content it's obvious that a large portion of their playerbase want to pay MORE than the 15$ a month, because anything you can pay for to get in the game is no advantage whatsoever. I once say a guy multiboxing 5 CHARACTERS. Let me reiterate that. 5 liscence, both expansions, plus the monthly fee. Blizzard has absolutely no reason to charge less in any capacity. They're a business, not a charity. And at the end of they day, something is worth exactly what people are willing to pay for it.

Stubby wrote:

WhiteRaven wrote:
MMO = $70 initial purchase + $15/month after first (Assuming you play 30hrs a month for 6 months, you've got a value of <$1/hr. And the longer you play, since your initial cost is amortized over more months, or more hours you put in that cost/hr decreases. Can have some residual value depending on the success of the game and your ability to sell ingame currency, items and accounts)

I payed 20 bucks for team fortress 2, It gets regularly updated almost monthly with new maps, new weapons, new achievements, new game modes. No cost associated with these updates. I have around 1400 hours into TF2. $0.0142857142857143 dollars an hour using your logic.

Companies don't need to charge monthly fee's for these games, Valve (Developer of TF2) has said, with every update, they sell more copies of TF2, enough to make a good amount of money. I wish MMO companies would stop trying to overcharge their customers and worry about how many more customers they could get with just charging whats written on the box.

Correct me if I'm wrong by TF2 is run on servers that Valve does not own? Valve opperates lobby services and game finding services. The lionshare of bandwidth and server horsepower is owned by players not Valve. Starcraft/Battle.net is the same way. As are Battlefield, Battlefield 2 and Bad Company...

In MMO the most costly aspects are: 1) Customer Service Support, 2) Bandwidth, 3) Infrastructure. While WoW has economies of scale to really turn amazing profit, you are probably not seeing the same ability by smaller companies to dot he same thing on a 30-40k player base. A typical software engineering metric, 50% of your software cost is development, 50% is maintenance. So if you have a 4-5Million dollar Development Project (really not hard for a MMO to hit that plateau these days)...you are sinking in 4-5 again after release for your developers and artists, add another few million in for redundant server architecture (cause people cancel when servers go down)....and I would doubt they are turning more than a 10% profit on the service fees. The fact that the company doesn't get 100% of that $70 initial price, means that the finiances come out in the long run not initial sales.

Software is a very competitive market...

H.B.M.C. wrote:You're missing the point.

I don't care about the monthly fee. It's the $70 to buy a game I can't play without paying more that gets me.

Once I've spent my $70, what do I get from it? Nothing apparently, as I still need to pay some more money to get the damned thing to work.

Ok, here is the problem, You've said "I don't think its kul to charge people for a game, and then charge them more to play said game" and people decided to just randomly start "defending" the reason for said costs by comparing the cost of other activities/items to the "fun" of the game...

this is just dumb. It doesn't matter if you prefer such a massively overcast hobby such as warhammer (owait, dakka's a warhammer board) if you feel the principle behind the charge is wrong (which I think is waht you are saying, its not that you CAN'T afford it but you feel you SHOULDN'T have to pay for it, which is understandable....*)

*... However, hopefully I can reveal to you how your concerns are not completely justified.

The difference bewteen an MMORPG and a standalone RPG is quite simple. (( Glossary by example. MMO = FF11/Everquest/WoW etc... Traditional Game = FF12, Super Mario World, Mortal Kombat etc...))

If you go out to the store and buy a copy of Final Fantasy 12, that copy is going to have the same content on it (unless you purchase/they add free DLC) untill the end of time (assuming good maintence). You have to pay 70$ for this game to pay off the time spent into the game(Designers/testers/etc), the marketing for the game (ads/events/retail space) and the profits to the publishers and somtimes any other charges (say it wasnt final fantasy 12, but Lego Star wars, some of the money from your game goes to Lucas' pockets). Barring DLC charges, this is all you will ever pay for this game because this is the extent that the PUBLISHERS are taking cost/profit to allow you to play this game.

Lets say you wanted to buy final fantasy 11, unlike 12, it is an MMORPG, which requires an additional 10$ monthly charge (first month included) for you to play your game online. The game itself, has no Offline mode (and as such, is dependant almost on the online community for many of the different mechanics of the game to function) so you are required to pay this fee to play this game. The 70$ you paid for the game goes towards the exact same pools as it for final fantasy 12, only a few more outlets...

