This is one more reason why I’m an old cranky man when it comes to MMO games. I paid for my game. I mean, I spent 40 or 50 bucks on Loom, 17 or 18 years ago, and I can still play it if I want. I really, really don’t like the idea of spending money on games in a completely disposable manner. It’s like buying paper cups for use at home.
Recycle your games!
I personally hate the idea of spending $40+ for the game, and then a monthly fee on that.
I mean, I could pay $50 for mario galaxy, and play that as much as I want for an unlimited amount of time. Hell, I paid 3 bucks for Atari 7800 games back in 91/92, and I still play those whenever I feel like!
it raises an interesting point about this genre of gaming. By its nature, it’s not a game that you completely own on your own system, separate from anything beyond your control.
Do MMO’s, or any externally maintained concepts, have to be marketed and sold with different expectations? We think we buy a game for $X and we assume the same ownership and rights as with any past video game release… but the game style is not the same. Do we expect the service to be up and maintained for all eternity?
It’s a similar argument with the lifetime of an ARG – how long should sites remain up/available after end-game? If a product is release that’s essentially to online components, what happens if those online components become unavailable? Is the product invalidated? Should it then not be sold any more?
Products can generally be recreated, and sold as self-contained entities – not so with service-based product such as ARGs and MMOs. It’s a debate raised with the software licensing model vs purchase and ownership as well.
It sucks. But what can be done? It’s the nature of the beast… I think somehow the public has to be informed clearly that by purchasing the game, they’re not purchasing the right to play the game in full ability for the rest of their lifetime (as is ideally true for standard video games).
Sure, there are workarounds – again ideally, fans could adopt the service and keep it running, and keep the flame passed on each time one ‘team’ needs to retire from maintaining the service… but I don’t think we can expect nor demand a service to be maintained beyond a feasible lifetime (unless of course it goes against contractual obligations of the developers and whatnot, which does exists to a degree I think, but none would be dumb enough to guarantee eternal uptime).
What about someone who just purchased the game? It’s way more unfair for them than people who bought it at launch. It almost just comes down to ‘buyers beware’ when buying into an MMO service.
And I heard Myst Online was really good… *sigh*
Considering all of this, the MMORPG games should be marketed as a service up front. Make the software a free download and then the user pays a monthly fee to play the game.
Like I find little utility in the MMO games. Frankly, other than Urban Dead–which is free–I’ve never found one which had a compelling entertainment to cost (in terms of both money and time) ratio.
Myst Online -was- marketed as a service. Software was free to download, and it only had the monthly charge.
I’m calling for further explanation of your position.
If you mean that you should pay $50 upfront, and then expect the company to foot server bills for eternity and feed you new content all the time…something isn’t right there. Thanks.
If you’ll look at some of the later comments I replied to, I was clearer there – I expect companies to be repaid (with profit) for their server and bandwidth costs. Whether a company allows independent servers at the end of their maintenance cycle or provides for non-internet play, I think there should be -something- you can continue to access after a time.
Dave says the software itself is free with a monthly service charge, which I didn’t know. In that case… well, I guess that’s fine. Different model, different expectations. Maybe I’m too much of a classic gamer not to get grumpy when a favorite game of mine is just … forever unplayable, in any capacity.
And by “classic gamer” I should have said “nostalgia gamer” or “classicS gamer”.
That brings up questions that get brought up a lot with regard to ARGs: how can they effectively be made re-playable, if a significant and/or necessary aspect of the experience is community involvement?
Uru is not just Ages you can solve and pretty stuff to look at. There were some Ages that required group solving, and some aspects that were enhanced by the presence of a continuous and strong flow of users visiting the cavern.
In other words, it’s not just a Myst game. Just like ilovebees.com was not just a website.
Uru was one game out of several hundred on offer from Gametap, many of which were resurrected from out of print status (yay Burgertime!).
I think Gametap was short-sighted in terms of revenue for a long-running MMO of Uru’s timbre, but at the same time, server bandwidth and continual development costs money. There were new Ages and story being released all the time. It was a constantly changing world.
Perhaps, if the game were marketed separately from the service, and the service was hosted by a separate company. Xbox Live comes close to what I’d like to see. I want to sign up for a gaming service to which I can connect any compatible game, then play it indefinitely, regardless of whether the publisher still has any interest in the game.
Uru’s not constructed like that, though. The world was constantly changing – new Ages were being discovered, players were encouraged to create and contribute to the storylines that were played out with characters from the universe who would appear “live” in the game with individualized avatars.
Last time Uru was shut down, they did come out with a CD version of the city that had the Ages and some of the cavern city to explore, but it’s not at all like the online game.
I didn’t know that. I’m okay with that – I definitely get that there would be some valuable content missing without the online world, especially contributions by other users. Of course, I’d prefer allowing independent servers, but that often isn’t practical.
Probably not practical, as well as opening up lots of liability issues.
It’s quite possible that like the last time Uru got shut down, individuals will host their own ‘shards’ of the Cavern (another way of saying ‘instance,’ I suppose), and might even be able to create new content or play that way. Not sure what the legalities on it might be since the affiliation with Gametap, but one can always hope shards’ll spring up on various servers.
Agreed. I don’t want to spend 50 bucks in order to use something for as long as the company decides to support it – that’s particularly cruel if I came in at the end of the life cycle. Imagine if MS, when they came out with a new Office or OS, DISABLED your package you’d already purchased.
Er, I mean, outside of security updates, which sometimes have the same result. You know what I mean.
As a business case, it’s also a damn shame because there’s no such thing as “Platinum Hits”. No one can come in later and experience your games. Writing a History of Gaming article? You’d better have been there when it all went down, ’cause you can’t research by playing it now.
I understand your feeling on this, but it seems like you like having a particular definition of ‘game,’ where it comes in a box and has a finite boundary.
Uru was not necessarily like that – it was part user-submitted content, it was part improvisation, it was part theatre, it was part digital LARP. This was all laid over the framework of a traditional Myst adventure game.
As much as I would like, I am not able to go back to see my favorite Too Much Light performances, because so much of it depended on the moments that happened there. Uru has some of those same aspects of you-had-to-be-thereness.
You want to have your cake and eat it, too, but if you’ve already eaten the cake, and you don’t have some of the ingredients because the people who provided them are no longer around to ask, well, I suppose regurgitation is your only (unappealing) option.
In the case of Myst Uru, I didn’t have the experience personally – it’s possible that if I had, my viewpoint and expectations for videogames would have expanded.
I’ve not experienced videogames that I would consider part theatre in the sense that they were live performances, excluding other users simultaneously experiencing the game – and I’ve certainly not played a videogame where I felt everyone had a say in controlling, to a significant degree, the actual plot (beyond, of course, typical very narrow trees structures).
So, I think I’ll have to agree that I probably had to be there to understand this particular game’s format – though I said in another comment that I didn’t realize this particular game didn’t charge for the software, only the service, and that right there makes it different from most MMOs. I think I could accept that easier than paying a typically large flat price initially and then service fees above and beyond.
Something like this really shows some of the appealing aspects to Xbox Live. As a separate payment for an interconnection service that works for many software packages together, it’s easier to swallow that, and I think provides for a longer shelf life for those games.
Not to make this longer, but I can’t say I’m entirely sure of that – I no longer have an Xbox to test old online games with, nor do I have Xbox Live anymore.
In entirely different news, I’m trying to track down contact info for Pat and Cheri Murphy. You wouldn’t have an email address, would you? Thanks.
Cheri’s LJ and flickr are cheri0627, that should help! I don’t think she posts very often, though.
Found ’em. Thanks!