5punk

Would You Pay A Sub For Single-Player?
Well? Would you? (Expanded below.)

Author: Jim Rossignol
Category: RockPaperShotgun dlc random whimsy
Publish Date: Fri, 07 May 2010 18:05:52 +0000



Well? Would you? (Expanded below.)

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Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

No.

What this is asking is would you pay a small fee for extra DLC every month. It's actually not as bad as it sounds - imagine a game like Dragon Age, with the game being updated every month in a kind of living world. I don't really think it's viable though, as the amount of work it would take to keep people playing every month would make the price too high for people to want to pay.

A sub to keep the devs paid and generating new content, rather than waiting until they'd made a more significant addition and released it as DLC? Not sure that model works.

Apart from the fact we used to get stuff like that for free in patches, the very reason singleplayer games are not multiplayer games is that there's not a time-limit on quickly you play them.

If we wanted events that lasted a week or two, we'd play a mutliplayer game - there are examples in pretty much every genre to choose from.

I can see it might be nice for a team who perhaps don't have the resources to run an MMO to give their customers a similar experience to say - Christmas in WoW - but it's a whole new type of model to have an SP game you cannot fully explore at your leisure.

If the original game was free or at a much lower price that would be a more convincing starting point for the model. And the game would need to be designed to fit the model from the start. But I Telltales Games are already doing that with their episodic content.

Dog Pants wrote:What this is asking is would you pay a small fee for extra DLC every month.

It's what I'm pretty much doing now with Railworks. But that DLC is $5-$30 every few weeks lol.

Didn't Hellgate try and do this, with subscriber accounts for people who wanted extra content?

Grimmie wrote:Didn't Hellgate try and do this, with subscriber accounts for people who wanted extra content?

Hellgate wasn't well managed or very good though iirc.

Hellgate was pretty shit.

His example is a bit bollocks though. Paying for a new bit of DLC each month isnt the same as paying a subscription. If you stop buying the DLC, you can carry on playing with the bits of the game you have already bought. If you stop paying a subscription, you have nothing.

I think my answer would depend on how cheap it is. If I had to pay £30 up front, then £5 a month to play a single player, then no, I wouldnt. If I didnt have to pay anything up front, but had to pay £5 a month to play, then yeah, I probably would. It would take 6 months-ish to equal the amount of money I would normally drop on a game, and frankly any game that I play non-stop for 6-months or more is worth a little extra.

It probably would balance out in total expenditure for me (I tend not to play single player games for more than a couple of months, due to either completing them or getting bored). It would slightly screw over games that are really short, but excellent. For instance, Mass Effect was brilliant, and I sunk a bunch of hours into it, but completed it in about a month due to playing for fucking hours, every day. Maybe a micropayment by the hour would work better?

Akiakaiu wrote:
It's what I'm pretty much doing now with Railworks. But that DLC is $5-$30 every few weeks lol.

I wondered if anyone here had been sucked into that cash egg

The Railworks thing seems to be what he is talking about: constant (and bloody expensive if you ask me) DLC released on a regular basis. As for subs: I expect to pay around £25 to £30 for a single player game, regardless of how long I play it. These days I would expect a certain level of post-sales support (patching) implicit in that purchase. Many devs are decent enough to release small content updates for free with their patches but usually you are expected to pay extra for a full 'expansion' pack (traditionally about half the price of the original). If I had to pay a sub on top of my original purchase to benefit from those same updates they can gtfo. If they provided content expansions commensurate with the level of my sub each month, then I'd consider it. e.g. to use the DA:O example - if I paid a tenner each month to have the story continue unfolding that'd be quite cool.

theres also a problem that arises with games in general in that if they dont have enough players subscribing to be able to continue supporting the game then youll just have a fuckton of games dying, and would developers use this as an excuse to release a games with stripped down gameplay and features so that they have more stuff to release every month

i dont want a games market flooded with Generic shooter 1 that will have a new gimmicky feature every month for £6.99 with a £30 one time purchase

I had a look around and did find a game that sort of uses this subscription model, though it is a multiplayer game.

iRacing is an online sim racing game, where you pay a monthly sub and it has race seasons and championships which play out over the weeks and months in the way real race seasons do.

I think currently subscribers have to pay some astromonical amount extra to buy new cars and tracks, but let's imagine it's a singleplayer game and the sub is for the new content.

So, lets say you pay your sub, and every month either a new car, track or both come out. The cost of new content is justified as they laser-map the tracks and buy engineering simulation models of the cars, there's no doubting its quality*, yet the devs need the money up-front in order to finance the trips to the tracks and car factories.

To make it fair, if you cancel and later re-sub, you only regain access to content which was released at the time(s) you were subbed.

* I mean quality in terms of the simulation. Most of their tracks are ovals and their cars Nascar bricks on wheels, which doesn't do it for everyone.


Just an example of a model that might work.

Lee wrote:No.

I'll be honest, I didn't read the article though. Should I bother trying to have an informed opinion? I think not - Occam's razor well and truly applied. I should be judge or something.

I too intially thought no fucking way, but it's been bugging me, partly because it's one of those crazy scenarios which couldn't possibly work, yet end up happening at the thin end of the wedge until suddenly you wake up and it's the norm. So I've been dreaming up scenarios where I might.

I swore, on the back of Everquest scare stories that I'd never pay for any subscription game. That didn't pan out quite how I imagined.

On iRacing's to-do list (to use my imaginary example) is the hugely ridiculous, yet somehow alluring potential combination of the Williams FW31 and Oulton Park. Carnage.