#1 Hardware to support the online users, as the game requires you to play it online, the publishers/developers are responsible for maintaining a server environment for players to use. The costs of such hardware/software/licensing/telecom are FAR greater then that of a standalone game such as Final Fantasy 12 so that leaves the developers to make one of two choices... either incorperate the cost of said expenses into a realistic price increase for the title as a whole, charging more to those who first buy it and less as time goes by (if a standalone would be 70$ an mmo such as this would retail for around.... 560$ a copy ((And you'd still need to break over 100k to make the server-hardware/software budgeting, and keep in mind, the more people who buy the game, the more hardware you will need to purchase, thus increasing the cost)) and probably still require a monthly fee of around ~1$ to handle telecom fees.) or allow the game to compete in the standard market and charge their 10$ monthly fee (and still hope to recoop costs).

#2 Staff to support the game itself, unlike FF12, when FF11 launches, the game developers can't just immediately begin work in another project, instead they have to devote time and resources to thier obligations to their players. Maintaining the servers is one thing, but thats mainly discussed in #1, the other costs are in support staff for things such as Game bugs, glitches, player-caused incidents (hacking, and even to a more recent extent, harassment) and day-to-day troubleshooting. These employees aren't free, and they should not be expected to spend their time increasing your enjoyment of the product for free (or equally so, for the 70$ you dropped on the game). Subscription fees are paying their salaries and justifying their employment, thus when a game is successful and has a massive spike in subscribers, publishers/devs will hire a surge of the Support Reps to handle the potential rush of calls, when the subscriptions fade, so do the Support Reps (sadly) either way, to expect this level of service (something you will not find in a traditional game such as FF12) for no extra cost is a bit selfish.

#3 New Content! Many MMOS incorperate at least some level of new content for free, yes "expansion packs" cost money outside the usual subscription fees, but these are typically game-changing advancements, graphical overhauls, and something that requires promoting, retail space, and many of the other costs normally assoiciated with traditional games. However, free content packs, such as a new zone to play in, new dungeons to explore, and "real time seasonal events" (such as New Years Eve etc) aren't necessarily "Free" but moreso are paid for by that "10$ a month" (Again, expecting a programer/sprite artist/support representive to work for free is as unfair as it is selfish)

Now, all that above for just 10-15$ a month is actually a steal of a deal, and considering what you SHOULD have to pay for a game such as this, well worth it.

Its not totally fair to compare the 70$ upfront and 15$ month charge of an MMO to that of a Traditional game as the costs associated with them are very seperate as well, the best(or at least the most simple) way to know the difference between them is the basic idea that:

A traditional game spends money making the game, and stops incurring (major) costs post game launch, and as such will have a set value required to start reaching a state of "pure profit"

An MMO has all of the same assocaited costs as a traditional game, yet MUCH greater upfront costs (making the "pure profit" stage significantly further away from traditional games) and has continiously occuring costs throughout the lifespan of the game (making the "pure profit" stage almost an impossible goal.)

Daemon-Archon Ren wrote:
Warhammer Age of Reckoning (They specifically said, it's just like WoW but 'Different' and every point that was 'different' was what killed the game)

Taking massive amounts of money from their subscribers' and ex-subscribers' credit cards without permission also helped, or so I hear.

H.B.M.C. wrote:I wanna call my character Jervis.

In the grim dark future there is only receding hair lines. Haven't you heard... Jervis gets to play as the emperor spontaneously nerfing all who stand before him.


I don't think this is the worst approach. The micro-transaction approach is much better for casual gamers. You pay for things as you need or use them. If you don't want to use something or play an area of the game you don't have to pay for it. The big advantage being if a person has a busy month where they couldn't play, they didn't flush their months subscription down the drain. This model only really troubles those who go way beyond the value of their monthly subscription.

Yeah you can make arguements of maintaining an internet connection to play, but the internets a bit of a neccessity these days, you'd maintain it with or without the game. While some have voiced disdain of mmo, and that they'd be online solo, making alot of the internet connection and rest a waste, more and more "offline" games require an internet connection just to prove its a legitimate copy and play.

i was really hoping space marines weren't going to be playable.

I really liked the idea of having to struggle to survive against hard NPCs, playing as space marines i really don't feel this will allow it to work.

at least its a lot like planetside so i think that balances out. I am really hoping this will work.

how is it alot like planetside? The only trailer I have seen has shown that it is

A. 3rd person

B: More like a hybrid of WoW and Star Wars Galaxies (3rd edition?)

