🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sat, 17 Mar 2012 07:36:32 -0700 (PDT), Antonio Huerta
<ahuerta@inbox.com> wrote:

>So far, the first-person shooter developers used the following pricing scheme: they charged a set amount of money for each sold copy.
>
>Now, I am playing Team Fortress 2, a multiplayer FPS. It has now evolved into the scheme when it is offered for free to play, and the players are sold the highly coveted items such as new weapons and accessories (hats).
>
>I got a pricing idea for a single-player game. The game is given away for free to play. But each time the player's character dies and need a new "life", the new "life" is sold for a sum of money, say, 10 cents. Say, the character dies once every minute of the gameplay, on average. Thus, the player would need to pay $60 over the course of 10 hours of gameplay. That's the price of a 10-hour game.
>
>The advantages are obvious. If the gamer started to play the game and did not like it after several minutes of playing, then he is out of pocket for under a dollar. The player can switch to another game. If the player has good skills, then he is rewarded for that, as he would be more rarely dieing, and thus, the game would cost him cheaper.
>
>The game developers would be motivated to develop the better games, so that the players would be interested to press on with playing the game.
>
>Obviously, the computer needs to be connected to the Internet during the gameplay, so that the seller's server counted the new lives needed and charged the player. If the player uses the "easy" difficulty setting, then he dies rarely, and would be charged at a higher rate, say, $0.20 per life. At the "hard" difficulty setting, the player would pay only 5 cents per life. And at "normal" setting, the price per life would be the said 10 cents.
>
>What do you guys think about the pricing scheme ? Does it have a merit ? If it does, then I dare suggest this is the future of single-player FPS.

To me it seems more like the pricing model of the past -- drop a
quarter in the slot.

Also processing microtransactions over the web is not worth the hassle
to the vendor nor consumer.  You'd have to collect the money up front
in batches of $5-10 each (like Xbox points), because processing them a
dime at a time is too expensive, and if it were pay-after-use, then
too many cunts would use their firewall to block the payment
transaction, find ways to hack the money system, etc. I also think
that tying a monetary value to character death in gaming might take
the fun out of gaming for many folks.  

I personally prefer fixed-cost services.  Like if someone could come
up with way to download and play any game on the planet (not just new
ones) for as long as you want, and the cost is $50 per month per user
(and no, shitty cloud gaming doesn't count, must be real PC gaming
taking full advantage of hardware of my selection).  Assuming it still
allowed enough profit for the game vendors, that model would remove
the risk of spending money on shit games.  If it did not allow enough
profit for the vendor, then the end result would be smaller game
development budgets and in the long term shittier games.

Although I will say I'm glad someone is thinking about new concepts,
so while I wouldn't want a pricing model like you've suggested, I
think its good that someone's thinking about it.