Server Status Thread

[zebratul]

Current lag makes the game much less enjoyable.

[Hrenli]

WoW at his 5 dollars a month

WoW never was and still is not 5$/month. Unless we are talking Klingonian dollars, which should have been directly stated, otherwise people would assume you are talking USD.

[Agame]

WoW at his 5 dollars a month

WoW never was and still is not 5$/month. Unless we are talking Klingonian dollars, which should have been directly stated, otherwise people would assume you are talking USD.

15, my mistake.

[Ysh]

MMOs that are still in beta

Haven is in alpha.

So it is even cheaper ? Lol, man, you made my day

Star citizen was a sort of a scam. Give me your money and I'll try to make a game, see how it works out. If not, you paid, I tried.

HnH is a game. It's developers did not ask for money first, make the game later, so at least, it's not a scam. It's an Alpha, priced like an Alpha. (Give some cash if you like it, try for free.) So, who likes it, should give out of honesty and decency. But when deciding how much to give, people should think of a fair price, decided not by me or by game developers, but by market prices.

For example, Minecraft was a fine moddable game written in Java. About the same size on disk or bigger than HnH. (I mean just total size of all its code plus textures, as a rough and inexact measure of the work that went into it.) 5 euros in Alpha, then 10 euros in Beta, with all updates (subscription time) included.

Starmade was 10 euros for ever (total price of the game, all updates included, no subscription fee, not mandatory) and it is a good sandbox game. Still in Alpha or Beta.

WoW at his 5 dollars a month was about 8 Gb of a game when started, a few years later it had the same price at 17 Gb and continued to grow. And for my taste, it had better graphics and combat mechanics than any sandbox ever

All these examples had or still have their own server paid for by the developers. MC had an official server for a year or 2 then chosen to go the private servers way. Starmade was private servers from the very beginning, with only 2 servers belonging to its developer, but there were alwais at least 2 servers paid for by developer. WoW alwais had only official servers, but its players chosen the private server way

Of course, financial success of a game depends on millions of players. But that is up to midget swarms and promotion campaigns to decide, not to us, its players.

Games are not commodities.

[BigCountry]

MMOs that are still in beta

Haven is in alpha.

Star Citizen is still in alpha and people have ponied up an average of like 80 or 90 USD each if I recall the article I read right. Been a year or two ago.

Fortnite is still in "beta"....lol

I have come to the conclusion that entire business model is simply a way to avoid paying any real taxes

[MagicManICT]

I have come to the conclusion that entire business model is simply a way to avoid paying any real taxes

Ok, I'd like to hear the reasoning behind this one. Last I knew, if my software company received income greater than the expense of running the business, I had to pay taxes on it, whether I had a finished product or not. Maybe this isn't true in all parts of the world?

[Agame]

Games are not commodities.

Then... What are they?

[MagicManICT]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity

Software products are intangible goods.

[Ysh]

Games are not commodities.

Then... What are they?

I mean particularly for commodity definition is ''good or service that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.'' Each game on market is not equivalent to every other game on market. I am sure there are men here that play Haven and Hearth that will not play World of Warcraft even if it was free. You can not just look to other game and say ''this is cheaper, why will I not pay to play this game instead?'' Reason is maybe Haven and Hearth is better game in some way than this cheaper game. For me, this monthly fee price of game is very small expense in my budget. I do not discriminate much based on price of this game, what is more valuable to me is my time. I do not choose to play this Haven and Hearth because it is cheap, but rather because right now it will capture my interest better than other offerings on the market. This is despite it being ''alpha'' game.

I have seen other men have some similar sentiment when Haven and Hearth first goes pay to play. I think original price for 30 days subscription is $15 or close to it, before they rework the business model to the one that it is today. Some of the men will ask ''why I will pay as much for this tiny game with two developer if I can pay same amount to play AAA game with thousand of developer and big budget?'' To me this seem like silly question. Number of developer or budget of game is not what I will consider when decide which game to play, what I will consider is how much I enjoy to play the game. This is the experience I am paying for. I think real question the men should be asking is ''what is wrong with AAA developer if it will have thousand of developer and big budget only to be outdone by two Swedish university dropouts.''

[Agame]

OK, you are right. For a game to be itself, it can't be separated from its creator, so it's not a commodity. It is unique. But this uniqueness of each game, almost every game has it, you know? Uniqueness in itself becomes really common after a while. I mean, if Jorbtar pulls the plug, I am sure all of us will play something else in less than a week and will forget to check to see if HnH came back or not. Because other games can be just as unique and fun, in their own specific way. Up to the point it does not really matter what one player plays as long as he really plays it.

That is why I think about games like they would be commodities, even though they are not.

Fun fact: This game reminds me of Starmade somehow. Not by graphics or gameplay, that one being a sort of Minecraft in open space, where everything is made of 1 cubic meter cubes, but gravity is exactly where you want it to be or none at all. No, they are similar by how I feel when I play them. They hit the same cords, no matter how different they are. Over time, they do become interchangeable, the games in general, and it does not matter anymore who is producing them.

Just as an example, sorry for the NSFW: Your wife is unique. But the girls you pay to be with by the hour, they are interchangeable, even if they are all unique. Games are paid for, they are not life-time commitments. And yeah, if a girl wants 4 times the money that another girl wants for the same hour, I fell tempted to ask why, what does she do and none other does? Even if we talk about cigarette money, not some serious amounts. But 15, even 25$ a month is Ok, it's in the normal range for a MMORPG, no pb. Paying a hundred would be insane, like 80-90$ for a game that is not yet a game, that Star Citizen. Or like here if you get the gold subscription hats.