C: Very graphics intensive

which is why MMOs are developed with solo, party, group and alliance content in mind. Can you solo all of WoW.. yes but its mind numbingly booring.

its an MMO, it means Massive Multiplayer Online which means you are going to interact with lots of other players online. As for monthly fees, thats how its done in the industry. Yes there ARE exceptions Guild Wars the MMO with training wheels, farious free to play games such as Archlord, Rising Force Online and other korean ports (these are free to download AND play), and then there is Project Entropia which is free to download and play but lets you control what you spend directly billing your credit card when you withdraw money from an in-game bank.



I do agree that paying the same initial cost for an MMO as compared to a regular game does not seem right. sure you get a free month to play but the time involved with playing an MMO is a drop in the bucket compared to the time needed to invest in the game. I do feel that subscription fees could be cheaper ( i honestly think $10 would be great but even $12 or $13 is fair), game companies do offer discounts on their monthly fee if you have your billing cycle extended but then you are comitted to playing for that long ( i hope you don't get bored of the game in that time).

Project Entropia is a great example of a MMO that thought outside the box and implemented some features that no game has yet to duplicate.

i understand where H.B.M.C. is coming from with the initial cost and the monthly cost for MMOs. Add on top of that the fact that unlike regular games like ones for the PC or Console; once you buy it, it's yours and unless your game has its activation code intact you CANNOT sell or trade your game without breaking the ELUA and risk having your account banned and unusable.

MMO developers treat playing their game as an investment. you invest time which you buy with your money to progress and advance within the game. What happens when you want to quit the game after a year or more?
Project Entropia not only let you put into the game as much money as you wanted via atm withdraws from in-game banks (you withdrew straight from your CC at the in game ATM) but it also let you take your money back out if you wanted to "cash out" of the game (a currency conversion and small transaction fee later and your in-game cash was now money you could buy real tangable stuff with.

So when is this game due to be released? I couldn't find any release date info.

GG

April 2011, at the earliest.

I thought it was sometime in 2012. There was some THQ picture showing it on their release schedule.

"At the earliest" means it can release then...or at anytime later.

It, however, does not mean "it will release precisely then."

So if I got my math right if you've played WoW since the beginning you are out over $1200 at minimum? I'm glad I saved my money and bought 2 dozen other games.

How do you figure 1200? (15$ a month is the MOST you will be paying ~66 months since launch -3 free 945 + 40 + 40 +50 (IDK why Wrath was 50 or why people paid that much for it tbh...) = 1075 and thats if you are paying the MAX price, 1009 if using 3 month 943 if using 6month... also, this is assuming absolutely 0 non-play time, and not taking into account the various times in which blizzard has refunded days/weeks back from the game, and assuming you had 0 friends sign up for wow (1 free month for each friend you sign up/get to come back) and you did not know someone who worked at bestbuy (the bestbuy employee discount, when I worked there, allowed you to buy 60 day time cards for 11$ )

The actual minimum for someone who could achieve all of these and has been playing since launch is actually 40+40+50 (130) for discs and 66$ in subscription fees, as the refer-a-friend did not take place untill Jan 07 so from Dec 05 to Jan 07 you would have to buy 6 timecards @ 11$each, use refer/scroll for rest of time (up to 20 months free a year, 10 from refer, 10 from scroll) or 193$, far less then your min of 1200 (and you'd still have 1 extra month left over)


Back to the real topic...

I'm betting this game will release 3-6 months after Cataclysm, unless the developers feel it will require longer then that.

H.B.M.C. wrote:If WoW (or any MMO) was like a free (yet unplayable) download that you could then play by paying for a monthly subscription, I'd be totally down with that. I just can't see the up-side to paying monthly for a game that you still have to buy in a store.

It costs $20 for the game, which includes the first 1.33 months, with $20 being the cost of 1.33 months. That is essentially free.
And WoW is a free yet unplayable download. You could go and download it right now if you wanted.
And you don't have to buy the game in a store. You can do everything online.
Not to sound insulting, but it seems like everything you know about the game is wrong. You may have been misinformed.

Daemon-Archon Ren wrote:

TyraelVladinhurst wrote:and i want to play as an arch magos... but will it happen? most likely not. more then likely it'll be marine and guard based

Acardia wrote:I want to play as a Broadside.

Oh ye of little faith!

Tzeentch has granted this man his wish!

Such is the power of chaos! (And MSpaint)

Am I the only one that thought this was fething hilarious?

asmith wrote:So if I got my math right if you've played WoW since the beginning you are out over $1200 at minimum? I'm glad I saved my money and bought 2 dozen other games.

I'd check the math on that one.

If you've enjoyed playing WoW from when you bought it, till now, then you have invested your money well. If you played a lot, then your investment of time/money was a very good one as the cost per hour of entertainment is rather low.

Then again this could be said for any mmo.