by ToxicToothpick » Sat Aug 29, 2015 12:14 am
I'm no H&H expert. In fact I am barely hardly just getting started.
But I know a few things right off the bat.
The more important being that you need players to make the game appealing enough for people to pay for it.
Locking people out that play for 48 hours empties your already fairly empty servers even further, reducing the value of the game for the few people that are going to play, and driving them off.
Soon you'll have one village with about 4 - 6 p2p players and they are just sitting there getting bored until they stop playing, because they never find any other players.
There are far FAR better ways to do a payment model in this sort of game.
Considering the niche appeal at the moment, even something like a Patreon would probably make more money than subscriptions would, without having the side effect of killing off the player base.
I'm all for developers getting paid for their work, but this is clearly a poorly thought out business model to slap onto a game that already isn't overly popular.
Best bet is trial + buy to play. Subscriptions are sort of a thing of the past these days.
WoW holds a monopoly on them (even they have something in place for dedicated players to avoid the monthly fee as well), and everyone else that attempts them seems to inevitably fail (WIldstar/ESO/TESO/Warhammer/DaOC/Dark Fall/etc./etc.)
PS: The cost itself isn't the issue generally. Even if it was like $2, it's still putting up a hurdle for new players. It's another system they need to give payment information for, which can lead to issues and frustration. I would happily pay for the game if it had a larger player base and I could just stick my debit card in my CD drive to throw $10 at it, but that's not the case. I'd have to transfer said $10 to my paypal, which takes a couple weeks and has additional fees, at which point I might not even want to play the game anymore since I've been locked out of it for a week.
Last edited by ToxicToothpick on Sat Aug 29, 2015 12:18 am, edited 1 time in total.