You may or may not have heard but Bethesda are releasing a new title!
…and it’s for next gen consoles!
…AND its an MMO (massively multiplayer online) version of the Elder Scrolls Series!
…and it’ll have a monthly subscription charge…
so lets start with the facts (or at least what has been officially said so far):
- The game will retail at £50 RRP
- Presently it will also require an XBL/PSN subscription to play (athough they are apparently ‘negotiating with the relevant companies’ on this point)
- The first month will be included in the cost of the game
- Each subsequent month will cost £9.99 ($14.99)
- There will be discounts for purchasing mulltiple months at once
- There will be microtransactions available in-game
- All initial areas, modes and items will be available without further purchase
- The DLC ‘expansions’ will not be included in the subscription fee
Why a subscription fee?
Well, Bethesda have answered that question:
“Charging a flat monthly (or subscription) fee means that we will offer players the game we set out to make, and the one that fans want to play, going with any other model meant that we would have to make sacrifices and changes we weren’t willing to make.”
But the two questions that spring to my mind are:
1) Is pay to play/ monthly subscription the right model for Elder Scrolls Online?
2) Is the price point set too high?
Is pay to play/monthly subscription the right model for the Elder Scrolls Online?
There are a number of different models that have been employed by MMOs, with varying degrees of success.
These broadly break down into ‘Free to Play’ (F2P) vs ‘Pay to Play’ (P2P)
F2P models do not charge a subscription, and sometimes even the game itself is free. However, there tend to be a large number of ‘pay gates’ once you start playing. The main one is having to pay real money for the premium in-game virtual items. Sometimes this is direct, and other times it involves buying ‘booster packs’ with randomly generated items in them. They can also have high charges for stat boosts, ‘real estate’, expansion packs, membership tiers, priority access to servers and often have advertising.
P2P models are subscription-based (or sometimes even time-based) charges applied to the game. Often most of the in-game content should be free, although the companies still tend to provide optional microtransactions and expansion packs for fees.
Many people prefer the idea of the P2P model in principle. They like to know what they are going to pay for a game up front. They like to know that certain items and/or progression isn’t going to be locked behind a paywall. A decent company will also plough much of the money they make back into the game to keep it running properly. That means no long server queues, Moderators on-line and in game to deal with cheats and ‘griefers’, and should mean constant patches and updates to keep it running smoothly.
Also, a strong argument for P2P is that when you make a game free to play all you do is make it so that trolls can play the game with no remorse and no cost. By contrast P2P tends towards a much more tight nit community.
….buuuuut the end of the day, I can’t help but compare it to GTA:Online. Rockstar currently manage to provide that to one of the largest single game communities at no monthly cost, with free DLC, and only with the anticipation of optional microtransactions. So far at least, they have managed to fund all of this with the upfront cost of the game. Defiance seems to be the same; a game funded by entirely by cheap software and optional microtransactions.
Also, there is only really one major title that has successfully used the P2P model long term –World of Warcraft …and even their subscriptions numbers are now falling.
Star Wars: The old Republic was P2P but simply couldn’t sustain itself with that model. They have now switched to F2P and are doing much better. Other big titles like Guild Wars and League of Legends have always been F2P and do very well.
I am on the fence on the issue. I think I marginally prefer the F2P model, but only if I can still get a decent chunk of content for free, and anything that costs money is reasonably priced. I would however consider a subscription fee for a game I really liked – if the price was reasonable.
Is the price point set too high?
I think that P2P is fine in principle for Elder Scrolls. When I first heard about it I thought to myself ‘fine, if its £3-4 a month, i’ll probably play it for a bit’.
I think the price they have set is just far too high.
A) One way to look at it is that Xbox Live is £40.00 a year. Playstation Plus will be the same for PS4
That’s about £3.33 per month.
These fees let you play ALL (other) games online, and they have a number of other major benefits with them as well.
By contrast £9.99 per month to play one game online seems to me totally disproportionate.
Maybe that’s an unfair comparison though.
B) So instead i’ll consider it from a ‘value for money’ angle[
I played Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for ages. In total each got about 180-190hrs of my time, which was spent over 2 years for each of them. I got (and completed) all the DLC expansions for each of them.
At Lauch, Skyrim cost £40.00 and online sources quote around 300 hours content if you do EVERYTHING it has to offer. Skyrim received three expansions: Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn. The first and third brought new quests and story content, while the second was focused mostly on player housing. Dawnguard took about 25-35 hours to complete, and Dragonborn took about the same. Dawnguard cost £14.99 at launch; Hearthfire cost £4.99 and Dragonborn cost £14.99.
Therefore I personally got 2 years of gameplay from Skyrim for £74.96. The general ‘wisdom’ is that cost gets you 360+ hours of gameplay not including just wandering round and soaking it all up.
….That same cost would get me 7 months subscription to Elder Scrolls Online…. but wait, first I would have to pay £50.00 for the game itself (with one month free membership).
…so in reality paying £75 would get me the game and 3 1/2 months online play.
To turn that around, 2 years of play on the Elder Scrolls Online will cost £279.77 in game cost and subscriptions alone
This still isn’t totally fair though.
Skyrim didn’t require servers and moderators (although it certainly required regular patches and updates!). So what about these costs?
C) The costs of running an MMO?
For this discussion lets discount the initial cost of the game itself. I think we can agree that single player games prove the cost of the game itself should adequately cover development and publishing fees.
Therefore i’ll take the monthly subscription fees alone when considering the cost of running the game.
We need numbers. World of Warcraft currently has around 7.5 million subscribers.
When considering these numbers we need to remember that:
- WoW is 9 years old. When it launched the subscription base was over 12 million
- The game has a lot of competition on its platform, many of which are F2P. Consoles currently have very few MMO’s to choose from, and none in the fantasy genre
- WoW is PC & Mac only, Elder Scrolls Online will be Xbox One, Playstation 4, PC and Mac.
- Elder Scrolls is a well established, respected and much loved franchise
…so, given the lack of competition and the massive player bases on the XB1 and PS4, I think its a very conservative estimate to think that Elder Scrolls Online will be aiming to get at least 7.5 million subscribers worldwide across all platforms.
At £9.99 a month that means the total revenue for 7.5 million subscribers would be £74,925,000 per month.
…that’s £75 Million. Per month.
To put that in perspective, according to Blizzard, it spent £110,240,000 on upkeep between November 2004 to September 2008 (Source). That’s about £25 million a year, and during that period the subscription numbers for WoW were between 10 and 12 million.
Based on those numbers, the upkeep costs for an MMO with 10 million members is about £2.4 million a month.
That £110.24m figure apparently includes payroll for the entire staff, hardware support, and customer service (another source).
Even if we assume (for some reason) that Elder Scrolls Online costs twice that to run, that would be £5 million a month.
If we assume the game only gets 3.25 million subscribers across all 4 platforms, the revenue would still be £37 million a month.
If the subscription was only 3.25 million and the subscription cost was quartered to £2.50 a month, it would STILL make £8.1 million a month.
So even running unrealistically negative figures, the game would be making £3 million in clear profit per month for a subscription cost of £2.50
…and i’d point out that these figures have not taken into account the money the Company will make from microtransactions, boosts, expansions, tournament entries and even merchandise etc…
For all the reasons above, as much as I love the Elder Scrolls series, I won’t be getting Elder Scrolls Online.
If they halved the subscription fee (which I believe they could do while still turning an incredible profit) I’d consider it. It looks awesome, just not ‘£159.89 for the first year’ awesome.
What do other people think?
Are you getting it?
Have I totally screwed up the numbers or missed something?
As always, i’d love to hear what people think
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