Morara

Is a 2 year old game new enough to justify a $20 price tag? And even so, would $10 per account make a huge dent in the business, which makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, counting all the games they sell for?

Illuminator

$20-$30 is perfectly reasonable and in line with what legitimate players are willing to pay for an online game that gets updated and revamped regularly. $10 is almost dumping and encourages account abuses.

If a game is selling for $10, guess what? New people will see it on the shelf and think it's worth all of $10. You know that special rack at Walmart that has all these cheap bullshit games? Those are what $10 gets you.

But the good thing about this is, now we know why plat sellers have such an easy ride creating new spam accounts. They ain't paying $40+ like the rest of us.

$19.99 is the lowest I can find. Let's see if we can take it lower.
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/everq...ml?q=everquest

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Gori

One thing I think you have to take into account is that what they are selling for $10 is the core game only without DoF, KoS or EoF. I think they are using these as loss leaders to get people hooked then hoping they will use the digital downloads, where the best margins are. I don't think $10 is too cheap for what is in the package, and trying to eliminate farmers through marketing strategies is like trying to drive a nail with a screwdriver, sure it may work, but is it really the best way?

LFG

Ok Illum, I know what you are talking about now. Yes, there is an "original release" version of EQ2 you can buy for $9.95 at retail now - I'm pretty sure I remember seeing one at Best Buy anyway.

So yeah, for ten bucks, anyone can pick up an account where they can log in and spam plat selling ads to hundreds or maybe even thousands of people before getting banned.

That's pretty cheap advertising IMO - considering it costs between 50 cents to a buck, at minimum, to send you a piece of the junk mail that you throw away at your mailbox each day. A legacy EQ2 account would cost a penny or less per ad then.

This might be the cheapest possible method of advertising possible, next to anon-spam email. But it is still often more effective advertising to contact 1000 known, qualified buyers (people using EQ2) than 100,000 random unknown targets (people who most likely are not EQ2 users).

And you can block email spam - you can't block ingame spammers until you know who they are.

I wonder if EQ2 could be set to allow users, at their option, to block any tell or email that includes a URL or keywords. Because we all know which keywords to block now, unfortunately, which proves how effective this advertising has been.

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Illuminator

Having played the game for however long, long enough to post an opinion on eq2flames.com, $10 sounds to you and me like Yay! $10 Dollars! Wuwu!! Good deal! Me love you long time!

But this deal isn't pointed at us, it's for the gamers that don't know about EQ2. $10 for a game at a retail store sends warning messages, like the content is sub-par or outdated bargain-basement goods. Firstly, good current games don't get priced at $10. $10 makes you ask why the game isn't selling for $30 or $40. Secondly the impression is that expansion packs change the game so positively and dramatically that you won't want to play a game without them. Who played Diablo 2 without the expansion? Who played Age of Empires 2 without the expansion? Or any other game? But you know nothing about the game, so you assume the $10 version is complete shit, and the $40 version you've ruled out already (otherwise this conversation doesn't exist).

I'm not making this shit up, I've been playing computer games for almost 20 years now and these are the thoughts that go through my head when I'm browsing games at stores like Electronics Boutique and Gamespot.

My view is the game has to sell itself, and a $10 price tag isn't going to matter.

This marketing strategy sounds good on paper but I honestly don't see it being successful. And what breaks the deal is that this, like all other loopholes and unbalanced things, is an easy path for abuse.

There needs to be more pragmatism about this, people are unhappy about getting plat seller tells (my server doesn't nearly get the worst of it), and we're in this aw-shucks fantasyland about $10 retail packages.

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Gori

We will just have to disagree about the merits of pricing at $10 I guess. I really don't think they are going to move more units at $19.99 than they are at $9.99 simply because it is priced higher (implying better quality?). I know I have come pretty damn close to buying some other MMOs that were priced around $20 (FFXI, DAoC, CoH/CoV) just to give it a go for a month, if those were $10 I probably would have picked up at least one of them just for the helluva it. Maybe that is the strategy SoE is using: luring in other current MMORPG players with a cheap "taste" and hoping they like it enough to stay...and use the digital downloads if possible. Who knows.

They have a problem with plat spammers, that goes without saying, I just don't think the solution to an in game problem lies in changing your real world pricing/marketing. Figuring out regular consumer behavior is tricky enough without worrying about what a change in price would do to plat seller balance sheets.

Rebic

Couldnt they mass ban certain IP's once busted. I would think a better way to disrupt them would be not just banning one IP, but banning that whole octet when its discovered. So if IP 10.150.140.30 is doing it, ban all of 10.150.140.xxx numbers. Sure you might get some other people who are playing legit, but chances are, the farmers have that whole octet of numbers. Not a perfect way, but definitely would take a bigger bite into it, then they have to get new IP's and new accounts.

Pinski

But what happens when legit users are on that same subnet?

As for $10, $10 is, imo, too cheap for a game to sell. If I see a game for $10, I think wow, that must be a pretty shitty game or a really old one. WoW currently sells for $20, then again, we are coming into an age where box-sales after launch aren't that big a deal for $, it's just a problem of perception now. Where people think lower cost = shittier, which will always be a problem in our world until people get their heads out of their asses.

And technically, you don't need to have a game-card, they can just get a bunch of credit cards and do it that way. There's enough people in china that they can steal so many people's identities and those people will have no idea it ever happened to them, because it doesn't effect them very much unless something big happens.

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Morara

Keep in mind you can legitimately generate random credit card numbers for a single account, with credit card masking services like Shopsafe, which a lot of American banks offer, and probably other countries do, too.

Rebic

Yeah that could happen to a very few number of people, where they get locked, so would have to call SOE to get resolved. But realisticly, the whole octet most likely will be assigned to whatever company is doing the selling and hiring these workers, so they would have a range of subnets with all of the numbers from 1-255 for each subnet.

So the chance of finding an actual legit account in that same range of numbers where the farmers are working would be pretty slim, possible but slim.