I ve been following the game developer con out of Cali the pass couple of weeks. Its rather small, with mostly outsource projects and a crazy guy called Rast doing the interviews.
There is alot of talk about across-the-board price hike, coming to MMORPGs and the debate of f2p games making a real impact.
Ncsoft first coined 14.99 as the average price needed for a good mmorpg development back in 1999. In 2000ish, they made headlines by removing GMs from the game and making email the sole way to get ahold of staff.
Back in those days , servers , net , and staff were expensive. EA , Ncsoft and Sony said the cost for CSR was about 12.00 an hour US.
As has been pointed out over the last couple of years, prices have droped rapidly for servers , internet lines, and CSR has been moved to Outsourcing.
So what would cause the price to rise? Development , and start? Currently games are being pushed out in a weak beta state in hopes of making development cost back.
CSR has been changed to the point that the last internet outage, cause SOE's core CSR in India to come to standstill. (couldnt even send emails in some case.)
Some developers arent even using funds from the mMORPG fee to update the game. Take Wow for example, they add content but most of it low budget , low stuff , they ve tons of money but only 2 expansion.
it cost more for the MrT ad, then for them to make Burning Crusade, which was retailing for 49.99 and sold a record number. They even had enough money to send Burning Crusade to VIP members for free.
So where does the money? I know its not a bad thing to make a huge profit on product.. But if you gonna pay for something shouldnt it be greatly and vastly improved rather than shoddy updates which break things?
So if War cames out with a 50 to 70 box price and 20 to 30 per month fee , would you buy it? Remember the EA guy pointed out a Warhammer figure cost 70.00 unpainted, and people buy tons of these.
he also goes on to point out that Warhammer books , comics , other items cost 30% more than other items from D&D series.