If your favorite MMO company decided to follow SOE’s example and set up their own multi-MMORPG subscription service, where you could pay a bit extra to have monthly access to all of the titles under their umbrella? And if so, how much would you be willing to pay?
- Cryptic: Champions and Star Trek Online
- EA: Warhammer, Star Wars, Ultima Online, Battleforge
- NCSoft: Aion, City of Heroes, Dungeon Runners, Exteel, Lineage
- Funcom: Anarchy Online, Age of Conan, The Secret World
- Turbine: DDO, LOTRO, Asheron’s Call
100% yes to EA.
I preordered my WAR:CE months before launch and then hardly played it all. WoW’s fault =/
And I’m waiting for Star Wars
But that’s pure coincidence that there’s 2 titles on the same “publisher”. I’m absolutely fine with one MMO subscription for the time being, not even enough time for that.. blame the alts
Cryptic: Maybe, with both games unlaunched it’s hard to say, that’s a nice package though, superheroes and Star Trek. $25
EA: $20 tops. Mostly I’d play Star Wars, I might dabble in UO now and then for old time’s sake
NCSoft: Depends on how Aion turns out. I like CoH, I actually had a lot of fun with DR. Exteel and Lineage aren’t my cup of tea. Assuming Aion is good, $25/month?
Funcom: Nope. You can’t dabble in Anarchy Online; it’s too complex. Played the hell out of it for a long while but when I try to go back now I’m just bewildered again. AoC broke my heart so don’t see going back to it. So The Secret World is the only game in that package I’d play, no sense paying beyond the monthly fee.
Turbine: Nope. Got a lifetime sub to LOTRO, no interest in going back to Asheron’s Call (is it still 90% people botting?) and DDO, if I understand correctly, is mostly group oriented.
You can add DAOC to EA’s list.
How much would it be? Like twice the price of an MMO? Can’t say I’d do it since I never play more than one MMO at a time.
In a word, yes.
Right now I play WAR and CoH. I’d love to try Aion and I think everyone I know wet themselves in glee over KotoR. To be able to keep the games I play and still have access to more? What’s not to love.
Also with Champions, alot of my CoH pals will likely give it a whirl, I on the other hand am honour bound to try Star Trek Online. It’d be handy to sub to one and be able to move back and forth.
However if all these came to pass… we’ll need more hours in the day or a way to become independantly wealthy from playing MMOs
In my case, no. I already have the Lifetime to LOTRO so I don’t need an all-access from Turbine. I do have a $10/month subscription to DDO which is the only sub I’m actually paying for currently.
I’d like to have occasional access to AoC (Funcom) and Warhammer (EA) however those are both from different publishers. What I’d like is a third-party program to pick and choose multiple games from multiple publishers and have an all-access that way. Otherwise no single publisher currently has enough games on their roster to interest me.
SOE can get away with it because their roster is (from my perspective) all sub-par games to begin with, so getting all of them for the price of two monthly subs is a bargain, I suppose.
I wouldn’t but, if they offered a lifetime membership like did (does?) LOTRO, a good chance I would done (do?) that.
I don’t think I’d subscribe to any of them. BUT, if you could purchase a pass with EA and get discounts on all of their non-MMO games by being a member…I might do that. Same for NCSoft.
Franky, no, I would not pay additional to have access to all of the companies titles.
It’s time consuming enough playing a single MMO.
However, for those who like to dabble in other MMOs, it is a nice deal. I’ve never seen pricing but imagine they would want to keep it under 29.99 – in fact, $24.99 pricing might persuade some folks.
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My main question would be how many of them I could sanely have going at once. :p
As long as it didn’t cost more then the price I’d pay for one game subscription, which is $15 a month. None of the companies have more then one game I’m really interested in. If a pass was $15 a month I might actually try more of one companies games.
I am not in the market for an mmo at the moment but if I were I can tell you how much I would pay for a multi-mmorpg subscription: €14.99/month.
The nature of these games is such that you can only really play one seriously at any one time. Paying more than the sub for a single game isn’t worth it imho.
