29 Days Later
Mutant Strain Virus Station Pass still a bad idea.
Excellent writeup over at MMOG Nation on the very ill-advised Sony Station Pass price gouging "rate adjustment" of last month. Perhaps the most poignant observation:
This is a dangerous time to be raising services like this. LOTRO’s never-ending membership is probably looking like a good deal right now. You never have to pay a monthly for the game, ever, if you fork over the equivalent of 7 months worth of Station Access. That’s crazy. LOTRO may or may not be a critical success, but given the license you know they’re going to run that thing for at least four or five years. Assuming five years that’s $200 for LOTRO or $1800 for Station Access. That’s some grim stuff there. Likewise, games like Tabula Rasa, Warhammer, etc, will not be available on Station Access.
You can argue that they're comparing apples and quantum mechanics here, what with LoTRO being only a single game and Station Pass granting access to multiple (Sony only) games, but it makes little difference if LoTRO takes off in a big way.
Sony tried to pull a classic Airline industry move. One airline raises its prices with the wink-wink nudge-nudge expectation that the rest of the airlines will follow. But at least in the case of Turbine, the other airlines are just high-fiving each other (with their…um…little wings…I guess. You know sometimes an analogy can crash into a Himalayan mountainside where the little surviving analogy passengers will be forced to eat each other. Oh shit, now I've gone and pissed off the cannibal, airline, and mountaineering fans. And this blog used to be about gaming. I suck.) as they work towards not only profitability, but also cultivating good will towards their player base instead of soaking them for every single nickel.
Sony, you can still do the right thing. Roll back the Station Pass price increase, admit the mistake, and start working on ways to increase revenues by increasing player happiness. There's a lot of value in the SOE portfolio. Why not make it more accessible, instead of less?
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I play EQ2 and only EQ2. Before the previous price increase I had wondered about Station Access as a way of gaining more alts and maybe try another game or two in the portfolio, because the price difference used to be small enough to justify paying the extra for more alts.
At the current price, I think I would have to play another game, in order to consider it. After the latest hike, I can see no way that it makes sense. I have heard it said that is twice the cost of a single game’s subscription, however for EQ2 and presumably other SoE games you can reduce the monthly cost by paying in advance. That option is not available on Station Access.
So now, if I want to play another MMO, there is no financial advanatge to making that game another SoE game; which is surely the point of Station Access to keep you tied into the SoE family of games.
As an evil marketer, I understand the logic behind the Station Pass price increase. It’s all about the target audience and their relative threshold for pain. The key question is: Who are the folks paying for the Pass?
These are more hardcore players that are more invested in the games. Their “investment” in the game is in the form of levels, assets, social capital or overall interest and all these things combine to increase their “switching costs”. According to old school economics, they therefore have lower price elasticity than single title players. This lower price elasticity means that Sony can raise prices a bit and not get spanked by a mass exodus. If they keep increasing, they’ll snap the elasticity but as your airline example shows, when consumers are inelastic, you can take advantage of it. Until you go above switching costs, consumers are still better off paying the increase than losing the value of their “investment”.
Sure, it’s a scummy move but it makes economic sense when you have a hardcore audience to milk.
I’d wager the price increase has little to do with the audience or market, and more to do with the money from the pass being divided up to support development on so many games. And if someone has station access, how do you decide which team gets his money? Is there a program down in the finance department that queries the databases for playtimes and awards money based on usage? Or is it completely arbitrary, or worse, completely marketing driven? The game with the most potential to rope in new players with an expansion will get the funding to develop?
Station Access was a good idea, and allowing players to get a discount for “company loyalty” is great.. but it should never have been an all or nothing campaign. Instead they should have allowed the player to build a game package… 1 game is $15 a month, any 2 games is $25, any 3 games is $35, etc… maybe even deeper discounts the more games you activate… But putting a flat rate for all access was short sighted on their part.
At this point, they should leave Station Access as is (at the old price) and new games would fall under a new packaging deal or as an add-on to the old Station Access.
SOE don’t make mistakes. Just look at the SWG NGE – a perfectly planned, well communicated and fantastically designed overhaul of a system to bring revolutionary new gameplay to a popular and oversubscribed MMO.
I sincerely hope you’re being sarcastic, Dragon. (Text can be so deceiving sometimes.)
I don’t know about the guys who live in their parents’ basements and get allowance at the age of 30, but I have school, and work. I only have time for one MMO, and I only ever get to play it on the weekends. I can’t be bothered with the station pass. Besides, all of the games on there totally suck. Way to ruin every game you touch, SOE.
[Insert further rambling disdain toward Sony in general]
The biggest problem I see is that you’d need to be playing three games for the pass to really be worth it. And what are they offering? MxO’s down to three servers and they pushed it to the side the moment they picked it up. Planetside’s nearly dead. Star Wars Galaxies is one of the buggiest games on the market and doesn’t have enough players to fill a small apartment. Vanguard apparently has “potential”, but I’m pretty sure that just means that it isn’t any fun, at the moment. I guess that leaves EQ and EQII. But, hell, who isn’t sick of fantasy games with classes and levels, by now?
Personally, I think they’re doing this for the same reasons they do anything else -they hate their customers and they want them to stop buying their products. It’s the only thing that would explain their business decisions.
The market’s flooded with MMOs, and there’s a handful of new ones coming out this year. Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Warhammer Online -those are quality games. If they think that there’s people out there that want to play three MMOs a month for a long period of time (let alone three Sony MMOs), I think they’re in for a surprise. Well, I would if I thought they were smart enough to understand that losing money is bad.
I am quite disappointed that there is no special Ambernight April Fool’s extravaganza this year. After last year’s wonderful beanie baby edition (I would link to it, but it’s been conveniently removed from your archives. Thank goodness for the wayback machine).
I guess it could be said that every day is Fool’s day on ambernight.org…
The move completely mystifies me. At a time when the interest level in EQ, Planetside, MxO and SWG is definitely on the wane and Vanguard is a buggy game with intense system requirements, why drive the price of entry up for people looking to play more than one game or try out all the titles you’re offering? To completely fracture the playerbase back into single title only play?
MMORPGs just aren’t quite the same when only a handful of people are playing it.
Seems to me that decreasing the price for the access pass, grabbing more subs and sustaining the longevity of the titles they’ve already developed might have been the smart move. If it were me, I might even offer the clients for the less popular games for free, to garner more interest in them rather than just let titles which cost millions to develop wither on the vine.
Sorry benro, I thought about it but I’m traveling this weekend and didn’t have time.
BW, I found last year’s in the archives here. Colonel Witherspoon says Wot Wot!
@Bissrok: I certainly don’t think SOE hates their customers. There’s a lot of talented professionals who work at Sony, and I think the vast majority want to make products that their customers enjoy playing. I just think they’re misguided in the way they try to handle the market, and it seems to always be at the expense of their customers.
I just spent 8 straight hours playing in the LoTRO pre-order beta. I don’t ever spend more than 3 hours online anymore so it was a bit of a surprise to have looked up gritty eyed at 3:30am and realize I should have quit 4 hours ago. If my initial experience in comparison translates at all to the rest of the game, raising station pass price may prove to be suicidal for Vanguard. If people are going to be paying full price for two games this year, Vanguard isn’t going to be making the cut on many rosters. I’ll be paying for CoH, and if LoTRO stays strong after the first blush I will be paying for it for a while as well. I will likely have to give Mythic 6 months to break my heart with Warhammer too