Pay-to-Play
Pay-to-Play
Many people get upset when they find out that MMORPG's cost the usual $50 plus a monthly fee. This is usually because they do not understand that there are many good reasons for this monthly fee. Bandwidth is not cheap, and the game's developers must pay for a large amount of it (enough to service many thousands of players at once). Servers have to be maintained, the customer service people have to be paid, and the devs themselves would like to get paid as well. So what about that initial $50.00? The fact is, the company sees very little of that after all the costs involved with selling games in a retail setting. For games that don't need to pay the developers to continue making content for years after release, the money they do make is enough, but MMORPG's are constantly changing, evolving, adding new things to do and see. Therefore, they need your monthly fee to survive and continue making the game great. Remember also that games like Diablo that have free online components can do so because they simply match one user to another rather than hosting thousands of users simultaneously.
The pricing structure for City of Heroes is as follows:
1 month for $14.95
3 months for $41.85 ($13.95 per month)
6 months for $77.70 ($12.95 per month)
12 months for $143.40 ($11.95 per month)
75.0%
25.0%
0.0%
0.0%
0.0%
