Korean payment style.

C

Cat1yst

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 1, 2007
Messages
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Ok, now this is a bit of a rant.

But i honestly do not know why people hate the pay as you go idea. The game starts out free, and if you want you add payments. If its a good game you purchase more to make the experience more enjoyable, whats wrong with that idea?


Personally ive played Leauge of Legends since open beta. The game is free initially, but because it innovates the MOBA scene imho with its new lineup of heroes and gameplay mechanics, that i came to enjoy the game greatly and ended up spending money on heroes and marathon session exp boosts. The game lets me do pretty much anything that modifies my competitive chances without needing to spend money, but because the game is good and i want to try out new content without having to work at it, i spend real money.

Honestly i dont know whats wrong with it. Free to boot, then buy game content as it goes along.
 
Cat1yst said:
Ok, now this is a bit of a rant.

But i honestly do not know why people hate the pay as you go idea. The game starts out free, and if you want you add payments. If its a good game you purchase more to make the experience more enjoyable, whats wrong with that idea?


Personally ive played Leauge of Legends since open beta. The game is free initially, but because it innovates the MOBA scene imho with its new lineup of heroes and gameplay mechanics, that i came to enjoy the game greatly and ended up spending money on heroes and marathon session exp boosts. The game lets me do pretty much anything that modifies my competitive chances without needing to spend money, but because the game is good and i want to try out new content without having to work at it, i spend real money.

Honestly i dont know whats wrong with it. Free to boot, then buy game content as it goes along.
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I'd rather just pay 30 upfront and have access to everything.
 
Very inefficient form of payment (a dollar here and there) and detracts from gaming experience by integrating the idea of payment into your mind at every step in the game. I like to pay for the game, then have you not bug the shit out of me. Just let me enjoy my game with no stupid limitations or distractions or intermediate card swiping. Let's be clear. A responsible person (with his money) is always thinking "what am I getting out of spending my money for an additional feature". I'll take THOSE kinds of considerations BEFORE I start playing the game, thank you very much. You see, this is the kind of business model that companies take when they want to eliminate their own risk at the expense of the consumer. A responsible company would do the appropriate market research, keep up the quality of the game, and manage instead of pushing the job that sales should do onto the consumer.

This is also why Guild Wars' expansion pack no monthly fee model is far more attractive to me. After very long intervals in between each successive decision, I get to decide whether or not to improve my experience, and when I do, I get to improve on it forever (as long as the company has not shut down). I'm okay with that. In fact, if a game keeps up its pace and continues to deliver, they can make just as much as monthly fees, but do so in a more consumer-friendly way.
 
While I will personally never play on a MT based server, I think it's a good payment model if left on it's own. The issue with MT comes in when you require a monthly fee, plus have options to buy items on the same server. People want to escape reality with MMOG's, not spend time in game seeing how much expendable money everyone else has with their store bought characters.

A server should be either monthly fee based or MT based, but never both.
 
Cyrilix said:
Very inefficient form of payment (a dollar here and there) and detracts from gaming experience by integrating the idea of payment into your mind at every step in the game. I like to pay for the game, then have you not bug the shit out of me. *MASSIVE SNIP*
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I guess it depends on how its implemented. So far ive never noticed in any of the pay as you go games ive played, they bother me to purchase additional content. So far its all been 99% free and that last 1% does not give other players a significant advantage over me. Its basically ok you play the game for free, heres some additional content if you truely love our game to purchase.
 
Except the "Korean payment style" is a style in which you pay purely for making your in-game avatar to "look cooler/cuter/badass" (in which case I have no interest to begin with) or the game is so crippled without payment that you're forced into buying these little things in the game for which you don't really know what the value is (and next thing you know you end up spending a LOT of money on a lot of things without knowing what you really get).

From a cultural perspective, this sort of payment style works in Korea, but except for little kids who are gullible (or who will endlessly bug their parents to sucker them into giving them their credit card info) I just don't see something like this happening in the U.S and being successful. People here tend to like buying discrete chunks of something that they can accurately assess value of. If they can't do that, then they won't buy it. All the downloadable content so far has been in the vein of "Pay us a little more and we'll give you extra content to play", not "Pay us a little more and your game experience will be 'better'", a better gameplay experience is highly subjective and difficult to assess value, but more game to play is easy to put a value on.
 
I don't understand the premise of this post though when you say "why do people hate the pay as you go?" From a purely objective stand point, micro transaction type gaming is growing world wide (and yes in North America too). There is also "hybrid" models becoming very popular. Let us take Mass Effect 2 for instance, you pay for the initial game then they market and sell trinket type "DLC" content. So yes this type of business model will work in North America and Western Countries despite beliefs
to the contrary. You also should not look at the forums as a representative of the market as a whole.

However at the same time, some people will not prefer this type of business model for various reasons, and there are perfectly valid ones. Many gamers want the inherent competitiveness and accomplishments in the game to be determined purely by skill and effort put into the game, and not influenced by real world money for instance.
 
I do agree with these free-to-play with optional micro-transaction model in those Korean MMO, for example.

While I'm no expert in MMO, only played one MMO which originated from Korea, they are constantly releasing new content like new worlds, new maps, new jobs, and all of these are for free. And sometimes, they even revamp the entire game. The game just keeps expanding with new content, I think its worth it to spend on the game every now and then.

Yeah, some may argue that the money wasted by these kids are pointless such as decorating avatar and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, all these new content doesn't come free, you need people to continue developing the game, fixing bugs, and maintaining the servers, etc.

So I don't think its bad at all.
 
A lot of people are already grumpy about DLC's. It will take another gamer generation before Korean style payment has even a possibility of being mainstream in the US.
 
I'd say league of legends brought it fairly close to the mainstream.

Anyways, I don't have a big problem paying for DLC in single players if it is well done. I tend to think that devs have a responsibility to fix bugs and finish polishing the game after release, or at least they do if they want to maintain a good reputation. As far as additional content goes, I don't consider that part of their responsibility, so charging for it is fine by me. After all, they need to at least cover development cost and make a couple bucks for providing something extra. Really, they're just mini expansions, and the customer can decide whether they are worth paying for. That's my opinion from a logical perspective...part of me does agree with Cyrilix.

For multiplayers it gets a bit more complicated. There is a line that companies cross by charging for something that gives a competitive advantage. If that line isn't crossed, I'm fine with some micro transactions, as long as they don't affect the overall feel of the game too much. I'm sure it's tempting for companies to get as close to that line as possible though, and that could really destroy some otherwise good games.
 
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