I have a life-time for LoTRO and no real interest in DDO, so I wouldn’t take the Turbine multi-sub. Of the others, only Cryptic has more than one game I’m interested in playing. Assuming each individual game sub is $15/month, I would pay say $20-25 for both, either $5 extra or $5 off.
Hmm… Maybe Cryptic, since I really want to play both of their games, and possibly Turbine, since I wouldn’t mind giving DDO a shot again just to see how much it’s changed, but I’d be pretty meh on the others. Once Blizz comes out with it’s “next gen” MMO, I’d probably pay a little more to access that and my WoW characters.
If only I could pick and choose which MMOs I wanted under one subscription umbrella. Then my husband wouldn’t keep giving me the whole “Do we really need to pay for more than one MMO at a time?” talk.
I was on Station Access for a while but eventually gave it up as I just didn’t have time to play all of the games. Plus, looking at the list you’ve got, there aren’t many companies who have more than 1 game I want to play. Maybe Funcom but then AO is free anyway.
I wouldn’t do it. I am a one char, one mmo kind of guy except WAR made me a 3 server, 3 char guy because it took until my 3rd toon to realize that Dark Crag is the only real server in WAR.
EA, just because they have Star Wars and Ultima Online. Warhammer is a weak WoW alternative, despite the pvp focus I must agree to Bartle’s harsh evaluation that it would be a lot like WoW.
Still, the best package you offered. I would prefer Diablo 3 and Guild Wars and the ominous nextgen MMO from Blizzard for the future.
I can’t afford the time to get OCD about more than one game at once, so I’d pass on the whole concept.
Does it count if I’d pay money to never again be reminded that EA now owns both Mythic and Bioware?
How much is a Station pass? I don’t follow Sony all that much. Id probably pay a fair market price (maybe even the cost of 2 MMOs, or 1.5 in the case of a company that had 2)
I prefer the “lifetime sub” model that Guild Wars uses. I’ll probably happily pony up for any other reasonably well-crafted MMO that uses the same model.
If I were a subber, though, I’d probably not really go with a Station Pass sort of thing anyway. As others have noted, even one MMO is plenty, and if I want to swap out, I’ll just desub and sub in the other one. The Station Pass is a decent idea at heart, but MMO design begs for monogamy, and is overbearing at that. MMO polygamy is just asking for trouble, at least under the sub model.
EA and NCsoft would have the most appealing subscription to me.
And yes, I would.
@arbitrary Station Pass is $30 USD/month, I believe.
With EA if you got acces to Warhammer, Star Wars, Ultima Online and Battleforge i would pay £15 as WAR+Starwars alone would give me access to two IP’s i love.
What about Blizz – what would they charge if they gace a pass which allowed access to the new MMO, WoW and potentially Diablo 3 if they did make Battlenet subscription based?
I’m with Snafzg, about 2x subscription (at least for pubs with more than 2 titles). Since DAoC, WAR, and soon to be SW are the main MMO’s I play (have played, will play), I would totally shell out double for a pass to all of them. It would also encourage me to try their other games (and shell out the cash for the actual game)
Since I plan to try both of Cryptic’s upcoming titles, I’d be game for this…esp if a discount was involved.
I admit I’m concerned about whether Champions will be a pay-to-play or a pay-to-win model; the whole rumor of “micro-transaction functionality built in already” has me concerned.
Yes. But what I’d pay would depend on the games on offer, etc.
What I’d really like though: if some third party company could work out a way to act as the subscription manager and authentication server for multiple games by multiple vendors. Because what I’d really like would be something like the Safari Books Online service where your subscription gets you a number of slots that you can fill with whatever you want to read at the time. I want a number of slots for whatever games I want to play at the time, and the ability to change them at will. The third-party company would be more like a cable network and SOE and NCSoft, etc. would act simply as content providers.
That’s my pipe dream. But I think we’d have to see a lot more competition in the online arena before anyone became willing to try to work out an alternate payment model like that.