Subscription-based MMOs: Worth the money?

Now and then I see people posting on forums and in online communities, saying how they would never pay a monthly fee to play a game. They feel it's outrageous. My thoughts? Well, MMORPGs are cheap entertainment. For $15 you're pretty much set for a long time to come. Compare that to going out just one night and you get the general idea. Same goes for single player games, they don't last even close to the time an MMO does.

Video games in general are really cheap to play. It's only the hardware that costs, but that is something you won't have to upgrade too often. Having a PC with an internet connection gives you access to a very large amount of Free to Play MMOs. Some are okay, some are even pretty good and then there are those games you want to stay away from.

Doing some simple math, a single-player game costs approximately $50 and you get many hours of entertainment. There's also the replay factor with different game modes and scores which you can achieve. Let's say you buy a Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy 10. You can easily play that game for 30 hours and have a lot left to do. That's $1.60 per hour. I call that cheap and very, very good entertainment.

Then there are games such as Unreal Tournament. Buy the game and you get a CD key that allows you to play online as much as you want. It’s pretty much endless replayability, depending on how much fun you have and where your limit of "repetitive" is. It's very enjoying to play with or against other players and if you've done that for awhile, it gets hard to go back to single player games. At least for me: very hard.

Regardless if you are blowing other people up or e-dating in Second Life, you still have a great way of being entertained and it's cheap.

Now, take the MMORPGS like World of Warcraft and Age of Conan - they have one thing in common: a subscription is required.

The normal fee to be charged for by a subscription-based MMO these days is approximately $15 per month. This is used by the developers to further enhance their game and release patches that fix bugs and add more content. It also includes covering the costs for customer support and more.

In general you get the whole kit of a constantly developing game with customer support and solid servers when you play a subscription-based MMO. If you would try to find all these things in a Free-to-Play MMO, chances are you'd end up disappointed.

Let’s say that you play World of Warcraft 15 hours per week, you've paid $50 for the game, and then you get charged $15 per month. You can already now tell that it's at very least a very decent price for the amount of hours you play and get entertained.

Since subscription-based MMOs usually are way ahead of Free-to-Play MMOs in most regards, such as the players being more mature, since they actually pay something and care more for their characters - it usually result in a more enjoyable experience and you end up playing the MMO for many years to come. It's normal to get attached to your character(s) and you usually make many friends. That $15 each month is well worth it, if you ask me.

How about other form of entertainment? Let’s compare to television and movies. Television can be free. For example in Sweden, simply owning a TV costs money since you need a TV license, which is around $28 per month. And usually if you want more channels and better picture quality, you will have to pay for that as well. See where I'm going?

Going out to the cinema is at least $15 per person, unless you're very cheap. That's for around 1.5 - 2 hours of entertainment.

Let’s not even compare going to a night club, cocktail bar, or a convention. We all know that costs even more.

Now, if you're part of the crowd that feels against paying a subscription-fee for an MMO, did this article make you reconsider or possibly even change your mind? Or if you know someone who is against subscription-based MMOs, link them this article and tell them to post a comment to share their thoughts.