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FFXIV’s Pricing Model

Thursday Jul 1,2010 05:44 PM
By Keen
In Uncategorized

Final Fantasy XIV will be coming out for PC on September 30th (22nd for head start program) with some interesting news on their pricing model. The subscription fee is a respectable $12.99 per month. I’m a major proponent of subscription fees so whenever I see a new MMO coming out with them I always feel like it’s a score for the good guys. Interesting to note is that you only get one character slot activated and one “mule” type character that can sell stuff while you’re offline. If you want more character slots (up to 8 total per account) then it will cost you an additional $3.00 per month or $1.00 for another mule.

Crap… that’s a vicious price for an alt. When I reach the max level in a MMO I then become an alt-aholic. Ouch. I couldn’t afford to become one in FFXIV. For the price that’s pretty expensive. I would prefer a one time flat fee of something like $15. I’m also a proponent of the character transfer type service fees because I think those services are an excellent service to the customer and also a great way to generate additional revenue for the company. While the price may be steep, is this a good thing for the game?

I do believe that limiting the amount of characters is important to a MMO. Star Wars Galaxies limited players to just one character and it helped the economy by limiting the saturation of player provided services. If having a weaponsmith in the game is important and you can just make an alt to max its weaponsmith then someone else can’t become a dedicated weaponsmith and feel like they have accomplished something while maintaining a prolonged importance. Perhaps this will allow those who are willing to fork out the cash to buy their way into self-sustainment while still allowing that diverse playerbase. Then again, this all depends on the game itself and whether or not they really hit a home run with the profession system.

I’m not sold on FFXIV yet. I think that from all the footage I have seen it will be worth trying but only to see if my doubts about the game can be confirmed. I could not for the life of me get into FFXI because of how fractured the server communities were being shared with the Japan community at launch. I also hated the controls and never felt hooked. The game needs to grab me in some way in the first 20 minutes. I need the polished Westernized feel to to be apparent or else I’m just not interested — there are games that can provide that for me and I needn’t bother with the heartache of trying to love a game for the wrong reasons.

Despite being told by the benchmark, or rather after it laughed at me for foolishly even thinking that I could run the game, I’m still going to find some way to play the game for free and let you all know what I think. There’s absolutely no way that I’ll be getting any sort of collector’s edition though. It’s just too risky.

Read the original post on http://www.keenandgraev.com