Stacking boxes

Imagine you buy a car. Imagine it comes in a box, with a nice bow on it. You open the box and find your car in it. It's really great, but you soon realize that you have been chipped a little, as all other cars can also drive backwards. So you buy another box, with the feature of driving backwards. You know, you can live without it, it's just not as much fun.

Then you realize all other cars also have a horn. So you buy another box with a horn feature. You know, you can live without it, it's just not as much fun.

Happy with your car you find out that everyone else is able to personalize their car's appearance, while yours is dwindling around somewhere in the dirt brown. So you buy a box with custom paints in it. You know, you can live without it, it's just not as much fun.

And then you realize you have missed [insert something else ridiculous here]. You stand in front of box number four. And now you are just pissed off. And you have every right to be.

This is exactly the situation on many large MMO's today. It makes as much sense as the car example above though.



See, there are exactly two channels presently available for peddlers of digital fun. Channel one, or the old one, is where they actually create little boxes and get them to you, either over your local store or by the amazing thing that is online shopping. This is the boxing buddy nightmare.

The second newfangled way is to use something called the internet to not only proffer but also distribute the bought goods. considering they are digital in nature and the boxies just carry the data in a different, round shaped way, you might see where this could be beneficial. No shop needed, no box needed, never out of stock and available 24/7.

From a normal box sale, the publisher gets a good chunk and the actual developer usually a very small one. If you are both in one, you might get a lot more though. If you sell it online for the same price (or sometimes, strangely, even more) then that's pretty much all just profits. Yes you need servers, website monkeys and bandwidth. The former two you have anyways, but servers and bandwidth are cheap. Amazon charges you 15 cents per gigabyte. If you use more, it get's cheaper. If you are a big corporation, well you get the picture. So even if you would send out 10 Gigabytes in data, the box, DVD, shipping and handling of that, returns, billing etc, will cost a lot more than that dollar fifty.

So how come MMO's still push boxes on you?

If you want to join an MMO that has been around for a while, you most likely end up in the same dilemma described with the car. In order to actually play the full game, you don't buy one, but 2 - 6 boxes. Or downloads. None the less, they let you pay 6 times, which in most cases comes down to about 20 bucks each. So just for the game, the privilege of playing it, you will lay down 120 bucks or more. And then you still pay the monthly fees on top of that. This is the most prohibitive way this could be handled, period.

Instead, do away with these expansions for existing players. I very much like the way EVE handles this. You buy the game (5 dollars) and pay a month subscription (15 dollars). From there on out, you just pay monthly subscriptions. New extension? You just patch and that's it. Everyone plays the same game. No fracture, no multiple paths to take care of in the programming sector, in the patching area, in the support, testing, anything at all. Both creator and player will be happier for it.