Forums » Suggestions

Alternate Billing Options

Nov 03, 2004 Scuba Steve 9.0 link
While I myself am happy with paying for vendetta by month, some of the trial players I've seen have problems with paying for a Vendetta subscription because they don't want to pay for a month they won't use. So instead of losing potential customers, why not introduce another way for people to pay for game time? Instead of paying by month, players could pay by a set number of hours. As an example, hours could have a slightly higher price than monthly, say 300 hours for $12.99 as compared to a month for $9.99, so that way it's cheaper to buy hours that last over two months, than buying two months and wasting one.
Nov 03, 2004 mburrack link
Although it would be a break from standard MMORPG pricing...I have to admit it's a very intriguing one! Not to mention that the free trial basically runs on that same principle: 8 hours of free *play* time, not real time.

I'm all for Vendetta Online being the first to try this model for MMORPGs. I have a feeling it could be extremely successful.

--mcn
Nov 03, 2004 neko128 link
I'll start by throwing my support (for what it's worth... :-P) fully behind this one. My free time tends to come in cycles; for example, the last three weeks, I've been waking up, going to work, getting home 16-18 hours later, and going to sleep; but now this week, I'm working relatively short hours, and so I have bunches of time to play games such as this. The screwy schedule is why I finally just dropped Planetside; I ended up wasting half my subscribed months.

My one suggested modification would be a much lower amount of time per paid period. I mean, $12.99 is more than a single month (closer to two), but 300 hours is something more like 10 hours PER DAY for a single month... Based on its pricing, lets be generous and say it's equivalent to 5 hours per day for the full period you're paying the equivalent of. That's a whooole bunch for that kinda price.

I'd actually vote for something closer to $9.99 for 60 hours; 2 hours per day seems like it'd be much closer to average than 5 or 10... And the option still exists for similar "graduated" pricing schemes; $24.99 for 180 hours, or whatever. If someone plays a whole bunch, the monthly options would be far better; if someone plays only a little, the hourly option would be far better... And that's the way it really should be, should this be implemented. One option shouldn't be clearly superior to the other in all cases, as I'm afraid the 300-for-$12.99 pricing scheme would be. :)