Price of a database byte: How much would you pay?

[Discord]

Hey there!

Now, I've been wondering about this for a bit now. How much would you spend on a computer game per year? Examples of such expenses would be perks and monthly fees.

The MMO-games tend to cover all pricing categories, some of which actually seem quite absurd to me. Some of you might disagree, but why on earth would anybody buy an island in a virtual world for 1500 bucks, while really you're just getting a couple of bytes changed in a database?

Please also, if you do not mind, state where you come from.

NB: WoW costs 156 Euro per year, providing you pay 13 Euro per month. Just for orientation purposes.

[Mirage]

The weak dollar makes FFXI really cheap for me here in Norway.

If you think the few megabytes your character profile takes up is all that costs for an MMORPG company, you are very mistaken. Sure, they make a profit, that's one of the main goals of any company anyway, but a game server is much more expensive to both run and maintain than a regular home computer, and both Blizzard and Square-Enix has a couple of dozens of these. Then add in backup systems and bandwidth costs, don't think you can get away with using the CEO's home ADSL :p. It needs to be both extremely stable, and have a lot of bandwidth. After all that, we need to consider hardware faults. Do you know what the average lifetime of a hard disk in a server is? It's something like 3-4 years, meaning a ton of hard drives have been replaced already at S-E, seeing as this game has been running for over 4 years now. I don't know about S-E, but it is not uncommon for a server to have two hard drives for redundancy, and in addition, the hard drives are often faster than those used in desktops.

Considering all this, and the fact that they will want to make a profit of their games, I don't think 13 dollars a month is a too much to ask for at all.

[Discord]

The weak dollar makes FFXI really cheap for me here in Norway.

If you think the few megabytes your character profile takes up is all that costs for an MMORPG company, you are very mistaken. Sure, they make a profit, that's one of the main goals of any company anyway, but a game server is much more expensive to both run and maintain than a regular home computer, and both Blizzard and Square-Enix has a couple of dozens of these. Then add in backup systems and bandwidth costs, don't think you can get away with using the CEO's home ADSL :p. It needs to be both extremely stable, and have a lot of bandwidth. After all that, we need to consider hardware faults. Do you know what the average lifetime of a hard disk in a server is? It's something like 3-4 years, meaning a ton of hard drives have been replaced already at S-E, seeing as this game has been running for over 4 years now. I don't know about S-E, but it is not uncommon for a server to have two hard drives for redundancy, and in addition, the hard drives are often faster than those used in desktops.

Considering all this, and the fact that they will want to make a profit of their games, I don't think 13 dollars a month is a too much to ask for at all.

Hehe, no I know, we've had this discussion before. The profit of the company is not the point. Just wondering how much you would pay, or consider paying, for a game per year. The main focus of the poll are the pay4perks costs.

EDIT: Please everybody, just forget about the companies, profits, user exploatation and so on. It's off-topic here.

PS: I'd be glad if my hard-drives would live 3-4 years. The amount of junk they stick into high-end laptops is amazing. And yeah, Norway. I'm still recovering from the sight of a beer costing 6 Euro per bottle*faint*.

[Madame Adequate]

The MMO-games tend to cover all pricing categories, some of which actually seem quite absurd to me. Some of you might disagree, but why on earth would anybody buy an island in a virtual world for 1500 bucks, while really you're just getting a couple of bytes changed in

Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.

For the record, when you download music, it's just the same; data.

Edit: I'm happy to pay the WoW fees. I wouldn't really go above about $150.

[Mirage]

PS: I'd be glad if my hard-drives would live 3-4 years. The amount of junk they stick into high-end laptops is amazing. And yeah, Norway. I'm still recovering from the sight of a beer costing 6 Euro per bottle*faint*.
Alcohol taxes are sky-high here indeed. Worse than other goods, compared to other countries. I never buy beer at bars and pubs anyway, so it doesn't bother me a lot. I get the occasional cider a few times a week, that's enough for me :p.

While the odd harddrive in a desktop system might die after a year (probably because of a manufacturing fault), I am pretty sure the average is much longer for desktop systems. For one, they're not usually spinning 24/7, and even if they did, there would be far less reads and writes than for a server harddrive.

[Iceglow]

I'd pay a reasonable fee so long as the servers were stable and you were guaranteed to get online to the server where your char is based no matter what. But ideally I think it ought to be either pay once for a game and be able to play it for free or be able download/recieve the software for free and have to pay to play it. A fair deal in my eyes and many of my friends offline tend to agree however it is a capitalist society in this world so it would never happen that way unless you count guild wars.

[Discord]

Well... I'm paying for the WoW subscription, but that's also it. As a student, I'm not particularly rich.

I'm actually no fan of the pay4perks system. I mean, add-ons are alright. E.g. buying islands in Second Life(if they do not cost 1500 USD) or expansion packs like Burning Crusade, however it's pretty stupid when you can simply buy the best items and so on from the company for real money. I mean, there's this MUD, Achaea, which is pretty much just about spending 300 USD for basic skills and another 5000 USD for best items resulting in your invulnerability. Hate that sort of system.

PS: Yeah, terribly high alchohol taxations up in Norway. But Norwegians aren't exactly alcohol tanks anyhow.*tease*:P