dXter Member Posts: 59 From: Texas, the US of A Registered: 09-26-2006 |
Hey everyone, I was just wondering what you all thought about the issue of free vs. commercial Christian MMORPGs. Should we make them free to get more players, most likely at the cost of quality? Or should we spend more money on making a higher quality game and then put a price tag on it, but at the cost of not having some players that don't want to spend money it? Cuz I know some people that just surf the web looking for any free online game they can can get their hands on just to see if it's worth playing for an hour (like me sometimes, lol). ------------------ |
buddboy Member Posts: 2220 From: New Albany, Indiana, U.S. Registered: 10-08-2004 |
i know that's always a hard question with christian game developers. i think that it depends on the quality of the game and how large of a crowd it should appeal to. you should just price it how much you think it's worth. but not insane high prices. I think if it is one of those games where you pour sweat blood and tears into it, you should get something back, if only a little. i guess im trying to say it just depends on the game. also on your personal preferences. ------------------ |
Faith_Warrior Member Posts: 490 From: So.Cal. Registered: 09-05-2006 |
Pay is better, even if it’s just a couple bucks (if it's worth that). This will keep a good majority of people from getting in to just cause disruption such as hassling players or trying to crash the servers. Also it’s pretty impossible to run an “mmorpg” for free unless you have money to burn. In the end if it’s done too cheaply (like trying to run it off a home computer) people will just not even play it for free. There are quite a few free mmog/mog servers that are ghost towns (no population) like with 4th coming servers or UO emu‘s. There are some that have populations, but many that sre not. |
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dXter Member Posts: 59 From: Texas, the US of A Registered: 09-26-2006 |
Yeah, I agree that an online RPG can't be run without ANY compensation, but I was wondering about games that run off of donations. I know a lot still has to come out of the game owner's pocket, but do donations really help much? In some games rewards are given for donations, but a lot of times that can unbalance the game (whoever has the most money to donate gets the best stuff in the game). ------------------ |
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Faith_Warrior Member Posts: 490 From: So.Cal. Registered: 09-05-2006 |
Yes it can work that way. This is very true for isometric games due to a lower bandwidth and resource requirement. I think the best example you are digging for is Eternal Lands. EL runs through donations and perks and has been doing so for some time. For a 3D game the best example may be KnightOnline, KO is not based on donations but it survives off of perks. Perks are basically things like power-ups that people buy for their accounts so as to boost attributes of their characters. 3D games have far more resource and bandwidth requirements so beyond perks it’s very difficult to maintain a game with a large player population. It all depends on the size of your community, for smaller games it can be very affordable. You could run a server that can host a classic 3D mmog for a few hundred players on 24/7 for maybe $50-$80 a month on a dedicated server deal(rental). That of course depends on the size of you game world and the efficiency of your network code. Usually the greatest bandwidth demand happens when you have many players in close proximity, but if you design your game where people are more inclined to be spread out or such as with instancing than bandwidth usage can be far more efficient. But often in the case of instancing this comes at a cost to server resources (CPU and RAM). That’s why you see games like GuildWars able to operate, it’s mostly instanced so bandwidth is minimally used while their server resources take the grunt of the hit. Generally when I think mmorpg, I think along the lines of the classic way it’s done with big worlds to explore with lots of people to interact with, but beyond doing it that way which is far more expensive to maintain, yes there are more efficient ways to do it. |
Jari Member Posts: 1471 From: Helsinki, Finland Registered: 03-11-2005 |
One thing to note is that if your game is non-commercial you can use many free resources when creating it. ------------------ [VoHW] (Help needed) [Blog] - Truedisciple (mp3) |
