A Brief History of Online Multi-player Game Payment Methods: draft
In the beginning (1978) online games were free. The grandaddy of them all, the text based Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), ran on Essex University's DEC10 computers, and could be accessed for free outside prime time via JANET, or a limited dial up facility. That all changed in late 1984. In Britain MUD became available on the newly launched Compunet service at £3.00/hour, and Shades was launched on BT's Micronet at a similar price. In the USA, 1984 saw the launch of Islands of Kesmai on CompuServe for $12.00/hour. It should be noted that the differential between US and UK games prices was not at the time as great as it appears to be looking at it now. Telephone calls were much more expensive in the UK than they were in the US. Overall, the price was about the same, but in the UK British Telecom got the lion's share of the money spent. Because of this, most of the online games in the UK had migrated over to the US by the end of the decade, where the culture, and the rewards, were considerably greater. For instance, Federation II, one of the very first online games written to be commercial, multiplied its user-base by an order of magnitude by moving over to the USA's GEnie network. The initial choice of a per hourly rate by the pre-web online services set the pattern of charges for online games through to the mid-1990s. The only known experiment in other types of charging in this period was a brief attempt by AT&T's Istel network to price online games on their MicroLink label by the X25 packet. This was unsuccessful, to put it mildly, and lead to the demise of the network's attempt to break into the consumer market. By the mid 1990s General Electric's GEnie network was losing its position as the premier consumer network for online games, because of a failure to invest in up-to-date infrastructures, and a failure to take cognizance of the rise of the World Wide Web. Most of its games migrated to the then up and coming America OnLine (AOL), where the hourly rate model continued to predominate. Over the next few years a number of games, such as Simutronic's Gemstone series, started to experiment with a new model involving a two tier subscription price - a 'basic' subscription and some sort of 'premium' subscription which got you extra features, such as special quests to solve. (Remember that even as late as this most online games were still MUDs - multi-player text variants of Gary Gygax's Dungeons & Dragons.) In 1997 AOL changed its charging model to an all you can eat subscription model, and kicked all the games off its system, since they didn't fit in with its new business strategy. This forced all the main online games out onto the web, and for the first time gave them a choice of pricing models. It also meant that for the first time multi-player games had to provide their own management and charging infrastructure - not to mention finding some way of advertising themselves in the jungle of the World Wide Web. Over the next five years the online games tried a variety of pricing models, but one - the subscription model - soon came to predominate. It may well have been because this was the pricing strategy in use by the AOL behemoth. This model is still with us, especially for the major graphical on-line games, such as World of Warcraft, which came to dominate the scene once consumer broadband access to the Internet had become more widespread in the mid 2000s. A number of games, however, especially those based on web browsers as the front end, adopted a different strategy, which was a variant of the two tier subscription system. It had for many years been the case that online consumer services and games would have free introductory offers, usually a month free. Now this was extended to make the basic game free to play, but, if you took out a subscription, then you got extra 'goodies', similar to the old 'premium' subscription. This had the advantage that the free players gave you a big enough user base to build a player community. Building a big enough community to 'take off' is probably the biggest hurdle a new game has to face. Games like World of Warcraft that are loosely based on existing popular single player games have an advantage in that they have a ready made community to kick start the online version. Ultima Online was the first game to use this strategy. Other payment strategies have been tried at various time, including in-game advertising, and payments for specific items in the games. There were a number of proposals dating back to the late 1980s for games that were wholly cash driven, but they didn't come to anything, probably because at that time the online community tended to be professionals who didn't gamble, and because it went against the then prevailing online culture to be so nakedly capitalist! One important feature of the early commercial multi-player games was that they were specifically written to maximise their income on the assumption that they would be charged for on a pay-by-online-time basis. For instance, in Federation, a science fiction economic simulation, the economies of players' planets ran faster, and generated more in game profit, while the planet owner was in the game. Most other games had similar features. Needless to say, such design features proved counter productive once the charging model changed. With a subscription style charge these features encouraged players to stay online - using up processing power and bandwidth - without increasing the income. The early games did adapt to changing circumstances, (some died, but a surprisingly small number) but the next generation of games will once again be written to specific payment types. The current generation of MMOGs are mainly role-playing based games, and they fit reasonably well into a subscription based business plan. Indeed, the fact that they fit so well may be the reason why subscriptions predominate. This role-playing game phase parallels a similar, though shorter, phase in the early evolution of single-player boxed games. We can expect to see new genres of games coming to the market in the next five years which will require experimentation with new ways of charging, and with the rise of these new online genres, the current subscription model will become only one of a number of mainstream charging methods. Handling and developing software to cope with these new charging methods is likely to be one of the major challenges facing new games! |
If you have any questions or comments about the articles on my web site, click here to send me email. |